Stay Awhile

Better Than Before

2012-01-25T12:38:00.002-05:00

Why won’t the C drive backup to the F? I’ve got four years of business failures to save here, this has to get done before the new machine gets setup, I thought as my morning began today.

Letting the antsy dogs pile through the now open sliding glass door is a test in anxiety, as the largest Jack quickly bolts toward the fence that divides my and the neighbors homes, I try to muster a no to yell, too late, he’s gone.

Staring at my closet I count dozens of shirts needing to go to charity, even more shoes, and the uncategorizable that haven’t been worn in years. Why was I holding on to this, and where is my sense of responsibility this morning? Get with it Clark.

Back at the computer client and contractor emails demanding more of my time intertwine into the very strand of DNA this company is made of, I need coffee.

Flipping through new music on Spotify I spy Gotye, an artist my sister showed me a few weeks ago in some odd body painting video. No time to waste as Jack’s probably getting shot at by the neighbors, surely armed to the teeth in this Carolina working class town, I need to get to the shower before hell breaks loose, Gotye will have to do.

Miniscule task by miniscule task modern me goes through the assembly line of life with Gotye providing the soundtrack. Old boots and khakis that are too big for me on bottom, a pocket tee on top, something warm over that, and some cold water for my hot dry throat. Is that a bark I hear? Gunshots? Time to get Jack.

With a defecation dodging dash through the backyard I find Jack on the neighbor’s side of the fence. He can’t get back over, it’s time for my morning dead lift, 65 lbs of dirty dog up, and down. His paws caked with dirt are eager to share with my fresh t-shirt. I try to dead lift him over the fence without allowing the paw pat with outstretched arms and half-succeed.

As I walk back to the house I think about my doctor’s visit last week, and that clipboard with the white blood cell count on it. You look at those things differently when a friend has cancer, you realize, if for just a millisecond, the pain and utter fear of the unknown they feel each day of their life, my body shudders at the thought of it, I fight back a tear.

Inside now Jack sips from a steel water bowl resting on the kitchen floor and decides to share his mud with his siblings, Rufus and Jill love nature, fresh mud to them is akin to the best stadium pretzel you’ve ever tasted at the big game, sinfully delicious.

Muddy and frustrated I stand in front of the computer, no sign of digital preservation via my C to F backup, I want to yell in frustration. My email count grows, some with subjects like Can You Help Me with This Now, and If You Could Just Review These 50 Pages Real Quick, why is good coffee so hard to find when you need it?

I pause, think about all that needed to get done today, and that’s when it happened, old Gotye started to play something half decent. A song about life, about being down and out, and now doing better than before. A familiar storyline in my life, I turn the volume up.

I think back to my sister’s assessment of the album; the title track Somebody That I Used to Know standing in far contrast in terms of quality and toe-tap ability to the others, and mostly I agree with her, until the better song arrived, aptly titled I Feel Better. As I brushed the now-dry dirt off my shirt, I started to grin, life was better, everything was and is better, like a thousand years of championship seasons my team sat atop the podium victorious, arms heavy only from holding the trophy of victory so high for so long. Any possible thing I’ve wanted over the years, real friendships, love, stability, progress for my family, honesty, a relationship with God, it was all at my desk, right there in front of me. Life at 32 is stunning.

Pinch me moments these days come early and often, life is everything that I want it to be, and here are the two reasons I think it’s there now, and why I think your life, despite your dog-over-the-fence moments can, and should be, just as good.

Accountability as Zero-Sum

If you aren’t taking accountability for something in your life, that something, whatever it is, will take away from your capacity to achieve success. Look no further than my alma maters last year.

South Carolina’s baseball team suffered a tremendous loss of talent throughout the regular season and playoffs from a cavalcade of injuries in 2011. The team had lost the previous year’s College World Series MVP, Jackie Bradley Jr., along with many other key players, and just as one would get healthy another would bite the dust, an injurious cycle evolved to the ranks of something college baseball had rarely seen. The team’s motto? Win anyway. And that’s what they did, tearing through the playoffs and College World Series to a tremendous second-straight national title. Throughout all the injuries there was no excuses made for not winning, the team bought into the zero-sum game of accountability, where any reason, valid or not, to not perform at their best each day was unacceptable to consider. Win anyway.

Ohio Wesleyan University has a tremendous soccer program for any size school, as the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out regarding the oxymoronic nature of college soccer, the smaller the school the bigger and better the program. So it might not come as a surprise to many that OWU won their second Division III national championship this past year. What might surprise many is the fact they did so just days after having all their gear stolen from their team van, everything from personal possessions, laptops with a semester’s worth of homework on them, and all else in-between. Having to borrow equipment from other college teams to play their playoff games, they took the zero-sum approach to accountability, and despite incredible odds won it all, making the coach, most likely the disseminator of the zero-sum attitude, the winningest college soccer coach of all time, that very game.

If you feel excuses creeping into your life, as we all tend to each day, work to fight them off. Realize that by taking full accountability for your actions each day the result will be like none other.

Of course the other part of this equation involves having a stable enough life to adhere to such a provocative schedule of self-reliance.

Surrounded

You need something desperately and it’s 3 am, who is there to drop everything, most likely sleep at that time, and come to your rescue? Anyone? This small assessment of your friend circle, what I call the 3 am test, can quickly flesh out who is unequivocally your friend and who is conveniently hanging around, know the difference and ditch the ones that would do the same to you if they had something better going on. Ironically they’ll respect you more for being so blunt.

Somewhere on the internet a study exists that states our personal income can be determined roughly by the mean of our social circle’s gross income. In other words, if we hang with a bunch of people that are unemployed we are apt to be as well. Conversely if we roll with big timers we’re probably in the 1% too. While what you make financially is inconsequential to whom you choose to befriend, what is important here is the real-life example of how statically we are similar to whom we surround ourselves with.

How do you view you? Loving, kind, selfless, interesting, adventurous? Are those the choice descriptors that you’d award to your friends? If not, remember the above equation of us being the financial, and quite possibly emotional, mean average of our friends. We don’t need friends that are exactly like us, especially if we are negative pessimists, but certainly we need friends that share a positive outlook on life, if progress is the goal. If you want to surround yourself with positive people think about visiting with the volunteers at a shelter or church or homeless mission, trust me those people will change your life for the better.

If we commit to surrounding ourselves with people that will make us better instead of comfortable, greatness can and will occur. It took me years, nearly a decade to be exact, to put to bed the relationships that held me down, and now I’m here to challenge you to do the same.

By no means do I have much of anything figured out, but as I grow older and count my failures in dozens instead of digits, I realize the wisdom in ideas I once thought cliché, to us both comes the spoils from following such ideas earnestly.

This post was inspired by the song I Feel Better by Gotye

Paralysis of Tragedy

2011-12-28T14:46:00.001-05:00

Just like any other night on Two Notch Road, cars blinked past streetlights at speeds high enough to paint a mahogany ember over the deep indigo midnight sky. Buildings arose into sight as quick as they disappeared. A Cadillac with thick charcoal tinted windows came centimeters from my front bumper in what seemed like a second. No stop light in sight, my size 13 tensed the brake just enough to stop behind him in time.

Two flashes of blinding light turned night to day for an instant, and then back to night, followed by the torturous noise a volcano might make in full eruption.

Growing up part of the generation that witnessed the first fully televised war, Desert Storm, and the subsequent proliferation of all-things-media in every battle since, it’s no wonder I had a fairly good sense of what it might feel like to stand near a bomb detonation.

I yelled, not out of surprise, but out of something primal, like a drum beat it was over. I touched my face, was I alive?

That feeling right after a headlining rock concert ends, when it’s silent but for the crowds whisper, yet a layer of sound still hisses in your ears, that’s the feeling I had as I swung open the door to my truck. Everything slowed down, next to a sedan now resting driver side up stood a family of six, all crying, shouting, where were the paramedics? Where was the ambulance? Can someone do a head count, no body count, now? Please God.

Prayers aren’t always exercises in meditative stamina. I shot a prayer to God, please God, help them, whoever them was at that moment.

With my husky SUV shifted into park and the wide body rear fully blocking traffic I walked toward the wreck, now pushing smoke to the air like a steel tipi, I wondered for a second if anyone was alive inside, and then to the question of what might happen if the evolving push of smoke turned to fire, surely I’d die.

When tragedy happens the dead have a way of kissing you goodbye, ever so slightly letting you know that the steps you take are among ghosts now. When my grandmother passed away, the patron saint of my childhood, she said goodbye to me in a dream. When my uncle came to tell me the news that summer morning all those years ago I already knew my hero had left this earth, bound for the heavens above.

The family, now kneeling to the ground in pain, stood dangerously close to the fuming car. A man ushered them away, motioning with his eyes for me to get back. His bravery led to a pop of adrenaline chasing the fear out of my bloodstream, as my eyelids began extracting from their usual sleepy posture to just about the back of their sockets. I started to run, towards the car at first, and then into the hand of a man that pushed me back, telling me nobody alive was in the car with a shake of his head. Before I could speak he was gone, was he ever really there?

I regained my footing, standing still as a statue in the middle of a fatal pile-up scene.

Silence, the great exasperator, did her best to make me feel like there was something I could’ve done to save the passengers of that wrecked fuming collection of steel. I stood still while the paramedics darted by me on both sides.

Whatever time we have left is precious, and far too important to spend entirely on the road of self-fulfillment, for when the collision of life and death occurs we’ll want to pass on with a spirit of selfless giving, even in, or maybe in spite of, the paralysis of tragedy.

Running Towards Redemption

2011-12-20T16:54:00.001-05:00

Ten summers ago I ran a road race with my father. It wasn’t anything serious, a sleepy 5k on a sticky summer night in South Carolina. One learns quickly upon moving to the south that outdoor events, during the summer at least, are reserved for the evening, because frankly it’s too damn hot to do much of anything when the sunlight radiates it’s suffocating heat into the thick muggy mid-Carolina air.

As I nervously approached the block of runners stretching near the starting line my dad tapped me on the shoulder, and whispered to follow him. We waded through hundreds of people on our way back. I wondered where we were going, the starting line was the exact opposite way, why were we walking away from it I thought confounded by what seemed to be an obvious disadvantage we were now placing on this father and son team.

Right before the race began we reached the very back of the field, and my father quietly said something I’ll never forget, he looked forward to the sea of bodies, and back at me, and explained that he liked to start in the back so that he’d spend the race passing others instead of being passed like those that might start at the front but not be in good enough shape to keep pace. It’s the psychology of it he explained, and we were off.

A penny, if you spin it the right way, on a flat surface can turn for seconds at a time in revolutions so fast the coin itself appears blurred, tails and heads become almost one, until the coin slows enough for gravity to pull it down to one side or another. The penny can fall, in theory at least, on either side just as easily.

When a man loses his money he feels inadequate, in his DNA is the need to provide, and with no money becoming a provider all the sudden doesn’t quite sound possible. With no money a man becomes almost irrelevant to a culture set upon, run by, and worshipped for monetary measures.

When a man loses love he has no shoulder to cry on, no one to listen to his feelings, to rub his shoulders and tell him it’ll be alright, that everything will be alright. No love to hold him up when he is too weak to hold his own weight, to push him for the better, and to champion his interests and goals as if they were her own.

When a man loses his car he has no transpiration, which often means the freedom he once had is no more. When a man has no torque in front of him, no rubber beneath, no wheel to rest his hands on, his life is at a perpetual stoplight, always red, never green, at least in a city with scant public transportation.

Combine the three, no money, love, or car, add in that unforgiving Carolina summer heat, and you have all the ingredients baking toward a depression of serious proportions. You also have something else, a gift, a wondrous gift that is so special, so unbelievably amazing, it has no price that one could pay for it. Beyond the bitter taste of what you don’t have, lays a honeycomb sweet opportunity to change your life in magnitudes otherwise incomprehensible, for the better.

Running from the back of the field in that road race a decade ago was so exhilarating, just when I thought I couldn’t possibly pass anymore people as I steamed through 3.1 miles, a few more bit the dust behind me. Finishing nowhere near the top wasn’t even on my radar as my feet dashed the finish line, because I knew that I was far from last, that my time was respectable, and that my effort was worthy, simply by counting all those that ended up behind me. Psychology indeed.

The gift of starting at the back of a race, and in life, is in experiencing something from nothing. Seeing progress not in the context of a lifetime of progress, but in that of having nowhere to go but up in the moment. Instead of carrying the faults of ambitious goals gone ary, we celebrate the smallest of victories out of nothingness. A strip steak to the rich is dog food, to the poorest of the poor it is a meal reserved for only the most special of occasions.

This past summer, years after the road race, when I thought I’d surely have it all figured out, a season of despair had arrived so unexpected. Just when I thought things could not get much worse, they started to get better. The fall and winter brought so much right, so many smiles and laughs have been had, and my old Subaru has to be the best car I’ve ever owned if for nothing else that it cost $2,500 and runs like a gem. The money I make now comes from the hardest work I’ve ever done, and is the most gratifying. I do as much pro bono work as paid, and it’s totally awesome. Life these days is as sweet as the tea down here, not because everything is as good as it’s ever been, but because everything is now the way it should be. I am who I want to be, finally, and while arriving at the destination of being my true self is enormously fantastic in it’s own right, the real blood pumping, finger tingling, eye bulging excitement comes from what I, no we, can do now. The world really is my oyster, and yours too.

That penny spinning, I envision you like that, all of us actually, a motion-filled entity that can at any given time land to do good, to give unselfishly, to toss ego in the trash can, and just serve and build a better place, as it can fall on the side of self-gratification, one-upping the Joneses, and far worse deeds that arrive from our inner desires to do wrong.

When I speak to others and they share with me, maybe because I welcome openness, or maybe because of some otherworldly reason, they share their desire to do more with their life. To build a business that matters, or to give to the poor, or the church, or to students with no school supplies. Each time I hear such wishes I think of that penny, and of the race, and how if we just take a minute to walk to the back of the pack, shedding all our thoughts and perceptions of who we are, or what others think we should be, before a nightmare of a life does it for us, we are capable of so much goodness… Maybe even enough to change the world.

Preservatives

2011-12-03T13:56:00.002-05:00

Not long ago I purchased a laptop desk after hearing from friends and reading in the paper that extended use of a laptop computer as the namesake suggests on one’s lap can possibly cause infertility. Being tethered to my MacBook Air for more hours in a day than I care to admit, it seemed like a smart preventative investment. Preservation of unborn children has been on my mind lately.

A crazy man stands firm in the middle of a busy four-lane thoroughfare in an industrious area near my home. Wielding dolls that look straight out of a Chucky movie, and grotesque picture signs of lifeless fetuses while dodging cars and trucks that almost seem to speed up as they near him, the man finds time to wave at passersby. I don’t know his name, but for at least a decade, the time I’ve lived here, he’s furiously waved his signs and dolls in an effort to get expecting moms to think twice about having an abortion. If you live in Columbia, South Carolina long enough you too will get the shock treatment.

On 60 Minutes recently Scott Pelley interviewed a homeless Florida family living in a van. What was more striking than the picture of Pelley, an upper middle class income earner to put it modestly sympathetically interviewing a poor homeless family, was the nature of the children. Calm and resolute, the children stood as reflections of their parents, the words whispered from their mouths could’ve easily come from mom or dad, like a circus maze mirror, distort the size of their parents and you’d get the children. As brother and sister stood side-by-side extolling the benefits of the simple life their parents proudly looked on like a young couple would at their son or daughter’s first soccer game.

Over craft beers with a friend last night at a local pub, by the way that’s what people do in their thirties, they drink craft beers at pubs instead of buds at dive bars, a woman caught my attention. Tall with dark hair that curled off her head ever so slightly falling in her firm-as-can-be snow white face, no smile or smirk evident, like she hadn’t grinned in her lifetime she beamed of natural beauty. You know the kind of beauty where makeup isn’t needed, and just about anything she wears looks like her go-to best outfit? That’s the kind of beauty this woman had.

As she floated across the floor she glanced at me, blatantly catching my eyes fixated on her, headed somewhere intentionally, or maybe just to stretch those long legs, she went gracefully through the cluttered beer boasters and chatty girls with their cell phones and gossip. I turned around, surely there was a clock above my head, or maybe a window beside me, something that would call her attention to where I was sitting, or was she looking at me? Minutes passed, lost in conversation I’d almost forgot about the whole thing, when she appeared a second time. She navigated the swelling crowd eyes meeting mine, body moving effortlessly. I stopped to take the scene in and as my eyes froze on her, she reciprocated, just to walk out of the bar never to be seen again.

My mom told me, some years back, that I was to have an older sister, her name was to be Jean Vee Ev, which I guess means Genevieve in French. What a beautiful name I told her, my mom smiled and nodded. Jean Vee Ev was never born, but her ghost still visits often.

Colton, the young boy profiled in the bestseller Heaven is for Real, a tale about visiting the other side, was interviewed not too long ago on TV about meeting his miscarried sister, which made me feel better about thinking of Jean Vee Ev from time to time.

