Startups that pay in love are a blank
canvas that comes to life through us.
By nature, parents want to provide the means for children to go beyond their potential. Family requires immeasurable resources, but the love from our kids unlocks more hours in the day. The added productivity comes from seeing the best of ourselves in someone we care so much about. Purpose is renewed and the heart we put into our creative work can make our presence as parents even more interesting.
Summon Stories
Children grow up fast, so we stay in the moment. Everyone tells us to cherish the simple joys of life, but it may be worth getting a little extra creative. One way to enhance your family’s ability to relive memorable moments, is by using multimedia marketing skills to summon family stories.
Every moment is special. As creation becomes second nature, handpicked memories can be stitched together to revisit interactively, any time, with or without you.
Most of us have an endless collection of photos and video on our smartphone, but scrolling around on a digital device doesn’t translate into something a group can enjoy together. It’s easy for good things to get lost in so much noise and spoken storytelling is always merry too, but why not paint more stories with a few added brushes?
Quiet relics like photo slideshows, something printed that sits beautifully on the shelf, a mix of audio recordings, art on the wall, or a cinematic feature film that highlights your adventures. You’re the creator with endless ways to create.
We all do a form of this, because family is our favorite, but the time required is real. A rigid cadence is not required, since any day is a good day to ship this type of of art. In the early days of photos and video, it was only birthdays and Christmas — now everyday is a holiday. No need to rush, but keep producing new surprises. Everyone will love the end result and as more come together, the growing playlist becomes a sequence of stories that follow kids growing up. With our constant collection of content, a good story is always ready to tell, but at a minimum, why not share an annual gift with your kids, partner, and other loved ones?
Along the way, attentive and controlled organization will make a growing collection of relics easier to craft. This takes an ongoing commitment, but file management is easy and helps bring life to life with shared memories.
Your future self will then thank you for an effort to organize this heartfelt content. Share in public if you want, but that can alter the art if it becomes a show. Do it for yourself and your favorite people first. Organize what will be a massive library offline, then, if you want play with the transitory channels of social media, that’s a personal choice.
No matter who resists whatever it may be, time compiling legacy projects will rarely feel wasted. It’s using our real skills to commemorate those we love. Scanned memories may give us content without capturing it in the future. For now, it’s up to us to trap time for personal storytelling.
Compensation is not money, but this does enhance your content creation skills for other areas in life. Technology also makes editing content more productive, but this is not your average task. This is the type of sincere storytelling you enjoy spending time with.
As kids grow up, these projects will have the lowest view counts, but always be your very favorite. Looking ahead, it’s crazy to imagine being a child right now, then receiving such a gift from my parents someday!
You’ve Got Mail
Consider setting up an email for your little one. This inbox can be used as a communication channel to write to your child as they grow up. Whether you start writing before they are born or later in their life, imagine what a gift this inbox will be in the future! This email address can be shared with family and used for online accounts if you want, but at a minimum, this curates a personalized time machine full of thoughtful updates.
Extra Shot
What’s your favorite parenting tip? Share it as a comment or hit me up!
Along with sentimental content, your kids will appreciate an email address that can be used after childhood. First and last name with your preferred email provider should stand the test of time. This is also a good chance to register a URL using their first and last name. This can connect to their email or support a personal website someday.
Avoid Routine
“Time flies” and “they grow up so fast” is accurate, but avoiding routine may slow down time.
The freedom to be spontaneous is a privilege and everyone will define such flexibility differently, but a proven path to explore such a reality is entrepreneurship. Boundless hard work, dedication, and resiliency are what this lifestyle takes, but suffering provides a stronger sense of purpose.
As this purpose is layered in later stages of life, experiential wisdom can be channeled into more treasured time doing things that make us happy. While hardship is part of the deal, children make their parents happy. Perhaps a reward for parents who lead by example, is the opportunity to share everything with those who matter most.
Cody Retlich