Dunkirk Review: A Haunting, Heroic Masterpiece
July 20, 2017
Gishwhes (As We Know It) Is Over
August 14, 2017
Hey hey hey! As many of you know, we take part in this crazy, fantastic, amazing, international competition every single year… and in a few hours, it starts again. The best week of each year! The time for explosive creativeness and fun times around the clock! Gishwhes 2017 is here!
Tips for Gishwhes 2017 – here’s how to succeed
Gishwhes 2017 begins today! HOORAY!
I feel like I’ve written about this competition a lot lately and that feeling isn’t so far off: just recently we published this quick quide to Gishwhes and we’ve also shared a lot of our photos and videos across our social media along the years.
And there’s more to come. We have our gishing pants on and there’s no turning back now!
Participating in Gishwhes 2017? Here be tips!
Since we’ve done this for years, we thought we’d share some of our best tips for anyone competing – first-timer, old-timer, anyone really. Some of these tips apply to life itself, we’ve noticed. Some of them necessarily don’t. Apply to life and gishing as you see best:
- BE KIND. Always, forever and in every occasion: be kind. Be kind to your team mates, be kind to those you ask help from. Be kind to any businesses who decline participating in your photo or video (as they have every right to do so) and be kind to those who might reply to you rudely. Gishwhes isn’t an easy concept to explain or to understand, so you’ll just have to forgive anyone who isn’t as excited about it as we all are. But you be the one who spreads kindness. That is the thing.
- BE BRAVE. Doing a crazy thing in public might seem like a really intimidating idea at first, but do it anyway. Dig deep, find your courage and just do it. We promise you; you’ll soon notice that the more nutty things you put yourself through, the more you’ll start to enjoy them. And the people around you will as well, be it friends or strangers. You might get some smiles or weird looks but that’s all ok. You might meet an adorable family of tourists from far away who ask to take a photo with you and your awesome, weird costume, and that’s even more ok. It’s a sign that you’ve made their day. That they’ll have something to look back on and smile later on.
- DO GOOD. Gishwhes is as much about charity and doing good things as it is about competing. Make sure you do as many of the good will items as you can: they might not be as fun and colourful items to do as the more creative ones, but they matter the most. Just check out the “Charity & Impact” page on the official Gishwhes site. So impressive! It wouldn’t be that impressive if we all didn’t contribute on that side of things, every single year.
- BE PATIENT. If you don’t succeed at something on the first go, try again. Completing one of the bigger, more complicated items is such a great feeling. Keep going, don’t give up, but never forget to have fun while at it.
- COMMUNICATE. The worst thing that can happen to a team is not the fact that one of the team members has to step aside all of a sudden; that for some reason, they can’t participate anymore, which means the team loses one important member. That’s not the end of the world. To us, the most disappointing situations have been those where someone doesn’t communicate with us at all during the week. We’ve left wondering if something bad happened to them or if someone hurt them without even knowing they did. If something comes up and you think you can’t continue with the competition anymore, just talk about it – to either the team captain or to anyone, really. Just let them know so they can be supportive of you and your situation (if you so wish) and so that they can pick up whatever items you can’t possibly complete anymore. Don’t be a ghost. Be a part of the team. Discuss. Share.
- COLLABORATE. One of the funnest parts of Gishwhes is team work. If you have a good idea for an item, swell. If you can share that idea with the rest of the team, hear their input without being too touchy about (reasonable) criticism or suggestions, even sweller. Two, three, even 15 sets of brains and creativity and skill is usually better than going about it alone. So again: Discuss! Share!
That’s it. A list of our best tips for Gishwhes 2017. We hope you found all this useful! Feel free to comment and share your own thoughts in the comments below.
Also, do come back for the full Gishwhes 2017 list after it’s been published on the official site. We’ll post it here to ease the server load and to make sure our friends and family can read through it and shake their heads in disbelief.
Like every year.
That’s it for now, sweethearts. We really need to get back to preparing our glue guns for the race, now.
GOOD LUCK, FELLOW GISHERS! WE’LL SEE YOU ON THE BATTLEFIELD! <3