I wonder if you asked a healthy happy ten year old girl how she felt about the zealotus doll waver if her mom had decided to have her after being accosted by one of the very signs the man waves so vehemently. Would she not thank him for her life? If all of this insanity led to her safe arrival, in a crazy ass way is this not the best thing that ever happened to her?

Would the homeless jobless parents give their children up if they could? It surely doesn't seem to be the case. Would they take their children back if they could, just to save them from suffering a fate most children could never imagine after hearing the humility and wisdom in their young voices on TV? It seems as if in their own way, van and all, they’re doing well enough, and are thankful enough for their children to not take anything back.

The woman in the pub, she made me think of Jean Vee Ev, dark haired and stoic like her mom, would she have been happy to live life on this earth? To endure the ups and downs of life for a chance to make a difference in another life? Unsettled and out of place in that pub, ready for things far more important than a martini to come her way, she walked out the door assured that the next day she’d get to her volunteer gig at the shelter earlier. Surely like my mother she’d be a difference maker, a world saver, wouldn’t she? Some days I can only wonder.

2011-11-29T12:55:00.002-05:00

I woke up this morning and asked God why He gave me another day?

God replied, to do my work.

Reimagined in Ruins

2011-11-23T15:05:00.001-05:00

Not too long ago I tweeted that I’d be better off with no material possessions. A smart apple tersely responded surely I wouldn’t want my material cache of belongings stolen. Time passed. I let his tweet echo in my mind for sometime, the notion of giving versus being taken from, and the idea of what it would be like to have nothing swished around in my mind like a soapy sponge on last night’s dinner plate.

Today, in front of me, after a good cup of coffee, stood the unanswerable Socratic paradox, if we work to accumulate material possessions, then it would be unimaginable, or counterintuitive at the very least, to give them all away, nonetheless have them taken from our grasp? Surely running water, an insulated home, and a stove to cook food with is necessary for modern life. Case and point - that delicious cup of coffee required some boiling water to drip into the ceramic cup, not to mention the electricity that propelled the grinder blades to crush the roasted beans into a handful of sandy goodness. Surely we shouldn’t live without everything I concluded, as many of you have very long ago, but all that other stuff, you know, everything that doesn’t serve our daily needs, are all those things really necessary?

I’ve been robbed three or four times, my mom a few times, my brother at least once, my father a few times, and my various businesses in the tens of times, not to mention close friends and family that’ve fallen victim to the act countless times. What universally seems to come from robbery emotion-wise is not so much the loss of possessions, but rather the feeling of violation.

I don’t know about you, but my robber is dressed in all black, wearing a perpetual scowl on his lips wet with the fresh drool delivered from the adrenaline rush that his thievery so often delivers. My robber loves to take, destroy, and dirty the very place I call home in a way that shows he is not only a taker, but a controller. My robber hates what I love, and would kill my dogs if he knew how much it’d break my heart. My robber is forever a thug, a wild man with a heart for terror that waits for everyone to sleep so he can cowardly slip through the door and take what is not his like Bank of America tagging on new debit card fees for it’s customers.

My robber wickedly does what he can to cause strife, profit from my loss, and create chaos, fear, and hopelessness.

Here is the funny thing about the robber, he’s not up on mythology, at least not the story of the phoenix. See the phoenix of Greek lore actually ignites itself on fire after nearly a dozen centuries of life, just to see itself reborn out of her own ashes for a new life of fruitful existence. In essence the very person that exists to hurt us is helping us, freeing us from all that we own and associate with in grand fashion, allowing for our new selves to emerge in way we would never self-perpetuate. Our robber ducks in, tosses a match on our nest and resting bodies, and lights a fire of change that we would never ask for on our own account, but are so grateful for after we see the beautiful ashes the fire left in it’s wake. Given a life reimagined, what would you do different? Exactly.

Look around your living room, your office, or bedroom. Would you buy that same desk if you could? Surely you’d think twice about that snow globe with the snail in it you thought was so cool five years ago you had toss it on the checkout counter at the surf shop, or about that t-shirt you got at that Limp Bizkit concert before they were lumped in as has-beens from the nineties. If you really look around, and really ask the question, not do I need this, but how often do I use this shirt, snow globe, watch, or candleholder to better my life? If you really ask that honest question for all the items in your home, the answers might start surprising you. Nine out of ten possessions will suddenly look out of place, as there simply is no need for them anymore.

When all your belongings are taken, stolen from under your grasp, what really happens is opportunity disguised as tragedy. We are gifted by the visit from someone so greedy they take everything you own, and leave you with so much less than you would’ve ever tossed out on your own. You have nothing now, so finally you are free to live the life you know is best for you in all that wisdom you’ve acquired through the years since you purchased all those things to being with. Living with less might just provide that blank slate you wanted for so long, but never knew how to ask for, once you have a roof over your head and a stove to cook with of course.

The People That Encourage Us

2011-11-15T13:56:00.001-05:00

Growing up near the city dark was relative. Streetlights flickering connected to a grid of a few million more all dancing to the beat of electrical currents. It was dark then, but never blindly so.

In the country a porch light after the sun diminishes is washed out by darkness rendered nearly useless. Stand outside in the country on a night when clouds cover the moon and your celestial views disappear. You can’t see anything tangible allowing for all the rest to arrive in front of you. All those emotions all the sudden transcend from a feeling to a color to an object standing right there in front of you. Reach your hand out and burn your fingers on the heat of your anger, or risk frostbite grasping the bitter cold that comes with being alone. In the black night a pulse can be felt, read even, that doles out memories with uncanny regularity. We become history students of our own mind.

In times like these our minds have priorities of their own, our thoughts become discourse, our minds the judges. We play out scenarios of the past, people no doubt, who somehow put us down. We wonder how we could prove them wrong, how we could impress them, how we could satisfy their often impossible demands of us. Like a wild tiger in a phone both, the panes of our fragile sensitivities are broken over and over, the phone rings to bring us out of this disastrous place, but tigers don’t know stop as well as they know go.

Sometime ago Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth fame wrote in an essay that we pay to go to concerts to watch other people believe in themselves.

Believing in ourselves, having the absolute faith we can do the unimaginable, we are ordained to be successful through the practice and patients that self-belief fuels. If only we knew where to get some?

A black chandelier sits in my garage, gorgeous and regal, it stood to make a wonderful addition to whatever room it graced. Problem is the chandelier arrived broken, a few pieces missing and thus it emits no light. Our thoughts of those we can’t please are a lot like my black chandelier, broken and useless, incapable of providing light. To think that entirely focusing on our detractors will get us to where we want to go is akin to the bookstore owner asking the librarian for advice on selling more books.

When running we can’t walk, when talking we can’t be silent, and when thinking of the negative we can’t fully embrace the positive in our lives, the great encouragers.

Great encouragers are often the last thanked at the party. They’re the ones we take for granted, as if they somehow owed us their encouragement. We say thanks to them, but do we really mean it? Do we realize the true power of their positive words?

Great encouragers are those that without immediate benefit offer support in praise regardless of our personal wellbeing. Great encouragers can be found among our family, friends, and even strangers in the street.

So many instances exist where great encouragers do their work, often without hoopla or bravado, they go about providing the love and assistance we all need in order to build that priceless thing known as self-confidence.

An email arrived late one evening a year ago, the subject something about writing, and the body something about how I made someone chase their dreams. I did the minimum, I thanked them, and never spoke to them again.

On the phone after a few hours of venting off frustrations from a summer filled with struggle my brother pointed out the possibility I haven’t ever embraced my true gifts. I agreed to get him to stop talking about it. Never did I mention how much it meant to me, not till now at least.

I got a text message not long ago from a friend I hadn’t talked to in a year, it in a roundabout way said their life was better with me in it.

Great encouragers innately are synced with our emotional clocks, they know when to say what and how. We often serve the same role to others.

A student once told me they wanted to drop out of college because they felt like they didn’t belong. I told them they were gifted, rattled off some initial ideas of what they could do with their life, and a year later they told me that’s why they stayed in school. I never heard from them again, I wonder where they are now?

Some years ago I dated a stripper for a few months, she hid her occupation from me out of embarrassment. When I found out we talked, and discovered that she had flawless math skills. Next thing I knew she’s done taking her clothes off for money, and now gets it from helping kids wrestle with numbers for standardized tests.

At a cocktail party this past weekend I told a young man I believed in his idea, his confidence grew before my eyes.

Did the writer pursue their passion because of my book? Did the friend really live a lonelier life without me? Would the stripper have quit without my tutoring pitch? Would the man chase his dream idea without my words? Who knows? If my words, something I’ve got a near unlimited supply of, even influenced any of the situations in the slightest towards the positive was it not worth saying to them?

We all might not have the abilities or personality for that matter to be great encouragers to others, but we all have the capacity to love, cherish, and embrace those that encourage us.

Paring it to Essential

2011-11-04T17:02:00.001-04:00

Why were we so happy as children? Can a brain scan really tell us it’s all science? Are dopamine levels all we really need to gauge human happiness?

Remember being happy as a child, you know, laughing in the forest on a chase with a sibling, tossing in bed incessantly from the utter excitement of going to the amusement park the next day, and the holidays, it’s like a three-month trip on the euphoria train for adolescents like we used to be. Can you recall those times? When our happiness was so abundant it was nearly omnipresent. So what happened between then and now? From the times when we were happy little children to jaded disappointed adults? Where did all that happiness go exactly?

Stuff consumes our beings in ways freightingly unintended. The more things we own the higher the probability something needs to be fixed, cleaned, updated, or at the very least used. Stuff with value can’t be given away, for those that need money and if the time ain’t right to sell it, well the burdenous cycle continues. We just become people with stuff accumulating more stuff in an effort to quench a never-ending thirst for stuff. Not to mention the monetary debt being in the stuff-cycle brings, and all the enslavement that comes with being in debt, it gets really unhappy real quick. Stress, unease, fighting, and even fatalities are results of such.

Having copious amounts of money isn’t much better if we aren’t wise with our spending. We never had to worry about our pets surviving a turbulent private jet trip to the Caribbean island we own, or the lack of veterinary care to treat them upon arrival before all that money fell in our laps. No, with money, after a certain point at least, comes big whoppers of unexpected problems and hassles. Problems everyday Joe’s working the night shift at the tire factory never, ever, in his wildest dreams would worry about. What’s the going rate to heat a McMansion each year? And the pool costs how much to maintain? It’s a tough nut to maintain if the money well ever dries up.

Stuff and money sap us of the one great pleasure of youth, simplicity. We lose our simple lives of routine for the grand production of a delicate balancing act, where balancing atop the razor thin wire of focus and purpose is a daily routine.

Some of the biggest companies in the world, many of them to be more specific, prey on our needs for more stuff. Apple is far from an ambivalent party here, there are product cycles geared towards our insatiable need for the latest and greatest. A child in the Horn of Africa just wants some food so he doesn’t die that day, but we maxed out our credit cards on something far less important than life-sustenance, we got something tangible that has neither a heart or a soul. If only we could pin our grievances on materialism and the trappings of such, but it’s more complicated than just what we buy, it’s also what we say, and what others around us say.

People pollute our minds with mental junk.

I’m secretly bothered by people that talk about other people, because mentally they are creating clutter on the most sacred human space of them all, the mind. Their mind is now clogged with it, and they are fast filling up my brain shelves with it as well.

We verbally butcher people for the craziest reasons, and yet it never satisfies us, so we keep at it, hoping one day there might be some fulfillment from putting someone else down, though as far as I know true peace has never arrived from such. I’m not talking about written critiques of elected leaders, or investigative journalism that uncovers the world’s most hidden improprieties, no, I’m talking about gossip. Gossip blogs, gossip from our lips, gossip from others, it’s useless, and propels us to stock our mental shelves with the unimportant in the most valuable of places. If we are so concerned with Kim Kardashian’s wedding failure or Justin Bieber’s paternal DNA test, what just got shoved out of the way? What if instead of Kim and Justin we thought of homeless Bob on the street corner and Mary in an abusive relationship? Our mental shelves offer only so much capacity, and our wellbeing is much better off for focusing on the Bob’s and Mary’s instead of the Kim’s and Justin’s of the world. Heck, we might just be able to help Bob and Mary.

How can we ever be happy with so much in our minds, homes, and banks? Truth be told we can’t, we never will be, and we shouldn’t expect to be until the art and act of simplicity is fully embraced.

Simplify everything, where you live, what you buy, whom you hang out with, and what you say. Try it for a week and see if it isn’t easier to be a better person, and as important, simply be at peace with world. Simplicity works in our world because our world is full of distractions, and without a clear and well thought out plan we don’t stand a chance at making it through unscathed.

Simplicity offers at the very least a road to a home built on the fertile soil of peace landscaped with trees of calming focus, and a door open wide enough to let whatever shows up come through with ease.

On a personal note I’ve been working on simplifying my life for the past 13 months. Everything in my life has taken a turn for the better, and while I still have a long road to travel to achieve anything close to peace of mind, I feel empowered by what simplicity has offered me thus far, and the above is my testament to such.

Searching for Solace in Rejection

2011-11-01T23:04:00.000-04:00

There is a level of brevity in being painfully rejected. Whether or not I could play kickball as youth, I certainly didn’t look like I was any good. When the schoolyard picking went down I was at or near last picked for as many games as I remember ever playing. I wondered if maybe, just maybe, I was a sleeping Frank Thomas of the kickball diamond, a Pelé of the asphalt, or just as bad as they thought I was.

As much as I’d tell myself back then that rejection gets easier, it clearly doesn’t. The only consistent element of rejection, or the feelings that accompany it at least, are that they eventually go away, or so we’re taught with clichés like time heals all wounds. Does it really?

With age we replace being thought of as insignificant on the playing field for being thought of as insignificant in life. We aren’t invited to certain cocktail parties, to chair or even be part of given committees, and if single, we aren’t always loved back in the way we wished. We grow envious of people with stuff we don’t have, and when desperate, put those down that have less. Less money, education, humor, wisdom, hair, you name it, anything to dial down our own feelings of rejection.

Stubborn loyalty exacerbates the scope of rejection’s reach. We, as souls that have felt the pain of being last picked in the game of life a few times too many hold dear to the bonds we were able to form, to the team’s that did pick us, even if it were for just a single game.

My grandmother never remarried after her divorce. My mom still asks about my dad, 25 years after their marriage ended. I look at my only brother and see a reflection of my own thoughts on the matter, us both still clinging on to things long past. I can’t help but hope the pattern ends with us, but reason tells a different story.

Here is the paradox of life, if we want to participate we must allow for the possibility of rejection to exist. In other words, if we wish to satisfy our human DNA for love, appreciation, growth, and fellowship we must risk feeling totally and utterly rejected in all categories. If you are like me, and equate rejection with sharp torturous soul-stirring pain, then you understand why we’re almost being reckless by participating at all. Enter the modern life.

You hang out with whom you trust, read whom won’t hurt you, and pander to those that potentially may. You seek guidance from those that seem immune from rejection, hoping it’ll rub off on you, and in effect bolster their reputation for immunity. We live in a dog eat dog world, where those that are self-aware enough to admit having trust issues are in fact making themselves ripe targets for rejection to occur. Like a wounded rabbit limping along in the open coyote infested California desert chances of a pleasant outcome dwindle with each minute passed.

Can we decipher anything but bitterness from the taste of rejection on our lips? I believe so. We all feel enslaved to certain people, standards, and cultures, and when rejection occurs, it offers freedom from such slavery. You no longer are shackled to whom you had to be to exist in the place you were told not to enter anymore, you are now free to be different. Fired from a job? Now’s the time to try something different. Dumped? Now’s the time to date someone different. Kicked out of the house by your roommates? Now’s the time to live somewhere different. See a pattern? In our rejection we gain freedom, and maybe a little courage to do something crazy good.

Not a day goes by I don’t think about some type of rejection in my life. We lost the state championship in football my senior year of high school, we never were able to enter that elite club of winners, the loss still stings 14 years later. I still wonder why my ex girlfriend left the country and never came back, and why that magazine book critic didn’t like my debut novel no matter how unsatisfying she thought the ending might have been. I wonder, ponder, think, vent, and stare at the walls blankly. At the end of the day my ticket to freedom is the only tangible thing I’ve got to show for those rejections.

And you, do you feel free as a net result of yours? Are you free to live, work, and do in a better way from being rejected, or did all those no’s just leave you without a yes worth living for?

Tools of Empowerment

2011-10-19T16:51:00.001-04:00

The Dali Lama, Tibet’s exiled Spiritual leader was rebuffed in his efforts to attend the first peace lecture put on by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa due to an official reason of a still-pending visa application, though many suspect the South African government has other motivations for keeping him out. Safe to say, the Dali Lama wasn’t able to physically attend, so big brother wins right? They strong-arm the vocal minority with big brother like tactics, such as, well, never approving a visa application by the Dali Lama for entry.

