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Focus and Feedback

Guest post by: Jim Stovall

Article Overview: For the last six months, I have been working daily with the movie studio that is turning my novel The Lamp into a motion picture. The movie has an all-star cast including Academy Award-winner Louis Gossett Jr., so I have been eagerly working every day to make sure we have attended to every possible detail to the best of our ability.

Focus and Feedback

For the last six months, I have been working daily with the movie studio that is turning my novel The Lamp into a motion picture. The movie has an all-star cast including Academy Award-winner Louis Gossett Jr., so I have been eagerly working every day to make sure we have attended to every possible detail to the best of our ability.

Once the studio had edited the movie together and we all agreed it was ready to go, we conducted focus group screenings with random audiences across the country. These groups agreed to watch the movie and candidly fill out a survey with their feedback and how they would rate the film overall.

The people who make the best audience feedback screening subjects are those who have the least background with me, my books, or our other movies. This seems counterintuitive as does most great wisdom that we try to implement in our lives.

Even though I wrote the original story, the director worked 'round the clock on every minute of the movie, and the other film editors and technical people worked diligently, all of our collective best efforts could not match the creative feedback we received from total strangers who had no knowledge of the project. Even though the film was rated "Outstanding" by these focus group audiences from all parts of the country, they still pointed out a number of places where we could make minor edits or adjust the sound levels and make it an even better movie.

For years through my books, speeches, movies, and these columns, I have offered the following recommendation: "Never take advice from anybody who doesn't have what you want." Therefore, you may be asking yourself, after having many months of constant focus and input from some of the very top award-winning people in the motion picture industry, why we would go to the trouble of inviting total strangers who have no knowledge of our project or the movie industry for their opinions.

Whether you sell a product, a service, or your ideas, at some point you and your productivity will be judged by the general consuming public or the people for whom your products or services are intended. You can get so close to a project that you can't see the forest for the trees. Experts may be a good judge of how to do things, but if you want to know what the general public wants, you've got to find an objective way to ask them. The final judge of your work will come from a person or a group of people who will make a buying decision.

As you go through your day today, seek the advice of experts and feedback from people who will become your buyers.

Today's the day!

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Article Tags: advice, Jim Stovall, louis gossett jr



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Re: Quote of the Day - ?"Where focus goes energy flows." - Tony - Focus on a single task, eliminate millions of disractions
Re: Five Personality Traits of Successful Business Owners - 1. Focus 2. Ability to Adapt 3. Hard Work 4. Good planning 5. People Skills
Subject Line Etiquette - For myself, it's not so much "etiquette" as common sense. If you're emailing someone with a business offer or to strike up a relationship, you do not put "Hello" or "Hi" or something cryptic in the subject line. You make it clear what your email is about - just as you would on a message board. So instead of "wff" for example, the guy who emailed me a couple of days ago should have said, "Feedback on Your WFF Article" - so that I would have known what it was about without having to look at it and try to think...
Entrepreneurs to profile - Here are my suggestions: Howard Schultz, Founder of Starbucks Jason Jiang, Founder of Focus Media


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