I’m currently engaged in three pop culture magic workings. I’m going to share two of those workings now, because it’s a good example of how working with two different pop cultures can be effective, under the right circumstances. The two workings are focused on the same goal. Each working is an evocation of a pop culture spirit that’s been chosen for strategic purposes. The pop culture spirits I’m working with are Grand Admiral Thrawn from Star Wars and Sam Bridges Porter from Death Stranding.
I’m working with Grand Admiral Thrawn because of his strategic genius and his ability to apply unconventional thinking toward solving situations. Thrawn has an appreciation of art, and uses the study of art to understand other cultures and the way those cultures behave. Thrawn also puts his community first. He doesn’t act from selfish ambition, but rather from a focus on trying to figure out how best to serve his community and put the community welfare first.
I’m working with Sam Bridges Porter because of his focus on connecting people together, not merely through the delivery of packages, but through the result depth of connection that occurs through service to others. I’ve also picked Sam because in the game you have to figure out the best possible route for navigating around the environment and obstacles that come your way, and because Sam embodies the discipline of the slight edge, making small adjustments that lead to big changes.
I’ve called on both of these spirits to give me advice on how to move forward on several different projects and I’m pleased with the initial results. What I’ve found with the evocation of them is that they’ve ended up collaborating together, because they complement each other, but also have enough of a different perspective that whatever advice they bring to me is one where I get multiple angles on the issues trying to be resolved.
So what are the projects they’re helping me with?
Community Engagement: The first project has focused on increasing community engagement, in the different online communities I moderate and run. Because of both them, in their respective ways, are good at connecting community together, I’ve been drawing upon their experiences to consider how best I can enhance the experience in my communities. The place where I’ve had the most success has been the magical experiments community, where within the last month the group has exponentially grown and participation in the group has also increased. Both spirits will give me occasional nudges on things I can do to increase the activity in that group.
I’ve started also asking for their advice with my fiction community and indie author community. With the fiction community, they’ve given me a couple of ideas around sharing ongoing stories and starting up a video series so that I can interact with people more and give them content that’s valuable to them. With the indie author community, they’re taking a wait and see stance, mainly because I have plans I’m slowly putting into motion over the course of this summer, and they feel its too soon to do more than just focus on the plans.
Book Release Strategies: They’ve also proven helpful with book release strategy ideas. When I started working with them, one of the suggestions they made was to start creating a book launch plan that could be used with each book. Because both of them are spirits of preparation they made the point that having no preparation provided no way to analyze patterns or make changes that could be helpful in my approach to launching books.
While they aren’t solely responsible for the changes I’m making with my book releases, they are helping me recognize the strategies and tactics that can lead to better results. Because of their insights and advice I’ve changed my book release plans for this year around quite a bit, but I think the results will enable me to achieve a long term goal in a much shorter time period, because of the resultant resources and better use of those resources.
Future work: I plan on continuing to work with these spirits, for a couple more projects that are currently being prepped for, for later this year or at the latest the beginning of the next year. Having long term strategists to work with is helpful because they’ll weigh all the scenarios and help you adjust and adapt plans to circumstances that might otherwise derail the effectiveness of the plan. I’ll share future updates as the work continues.