Home-jailed world-renowned Chinese artist and human rights activist Ai Weiwei, fresh off a several-month real-jail detainment is forbidden from leaving the country due to supposed tax evasion. Popular fashion imprint W magazine wants Weiwei to art direct their annual issue dedicated to art, a role traditionally performed on set for obvious reasons. The Chinese government wins right? Game over, Ai Weiwei’s art direction would be impossible without his presence, surely the establishment wins again, correct?

Twenty years ago, yes, today, no.

We live in an age where technology transcends boundaries once thought impenetrable.

The Dali Lama met Desmond Tutu in a Google+ Hangout (video conversation) that was broadcast to anyone in the world with an internet connection that cared to join.

Via Skype and a laptop Mr. Ai directed a striking photo essay virtually from his home in China set at Rikers island jail, a symbolic location for the assignment.

Is the world better for the meeting of the Dali Lama, and by virtue of the forum, being able to watch it live, and the Ai Weiwei photo essay? Time will tell, but certainly at first glance simply allowing people to participate peacefully in acts that aim to shed light on issues plaguing people today is, to understate here, important.

Our world now has tools, communicative and otherwise, that can be harnessed to achieve the once impossible. The kicker here, the really funny bit of all this, are the tools used in both cases above are readily available to anyone with a laptop and the internet. The days of governments using big bankrolls to defeat vocal outliers are numbered in large part by the affordability and accessibility of such tools. For a few dollars you could feasibly use Skype in every capacity for a year, and Google+ is entirely free. In other words, the tools that empower movements the most are readily available to nearly anyone with a computer and the internet, which at last blush includes the majority of Americans.

In the information age the arms race is no longer Scud missiles or WMD’s, but control of Twitter feeds and Facebook accounts. As powerful as the truth is, as high of a standard as democracy in the U.S and other first world nations have set, no second-rate government of oppression is acceptable to the world’s people. Somebody in North Korea watched Real Housewives of New York, and asked why they couldn’t one day drive a Bentley or become part of a societal elite, or at least make enough to have running water, a reliable power grid, and fresh food to eat. The answer to the question in their head haunts them, they know it’s possible, they know democracy is a living growing organism, and they are starting to figure out that via social networks and the internet the days of oppression-focused regimes are numbered.

A wonderful quote from an organizer of the Arab Spring revolutions went something like this, we use Facebook for organizing our protest, and Twitter to tell the world about it. These revolutionaries didn’t need to ask the FCC for permission, or beg NBC or CBS for airtime, they simply used the same social media websites we all do, and brought cause and call to action to the message.

I wonder what bright minds around the world might be able to do if they thought more about the tools we have at our disposal for circumventing once dominate oppressors? Can you imagine the Berlin Wall being up today? Would someone not think to share information online, organize, and protest until it was torn down, the regime with it? Surely they would, and now comes the question, what Berlin Walls remain? What revolutions are bubbling to the surface, and if important to you, knowing the incredible power of the tools available, how can you be part of them?

Convenience as an Elixir

2011-10-06T15:12:00.002-04:00

Shave ten minutes off the morning commute by taking the highway over the scenic route some might suggest. Toss that bag of frozen vegetables in the microwave instead of plucking them fresh from your backyard garden others might advise. Forget the book, just watch the movie version instead a friend opines.

What if a silver fox stood atop a tree stump, waiting to run from your eyes as you passed it in your Honda?

What if blood rushing to your sore back after picking peppers from the ground led to a humbling reflection on how your forefathers survived famine, war, and poverty?

What if a line in the book never made it to the movie, but inspired you to change the course of your career?

We live in a world taught to march to the beat of convenience at a tempo measured by time saved. Heartache is taboo.

Why is convenience synonymous with good? Do we really get as much out of being on time as we think we do? Should we stuff our daily schedule fat as a Thanksgiving turkey in an effort simply to ignore our deepest pains and sorrows? Is reflection worthless?

They say great art is often conceived from pain, the little I know about art seems to justify this. The dramatic arc, a foundation for today’s mellow dramas, has as much to do with pain and suffering as it does with chipper happy endings filled with resolute characters hugging and dancing in joyful poses.

For whatever reason, call it intuition, it seems as if generations of old are much more acutely aware of the healthy process of grieving, of taking the longer road, of walking when they could drive. The younger generations, X, Y, Millennials, and whatever we’ll call the ten year olds touting cell phones have little understanding of this. It’s the instant gratification crowd, where songs are achieved in a push of a button instead of a visit to the record store, food is delivered in minutes not hours, and the latest and greatest place is hosted online somewhere, but physically available nowhere. Convenience is paramount, and the slow down movement doesn’t seem to even exist, I checked Facebook before writing this.

The intoxicating effects of living a convenience-centered life, where reflection and introspection take a back seat to the next thrill is gender ambiguous, with young men choosing to binge drink in the name of masculinity and young women replacing the pain of an old boyfriend with a new one.

By age alone I’m in this generation, though I’d like to think I’ve lived on both sides of the fence, and deeply believe the lows in life are much greater lesson teachers than the highs. A few suggestions for taking a step away from convenience, and the traps that come with it follow.

Allow Pain

In bodybuilding pain is a sign of progress. When the muscles tear, and the fluids start rushing through them, the body is showing progress through pain. Unfortunately for those not in the hunt for the World Fitness Champion belt pain can be perceived as having the opposite effect. Often it’s like acknowledging and allowing pain to exist is in some fashion a sign of regression. Nothing can be further from the truth. Allowing pain to exist, being open about it with people you trust and professionals, can help nurture recovery.

Everyone feels pain, and when you have the courage to allow for it in your life flowers blossom from ugly dirt. By being honest about your pain, and seeking professional advice in books, from friends and family, or from a professional sense can be made of the pain, paths to recovery can be formed, and above all else your authentic self can emerge.

The process is slow, it won’t update as fast as your Twitter account, nor will it refresh as quick as your browser on the Urban Outfitters website, it’ll take time to sort this thing out, and that’s the best part about it.

Allow Failure

In sports we love to congratulate the winners, some even make it to the White House to meet the president. Winning is absolutely important, but what makes it so special is that on any given day just as many teams, players, and contest entrants are losing. Where there is a winner a loser must exist. Understanding that statistically we’ll all be losers as much as winners allows for the mind to open up to the idea of losing. You can, and should, shoot for high goals, but do so understanding that the higher the goal the higher the likelihood of failure.

Living with failure can be difficult, because everyone wants to congratulate the winner. It’s easy to envy the winner, to look at the winner and think there is something more special about them than you. Don’t buy into that trap, as a loser you hold the key to learning what went wrong, and you have a perfect tool to center your mind into a state of true humbleness. Allow for the hurt of failure to exist, and the analysis of what went wrong and why to happen before jumping into the next game, it’s our best tool for becoming the winner that we know we are capable of being in the end.

Allow Soul Searching

It is alright to ask questions about who you really are, no matter who you think your friends, family, and coworkers perceive you as being. Chances are they are so wrapped up in their own lives that they won’t even think twice about accepting a changed you, so don’t feel like you are locked into whoever you are perceived to be. Soul searching is not only helpful, it’s therapeutic. Allow your mind to dig deep into who you are, who you want to be, and where you want to go. If you aren’t asking these questions about yourself, chances are nobody else will.

Allow Love

Let the guards down for a minute, if you don’t call Bob who will? If you aren’t emailing Susan to see how she is, will she likely email you? Allowing love to exist in this world isn’t easy. People want to be courted, and often dislike being the courter. They’d rather be called upon, than do the calling. What is stopping you from being the caller? The connector? The person that knows they might get hurt by reaching out but does it anyway, because they consciously allowed love to exist?

Convenience tells us to hide from the above like boy in a heated game of tag. It shows us small rewards in exchange for our utmost loyalty. It give us bragging rights to the meaningless things in life, empty as a plastic bottle protruding from a garbage can at the gas station. We allow for convenience to be our master by proxy of engagement, we say it’s ok to be this way because everyone else is, and then, sometimes years later, we wonder what the hell went wrong.

The Case for Organic Growth: Lose the Money Box

2011-09-30T12:34:00.003-04:00

I’ve had four people ask my advice on various business ventures this week. Four friends mind you, not people that would qualify as clients. I get asked often about aspects of starting or running a business, and for the most part I have no qualms giving advice for free. I’ve been hustling in some fashion for 15 years, and self-sufficient (living entirely off my businesses) for seven years. The precise value of my experience is not readily available on Salary.com, but fair to say it’s worth something.

So how do I decide who gets free advice and who has to ask nicely, and who has to actually pay? My simple test usually involves a mental history query, has this person done me wrong in the past? No, ok, sure whatever you want to know I’ll tell you. I’m not vindictive to those that have in some fashion wronged me in the past, I’m happy to give them advice too, for some money of course, as they would fall into the client category rather than that of friend. Anyone else asking, such as a stranger, I’ll usually give them my thoughts free, really I don’t care about money anymore than I have to for my friends at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage or The Fresh Market require.

Enough about me, let’s get to the crux of the issue that keeps gracing my ears as of late, how do you build and maintain a business with longevity in mind. In other words, how does one build something that is less one-off and more of a daily revenue generator? My answer to all four people was almost verbatim the same, and it will be repeated here for those of you watching at home. Grow organically.

With the advent of green washing, and an all around pension of those in the media to overuse terms like organic to the point of rendering them near meaningless, it is necessary to explain the word in relation to growing a new business.

Organic as defined by the online iteration of Merriam-Webster: of, relating to, or derived from living organisms <organic evolution>.

Just as evolution is an oft-taboo topic among Christians, growing organically is just as much something aspiring entrepreneurs do not want to talk about. What do you mean we have to wait to make money? What does it mean to give away my product, I thought I was trying to make money, not lose it? If you look close enough at their faces you can see the blood drain from their cheeks, as the skin settles back from the form of smiles to faces of inquisition.

Growing a business organically is so easy to compare to virtually any other organizational feat in life, think sports teams or ascending through higher education, I won’t bother you with such. Instead, just imagine a new business as something small and vulnerable, something that needs nourishing and protecting. Build it slow, let it fall before it walks, let the masses tell you it isn’t going to work, let people make fun of you for quitting your job to do it, let all of the awkwardness take place. Don’t try too hard to make it something it isn’t, just fail and adjust accordingly.

When you allow for the business to be small, imperfect, and open to change, you are in effect allowing it to be affordable to run, flexible to pivot into new directions, and above all else authentically yours. People seek realness from a business as much as they seek a quality product or service; look no further than your own curiosities. How many times have you visited a restaurant or clothing store and asked whom the owner was, and what their story was? Or online, how many times have you visited a website and rushed to click the About Us tab before all else? By operating on an organic level, of slow natural growth through effort and sweat over splash and big money, you will have a great story to share with all those inquiring minds, not to mention a sustainable business.

This blog post was partly inspired by the Jamie XX remix of Eliza Doolittle’s song Money Box. Somehow her lyrics, and the melody itself, provide an aura of less is more that perfectly speaks to the ideology of doing more with less. So often businesses are taught to think in terms of spend, spend, spend, when the best businesses can do with less, less, less and make more, more, more.

Eliza Doolittle - Money Box (Jamie xx Remix) by Tsiabaannah

Instead of going out to dinner tonight
We can grow vegetables
Underneath the skylight

Clicking these downloads everyday has its price
We can lounge on our couch
And listen to our 45s

So take your Dollar
Your Yen
Those Euros I can't spend
I won't get down with no pounds
Never need to leave this house

Don't need a moneybox
Cos I got lots and lots
Of what I need right here
Right here with you my dear
Don't need a cash machine
To make our days happy
So do me a favour
Don't jingle your change Sir

Instead of going to the movies tonight
There's no shame in us playing
Dust of that Sega Mega Drive

Hand me your trousers
You got holes in your knees
It's no fuss patch them up
Forget about that shopping spree

So take your Dollar
Your Francs
Your Rupees no thanks
I won't get down with no pounds
Never need to leave this house

Don't need a moneybox
Cos I got lots and lots
Of what I need right here
Right here with you my dear
Don't need a cash machine
To make our days happy
So do me a favour
Don't jingle your change Sir

Lock up your moneybox
It's not much of a loss
All that gold just goes to waste
Cos you're worth more anyway

No need to travel round London tonight
We can play Monopoly
Buy Mayfair in our own time

So take your Dollar
Your Buck
I couldn't give a penny
That's enough leave it out
Never need to leave this house

Don't need a moneybox
Cos I got lots and lots
Of what I need right here
Right here with you
I know I know I don't need a cash machine
To make our days happy
So do me a favour
Don't jingle your change Sir

Don't need a moneybox
Cos I got lots and lots
Of what I need right here
Right here with you
I know I know I don't need a cash machine
To make our days happy
So do me a favour
Don't jingle your change Sir
So do me a favour
Don't jingle your change Sir

Loobee loobee loobee loo

First Things Last

2011-09-21T19:50:00.001-04:00

A struggle for many of us comes with the comparison of what we have to what others might have. In the sermon below Amos Disasa helps illustrate the point that comparison, and our conventional views of equality are not important when it comes to gaining entry into Heaven. This moved me when I heard it last week, and I hope it is helpful to you as well.

First Things Last by Downtown Church

Two Clouds

2011-09-21T14:50:00.001-04:00

The battery in my smoke alarm must be running low, as it beeps every few hours in all it’s pitchy irritation. My eldest dog Rufus doesn’t like high-pitched sounds, other dislikes include thunder, strangers, and half full bowls of food. If a sound is loud and the pitch is high enough he’s been known to quickly hop on a lap, or curl up close to the nearest set of feet he can find until the startling sound storm passes.

Why this morning one of my many smoke alarms wanted to put the house on notice about an apparent lack of battery life at 5 am is a mystery to me, but Rufus wasn’t having any of it. With each pitchy chirp of the alarm his paws would scratch my bedroom door a little faster, my pets scratch instead of knock due to height restrictions. I tossed over in bed, hoping the sound and the canine notifications would go away, of course neither did. After twenty minutes or so listening to the cascading noises of door scratching and insanely loud beeping I got up and took care of it.

Now my home has one less smoke alarm, and Rufus, still shaken by the episode, has resorted to sleeping on my usually off-limits bamboo bathmat, as if to punish my tardiness in removing the battery from the device. Rufus might hold on to this grudge for a few days, or until I get some fresh bully sticks for him to chew on, whichever arrives first.

Our relationships, human ones that is, are a lot like the smoke alarm fiasco described above. We react in a state of panic when we must defy our presented character, in the case of the Pekingese regal, tough, unafraid, protecting, and evolve into survival mode, discarding the normal behavior, which surely at that hour would’ve involved collecting some of the 18 hours he sleeps each day.

Dogs hear sounds up to five times greater than humans experts argue, which would have this already piercing noise to the level of unbearable for poor Rufus to handle, akin to a human being shut in a room with deafening noise played intermitantly over and over again for hours on end. No wonder he had to go primal, he had to get to safety, and show his fear without regard for what either of his brothers or his master might think of him. While the incident is sad, it is similar to how a human might react if their house was on fire, and say someone they’d been arguing with was in the home with them. Forget the argument, let’s get to safety! Is there a way to be this honest with each other when a crisis is not occurring? Or are we never really this honest unless lives are on the line?

Often when we talk to each other we present our character foremost to match the context of the conversation, putting our true feelings on the back burner. The pop culture slang for this is putting up walls. I can’t count how many conversations I’ve had in the past few years where neither of us actually said what we meant, and the more this persists, the more it grows into the norm.

Take your pick of examples, a coach talking to a player, a parent to a daughter, a scorned lover to an ex, anytime there is a context, this notion of whom we want to be perceived as rather than who we really are comes into play. Add in the societal elements that go with being a citizen in the world today and you’ve got a person having a contextual conversation instead of a real authentic one. Sigh, roll your eyes, pause, take it all in, because it’s a lot.

With such a complex web of expectations and preordained rules, how in the world do we ever actually really talk to each other anymore? Perhaps by being above it, literally.

Imagine if we started off each meaningful conversation with each other by collectively stating the following-

Forget what we’re supposed to say, or what people might want us to say, or how people typically say what we’re about to say, and let’s just each get on our own cloud, and float above this place and all the norms that go with it. Let’s really just talk to each other with no preconceived notions, stereotypes, historical references, or anything else, just two people on two clouds facing each other above the rest of it.

What does removing ourselves from our normal place do? Could it give us a way to communicate without all the messy intricacies of following social protocol? Might we actually be able to say what we mean to each other more effectively, and maybe, just maybe, both arrive from our journey better off for it?

I Love My Mom

2011-09-16T21:10:00.001-04:00

The noise left my house around 4 pm today, silence comes early on Fridays, with all the chatter from clients following their bodies to Vail, or Palm Springs, or wherever they weekend. I wondered how many of them were looking forward to spending time with their kids, soccer games and spilling stuff in the back of the minivan. I’ve always said I want 10, maybe it’s time to stop talking like that.

Not sure why I was thinking of my mom so much today, it was as ordinary of a day for me as any. Woke up too late, answered emails, took client calls, spent a few minutes on the phone with pops talking about father and son stuff, read girls, and then he’s back to the office, I better get back to mine. More calls, more emails, wrote some web copy, sent some tweets, and then hit the market. Mom was on my mind.

I texted a love interest yesterday, she never wrote back. Today I drove past a lost love as I left the market, she didn’t turn around to wave, 0 for 2 in love games this week. The thought brought me to mom, and how no matter what she’s always ready to talk. Frued, you might be right, maybe men do just want to marry their mom? Or at least someone that’s nice to them consistently.

I was working late tonight, silence replaced by Swedish electronica, packing boxes for client giveaways, on guess the subject, moms. Dang, I thought, why don’t I send my mom all this stuff like I send to these strangers. I need to do more for her.

Dinner alone is no different than lunch or breakfast alone, I just sit and wonder, thinking about the past, the present, and the future. I say thanks, so much to be thankful for, I swear I almost died three times already, and that’s not counting childhood.

Most clients won’t call my cell past dark, sans the international ones, so when my phone started buzzing away in my pocket I thought it must be mom, of course it was. We spoke, she told me she was wearing the Clark Covington internet marketing rockstar shirt I sent her years ago, I laughed, she asked what it meant, I told her nothing anymore. She asked me to send her something to read, I told her better yet I’d bring her a book soon. She got excited, and then asked how the dogs were, she knew better than to ask about the girlfriend.

Love, Forgive, Repeat

2011-09-10T10:43:00.001-04:00

Friends will steal from you if they knew they would get away with it, and sometimes even that assurance is not necessary for them to jack your stuff. Friends will chat about you, no gossip, to others about your shortcomings. Friends will literally step on your back at the chance of coming closer to the summit on the rock of achievement. Friends will gently listen to your most delicate insecurities and load them up in their insult rifle, finger pressed tightly on the trigger, to fire back at you as soon as you offer a criticism of your own about them. Friends will look at your shortcomings and relish in them, knowing that at something somehow somewhere, they are better than you.

So let them be better, let them hit you with their best shot of what they think will hurt you the most. Let friends use you to get ahead in life, let them talk about you to make themselves feel at ease with their own person, and yes, let them take your money. Thank them for being part of your life, forget that you loved them and they hurt you, and forgive. Don’t forgive just to let them off the hook, though that is a residual effect of such, but rather to live your life in illustrious glory.

You did not choose to want to be around people, it was already in your DNA from birth, or maybe prior? Our collective desire to be around others is fueled by the utter sense of fulfillment people bring. Validation of being is only truly achieved through the prism of others, as we are never fully able to become sincerely sure of our life course alone. People matter.

Our entrée to deep relationships with people is trust, that sticky thing that can so quickly get broken. Trust allows us to open up, hey I trust you, so I’m going to tell you that I have awful sleep patterns, and anxiety, should I see a doctor or drink less coffee? Trust destroys walls of secrecy so the true you can arrive. Trust is reciprocal, you can’t fly the friendly skies because you’re claustrophobic, you think your neighbor Bill is stalking your wife, I’m here for you.

We have to invest our trust in order to receive the pearl that is friendship. We have to put everything on the line to say, you know what, even if this person does me worse than anyone ever has, the fact I have a chance to build a meaningful relationship upon which both our lives could be richer is more important, the risk is worth taking.

So let ‘em talk, let ‘em run wild all over your heart, because in the end, when you love, you forgive, and when you repeat the process you open your life up to endless amounts of beautiful, saint-like, amazing people.

Appreciate it All: Thoughts of Taxidermy and Motherless Children

2011-09-02T11:57:00.001-04:00

My computer transmits information to my mind via the blink of an eye. Three blinks, payment sent, payment received, quote work for new job dispatched.

Eight tabs compete for my attention like twin boys after the first plate of mac & cheese. Dinnertime.

My mind wanders, scores of buzzing, bleeping, and blinking, what was I doing again?

I didn’t actually attend my ten year high school reunion, but if I had, I would have no description for what I do, nonetheless who I am. I’m not a lawyer like Tom, or an Engineer like Billy, or a teacher like Sarah. I’m an entrepreneur? What’s that? Sounds a lot like unemployed to most people. My neighbor asked yesterday, she isn’t the first to think I’m a drug dealer. Should I tell them different, what would it matter?

A year ago I was still trying to tell them, still trying to make my life matter, which is a fruitless endeavor for those that are still in the identity trap. Be forewarned whatever you do to enrich yourself personally won’t actually make you feel much better, not for long anyway. I reflect back to this day one year ago, all I see is dark clouds, no twins, no tabs sitting on the screen strong enough to distract me from the pain. Riddled in debt, dating, LIVING, with a girl I couldn’t even stand, driving a truck that leaked energy, literally and figuratively, we all fall short.

One year later I’m like my Chow German Shepherd mix Jill after being gone 18 days, she was found immobile in a patch of brush on the side of the road. I was found in my home, not on a single day, but in a single year, I was found. Jill had a deep gash on her leg, and was tied up like a Christmas tree to a roof of a car in rope-like branches that held her from walking. How long had she been there, in the 100-degree heat no less, days, weeks? She was wounded but alive. The first time I saw those sweet tender eyes in nearly a month I broke down, the whole animal hospital staff did too. The tenderness of being alive was more joyous than any cut, scrap, or disability on earth. For those that never loved a dog, they feel anxious, happy, sad, aggressive, and lonely. Dogs go through many of the same emotions humans do each day, as Jill’s wet eyes ticked up to meet mine, as she bowed her head down in exhaustion, all I could do was thank God.

Being thankful isn’t easy in a world full of people trying to impress us. You live where? You drive what? You vacationed in what country? I wonder what that really makes people feel inside. The great irony of trying to impress other people is that it often turns them off entirely. I don’t know about you, but I’m far more touched by the single mom working 60 hours a week to pay for their child to go to a good school than the socialite posing in designer duds on a yacht in the Rivera. To quote a Sia album title, Some People Have Real Problems.

We can have it both? That’s the rational I hear the most, we can have balance, you know hit the Rivera one week, and then the soup kitchen the next. Here is the problem with this theory, once you hit the Rivera being around homeless people in the soup kitchen is less of a calling than a duty. It’s gratitude bargaining, and it never works out right.

Being thankful for your life, for what you have, isn’t just about not living opulently, or looking down at people that have less, or making their life worse by intentionally pushing your more in front of their less, it’s about being true to who you are as a human.

Being gracious sets off a domino effect of goodwill that will properly season your insides to be better on the outside. You’ve got to be proactive, just like you are with your budget, or your diet, or your time, or anything else in life, sacrifice your selfish desires for the better. In a world full of people proposing the opposite, this is often easier written than done.

I’m surrounded by two things all day, commerce and money. Commerce the court on which entrepreneurs play their game, and money the scorekeeper. It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of what it all means, of what you picture in your mind is a successful entrepreneur- Ferraris, private jets, foreign models, and a casino. Right, that is what you think entrepreneurs live like when they make it right? That is what the media has portrayed us to be, free willing sin-machines, with a little charity sprinkled in for good measure. It’s thanksgiving, somebody get a turkey for the homeless people, let’s throw them a bone. Disgusting.

We come in all stripes, some entrepreneurs don’t care about money at all, that’s how they make so much of it, they just don’t care. I’d like to think I fall into this category, though I’m tempted, I’m human, and dang if Porsche isn’t making this Panamera for me, it’s got 380 horsepower, vroom vroom.

We’re all tempted to just look inward, when so often we would be happier if we looked and acted on what we could do for others. Seriously, this post is for you, to make you happier in your life, like I’ve been in mine lately. Less is more, this is a movement.

So what I do to refocus my energy on others might help you. It might make me you think I’m crazy, but that’s ok since I stopped caring about my identity about a year ago, so either way this is what I’ve decided to share with you. An exercise in being grateful, take what you will, and know for me it works every time.

Lately I’ve been nurturing a fascination with reindeer. Maybe two or three years ago I learned they were real. I thought they were just as made up as the person they’re most associated with. But no, reindeer are definitely real, thanks to my zoologist friends for setting this straight.

After discovering the existence of reindeer I bought a picture of one and placed it in my room. It sits atop a metal storage rack, a casualty from one of my many failed businesses. The reindeer is docile, but massive, it’s body plump, antlers so pronounced they steal the show wherever the reindeer goes. If you look at the antlers closely on a reindeer, it becomes clear they are one of the highest reaching antlers of all the mammals walking the earth today. Stunning.

I’m a tactile guy, I like to feel and touch, not just see. Luck would have it I found someone that sells arctic reindeer hides, my bedroom needed a rug. Match made. This is what I think about when I start having impulses that aren’t in line with giving, with being a better person. I think about the cruelty of life, that if not our grandmothers, our great grandmothers were skinning and cooking these animals to live, to survive. Our life hasn’t always been about the iPhone, Netflix, or Lap Band surgery, it was once about finding enough food to eat.

So many people in our great nation are totally unaware that in some parts of the world, they still can’t get enough food to survive. There are no arctic reindeer for them to skin, they eat little to nothing and eventually perish. 20,000 air-breathing humans will have died from the famine in the African Horn region this year. And you want to go on a cruise? To upgrade the thread count on your sheets. There are people dying in Africa.

We sit back, and nod, we’re numbed to the pleas ever since homeboy got on the infomercials in the eighties and beat the subject to death. African starvation is like theatre, it’s in front of us, but it’s not real, right? Wrong.

I saw an interview recently on TV with a man from one of the hard hit regions in Africa where people are starving, ironically he is now working here in the states at the Plumpy’nut factory, where they make bars to sustain those starving in Africa. This one effort, started by a single mother of four no less, has surely saved thousands of lives. The man, he stood with a hint of anger in his face at the factory, and said something to the extent of, when we were starving we wondered why people didn’t come sooner, why they weren’t doing anything if they knew we were dying over here. This was his words, the gospel that compels us to do more for others is not always sugar coated, should we wheel barrel the dead bodies to your doorstep to get you to do something, when does it become real to you? I wouldn’t write this blog post if I didn’t think it is entirely in our power to eradicate world hunger forever. It is people, we can do this.

Gratitude is understanding how lucky we are, and acting on our thankfulness by reaching out to others and giving from the well of what we have to offer. Time is so valuable, if you knew how much I spent on people’s time it’s in the tens of thousands of dollars each year. Money is fine, but other currency exits. You have ideas, share them. You have connections, start connecting.

We become machines of change when we oil our soul with the humility that being thankful brings about. The engine for change already exists in our hearts, it’s just waiting to be fueled with gratitude and put into drive with execution on all that stuff you’ve been meaning to do.

In the hour or so I’ve been writing this post at a coffee shop a couple next to me has kept their arms around each other the entire time. Gratitude can be manifested outward, and if you take a minute and look around, you’ll see it is everywhere.

Smiles: My Reason for Living

2011-08-25T13:07:00.001-04:00

What’s a Contract Postal Unit? It sure doesn’t look like a normal post office to me, it’s Saturday, and these boxes need to go in the mail TO-DAY. The thought vanished as quickly as it came, as the tiny Latino woman took hold of the scores of boxes in my hand. She grunted quietly, I wondered ¿Hablas Inglés? No reply.

My pyramid of packages toppled her at first when she went to grab the lower box, this puzzle starts from the top dama. Ok, let me show her with my eyes, as my big browns rolled up to the sky, and slowly down to meet hers. She nodded, grabbed the first of a dozen boxes from the top of the pile, and placed it on the scale. With perfect timing as the first box touched the scale the screen went black, this was going to take awhile I thought, as samba sounds from the telenovela playing on the awkwardly hung flat screen lingered in my ears.

As the minutes passed so did the boxes, slowly, methodically, this contractor was posting box after box. By now her daughter, someone’s daughter, sat behind me tapping her foot, even she was ready for me to leave. And then, right when I was losing all hope, the last box left the counter, and she mouthed 122 dólares. Si, I said quietly handing her my debit card. So she didn’t speak English, but maybe she understood it, this poor lady had to deal with a commercial haul of mail, probably for the first time, and I wanted to thank her, I’ve been on the other end of the counter proverbially many a time.

“Thank you, you did a great job, I appreciate your hard work,” I said slowly the way people talk to non-English speakers when they want them to understand something, and that’s when it happened. Like the most amazing picture of the brilliant sun peeking through post-rain clouds she paused, looked up, and gave me a smile larger than her gaunt face might usually afford. It was beautiful, I tripped my way out of the shop.

Smiles, real and authentic, are like feeling God’s finger touch your forearm. Shockingly gorgeous, like a regal cardinal perching on your windowsill just long enough for you to see her vivid red coat as she spreads her wings and ascends high into the heavens. Smiles are the good to life’s bad, the better of the best, and not always earned, beautifully and serendipitous as it seems, sometimes they just arrive.

Two Hispanic women stood facing the counter, waiting for the CVS clerk to figure out how to activate their phone cards, were they calling family back home? I wondered if they knew about Skype? I glanced at their backs, they were wearing matching sundresses in different colors, I imagined they were the type that could make anything look good, sometimes fashion isn’t brand-oriented, it’s people. After a minute or less the problem was solved, gracias. They turned around, the taller one looked right at me and smiled, I smiled back, they left the store, I looked at the clerk even he was frozen for a moment. The right smile can stop you in your tracks.

I’ve experienced a lot of smiles this past week, just the day after my contract postal unit experience I’m in a big building watching a young minister, does he have a twinkle in his eye tonight? When we have lunch he doesn’t have that twinkle, but man, this guy is happy tonight. I can’t blame him, his fledging church is growing like weeds, and when growth equals stability, a spiritual entrepreneurial thing, we all share a laugh. A smile signifies a risk paid off, a path cut with a machete of ideas in a jungle of very old thinking, we are talking BC people.

Animals smile too. I see my little dog Rufus smile every time I give him a slice of American cheese, he knows how to get what he wants. Smile, sit, act good for a minute, then be bad again by sleeping on Dad’s leather couch. He glances at me as if to question whether that trip to the furniture mart in Atlanta wasn’t actually a mission to buy him a dog bed, sigh, his smiles still get me.

My two eldest dogs smile for a different reason, they made it out of that backyard, that dark nasty yard. They made it out of the tall grass, towering weeds that split at the top like stalks of corn, and from behind that shed, the very shed where their brothers and sisters weren’t so lucky. They survived, rescued no less, so they smile, and they protect what they have now, comfort, stability, I’m sure that yard isn’t ever too far from their hearts. Dogs feel pain too, but smile, maybe they can, in their own canine way identify with perseverance, two barks for yes, one for no, ok?

I soak in parental smiles, collect them actually. Mom in Myrtle Beach, her eyes fixed on the ocean and her hand patting me on the back, literalism is the best approach for teaching me lessons, as she very well knows. She’s waiting to go back, and when she does, you bet I’m doing the trip for another smile.

I watch my dad smile anytime we talk cars, MPG’s prompt them, as do belts, bolts, tires, and differentials. We talk cars like we talk dreams, it’s not what you couldn’t drive now, it’s what would you drive now, there is such a difference, we both smile at the thought of it.

Are you smiling in public, around family, friends, and pets? You should be. Gone are all your material possessions sans the clothes on your back, you stand helpless in a parking lot far away from your comfort zone, what weapons do you have in your battle to get home to safety? Here is a hint, scowling won’t get you far. We always have smiles, they are universally available in our personality repertoire, yet we so rarely decide to fire them off. What are we so afraid of? Can we just smile for the heck of it? Apparently not, just ask Congress, a group that is caught frowning more than a New Yorker that just missed the N train.

Smiles on occasion come in pairs, stuffed like a turkey with irony. In college the smile on the face of my financial aid advisor during an exit interview spoke of sadness, you’re 22 years old here’s $32,000 to pay back, we train leaders here, aren’t you ready lead? Just like the counselor’s smile came another a year later, when friends laughed at my idea to import intimate clothing from India to pay for graduate school. It worked, I chuckled my way through a masters degree on the magic carpet ride made of intimates from another land. Funny, but it worked, the mother of innovation is…

We hold on to the smiles of those gone and past with special reverence, if we can just hold onto that image for a lifetime, we will be better for it.

Grandma dancing around the kitchen with me after my SAT score arrived, acceptable enough for some college, any really, to accept this late bloomer. We laughed, we danced, and that smile of hers on that day is so very close to my heart, 14 years later, I can still feel that moment of elation, all in a smile. The very thought of sharing one more smile with my grandmother waters my eyes more than the gardens of my green thumb neighbor are doused with on a steamy summer day.

Or Jenny Dixon at college, we’d walk around campus talking about how we were battling for the worst reputation on campus, a partner in fodder. She smiled, and I smiled, God forgives, she’s gone but not forgotten, her smile and approving nods still linger all these years later. Surely she’d be proving those naysayers wrong right now, a flower that never fully was able to blossom withered far too early that night in Columbus.

My first roommate in graduate school, his mother by our sides, feeding us, setting up the blinds, telling us we were going to do big things one day, that smile, the encouragement, we all celebrated it. Even if we thought we knew better, we really needed every emotional push she had to offer, may she rest in peace knowing her son is as successful as she said he’d be, despite enormous winds depressing his sails, his boat still floats. She’d be so proud.

Or an artistic football player from high school, angry for reasons that were hard to discover, always nice to me, always welcoming, always treating me as an equal. His smile sits with me, gone too soon Greg.

A welcome smile tells us we are accepted in the foreign place we risked our sense of security to visit.

An approving smile tells us that our volunteering is time worth more than money multiplied into inspiration for others.

A thankful smile offers the notion that we are doing something for someone that can’t do for themselves in some fashion, we smile back in hopes of preserving the moment, even just for another few seconds. Who feels better the giver or the recipient? The answer might surprise you.

If smiles are such an important part of our lives, how do we ensure there are enough to sustain us? The answer is not within my grasp, but a good idea might be to start by being thankful for those smiles of the past.

Intuition

2011-07-29T13:45:00.001-04:00

I love a drive. Winding roads, mountainous heights, sea spray from the ocean, bring ‘em on. Driving for me is an action that mirrors a meditative process, as I drive, aimlessly have you, across random country roads, mountain valleys, highways, and oceanside thruways my mind moves from idea to idea, with a cadence often assisted by whatever music happens to come humming from the speakers in my car. There’s just one problem, the damn rearview mirror.

For the life of me I can’t get this mirror to stay in place so the traffic behind me is visible. Screwdrivers, keys, and even fingernails have entered the small screw that affixes the mirror to the assembly that holds it flush with the roof of the vehicle with no luck. Without a proper tool to fix the mirror, I went with something else, something much more powerful.

For reasons only Subaru can explain, when the rearview mirror is pushed up higher than need be, it’ll eventually settle into the right place with the assistance of the bumps in the road the vehicle negotiates as it twists and turns on your average roadway. In other words, via intuition the mirror can be adjusted to fall into place right when you need it most. Intuition literally fixed the mirror issue, but also speaks to a much greater principle of leading a prosperous life.

The other day I watched a biographer on TV speaking of Kurt Cobain’s death. The gentleman explained that prior to the OD/suicide of the famed Nirvana singer and 90’s icon, there was an eerily similar episode in Rome, where Mr. Cobain did virtually the same thing as what eventually killed him, but only ended up in the hospital. Without getting into the average life trajectory of those that are addicted to drugs, it’s fair to say that most of the people that cared about Kurt Cobain had been forewarned, his life was on very thin ice. Not long after his brush with death, after exiting rehab, he succeeded in what he had failed at months earlier, surely many close to Cobain were wondering if they had already known his fate before it occurred.

Intuition is mistakenly defined often as innate sense, like having a gut feeling, when more times than not intuition is a learned trait from experience. Just as my vehicle bumped and knocked the mirror down over and over again that it became abundantly clear to place the mirror higher to start so it lands right on place, there are many life experiences where intuition can solve problems without the issues that come with reason. Reason makes you question both sides of something, good and bad, what if this doesn’t work out, what if it does? What will Dad think of my popsicle business, what will Mom think of me dropping out of the PhD program? Reason becomes more powerful with every question, and often can push you into a state of shock, frozen to do nothing, as not to disappoint anyone.

Intuition tells you that more than likely something is going to happen, you and your soul know it, so it’s best to go about setting things in place for when that thing, whatever it is, eventually happens. Setting your own rearview mirror to the right place with the help of intuition, as to let it clearly showcase your past, might just help inform your success in the future.

Bootstrapping-A Merry-Go-Round of Futility & My African Pig Farm Experiment

2011-06-16T10:57:00.003-04:00

Frankly, I’m surprised, that when asked more entrepreneurs don’t mention capital as their biggest key to success. When asked about keys to succeeding as a risk-taking business builder they, entrepreneurs, often answer with words like perseverance, will, fight, creativity, but not capital. Let’s be clear, without capital, lots of it, your big idea is going nowhere fast.

Traveling on a Treadmill

For the better part of seven years I’ve started, managed, and closed businesses, lots of them. I’ve worked in the physical space on startups (coworking, coffee, tea, Vietnamese subs, seriously), and online (marketing, search engines, PR, publishing, ghostwriting) without much luck. Donald Trump never knocked on my door to hand over a big check, just as INC Magazine never ranked any of my companies on their coveted fastest growing list. Rather, I just kept breaking even at best, all in the name of growth.

For nearly a third of my life I thought, just keep working, just keep plowing away at these ideas, and at some point, someone, presumably fate reincarnated, will hand you a big check for your efforts. One day making a living will be child’s play, because this business is what I love to do. Then reality set in.

Did you know that 86% of wage earners in Africa live on less than $2 a day according to the UN? Are these people bad? Unworthy of a good living? No, you say, just not educated? Could you afford tuition on $2 a day? Life isn’t fair, and one of the most humbling ways of discovering the truth in this cliché is to look at global poverty in relation to human existence. They’ve never had the capital to change their lives for the better, and getting that capital is extremely hard, so until Bono gets there to raise some money, they make close to nothing, and live like it.

Back to entrepreneurship, it’s not that you can’t start a business with nothing, and build up something sustaining. In fact, many small businesses exist entirely to sustain the owner. As in, Bill Smith owns a hot dog stand, he works alone, and his profits are enough to pay his bills. This is very possible with nothing, or next to nothing, as Mr. Smith can use a credit card, or sell some stuff around the house, buy a cart for the cost of a new sofa, get some hot dogs, and work his butt off until his sweat equity turns into cash. What’s nearly impossible is Mr. Smith growing his one stand into a regional or national chain without capital. Not just a little capital, but a lot of capital.

Most entrepreneurs don’t want to just be self sustaining, though that is step one, rather they want to build something larger than themselves, and that is where the lack of capital kills so many businesses.

The Desire For More

Many make the false assumption that entrepreneurs want to build large businesses out of sheer greed. This often is not the case, as me, and most of my fellow entrepreneurs care more about creating jobs, opening up new markets, helping to create something out of nothing, for us, it’s magic. The desire for more is so great, ironically, it often fuels the lack of profits in many businesses, as they, like I have for so long, strive for growth.

Without hard money in the millions more than likely, it’s tough to weather the storms that so inevitably occur during business building times. It’s not like money is easy to make, so whatever the industry, this is what I’ve seen across sectors and economies, having sufficient capital on hand is the only true way to avoid failure.

When the mortgage crisis emerged, and banks started dropping like tears at a funeral, there was only one reason for the phenomena, lack of capital. Sure the banks, or the owners of the banks, made risky bets, sure they bought financial products Warren Buffett couldn’t properly explain, but at the end of the day, what plagued them was lack of capital. They simply didn’t have enough money to keep the troubled boat afloat.

While my goals are much more modest than the average green-eyed banker, I too felt the jellyfish like sting of being undercapitalized. Yet my desire for growth trumped my improvised situation, my desire for something larger than myself almost consumed myself, as humans we error.

Pigs in Africa

A few years ago, when my company dripped money instead of bled it, a client visited Africa on a charity mission, and bought some pigs. Thanks to the internet he emailed me pictures of the pigs and farm from his tent, literally, and told me about the sustainability of pig farming. People, with the help of us foreigners, could breed, and eventually sell these pigs for a handsome profit, and then breed more, and sell more, which would help them greatly increase their chances of surviving. This, for all the greenwashing out there, is a damn good definition of sustainability.

I invested some money in the pig farming endeavor, as it sounded like a safe bet. I believe it was $300.

Just today I received an email from a woman in Tanzania expressing internet in pig farming, it was the third I’ve received this week. Amazingly, the little experiment two years ago worked for those pig farmers, and somehow, someone found out I invested in the venture, and now they all email me for, unbelievably, capital.

Life goes full circle; people you meet that are meaningless to you now, might hold the key to your livelihood in the future. I write this blog post about the utter failures I’ve had at business for lack of capital, while receiving emails from well-meaning aspiring pig farmers asking for capital. The irony is not lost on me, and here’s hoping it won’t be lost on you either.

Check out more about the pig farm investment, and what happened over there by clicking HERE.

The King of the Internet: A Fool

2011-06-13T01:03:00.001-04:00

If he could just stand on his tippy toes a little higher he’d be six foot, then surely people would take him serious. If his tie was more colorful than the department store brand, people would see him as their leader. If his name was in the newspaper, then they’d know he was for real. Welcome to the internet, where any idiot with a laptop and WiFi can claim greatness.

I spend a lot of time online, ok, too much time online. I write for clients online, research their competitors online, and sometimes when I get real lucky, run a social media contest, you guessed it, online. I’m online all the time. I’m a machine.

There are no real words to describe the type of person you become when you spend more time online each day than you spend off. Hermit, that’s too Notre Dame hunched mascoty, introvert, not when you spend half your day on social networks. How about human, human of the new millennia, where commerce and markets spend days evolving online in ways that allow even those with great disadvantages a shot at exploiting them, and if lucky, hacking out a living in the process. Back to the insecure narcissist. I know him well.

I used to think, no, care, what people thought of me online. I used to buy into the online reputation myths, that if you are Googled (fair warning it gets ugly for me real quick) you must present a list of accounts for your searchers to find. You must take that picture, you know the one, tanned at the beach, looking like you never do in real life, and stick it online where everyone can see it. You must write interesting stuff about your character, 2011 gen Y translation, swag. You must, in other words, create a lie.

How actual societal reputation works- you do X, Y, Z over the course of fifteen years, people that watch your evolution judge you on both X, Y, Z, and your maturation process, and come to a collective whisper about who you are. The coach that won 278 games and got kicked out of a few for fighting with the opposing players is known as a legend and not a derelict, just ask Ohio State fans about Woody Hayes.

Unfortunately the internet, her bounty has filled my cup of livelihood for near a decade, is easily manipulated. I should know, this is what I do for a living. I manipulate results in Google, create so-called brands on Facebook, and hammer away at creating persona for anyone with a PayPal account. The internet does not present an accurate, hell, a real picture at all of a person, yet it’s our collective default. How do you use that rice cooker? Google it! How many miles is it to Beijing from Toronto? MapQuest knows. Unfortunately people aren’t rice cookers or 747’s, their motion-filled, flawed to the bone, human beings. Their active agents of self interest, not exactly categorizable to the dismay of Myers Briggs. People are fluid, rich with enough layers even LulzSec can’t hack them. Nobody can categorize the depths of humans, but God.

So excuse my lack of exuberance at the ever-growing flock of anointers of superiority on the web, of those that talk of humility while an unnerving odor of hypocrisy lines their every breath. Distrust those so-called experts they’d say, and by the way we have some exciting news about our expert new wham-oh service coming next week. Their wicks aren’t easily defused.

Give me a heartwarming, giving person, one that truly offers value to this world, and I’ll show you someone that doesn’t even have a Facebook account. Show me a person in Africa feeding the poorest of the poor, and they won’t seek to post pictures of the children on the net for anything but to get them more food. Show me a humble heart, and you won’t find so much of a wisp of reputation management around their names. They are who they are, for better or worse, and they leave their judgment day for the afterlife.

A great irony that seemingly goes unnoticed by the showoffs, is that nobody was listening to begin with. Their great stage wasn’t built on a solid foundation, in fact, when analyzed beyond their own figments; there is no stage at all. If only a few had internet access, if only a couple had a blog or a video-enhanced website, maybe they’d have a chance at being known for anything other than self indulgence. That’s the internet for you, her sweet revenge on those that seek the light, she makes it free to anyone that wants to bask in it, and thus incredibly difficult to find a place away from the gazillion others trying to get some shine, maybe it’s only possible if standing on your tippy toes.

An Email Excerpt

2011-05-17T13:13:00.001-04:00

Here is a portion of an email I sent out this morning detailing the importance of quality when it comes to building and deploying SEO campaigns. The larger part of the email offered our existing clients an insider offer on having us create some fancy schmancy link bait viral assets, though for you, the casual blog reader, I think just getting an idea of how we view SEO progressing might be helpful.

Inbound marketing, link bait, white hat SEO, the technique of putting something of value out in order to get priceless link value in return has many names, not the least of which is the title good strategy. While many online business owners pay thousands, and in many cases, tens of thousands of dollars to have SEO’s buy links for them, or create massive troves of content for link building article submissions, a few smart-thinking CEO’s are testing the waters with a strategy that’s a bit more focused.

If you have 100 articles in search that all read like they were written by a defected robot, what happens when people actually read said articles? Are Google’s spiders savvy enough to detect the lack of literature in such articles? At best the articles help gain you a link or two, at worst they create a negative content situation (NCS) which can profoundly affect your search campaign. Just look at Google’s now infamous Panda update, and the tens of millions of dollars it cost sites like Demand Media. Quality content matters.

It is our theory that one really good link is worth more than 100 crappy links. One link on Mashable, or TechCrunch, or if your industry is outside digital, on Martha Stewart Living, or Rachel Ray Home, is worth an infinite amount more than any collection of contrived links could ever be. But how do you get there? How do you, time-crunched owner of a business just fighting to survive, get to a place of high linkage with the residual PageRank and organic traffic that follow? With a creative asset that offers VALUE to the outlet.

After taking a few paragraphs off, the buzz words are back. Inbound marketing, social media marketing, viral marketing, all these tricky phrases point to a sort of exposure built upon something of value to the end user. At a loss for what that might be? Here are a few of them-

Infographics

Targeted Surveys

Video Workshops

Video Focus Groups

Interactive White Papers

This is just the tip of the high value content creation glacier, and as you might be thinking right about now, many of the above can work in concert with one and other, and aren’t all that hard to create.

Given the speed at which search engine algorithms are evolving, it is safe to say that concepts like the above play towards an evergreen, old-as-paper-itself concept of appealing to influential media in hopes of bottling some of their thunder when it comes to eyeballs, links, and most importantly traffic.

Chasing Suzy Socialite

2011-05-13T12:58:00.000-04:00

There is just something about the way she looks in sundresses. Like a lush rose standing alone in the middle of the 10th fairway at Augusta National, Suzy stands out.

She walks with such confidence, instead of one foot in front of the other, she glides, no, floats across the floor. Suzy never smiles, but looks far from smug. Her hair is never too long, or too short, and always perfectly matched to that of her television sitcom sisters that she’s so destined to become one day. She just has it, what the hell is it?

Everyone in school knows her, how could they not? Senior class president, captain of the cheerleading team, she’s hard to miss. Suzy Socialite steams up each classroom she blesses with her attendance from boys panting like dogs, hormones ensure they can’t help salivating at what they most desire.

How did this happen to me? I’m president of the cultural acceptance club, I like video games and bingo, how did I fall for Suzy Socialite? Understandably, love is never an easy emotion to explain.

I’ve never once had a meaningful conversation with Suzy Socialite, not once had we ever shared even a laugh together. The one time I did bump into her, literally in the hallway, she reacted as if a minor assault had just taken place, one part disgusted, one part determined to never let it happen again.

Connie Caregiver on the other hand, when don’t we laugh together? When don’t we have fun? She sends me cards on random holidays I’ve never heard of, and helps pack my stuff up for me when I’m running late for my next class. She’s vice president of the cultural acceptance club, so we are obliged to see each other at least twice a week. When we’re together we never run out of things to talk about. How come I feel so numb to the idea of chasing after her? I’m pretty sure she’s a really good person.

Tune Into Channel: Little Voice in Your Head

2011-04-29T15:56:00.002-04:00

I’ve been on a terrible night schedule as of late. Not long ago I caught a glimpse of a bumper sticker that read “My Sleep Schedule is Fu****” of course it wasn’t censored, but you get the idea, that sticker really resonated with my current situation. I sit wide awake at 3 AM emailing clients, some that share my owl-like schedule actually email back right away, which kind of frightens me more than the thought of doing work that late at night.

Always one to try to pull some good out of the odd, bad, and strange in life, I started to look at what’s good about staying up really late. For one it’s quiet, though I live on a quiet street to begin with, which makes the late night so quiet I can almost hear that portly old squirrel stretching out on a branch in my backyard, or that pesky ladybug as it summits my glass-enclosed porch door, and kicks it’s six legs up to relax atop the metal frame.

When not focused on the bustling nature preserve that is my back yard, I start to listen in to questions that feel appropriate for the time of night. Why do I carry a cell phone when I hardly get any calls? Or how being 31 feels better than being 11, but not as good as 21, why is that? Or how I used to think I’d get my PhD and spend my days encouraging young dreamers not to stop, instead of helping businesses improve their bottom line with ninja-like internet marketing tactics, what happened? My pondering often leads to more serious thoughts, like how those tornadoes just devastated a community in Alabama not so different than my own in Columbia. What if it had hit Columbia, what if I died in that tornado? Am I called to do more with my life? Is that permissible?

The thoughts one has when it comes to deeper meaning and life’s calling are, what I like to title them as, 9/11 moments. A lot of people will tell you, especially in the NY/NJ area that after 9/11 their priorities shifted. The tragedy was so massive, that even in a city as populous as New York, its ripples could be felt by nearly everyone that lived there. If someone we know wasn’t killed in the attack, we certainly knew someone that knew someone that was. Having a 9/11 moment is like that great reality check, what are we called to do, let’s answer this now, because life is not eternal on this earth, our time is short. A lot of people doing all sorts of things will tell you they decided to take the plunge after 9/11, because it just seemed like they had to do it, because they didn’t know if they had time to wait anymore.

