People who dream, people who execute, and people who inspire us to create

So many cool things floating around the internet, I must have been hyped up on sneezing pandas when this most exquisite piece of work bubbled to the surface. It’s “Panic Attack!” by Uraguayan filmmaker, Fede Alvarez. Head over here to watch it for yourself.

The news that surrounds this short film is interesting all alone: Alvarez has been signed to Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures to develop and deliver similarly themed freaky flicks. All I can think is “Cloverfield” — which has A) already been made and B) was super-excellent. Too bad it’s already been made. Still, the deal reportedly starts in the 6-figures with points if his films get made. All this after Alvarez made his YouTube opus on a reported budget of $300 (yeah, likely not including person hours in that budget, but whatever).

All of that is great for Alvarez, whose talent is deserving of a career in the field of moving images, however he ends up there. But it’s not the point of this post.

What “Panic Attack!” illuminates so clearly is the split in personality types when it comes to work ethic. See, people are either doers or dreamers. So, I’m going to wax a bit philosophical here.

Dreamers are everywhere. Like Joe Banks slaving away for a few hundred bucks a week, they’re closet cases, planning and scheming and wondering. They’re looking for the next out, the next exit ramp, entrance ramp, parachute, metaphore.

But the problem with plain old dreamers is that when they finely tune a dream, when they’re just ready to close their eyes and make the leap, they can’t. There’s no natural switch to flip that allows them to plan. They cannot make dreams into realities.

We’re all dreamers in some fashion or another. The special among us are those who can make plans from dreams and execute them. These are the people who practice daily overcoming the fear of failure, dread of hard labor, distaste of sweat, ugliness of rejection. Those who rise to the top, Fede Alvarez and his lot, are those who are on the path of battling those demons and building something truly great.

You can find quite a collection of doers on the net. I have a list of them, the people I turn to when I need to be inspired to execute, to turn from dreams to execution. Here are a few I check in with every day:

• Mark Frauenfelder – Editor-in-Chief and Chief Doer at Make: Magazine. Founder of Boing Boing (also a daily read).
• David Hobby – Strobist. A guy who just loves photography goes all out and becomes photographic Robin Hood.
• Garr Reynolds – Apple refugee has taken his serious skill and made it a serious commodity around the world. PresentationZen (Site and book) is a staple in design around public communication.
• John Gruber – John’s site, Daring Fireball, has become a staple of sanity in tech writing. His linked list is rich in commentary on current events in the industry. He’s a veteran producer, full-time blogger, and … frankly … he’s just plain intelligent.
• Brian Kurth – Founder of VocationVacations, a service which pairs people looking to change careers, with people looking to share wisdom about their own careers. He’s also a supremely competent entrepreneur and skilled writer. His book, Test Drive your Dream Job, is available now.
• Brian Brushwood – Brian is a magician whose key gift is to make college kids squirm. He’s an incredibly talented showman and host of long running podcast, Scam School (iTunes Link).
• Leo Laporte – As a geek and media person, I’d be remiss if I didn’t add Leo to this list. A decades-long career in television and radio careened nearly to a halt when TechTV imploded under the enormous weight of Comcast. A small brigade of talented technologists from the network moved into a new orbit around Leo, as he launched the TWiT network, a new media conglomerate around his show, This Week in Tech. Now the TWiT network boasts more than 15 shows, broadcasts live daily, all hosted from a studio converted out of an old victorian in Petaluma, California, the TWiT Cottage.
• Garrett Murray – I found Garrett because of his wonderful iPhone app Ego (iTunes Link). Turns out, he epitomizes the renaissance nature of executors. He’s an award-winning filmmaker and technologist to boot.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 19th, 2009 at 12:39 pm. It is filed under Blog, Features and tagged with Innovators. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.