A COMPETITIVE WORLD

There's a competitive world out there. People compete for jobs and compete for advancement in their companies or even in office politics. We hear terms like "cut-throat" or "dog-eat-dog" thrown around constantly. The question we really need to ask ourselves is "Do we really have to compete in it?" For people who can see all the tools available to us today and put the puzzle pieces together, the answer is a definite NO.

There is a creative way of thinking. As creatives we are not limited to competing for what's available to everyone else. As creatives we natually create and that even means creating our own opportunities where none may have existed previously. This could be as simple as creating a website and publishing your stories online in ebook form because publishers couldn't see the value in it, or it could be taking all the incredible tools out there and putting them together to make a studio quality animation by yourself because no one was going to hand it to you.

We live in an age of electronic media where all the monopolistic middlemen who used to decide what gets made and what gets seen are no longer necessary. If we have something to say we can create it and if need be, create an avenue to get it directly to our audience. People are everywhere looking for something new and those fixed minds of the competitive world, whether they make movies, video games, animated TV series or music are so busy worried about what the competition is doing or worried solely about that dollar that they can't dare to create something new and innovative. They certainly can't experiment when they have to spend millions out-doing the other guy and out marketing him too. In the creative world, though, time is on our side, because we can create the answers to our media dreams.

Bittorrent in a masterpiece of creativity. Youtube is creativity at is finest. All the blogs, podcasts, online social networks, Second Life, everyone is finding their way to just do it, or just say it while the big guys are spending outrageous ammounts worried about DRM. I guess now they are even competing against the consumer. Yet a small guy can spend six months making an innovative puzzle game and release it with no protection, as shareware and make hundred of thousands of dollars, by himself.

What is it that people are missing? What is that they are missing when they compete for top positions in some animation or computer game school, so that they can further compete for a job so they can become the guy who animated the smoke on layer 39 of a complex shot in yet another talking animal film or first person shooter? This wasn't the dream when they started out. What is it that companies are missing when they "Command & Repackage" a game that's been around for years or put new skins and updated graphics on the same old sports game and dare to call it something new for 2007? I doubt this was the vision of the people who started that company in a garage somewhere. Do they even continue to have a vision?

These large companies and suits and dinosaurs of old are going to miss the opportunities of the future. They'll be right in front of them but they'll miss them entirely while they try to squeeze every last drop out of the old system and out of consumers' wallets. The opportunities of the future will be ours. When sites like Lulu.com or Metacafe become household names, it will be the content of the creatives on there. The big machine may snatch up a few creatives now and present a flase dream of "making it", but more and more the guys on ground are turning them down. We can see more than they can now.