I’m not advocating for you to quit your job or school tomorrow and go to India to save goats from slaughter, rather, I wonder if there is a balance, a way to listen to that little voice, while still staying true to the duties that life so blatantly requires of us. Can we do something special and fulfilling, and still work our job at the UPS store packaging people’s crap for storage and eBay deals? Can we still rock as an employee and at the same time become the boss of our own lives, delving into a sense of greater good, and thus the fulfillment that follows?

What does your little voice say to you when all the noise of life calms? If you were in a vaccumous state, say standing in a room alone with nothing to distract you, what is that little voice inside urging you to do, and why aren’t you listening to it? If life as you know it really isn’t here forever, what are you waiting for?

Postscript-

The above operates on the assumption that doing good feels good. If you don’t yet buy into such a conclusion, volunteer at your local pet shelter, or homeless facility, or take a few calls from domestic violence victims, give it everything you have and take note as to how you feel after. As someone that volunteers on occasion, I personally believe it’s the most rewarding, endearing, heaven-on-earth like feeling humans can have. But hey, maybe that’s just me.

We choose to accept mediocrity not out of fear or regret, but often out of the societal norms that tell us to just keep plugging along. The shows, movies, songs, and everything else that is our popular culture tells us to maintain the status quo, for that is acceptable. Being unacceptable creates unease, raises eyebrows, and can be polarizing. Understanding the above will ensure an easier transition, than trying to accommodate a self-interested material culture with your actions.

Greatness arises from personal conviction, that when tested, stands firm. I challenge myself, and you too, us all, to have that conviction not just when things are going great, but when they aren’t. To have the ability to do more with our lives, even when life, culture, and our world is so evidently ambiguous to such effort. Our time is now.

Social Media Report: How to Run an Effective Social Media Giveaway

2011-04-28T15:36:00.001-04:00

Most of my posts are esoteric observations, this one however is not. Rather, this post is of the self-promotional variety.

I recently wrote a report detailing my thoughts on how to properly run a social media giveaway, and why just tossing out iPad 2’s and Visa gift cards does more harm than good.

Download it free here-

http://www.socialworkr.com/socialmediareport/

Life reflections will return next week with a fresh take on something abstract.

Giving: Revised

2011-03-31T13:43:00.001-04:00

Most nights at 8 PM I set my DVR to record an eclectic mix of programming. Like most of you I enjoy watching American Idol, and like my fellow sleuths out there, I love a good murder mystery, that programs such as 48 Hours and Dateline so cleverly offer. The other night my DVR ended up recording a more serious program about internet censorship, China, modern art, and human rights.

The story of Ai Weiwei was told to me through the award winning PBS show Frontline. Who’s Afraid of Ai Weiwei provides a fascinating look at a man that is both artist and activist. There are so many pieces of this profile I find captivating. Ai Weiwei’s art is world renowned, yet I’d never heard of him before. His native country, China, has the opportunity to finally showcase an independent thinker and cultural icon, and instead does their very best to suppress him. Though an artist of Weiwei’s caliber could live anywhere, he chooses to stay in the very land that aims to hurt him. His mother, acutely aware of the dangers Weiwei faces from her husband’s own artistic censorship, stands by her son’s side through it all. The story is much better told by Frontline, and most importantly, Alison Klayman.

Klayman has embedded herself in China for four years in an effort to document the very man China is trying so hard to suppress. Her work profiled in Frontline was so groundbreaking, surely she has some major investors backing this project. Surely she isn’t bootstrapping this effort I thought, as I wondered about a possible release date for her film. The plot thickens.

Two days after the show aired I received an invite to view a startup’s project on a funding website called Kickstarter. Being an entrepreneur heavily involved with online businesses, I get emails like this one all the time. You’ve been selected to beta test our new widget, you are exactly who we want to talk to about the usability of our new iPhone app, etc. Since I care, and since I’d like to think someone actually took the time to think of me, I do go and check out most of these websites I’m invited to review, and that’s where my second encounter with the story of Ai Weiwei occurred.

To my surprise this morning, when perusing the Kickstarter website, which in a nutshell is a crowdsourcing tool for people that need funding, I came upon Alison Klayman’s post. Secretly, I’d been thinking of Klayman and Weiwei ever since I watched the stunning portrait of the artist literally putting his life on the line for the betterment of his fellow people. So you can imagine my excitement when there was a real, tangible way for me to help her get the film finished. In fact, she let me back the film, I’m backer number 47 to be exact. The amazing part about the project, and Kickstarter, is you can become backer for 48 for as little as $1.

The way we give has been fundamentally changed by the power of the internet to connect willing parties. Klayman is more than willing to give you insider access to the film, swag, and even your name in the credits for a donation that would be considered modest by Hollywood standards. The interesting thing about Kickstarter, in the limited time I’ve spent checking out projects on the site, is that they offer not equity in most deals for donors, but rather gifts of appreciation. Got $250 to spare? Up and coming musician Lyndy Butler will write you a song, and play it for you…in person!

What is important about Kickstarter, and other web 2.0 giving enterprises, is that they allow for a more meaningful, intimate experience. There is nothing wrong with texting to give to say the Red Cross, but assuming you’ve done that, and you’re looking to help others, what better way than to take advantage of the new way to give online, appreciation included.

Check out the amazing Frontline piece below-

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

Check out the Kickstarter video here-

Go and get behind this important project in a way that not long ago you would’ve never been able to-

King & The Cupcake

2011-03-23T15:44:00.000-04:00

Times Like These

2011-03-22T13:38:00.005-04:00

I feel like a newborn. 31 year old newborn.

At Starbucks this morning I rested my bones on a new leather chair meant to look old. To my right was a man nearly half my age. Across from me a woman twice as old. One sat plucking emails from their Gmail account on a laptop, the other on their smart phone played a game intensely. Who was doing what no longer means anything, no matter of age, we all utilize technology feverishly. We are as techie in public, as we are in private. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook are those aged 50 and older according to a recent Pew Study. Safe to say, regardless of age, we are all hooked in some sense of the word.

Imagine going an entire day without your cell phone. Now imagine going an entire year. How different would your life be? Would it be better or worse? Surely you’d be less informed, but maybe more relaxed, and at ease with who you are as a person. Does technology inform us to a point where we become manifestations of the informers, or are we able to keep our individuality throughout the barrage of daily emails, texts, Facebook updates, and yes, blog posts like this one?

Before coffee, before a shower, before doing anything besides letting my dogs out in the backyard, I check my email every morning. By check I mean sort, and by sort I mean go to war. I forward, delete, reply, reiterate, and compose on a pace meant for those with serious volumes of email arriving daily. Without this routine, I’d probably read the three newspapers sitting in my driveway each morning, which doesn’t get done till the evening, or spend some time gazing at the trees in my backyard, which currently only happens on the rare occasion I slip outside for a minute between emails. Simpler times intrigue me.

Design wise my favorite period of which to draw inspiration from are the 1920’s. The roaring twenties, I picture my grandmother in a silk pattern dress with short curly hair, fur coat resting on her shoulders standing in central park as she mingled with sophisticated New Yorkers on a brisk fall day. I picture my grandfather, hunched over enjoying oyster stew from the famous Grand Central Oyster Bar, talking civil war history with academic heavyweights of the time. I think of old varsity sweaters, and badges that used to adorn them at my alma mater. I see the paperboy in a wool cap, the radio sitting in the center of the home, and books about railroads on the coffee tables of those that existed at such a time. I see the lines, the curves, the faces, and the places with unbridled optimism, because I was not yet born into whatever painful reality existed at the time.

Romanticizing a time, or place for that matter is alight, as long as the realization is there that you’re doing it. Truth be told, people had to go out and do something, there was no version of the iPhone in the 1920’s for them to keep busy with at home.

Robert Putnam pointed out over a decade ago, that we are spending more time alone thanks largely to technological advances. Maybe if Putnam had written his book today, he’d have romanticized the time more, being that now, even in a coffee shop where discourse once ruled, we all are slaves to our gadgets.

Postscript

Microsoft launched an ad campaign pushing for more time in the moment, and less on the gadget, little surprise, it wasn’t much of a success. Apple launched its iPad 2 not long ago, and rumor has it they sold over a half million units in the first three days.

A small contingent of people are logging off, I found this article about a man living off the grid interesting, he has no electricity, but of course, his solar powered laptop is never far from reach.

Forging Ahead: No Looking Back

2011-03-14T11:06:00.003-04:00

It’s Monday, of course you feel lethargic. Of course your officemates annoy you more today than on Fridays when they can kiss your butt goodbye for the weekend. It’s Monday, let’s all collectively sigh at the fact that you loathe where you are right now. Of course you don’t want to work, because you really want to live your dream.

Are people really living their dreams? On a Monday no less? I’m afraid so. I’m afraid that most people do in fact lie about living their dreams each day, but a small percentage actually are earning a living by doing what they love. You know the ones, always posting pictures of their exploits on Faceboook, you want to unfriend them out of envy, but that’d be too obvious. So you curse their existence in your mind, and respond with a ho-hum “that’ll be a fun trip” when the latest travel exploit gets brought up at that dinner party you didn’t want to go to in fear of seeing them in the first place. A small percentage of those people are really as happy as they seem.

What did they do to get there? Is there a way to really escape the doldrums of the normal life that has you reading this post right now? Yes dear reader, there is.

The older I get the humbler I get. I thought things were going really well ten years ago, now I wonder what disastrous stressful situation will rear it’s ugly face next. Am I going to get robbed at knifepoint? Business sued? Audited? All three?! Ah, the joys of being a disgruntled business owner. I’ve had your run-of-the-mill highs and lows in life, but for some reason the lows sting more with age. Without risk there can be no reward, with risk there will always be failure. The catch 22 of starting businesses is that, no matter how hard you try, some will not work out.

With the above in mind, that dreamers are living it up and failures arise regularly, I’ve curated a few ideas aimed at helping you mitigate the risk, and inherit the dream lifestyle that has your friends silently cursing your existence and unfriending you on Facebook in droves. These are after all the signs that you’ve really made it.

Forging Ahead By-

Setting easier to reach goals
Borrowing time not money
Giving credit to friends and family
Dancing when frustrated
Working from home
Visualizing success
Vocalizing plans
Ignoring pessimists
Reading lots
Spending little
Dreaming big

I could write in detail about each bullet above, but it’s Monday, and I don’t want to take up the time that might otherwise get spent dreaming of doing something you love for a living.

All About Gravatational Video Ad Network

2011-03-02T12:25:00.000-05:00

Wood

2011-03-01T10:38:00.001-05:00

A natural edged slab of wood sits atop two metal sawhorses in my home office. The wood is smooth, yet porous, as if it were sealed and coated a bit, but not enough. The exact species of the wood remains unknown, more than likely its redwood from what my online research comparing like images tells me. At nearly eight feet in length, it offers plenty of room for the desktop computer, a few notepads, and of course the ever-growing stack of unpaid bills that entrepreneurs like me wear as a badge of honor till our credit score shocks us into payment.

I imagine the desk would be the showcase of a better looking office, maybe put in the center of the room with a large pendent light hung above to showcase the beauty of the wood, and a fancy dark rug below to flesh out the enormity of it. Unfortunately in my office it’s up against a beige wall, with the only fur on the floor supplied by my dogs looking for a shady place to take a midday slumber.

The desk, as inconspicuous as it is in this office still commands attention. A majestic beauty from nature that needs no upgrade, software patch, or download. Someone cut a big tree down, and somehow sliced it in half. Someone lugged the tree from a forest full of redwoods, to a factory to seal, to a store to sell, and eventually to a builder supply shop where I picked it up. This desk has traveled a mighty long way to be here today, and with the incredible strength of two sawhorses, it provides stability when often stability is hard to come by. This desk is surely a desk I plan on keeping for a lifetime, it’s a lifer.

As luck would have it my computer sits at the far end of the desk, directly next to a window looking out on my front yard. The scene from the window is predictable, three ranch houses of modest size with well kept lawns standby idly across the street. In nearer view is an old tree. The branches of the tree fall directly in front of the window, stretching like tense fingers in awkward poses. The branches are ugly, they look like something one would use to torture another. If the neighbor asks my suggestion for their child’s Halloween costume next year, I’d be apt to suggest pulling those branches down and making a costume out of them, it’d frighten for sure. But these branches belong to a tree comprised of wood, like the wood used to make my desk. The same material I trust to hold my most important documents, offers up an entirely different look just outside my window, not more than four feet away from the desk. When I come across people that insult me, or frighten me, or worse yet, do both, I think of the tree in my front yard, and the desk, and how we’re all not that different inside.

Coming Soon…

2011-02-22T13:35:00.001-05:00

A Case for the Modern Workspace

2011-01-26T14:35:00.004-05:00

To gain perspective, it is vital to separate our perception from reality. If we want to know what stinks about our job, we must leave it for a week, and come back and see what stands out as we return. If we want to know what Spanish color we should paint our home, we should visit Spain, or at least Mexico, and take pictures of all the yellows, muddy reds, and turquoise that we can muster our camera to capture each day. We must separate to evaluate. Even if our time is limited, even if a weekend is all we have, it can, and does work.

Rather than make a feeble attempt at defining the modern workspace, visit this Bloomberg Businessweek article for more information-

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/feb2007/sb20070226_761145.htm

On a weekend trip to Ohio, I found inspiration in how people work. After a quaint breakfast, in the Midwest that usually involves sausage gravy and biscuits, and some general conversation, I started gabbing about a book idea that revolves around this concept of the modern workspace. How do we work when we have nowhere to go? How do we stay innovative when what got us here was automating nearly everything with the help of software, and brilliant coders? How do we stay inspired if we’re stuck at home all the time?

For those that have followed my erratic career, you know I was, and still am a proponent of coworking. Not only do I think it’s a great idea, I believe it’s an idea on the fast track to becoming the new normal. While my coworking space didn’t take off like I’d hoped it would, the idea for most areas in the U.S. is still gaining traction. My brother Clif rang in 2011 in a coworking facility in Manhattan. In Ohio a progressive group of people are advancing the idea of coworking in successful ways that involve bringing the playground inside, even my beloved South Carolina now has a tech corridor, with you guessed it, a coworking space. People are working different thanks to the connectivity the internet, and it’s millions of wonderful applications provide. Let’s take it a step further.

Any business owner can tell you the perils of operating an office. From the absurd amount of power that the building consumes, to the seemingly endless amount of supplies needed to keep staff ready to go, offices are a major expense in nearly every big business’s end-of-year accounting ledger. So even if you don’t work for yourself, you may soon be working by yourself. Large Fortune 100 companies have been sending employees to work from home for years now, and as the savings of such endeavors jives with the increased productivity of the home worker, you’ll only see more of it in the future. For better or worse our business ecosystem is subject to trends as much as fashion is to Hollywood stars. When Wired magazine writes a piece on Coca-Cola saving ten million dollars from sending their staff to work at home, you can bet many organizations will follow suit.

Nearly everyone that has approached me about modern workspaces in the past two years seems to love the idea of working in something that looks more like a lounge than an office. The word coffee shop no longer does the modern office justice; it’s now club office sans strobe lights. Working in creative environments, gasp, promotes creativity. Artists for as long as this country has kept track of them have been using creative settings to inspire their work. Writers take sea filled air and write classic American novels like Ernest Hemingway, or take modern day movie star Jason Segal moving to Hawaii to write his hit comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Simply put creatives are at their best when the workspace they inhabit frees their mind up enough to unlock the treasures buried deep inside it.

Just last evening President Obama during his State of the Union address underscored the future of work by explaining that with better wireless coverage people can do business anywhere there is an internet connection. President Obama championed his vision of an interconnected country that was able to compete worldwide with infrastructure that, at the core, fostered innovation. Innovation often comes from those that approach problems different, insert outside the box cliché here, and thus the importance of the creative workspace goes all the way up to the top of our governing body. In the information age that we live in, ideas are the trump cards that win the innovation game. Ideas are today what owning an oil field was in the 80’s. Ideas have immense value, and putting a focus on where and how we work is vital to nurturing them to life. Working anywhere there is an internet connection isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, somewhere that elicits emotion, calms the nerves, challenges the mind, and above all, fosters openness is where we should work moving forward if we truly want to win the innovation race globally.

So Emotional

For years I’ve loved listening to Sufjan Stephens, the eccentric artist famous for if nothing else long delicate songs that can include dozens of instruments throughout. I don’t know why, but each time I hear one of the man’s songs, or play one of his albums, I get emotional. Most of his songs aren’t sugar pop, they don’t offer easily decipherable melodies, often no chorus for the song exists, and sometimes the lyrics are tough to even make sense of. But something about the music touches me emotionally, I don’t need to know what, as long as I know it’s there, the job is done. The same goes for workspaces, you can elicit emotion through design as Mr. Stephens does through music.

