When Moving Forward Means Letting Go
The great 73-year-old actor Frank Langella – he was nominated for an Oscar for playing Nixon in the film Frost/Nixon– was interviewed on National Public Radio over the weekend and was asked about getting older. He said that he’s found a kind of strength in recent years that he wasn’t able to bring to the stage when he was younger. (He won his third Tony Award for playing Nixon on Broadway and is back there now in a Terrence Rattigan play.) “I haven’t done any plastic surgery or any plugs in my head. I’m letting my hair go as it goes, and I’m trying to age gracefully into my profession as well as life. I think it’s madness to try to be what you were.”
That last line really stopped me in my tracks—or on my jog. Of course, he’s referring to age—it seems like each day there’s something physical that we realize just doesn’t come as easy as it did before—but it’s also a great line for businesses as well in these current economic times. Our executive director, Matt Salt, returned last week from what sounded like an incredibly enlightening Fall Publishers Roundtable in New York. If an association like SIPA can do anything for you, it can get you in the same room with other like-minded publishers or marketers to discuss what’s working, what’s not and what your next steps should be.
What Matt told us really resonated, especially after I listened to the interview on Saturday. He said that these are now the times we’re living in—hopefully not a recession, but certainly not the boom times of a decade ago—so get used to them and learn to thrive in them. To paraphrase Langella, it would be madness to try to be what you were in those other times. You have to strategize for today, for your employees having to do more with less, for capital being harder to come by and for constant ups and downs in the market. But today also means all this new technology at our disposal. That’s the advantage that we have—and that’s again where an association like SIPA can lead you further and more successfully into this new age.
On Oct. 20, SIPA will air another in its series of free-for-members Webinars—now sponsored by the Specialized Information Publishers Foundation—titled Going Mobile for Publishers: Developing a Content-Delivery System for an Increasingly Portable World. Then from Dec. 7-9, the Annual Marketing Conference in Miami will take on topics like Building and Leveraging Loyal Communities, eLearning, and Multi-Platform Pricing Strategy. But mostly, SIPA gives you the opportunity to get into that little room—whether it’s at a conference, in a community, at a roundtable or on our Listervs—and talk to your peers.
The Listservs alone are amazing for the information they deliver. Whether it’s a discussion about Webinar vendors—how many people had heard of Mikogo.com before it was recommended on our listserv?—a tool called http://dlvr.it/, which allows you to automatically forward any blogs or about anything else you produce on the web to pretty much any social media site, or PDF protection for subscriber communities, SIPA members are very much on top of the latest happenings in technology.
And no, we shouldn’t be caught up in trying to duplicate anything from the past—be it a certain successful campaign or, in Langella’s case, a great role. Those are over; these are the times we now live in. In fact, Langella kind of scoffed at the notion that the roles he has played, especially of evil men, carry over into real life. Instead, he has learned to move on.
“I remember a young actor told me once that it took him a year to get over playing Hamlet,” Langella recounted, “and I said, ‘Well, then you did it wrong.’ It should take you until your first glass of wine at the restaurant later on to get over it.”
It’s that time for us as well.
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