Nov

Living without the “doubts”

I give this example of living of without doubts from my personal life, it is not a story a trumpet because I do not care much about my past, but at least this story will make the point clear that when you are single-minded with a clear goal in mind, doubts can do little to stop you. When I was 17, I read a book called “Think and grow rich” by Napoleon Hill. I was impressed with the content and I decided to immediately apply the knowledge from the book to birth my new project an “art , society and music” magazine.

I talked to the idea to a friend who was very good at creating concept but not good to actually execute them. My friend created the name for the magazine called Alfhat (victory), he created other concepts that will be included in the magazine, however, I think he didn’t believe in my ability to create a magazine so his collaboration ended with that. I quickly assembled a team to work on the magazine, I decided to create a first issue to test the market and to see how people respond, that was Alfhat zero, this one was short and FREE, and distributed at a particular music event, it was easy to assemble this issue , the public responded well. This first issue cost very little to print, because it had a little number of pages and was limited to few hundred copies just for the people at the event.

It was soon time to work on issue 1, we needed an interview of the hot pop-hip hop group of the moment, so I managed to find the phone number of the manager band to arrange an interview, he was a bit suspicious, he asked me how big my magazine was. I told him the magazine was pretty big, he agreed for an interview at the recording studio of the band.
The singers were amused to see such young people they asked us, if we do that for a school journal, heheheh, we told them, no, we are a regular paper. It was very easy to make interview of Belgian singers and artists, even if most of them were amused by our young ages, in Belgium, you are not supposed to do something of your life if your are young, people are supposed to go to school or work and shut up. I remember we went to interview a singer and his assistant called him by saying “There is a group children waiting for you!”.

Issue 1 was launched sold at the price of €2,5 EUR (100 Belgian Franc), it was an immediate success, which attracted the attention of many, among them some guy called Morgan, he asked us to join the team, he was appointed “art” guy, he had great connection in the artistic circuit in the entire country.

One part of the activity I particularly liked was to negotiate price with printing facilities.
We worked with some guy from Poland who owned a printing facility, he took hours of slow talking to negotiate a small price rebate, in fact, we had a normal conversation and at the end we did a deal on the price, he was happy to work with us because it was so rare to see young people doing something, the young today do absolutely nothing.
They are what I call borg. The other part I liked was to find advertisers, it was an easy part, we established a price table for advertisers per page, ½ page and ¼ page. Half a page proved to be the most popular format. Issue 2 was a success and a bigger than the previous ones, it was time to expand to France, In Belgium our magazine was sold in music shops, urban fashion stores and parties, we met some guy from Lilles (French city) , he joined the team , he knew well how to distribute our magazine over Lilles and Paris. On the same time to prepare issue 3, to be more international ,Morgan found “art” content from Germany, Luxemburg and Holland, Art can be anything as long as it is urban, one artist was specialized in painting faces in black and white with some special shadow? technique, we had a paper on him, many art photographies were featured in the magazine, the making of issue 3 was doing well, we decided for the music to include mostly French artists. It was relatively easy to interview them, we did the interviews , when they came touring in Belgium, it is important to note, that we never went to France not a single time. Issue 3 was a success by that time , we had a reputation, PR people for concerts contacted us to offer invitations so we could talk of their event in the magazine.

On the same time, the cost of printing increased, we decided to expand the activity so we could get better financing, we made an exclusive deal with some French label, we were their sole distributor for Belgium. This deal wasn’t enough to cover the price of magazine printed in high quality paper, Morgan suggested that we move on to the art exhibition scene.
After pondering the idea, we found an easier alternative, we will make a deal with a major event and provide them with frontstage decoration, the event was some big thing called “Couleur Cafe” festival which take place in Brussels every summer with thousands and thousands attending, I contacted the “Couleur Cafe” guy, he was very enthusiast about the idea.

I remember at that time one day I was in high school in my class, busy reviewing my business meetings in my agenda notebook, the schoolteacher confiscated my notebook but he was impressed with all meetings I had , he didn’t understand, he gave me back my notebook assuming my life might depended on more than my result in class…;)
At that time, the other schoolboys and girls didn’t understand why I didn’t talk to them.
In fact, I believe I could not identify to their existence, my partners in the magazine were from other schools, at my school I was alone by myself, I remember one day I was with my girlfriend near my school with the girls looking at us apparently jealous, normal, when your girlfriend did the H&M ads campaign. It was in the mid 90s when we were still in the supermodel era of Schiffer and the other.

The project for the “Couleur Café” festival advanced well when we had an incident Morgan went to some north European country at some techno festival there, he took some drugs and his brain fried, when he came back to Belgium he was put under medical assistance, he is still under medical assistance today ,the drugs destroyed his brain completely. I had to back off with the “Couleur Cafe” project , we wont be part of it, Morgan was the key, he knew all the people to make this possible. We eventually did our own limited event in a place that we rented, I later grew bored with the magazine so I left my chief-editor sit to my principal partner in the magazine, soon after I left another guy came in the team Gomez, he was a layout genius, the next issue they did without me was very well done, by 1997-1998 the dotcom boom was raging one guy I knew started his own dotcom, so I joined that was my next adventure …..

Now, you see in this story , I didn’t have any doubts, I was so single-minded that doubt wasn’t an option any more, people pick up project they think they will love because they so it on tv or someplace else, no, if you want to succeed in your projects pick something that you really love. If you can read or re-read the book “Think and grow rich” that would be great, as Klaus Joehle said to conclude his book “Living on Love” if you combine the teaching of “Think and grow rich” and the Love meditation technique you will do amazing things.

If you enjoyed this post share it with: