On Monday 20th May I went to Chris Cardell’s Internet Revolution 2013 event in London (Hilton Metropole Hotel, Edgware Road). It was clear to me that Cardell was trying to get us to review our characters (our mindset) as well as the entrepreneurial techniques we used; which, I suppose, is supposed to be par for the course in everything he does. This isn’t the first time I’ve been to a Chris Cardell thing and I fully believe that he endeavours to get his visitors to view him as a bold (not just knowledgeable) kind of person. And why not? This is a man who was once more than £100,000 in debt – that’s more than the whole of what I’ve earned since I became an entrepreneur back in 2008! – and he now runs a £20 million business.
Here’s some more evidence to back up this claim, in something I received from him titled “A Personal Message from Chris Cardell”:
“If you’d met me when I was five years old, you would have met a very different person. I was so shy I wouldn’t look people in the eye. I was having speech therapy because I couldn’t speak properly.
If you’d met me when I was 13, you’d have met a very different person. I wasn’t doing well at school. I was a rebel with nowhere to go. I still wasn’t looking people in the eye and my teachers were convinced I was heading for a life of… not much.
If you’d met me at 21, you’d have met a very different person. I had overcome much of the above and was now a successful radio broadcaster. I thought I knew it all. I was wrong.
If you’d met me at 28, you’d have met a very financially broke person. I had decided to become an Entrepreneur and had managed to create debt of well over £100,000. I had no obvious way to direct my talents. I had started to discover the basics of Marketing and PR but frankly, I was all over the place.
Then Everything Changed…
When I first discovered Advanced Thinking…”
Indeed, when I went to his event on 19th and 20th October, he was keen to tell us sometimes amusing stories of his earlier life.
I have played with the purely made-up idea that, when Vanessa Carlton, whom I’m very fond of, released an album called, “Be Not Nobody”, her implicit “real” message was, “Forget about trying to be ‘the true you’; seek to be ‘a’ true you!” But I would agree a lot more readily that Chris encourages us to develop goals which are conducive to our entrepreneurial lives (during this event he made it clear that he doesn’t tell us how to run our businesses. He only tells us what works.). He certainly discourages us from having a business website which only really says, “This is us, this is what we do, give us a call if you need anything” and leaving it at that. He specifically said that.
In this paragraph I will look at the probable reasons why I am prone to regarding translation as monotonous. When I sit down for another day at this job: for all my prowess in it I don’t usually expect to remember anything particular about it for a long time, possibly the rest of my life; like when Chris encouraged us to remember certain, shall we say, entertaining things about him from the aforementioned stories of his earlier life. I mean, if you are honest with yourself, what specific things would you expect people to remember about you in, say, a job interview? Or a date? Just things that stand out and “identify” you, and not for all the wrong reasons, do you know what I mean? I tell you, I have watched my new business video and found just myself going, “…yep…that’s me. …great” in a somewhat bland way, as if I only half-appreciated it, or appreciated it but didn’t relish it as much as someone else might think.
Between the advice that Chris Cardell gives everyone who goes to his seminars, and his reminders of the importance of implementation (those are very common), he said that it’s a myth that successful people don’t have problems. It’s how they handle them that counts. In fact, in the August 2012 edition of Business Breakthroughs the article on the very first page has the title, “Are you failing enough?” …Somehow I’m actually “proud” of this near-mistake I made in a recent translation project:
German: “Die Daten selber sind gemäss Aussage von Saulius Grakavinas um 08.00 Uhr bereit”
English: “The data itself is ready by around 08:00, according to Saulius Grakavinas.“
…not “as per the decrees of Saulius Grakavinas”, like I originally thought; but I DID understand from an earlier point in the document that this guy Saulius was a project manager – and remembered it.
Sometimes in my work there is ambiguity as to whether the ideas I have for my translation of things are correct or not. In the same project as that referenced above, I saw “IST-Situation” in the original – “Actual situation” or “Current situation”? It’s not like I don’t compare it with “aktuell” (German) and “actuel” (French), words which are well known as faux amis.