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Teamwork Breeds Sucess
(Article Contributed By Dino - Posted on June 30th, 2009)
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If you’ve read any of my articles for the past five years or so on PornResource.com, you might have gathered I’m quite fond of analogies. You also will know that I do some of my best thinking in the shower in the morning - of course, “morning” to me is classed as the time I wake up and is frequently early in the evening. I’m a night owl since my daughter arrived.
Take “this morning” for instance. I’ve just got back from officiating a 5-day national paintball tournament. I got back into the sport after a 10 year and-then-some absence, mainly for financial reasons. Back in the sport’s early days it was extremely expensive to play. Guns are still the same price, but now you get a lot more for your money. The major expense was paintballs.
Without these, you might as well just pack up and go home. Firing bursts of CO2 or HPA (High Pressure Air if you’re not a player) isn’t going to mark anyone anytime soon, so without paint you cannot eliminate anyone.
Paint back in the day ran a about 50 cents a shot or more. Granted the guns we had then were slow and difficult to aim, so it was rare to fire more than a few shots per game unless you were the Rambo type (and rich). Paintball markers now are insane when it comes to firepower; some of the high-end markers can throw out paintballs at a rate of 25 plus a second and paint prices have dropped to around 2.5 cents a shot or lower.
But I digress. In the shower I started thinking (as I usually do) about my work, and my eyes fell to a massive amounts of welts I have all over my chest, arms and legs. I was refereeing a mix of seasoned players, a few complete newbies and a lot of people like me; people who’d played a lot in the past but were behind the times when it came down to the new technology.
Teamwork is essential in playing paintball, especially when you start playing speedball. Speedball is played in a small enclosed area with a mirror layout of bunkers. Two teams start at either end with a central flag, and you have to hang the flag at your opponent’s starting position. Games are limited to 5 minutes, and they very rarely go that far.
There’s a point, I promise. Stay with me on this.
In speedball communication is vital. If someone is being suppressed and pushed down into their bunker by covering fire, they’re blind. They have to rely on their teammates to tell them where their opponents are. The rest of the team becomes their eyes and ears. If they stop communicating, then the game is pretty much lost there and then.
Teamwork and communication, no matter what you might think, does come into play when you’re running a business online. We all might be in competition with each other, but we talk. We talk on ICQ, on boards and at shows. Designers like myself talk to our clients all the time (at least I do) – we have to know what they want and if we’re capturing their vision of the tour or design that they have in their minds.
When that communication breaks down, things start to go bad very quickly.
Teamwork is a little harder to define in the online adult world. As I said before, we’re pretty much in competition with each other, but partnerships emerge frequently, even if they’re of the passive type. I might have a skill you need; you might have something I need. We work out a deal and we trade services/products together. That’s teamwork of a sort – two or more people working towards a common goal.
The point I’m trying to make through all this is simple: the adult business needs to work on its communication and teamwork.
Right now our boards are cluttered with surfers who are, for want of a better term, polluting our space with drivel. Sponsors and webmasters are more concerned with their “board persona” than their business. Sponsors are slinging mud at each other instead of working together for a common goal – to earn money.
I’m not saying you should strike up a deal with everyone you meet. I’m not saying that at all. What I’m trying to point out using the Paintball analogy is that it is perfectly possible for complete strangers to form a winning team (or temporary alliance) if the need arises.
We don’t need Rambos up front, trying to get all the glory for themselves. They might shine in the limelight for a few brief minutes, but in the end their lack of input to the whole will bring the team down with them and we’ll all be sat in the metaphorical deadbox, waiting for the next game.
It’s time to pull together, pimps. Till tomorrow!
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