Procuring an emotional workspace is not as hard as it might sound, photographs for one are an easy way to set the emotional tone. Artwork, affirmations, and even furniture can, and should elicit emotion. We are humans currently working in the doldrums of colorless cubes that are as inhuman as robots, setting the emotional tone in the workspace, even if for a group of people working for different companies in different capacities will have a collective benefit.

No Alarms No Surprises

Creatives are an anxious bunch. The stereotype of the laidback surfer making music fireside after a day at the beach paints an exceptionally poor picture of those that create for a living. Creatives are often so dedicated to their work that they are at it all day and night, all the time. This inevitably creates anxieties that range from feelings of separation from their home or families, to worries of making enough money to pay the bills. Sound familiar? These are the same things many of us worry about each day, and thus offering a space that quells anxiousness can be a group benefit.

One day not too long ago while volunteering at a local pet shelter I couldn’t help but notice the new age music coming from speakers seemingly mounted all over the facility. What’s with the music I asked my boss for the day? It calms the animals, and sometimes the people too the staff member responded with a smile. Brining in music to the workplace might not work for those companies that require a lot of phone usage, or have regular meetings with team members, but for many it is a great way to quell anxiety. Other ideas include allowing pets to come to work, as they too have been shown to calm owners and boost moral. Even utilizing scent, by having candles or a dedicated cookie baker each day can, and does help people get more done.

Brain Pump

As a long-suffering University of South Carolina football fan, it’s fair to say, on occasion, our team plays down to the level of our opponents. If we the fans know it, surely the players and coaches know it as well, so why then does it keep happening? Without getting too much into expectations, and all that comes with them, it seems that we are as humans adaptable in both directions. We can become great if we surround ourselves with greatness. We can just as easily become mediocre when we surround ourselves with such. And thus, challenging the mind, and challenging each other is a major selling point of the modern workspace. Who works there? I use their website, buy their product, etc., I want to work there too! By allowing ourselves to care about, embrace, and ultimately emulate successful people and companies, our workspaces can gain far more than whatever competitive information that gets divulged will hurt them.

Challenging the mind, and each other, is what made Facebook so powerful today. The hackathons as they called it, that delivered lightening fast user-requested features were if nothing else, a competitive growth strategy that has paid off more than 50 billion dollars as of the latest valuation. Competition doesn’t need to be uncivil or ugly, it can be positive, nurturing, and bottom line driven deliberate in the modern workspace.

Open Book

The best modern workspaces have only four walls outside, and none inside. Openness is what makes good workspaces great. Having an open workspace eliminates office politics in a large part, because everyone can see, hear, and observe what everyone else is doing, which should eliminate most of the gossip that occurs each day at work. Having an open office with multiple companies represented allows for deep sharing, and collaboration on levels that benefit all involved. The fears of openness are hardly ever realized, because it is in the best interest of all involved to play fair, and if the other three tenets of the modern office are in effect, then these people working will be at their best, providing the ultimate scenario for productivity, ideas, and yes, innovation.

Back to Ohio, to middle America, where the values that people carry there are often the very values we as a nation tout as American. Hard work, family, faith, you can find it all in the Midwest. In case you haven’t been to Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana or Michigan lately, let me fill you in, it’s freezing. There is snow everywhere, the roads are often iced over, and the dark clouds cast shadows on the endless miles of once-plowed fields like a massive blanket perpetually floating above. Being a weather-spoiled southerner now, led me to realize just how badly people in the Midwest could use somewhere indoors to go. Work from home in the wintery dark cold? Spend my days at a computer starring out to the cloud-drenched abyss? I think not. I need a fireplace, good people, something leather to sit on, and of course copious amounts of freshly roasted coffee. Luck would have it I often feel the same way when I’m home, even if the sun makes it a little easier to sit by the pool for the day, or ride around in my truck with the windows down. I still feel the burn to be around others, to collaborate, and to do more for the better. Something tells me I’m not the only one yearning for such these days.

Postscript-

I’ve had the unique opportunity to see businesses both succeed, and fail in creative-friendly workspaces, and my perspective hasn’t changed on why it is best to work together in places that stimulate the mind. Nobody wants to work in a prison, so why do so many offices resemble one? The idea of the modern workspace is no longer conceptual, it’s real, and a visit to nearly any big city in America will shine a light on such. Coworking spaces are already economically viable in larger information economies. While they might not yet be a profitable proposition in the smaller towns and cities that are still transitioning from the agricultural and manufacturing hubs that they once were, it is only a matter of time before they do. For the benefit of this great nation, my hope is that one-day soon the modern workspace will be the accepted place to work all around the country, like say you’d see a McDonalds nearly everywhere, one day you’d see modern workspaces. If not opened by entrepreneurs, then by large forward-thinking companies that can see the benefit in, ironically, collaborating on a project that benefits all involved.

Chocolate Surprise

2011-01-14T01:07:00.001-05:00

I’m no stranger to chocolate bars. I’ve always been a guy that craves the salty stuff like pretzels and tortilla chips as my junk food du jour, but may a person step forward that’s ever heard me speak one nasty word about chocolate. Chocolate bars, chocolate ice cream, chocolate filled croissants, I’ve enjoyed them all probably more than I should have over the past 31 years. I’m no chocolate expert, but it’s not my first time at the chocolate dance either. So then, imagine my surprise when a little short stubby chocolate bar with a big price tag caught my attention while waiting in line at the grocery store the other day.

$2.80, for what? Two dollars and eighty cents, I must be seeing this wrong, for what? It’s a little chocolate bar, like someone cut off a third of a Snickers, packed it up in fancy gold wrapping, and priced it for three times as much as a whole bar. Now I’m no penny pincher, or price checker for that matter, but it seemed like an awfully large sum of money for a tiny little stubby piece of chocolate. I have to admit, I was intrigued, enough so to pick up the little nugget, and learn more about it, as the person in front of me took their time writing a check (who does that anymore) for a few bags of some sort of produce.

The ultimate chocolate bar crafted by hand the package read, as if to dare me to find out if it really was the ultimate. Filled with hazelnuts, and rich milk chocolate the package almost begging me now to drop 3 bills on this bar no bigger than my thumb. Ok, their marketing worked, let me test drive one of these so-called five star chocolate bars. I’ll be the judge of this impulse aisle indulgence, somebody has to do it, why not me?

Fast forward two nights, and here I am, just a few minutes ago, chewing in utter ecstasy at what has to be the best chocolate bar that’s ever graced my gums in my entire life. This bar wasn’t worth $3 it was worth $30! It was light, but rich, with just enough consistency to make it chewy, without being too soft. This bar was full of exotic ingredients found in no Hershey’s bar that I’ve ever had, was that cumin I tasted? Maybe some hints of oak? Am I drinking wine or eating chocolate, why do I feel so good after eating it? This really was an incredible mocha-filled journey, that surprisingly was satisfying after the two bites it took to finish this piece of heaven.

So how did I, and judging by the half empty box sitting in the grocery aisle, many others get here. How did we as savvy recession-crunched consumers splurge on a chocolate bar of such miniature proportions to begin with? Differentiation. By offering something that on the surface looks absurd, a tiny piece of chocolate for triple the price of a much larger piece, the product stands out. It gets people talking, and has them wondering, what gives them the right to charge that much?

It’s not just chocolate, Kona coffee, one of my personal favorites, sells for more than five times as much as Columbian per pound, another one of my favorites. Why does Kona get put into the conversation of most exotic and refined brews time and time again, when it is a relatively boutique line of coffee that is packaged and distributed much less than my Columbian brethren’s beans? Because of differentiation. The exorbitant price prompts curious consumers to ask why, which brings up romanticized stories of Hawaiian countryside estates growing coffee beans out of volcanic ash. The narrative is there, because the price prompts the inquisitiveness of the consumer.

A client that has twice commissioned my services to sell their highbrow product to a U.S. market of beauty salons kept bringing this point up over and over again in their emails to me regarding their positioning of their product. It will differentiate the salons from the competition they’d tell me, and then we’d look at the pricing of their product, the narrative, and all the rest to see how this could be done. It was harder for me to explain the formula for successfully translating their wishes into retail results then, but after my chocolate experience tonight, it’ll surely be easier next time around.

What Happened To…

2010-12-22T21:02:00.001-05:00

Out of nowhere I caught a glimpse of a calendar showing a little more than a week left in 2010. It can’t be, the year is almost over? I didn’t put a book out in 2010, I was going to write that book about search engine optimization techniques. No time now, and to make matters worse the whole search industry is changing, since people more and more are spending time on Facebook, and finding their information at predetermined websites, instead of just Googling everything. No book in 2010. Well at least I still have that Tea shop that I opened for that girl I no longer date. No, that seems to be gone too. What really happened in 2010?

For starters I got pretty good at observing people. I met more than a few people in the past year that apparently were heavily involved in social networking, and marketing, and even SEO. Believe it or not, they’d come to my coworking space, or Tea shop, flip open their laptops, and get to work. These were the people I’d been waiting years to meet around this small southern town, so luck would have it when we did meet I never could muster up anything useful to say about my own business. It was as if 2010 was the year I retired from my own company, which is pretty tough to do when you’re the only employee. As hard as they try, my three dogs just can’t seem to type up those work emails with their paws.

Much of my businesses were closed down in painfully slow operational efforts that were like living a nightmare in real life. Even though I love you, and love working with you, you are fired because our company isn’t profitable like it used to be. Try saying that five times fast to your favorite employee.

Along with my businesses went some old friends, a girlfriend, and her dog, all of whom were apparently not on my side. With so much negativity in the air, it’s with unbelievable humility I write that so many wonderfully great things occurred in 2010.

As quick as I could email my landlord to let her know we weren’t renewing our lease on that 2,000 sq ft office space, my sanity returned. Within weeks my energy levels went way up, and all the sudden, no matter how bad things were for my many businesses, personally I felt great. It was like honesty’s sweet fulfillment coming to fruition right before my very eyes, sometimes when life is the hardest, the greatest feelings of joy can arise. A wise man once told me that God puts struggle in our lives so that we must depend on Him, and not a day goes by that I don’t thank the Lord for my own. The Wall Street Journal told me some years ago that according to psychological studies happiness is most derived from resilience. Science and God on the same page, I told you 2010 was some year.

In 2010 I cared more about people than I did profit. I wanted to talk more than I did sell. I was alive in 2010. I got to see my old girlfriend that hadn’t been around in years for a few weeks, I got to visit my old college campus for the first time in 7 years, I got to look in the mirror and not wonder if this was the day my company would get sued for a million dollars. I got to take in the air in 2010. I made a lot of friends in 2010, and had a lot of fun talking to those friends, spending time, even, as scary as it sounds, dancing with them.

What happened to my business was life, what happened to my soul was gratitude. What happens in 2011 nobody knows, but for sure I am ready to face the challenges with an extraordinary appreciation for people, for God, for the very ability I have to wake up, walk out my door, call my mom or dad, and tell them that I love them. It’s not all roses from here on out, it’s still going to be a long challenging road to recovery, to building the next Google or Groupon, or heck even the next Puppy-Finder.com. It’s going to be hard. But it’s going to be worth it if I can take the lessons from 2010, and use them to make 2011 better.

May you take some of this positive energy and put it into your soul. May you have the confidence to not give a you-know-what about what other people think, and make this year the year you do that thing you’ve always wanted to do. We are so lucky to be here, and I just wish so much pain wasn’t my reminder of this fact, so here’s to 2011 being the year that changes everything for the better.

The Man with No Email Address

2010-12-14T12:54:00.003-05:00

This past weekend cold weather blanketed much of the country with pearl white snow, as it tends to do this time of year, helping to usher in a tradition many engage in to keep warm if nothing else, the Christmas party. I gather for as long as Christmas has been celebrated, somebody somewhere tossed together some friends with tacky sweaters, booze, and music to create a memorable evening.

While I’m not exactly a celebration-phobe, it would be fair to say my pension for the holiday inactivity of sitting around doing nothing but eating all day is low at best. Simply put I love to stay busy, like many of my entrepreneurial counterparts, if we could sit still all day we’d probably be in that daft brown corporate cubicle next to you, right? So it is with great irony that as I get older, and more apt to move around randomly, I actually look forward to Christmas parties. Dare I say I love Christmas parties? I do, I love Christmas parties.

Last year at our now defunct office space we threw a grand Christmas party, so grand that I fell asleep face down on a blue microfiber beanbag in our graphic designer’s office somewhere south of 2 AM. The food, the drink, and the people were fantastic at our first and only company Christmas party. Especially the people, many of whom I honestly haven’t had a meaningful conversation with since. I still remember many of the things we spoke about that night, I still cite these long gone conversations in my I-know-the-answer-to-this-random-question quips at dinner with those I do see regularly. With no office to throw a party at, and a clever invitation hanging from my refrigerator door from a dear friend in Ohio, I boarded a plane to the great windy state, in preparation for a holiday party like no other. Besides me, and a few others, it was a cousin only affair, which remarkably resulted in more guests than most parties would have inviting family and friends alike.

In well appointed house on a street full of them crammed a group of young adults, a delectable spread of food that included frosting bearded Santa cookies, and of course the sounds of one of those all-carols-all-the-time radio stations blaring from a boom box you have to be in your thirties to own. Knowing virtually no one, except of course for the host, it was prime turf for new conversations, new discussions, new stories about life in America’s heartland. Being a southerner now for the better part of the past decade, I treasure the time to reflect on what had me a day away from living in Central Ohio for presumably the rest of my life. While this blog post could be about any dozen of the great discussions I had with this big Greek family, one in particular seemed head and shoulders above the rest, the man I met with no email address.

Standing a modest five six or so, dressed in khaki pants and a flannel shirt, with black-rimmed glasses, he looked as if he could be an internet junkie like the rest of us. He had two legs, two arms, eyes, and ears to boot. He smiled like a human, talked like one, and laughed like one too. Yet stunningly, he has no email address.

When winter arrives in Ohio one no longer needs to rely on refrigeration, that is what the porch is for, or so I learned from some of the guests at the party Friday night. Apparently nature can keep a 12 pack of beer just as cold as Whirlpool could. So it should come as no surprise that the front porch of this domicile became a place of constant activity. Think of it as a big outside icebox sans deli meats for holiday lights, and a wood swing. It was there I first got to know the man with no email address.

So what’s your passion? This is the question I asked, over and over again, until he finally told me, if for nothing else to get back to the warm inside with the rest of the people. He was into cooking foods, fine and modest alike, he spoke of olives like I would Google Apps, he talked about the communal benefits of cooking for friends, as I might pontificate on the benefits of instant messaging among coworkers. Fair to say this man’s a foodie.

Imagine my surprise when, in passing, after I propose sending him a link online, he nonchalantly explains that he does not have an email address. I don’t even have a computer, the man said as my jaw hit the floor. No computer? No email? Under 50, wait hold up, what’s the alcohol percentage in this Christmas ale I’m drinking?

Yes, I don’t do email, no need for it he explained with a smile. This is all it took to secure the unimaginable truth into my brain for good, I’ve met someone from my generation, the digital one, that wasn’t tethered to an internet connection like a writer to coffee.

The subtle explanation was given with ease, no anxiousness, it was as if not only did this man not have a computer or the internet, but he was totally cool with it.

In the world we live in today, in the world I live in today, the internet is a means to nearly all ends. I make money online, and take that money and pay bills online. I shop online, research my polling location online, and do nearly everything and anything else you can think of online. If you are reading this blog, you too are obviously online, chances are you’re also under 50, with a smart phone, and an income above average. So why, really, why is it that one person not having any type of association with the internet is that shocking to me, and probably you too?

I can’t imagine life without Gmail nonetheless the internet. I can’t imagine what I’d do with all my time if I had no computer, no Facebook to spy on old friends with, and no iTunes to spend way too much money on albums I may or may not like. I simply can’t imagine what I’d do with all that time. Which is why I probably should find out.

The truth is, as is obviously the case with this person, being different today isn’t getting the latest and greatest gadget, but instead disconnecting from them all together. The habits of a nation shouldn’t influence our day-to-day life in such dramatic fashion, we should be able to disconnect and still smile, like my friend with no email did all night long.

Postscript

Not too long ago I used to joke with a friend about the apocalyptic views of our parents. My mother is constantly presenting what if scenarios that deal with no energy, anarchy, and of course no internet. My friend's mother drew from the variety of disasters in the genre of food shortages, contamination, and world disease. Either way, our elders seem to have a greater adoration for the simple life. They not only think about it, they prepare for it. This is one of the many lessons we can take from our parents, and know that just in case, it probably wouldn’t hurt to see what life is like without a computer, the internet, and yes, even an email address.

The House with a Boat in The Driveway

2010-11-30T11:22:00.002-05:00

In the late afternoon I can often be found rumbling down a side street near my home, cut off t-shirt and gym shorts on, Lil Wayne screaming profanity in my ears as I push for another step, another mile, a little more me time. I admit it, my iPod Nano contains a masterfully blended mix of electronic music, folk, and yes, insanely misogynistic hip-hop. Hey, if it’s good enough for President Obama, is it not for me? Music filled with stories of struggle motivate me to run, often times my run concludes past a sprawling ranch home on a well manicured corner lot.

Maybe it’s just the time that my endorphins finally kick in, or when my blood really gets pumping, but I’m always subtly awed by this workingman’s paradise. The sixties ranch home has an expansive front yard cut short enough for one to practice a few putts on. The back lot is big enough for the Golden Retriever, whom I’ve nicknamed Sparky, to roam freely, the very pup that often greets my passing with a few barks loud enough to interrupt Jay-Z’s verse in my plugged ears. The home, nice on it’s own account, often holds a sport boat in the driveway next to a late model pickup truck. While I’m far from a boat market expert, it seems to be of the $30,000 and up variety. Nice digs for my little blue-collar town of Cayce. So who lives there? It’s a question that often runs through my mind as I pass by the place in exhaustion.

What do those folks do for a living, are they young or old, happily married or miserable? Look at that boat, they must be happily married with that thing in their driveway, get in a fight? Take a soothing ride on the waters of Lake Murray, bring Sparky the retriever, and enjoy life. All is forgiven, or is it?

I believe many in America, and beyond, aspire for something like this house might possess within its 50 year old brick walls. 3 beds, 2 baths, big yard, a few kids, family pup, and of course, a sporty boat. Awww, how that boat glimmers in the sparkle of the street light that covers it with fluorescent illumination each night. With a boat like that, the American dream has been reached, mission accomplished, live there for a lifetime, and enjoy all that this great southern city has to offer, right? Wrong.

Can you imagine my dismay when, one day not too long ago, the boat was gone from the driveway. While Sparky still came to the fence to acknowledge my passing by, he didn’t bark this time, in fact, the dog looked a little sad. Maybe this nuclear family was on a vacation, and old Sparky had to stay home, maybe the boat will be back tomorrow I told myself as I continued down the long road, past more feeble abodes.

A few days later, after getting back from a business trip, I ran my normal route, bobbing up and down with the rhythm of the music in my ears, so excited for my upcoming visual affirmation of the American dream, when low and behold, as quick as I could approach the home I couldn’t help but notice a for sale sign that donned the now less than perfectly cut front yard. First the boat is gone, now the house is for sale? What happened? If only Sparky could tell me. He sat quietly in the yard, eyes fixed not on me, but on that for sale sign. Surely they’d come back for him, but where they’d go, and how come this American dream never turned out like I thought it would, only the Lord knows.

The Problem with Ego

2010-11-27T11:09:00.001-05:00

In a steamy Tennessee courtroom some years ago I watched as a judge handed down a guilty verdict like a brick might hit the pavement after being dropped from an 11^th story window of a skyscraper. Words were not minced, eye contact was made, and his honor’s voice was as rich with confidence as it was with southern drawl. Judgment day had arrived for one of my more scrupulous family members, and all I could do was watch in awe.

The only thing that can make inner-family lawsuits more combustible than the act itself is the presence of arrogant counsel. Something about a cocky lawyer prodding at whatever bones are in the family’s closet, on either side of the case, can literally make people turn to rage induced fits of violence. Luck would have it my not so trustworthy family member on trial had himself a real grade A false-bravado-filled attorney from New York City.

After a moment of silence following the verdict, as the swarms of lawyers packed their things, the judge, with a slight smirk, invited the defense to view the portraits of notable judges that had ruled in the courtroom from the past on the wall as they left the building. These portraits of stately southern judges in their black gowns with stern sophistication painted on their faces were showcased in baroque era gold frames all along the entryway to the courtroom. One would be hard pressed to miss these relics, so why did the judge ask the defense to view them on the way out? It was as if to suggest, that not only did the judge want the losers to know this was his turf, but that their was a long precedence of intolerance for Yankee arrogance in his courtroom dating back many, many years.

While the case, and that day in court in particular taught me many things, most notably to have legal counsel review all documents related to a trust or a will before signing anything, it was the juxtaposition of confidence and ego that shone the brightest that day. If there was ever an incident in my life that helped underscore the power of confidence and the idiocy of ego, it was this day.

Ego tells you to do things you shouldn’t do, say things you shouldn’t say, and act ways that are unbecoming to your own reputation. Ego tells you that you’re better than you are, and hides when you inevitably fail. Ego is cowardly in defeat, it leaves you starved, embarrassed, and bewildered. Ego is incredibly dangerous. Ego saps away the very humility that your soul counts on to grow and mature for the better.

Confidence is intently listening for days on end at a heated trial, playing no favorites, and when the time for judgment comes, making the decision with all the facts in mind. Confidence comes from history, experience, and education. Confidence grows with time, and contracts with failure, but never fully leaves the soul. Confidence allows for error, and helps set resilient success stories on a trajectory of achievement from the start. Confidence is okay with losing sometimes, and gets along with humility just fine. Confidence is the anti-ego, because it is based entirely on experience, not inner-perception.

As I get older, I’ll be 31 in a few weeks, I feel less inclined to do anything that isn’t in my realm of confidence. In graduate school a professor once noted with a hefty laugh that the older she got the less she really knew about anything in life At the time I thought it was a ridiculous remark, but the older I get, surely the more I realize that I really don’t know much about anything either. One thing I do know is that humility, with the right amount of confidence, can take people to places they once only dreamed they could reach.

When a coach talks about another team before a big game, they often emphasize all that is good about the opposing team, to help motivate their own to get up for the game. Lou Holtz was a genius at this, to the point that it was often fodder for the media when he spoke of inferior opponents before games. Lou Holtz won a national championship in arguably the most competitive college sport at the highest level of college athletics.

Creating an environment for positive thinking, high goal setting, and confident execution is only possible if we accept the dangers of ego, and purposefully avoid them. Any ignorance on our part could throw off the chemistry that exists in all of us to do great things. Making a purposeful choice to recognize the power of humility, handwork, and confidence, while avoiding the pitfalls of ego, will greatly enhance our collective abilities to live fruitful lives of importance.

Life Stock

2010-11-16T10:11:00.001-05:00

Isn’t this great? You’re happy now, I’m happy now, we’re happy now!

How often do we really engage in conversations like the one above with friends? How often do we really stop to take an emotional euphoria inventory? Not enough. Simply put, we are so caught up in doing something that’s supposed to make us happy; we neglect to take stock of our emotions when we’re actually happy. This, I believe, is called being giddy.

Oh how things change when the sun sets on our good moods. How the hysteric vertigo ceases when bad things happen, when times are tough, we all tend to become life stock takers of the highest account. What is this life all about? Am I really happy in my job, at home, with this new red coat? Nothing is left out when things go wrong, we’re a determined bunch, ready to take account of each and every little thing in our lives. So, how come when our lives are going great, we’re too overjoyed to find our mental notepad, nonetheless take an accounting of our lives?

I tend to put things I don’t understand into the category of human nature. The reason we cry at the very movies we know are contrived to make us do just that? Human nature. How us men tend to lift our chests a little higher when we walk hand in hand with our significant other late at night down a dimly lit street, human nature of course. It’s all human nature if it’s something I don’t personally understand. But this notion of life stock, of looking at where we are at when things are going well, it’s been camped out in my mind for sometime. Why is it so hard to be grateful when things are going well, yet so easy to take introspective looks when the chips aren’t falling our way? Of course when things go wrong, we want to change, so we take these closer looks at what is making us happy, and not, in our lives. But could we be happier, or at least sustain the happiness if we did actually look at life closely when it was going well? Surely most would agree, that if we could just take the time to look at all that is going well, we’d be even happier. But why then, is it so darn tough to stop and smell the flowers while they rest in our palms? Could it be something that takes effort and deliberate action, like say the art of listening? I might be on to something.

Most people I know are awful listeners. For whatever reason, they’d much rather speak their two cents, than collect the verbal change of others. They want to share their side of things, before they even fully understand yours. In fifth grade a teacher of mine once told me the secret to making friends in life was being a good listener. Even at that age, I knew she had mentioned something profound. Few dispute the power of being a great listener, yet even fewer make a concerted effort to be one. We get carried away in our own voices, giddy if you will.

Taking life stock when things go well, listening when you have a lot to say, they’re both tough, they both take thoughtful approaches full of sacrifice. When one listens, one can’t speak. When one takes life stock, one has to be removed from the very moment that is so wonderful to take in. It’s against our, you guessed it, human nature.

On rainy days like the one we have on our hands in Columbia this morning, I can’t help but think about these things. About being better at some of the most basic things, that can surely have a measurable positive effect on the lives of any who practice them. For the past few weeks I’ve tried to start each day with a reflective prayer, and look at what good is going on in my life. To be honest, I never get all the way done with listing all the great things going on, yet for many looking in, it’d be considered a difficult time for me. I can tell you that, because people ask how I’m doing a little more often these days, sometimes with moist eyes. Through introspection, and simply taking stock of the good in life, no matter the season of emotion in your heart, so many positives can arise. I don’t need to tell you about those, because I know after you’ve counted your blessings today they’ll become abundantly obvious.

Postscript

I have not lost my mind, or my company. I know this blog has been for the most part about business for the past four years, but I’ve had the itch as of late to write about more personal stuff. I appreciate you reading it, and hopefully I’ll write something about business soon, as I’m still conducting it, and have new things on the horizon to share with you.

Moving On Can Be The Damnedest Thing To Do

2010-11-10T14:07:00.001-05:00

Work with me on this one. Let’s say you love summer, and spend your time counting the days until the pool opens, the khaki shorts can be brought out from storage, and the good old A/C unit can get cranked up again. The trips to the beach with friends and family, the late setting sun, it all just gets your heart pumping with passion. The memories of great times seem to follow you around like your shadow at dusk. Is there anything wrong with your passion for summer? Of course not, she’s a beautiful season worthy of your undying love. But, if you are all too often caught up in missing summer, are you really able to truly appreciate winter? If you spend your time in the now frustrated about what you don’t have, how possible is it to honestly, and sincerely be appreciative for what you do have? Few dispute gratitude has its way of making us all feel better. So then why is it so hard to let go sometimes?

I try to live in the moment. Ask close family of mine, and I’m sure they’d tell you I live in the moment a little too much for comfort. Retirement account? That’ll be the day. Annual doctor visits when I’m not sick? Forget it. I pretty much take each day as if it could be my last, and try my hardest to accomplish something. God forbid my last day on earth I’m found passed out in a Snuggie on my couch watching Oprah. That’s not cool. I hope to die as I lived, to leave it on the field as they say.

Living in the moment is great, but, from time to time, I find myself drifting back to the past. Oh the past, don’t we all have a way of romanticizing the deliciously good times, and forgetting the sour times all together? I know I do it, if you ask me about someone I couldn’t stand ten years ago, I’d probably call them a great human being. Ask me about a mediocre business venture in 2005, and I’d tell you it was the best choice I’d ever made to be involved in it. Maybe, just maybe, that’s why I get so caught up in the past from time to time. I’m always thinking ahead, yet sometimes I just can’t let go of things in the past.

Moving on with life is most difficult when dependency is involved. Emotional, physical, monetary, it all seems to ply us together to moments that are anything but here forever. In the past seven months I’ve made a lot of changes in my life, and I’m betting you have too. Looking back on this time, many things were very easy to let go of, while a few have been much harder. Through prayer, and a few friendly consultations over imported pints of stout, I’ve learned the best really is yet to come, if I can just open my eyes and see it in front of me.

Choosing The Right Path

2010-11-01T10:10:00.002-04:00

Our lives are defined by the choices we make. This message was made clear to me sometime ago, as part of a Sunday morning message from the pastor of my church. The idea behind the sermon, and the crux of this blog post is this; never let your choices put you in places of danger, because life itself offers enough danger without us having to put ourselves in precarious situations.

There is so much in life we can’t control, such as encounters with hateful people, traffic tickets, or even something as simple as getting rained on. We can’t control when our neighbor has finally had enough, and decides to unload 18 rounds into the bodies of people in her workplace. We can’t control when the person we sit next to on the airplane sneezes too close to us, offering us a virus when all we wanted was to get to Minnesota safely. We can’t control these things, but what we can control, and should, is our decision making.

There are two types of decisions you make each day, those with substantial consequences, and those without. Where to go to lunch? This is a choice where the consequences, are probably at worst, a stomachache and money wasted. Where to go to college? This would fall under the substantial consequence realm. Where to work, what church to attend, whom to marry, these choices all come with real consequences, good or bad, making choices like these will have a significant change in the way you live your life. This post is about these high level choices we make.

I see so many people that are deftly understanding of others, yet when it comes to making choices for themselves they take a left when so obviously the better choice is to go right. Complicating this phenomenon is the fact that more times than not, the better choice is the harder one to make. Human nature kicks in. We default to choosing easy, when true rewards await us only if we went with hard.

Regardless of your religious beliefs, to sincerely believe a greater power is monitoring your decision-making, and to start making choices under such an assumption is unquestionably beneficial to making better choices for your wellbeing, and ultimately living a happy life.

Postscript

In the pursuit of happiness is a very powerful statement, not just because of its age, and transcendence of time, but because of what it ultimately sums up by the greatest philosophers of our time. It is a single sentence that defines the lives of nearly all that inhabit this earth. By being deliberate, and utilizing fore thinking about the big choices we are about to make, our chances for obtaining true peace, and happiness on this earth are greatly enhanced.

On a personal note, my impulses often lead me down crazy paths, exciting at first, but often terrifying as the paths turn into long winding trails of consequences. This post aims to illustrate that when we think about the potentially hazardous results BEFORE a choice is made, we are apt to make better decisions when the time comes to firmly make a serious life choice. You might laugh, and think this is obvious, but easier said than done, just look at so many people’s poor choices over the last year alone. Hopefully this post serves as a healthy reminder for us all, that being patient, and having foresight will take us to fruitful places, full of the things we truly seek, rather than the drifting dreams we so often chase.

2010-10-21T11:44:00.003-04:00

Over the past eight years I’ve launched a few dozen internet businesses, opened 3 retail stores, wrote four books, and spent way too much time online. Am I burnt out? I don’t know if I can accurately answer that question, sometimes the hardest place to see a game unfold is when you’re a player on the field it’s being played on. I know it’s been a fun, hard-nosed eight years, where I’ve worked more than I’ve done anything else.

The one common thing people ask when they visit my house, to fix something broken, deliver a package, or just say hi, is, in one form or another, a question as to if I just moved in. There are boxes everywhere, nothing is really unpacked, and while I live in my house, it’s far from a home. My answer to them is always the same, I’m so busy with work…

I used to wear such things as fourteen-hour workdays, and unpacked living as a badge of honor; I was totally immersed in work. Then June happened.

For whatever reason, like Forest Gump stopping his marathon run in the middle of a desert road, I no longer was interested in the 24/7 grind I had created for myself. Maybe the successes were becoming less frequent, and the failures more, and all of it was just too much to handle.

After spending the next four months trying to “figure things out” I eventually realized the only cure for my disease was to try something different. A new routine, a new lifestyle. With that notion firmly embedded in my heart, I took to getting going on this new journey. I’ve closed down many of our internet assets, and all but one retail operation. I’ve canceled any commitments I had lined up for the rest of the year, and am committing myself to finding love in my work again, and making my house a home.

What’s next? I’m not sure. I know for work it will be something less tethered to the online existence I’ve had the past eight years. I’ve got a few ideas, anyone that knows me well, knows I’ve always got a few ideas ready to be tested. For my home I’m going to put the level of effort I have into my retail projects into making my house a home.

I hope my story inspires you, to not only do what you want to do for a living, but know that changing course is alright too, and often it’s fighting those big undercurrents of stability that undermine our efforts to change status quo the most. Yet we always hear that reinvention is what makes life so fruitful for those that choose the road less traveled of being their own boss. Maybe my story will get you thinking about changes you want to make, and give you the feeling that you are not alone in changing for the better. If you are going through something similar, feel free to reach out, I could use the company on this new journey.

Postscript-

So far my best kept tools for transitioning to a new lifestyle have been prayer, humility, studying up on quotes dealing with courage, long jogs down empty roads, music made with passion, and of course, being around wise fun-loving people.

Waving Goodbye to Fear

2010-10-17T15:31:00.001-04:00

Fear can be paralyzing if you let it. Fear binds you to a set of rules that are not your own, fear makes its presence felt, and converts you into something less than you are meant to be. Fear numbs ambition.

Some people call fear the devil, others refer to it as life itself, however, fear is nothing more than a fleeting emotion. Fear is no greater than any other emotion that you might feel on a given day.

Pushing past your fears is no easy task, but with identification, and deliberate action one can, and will, surpass their fears. Unlike so many situations in life, I believe that those that push past their fears the furthest are directly rewarded for their courage. In other words, while most instances in life are not directly correlated as an equal proportion give and take relationship, the surpassing of fear is. The more you let go of your fears, and move forward in spite of them, the greater your life will be.

Fear manifests into many forms each day including, but surely not limited to, self-pity, circumstantial disasters, physical illness, pessimism, doctrines, societal norms, peer influence, and familial pressures to name a few. Fear preys on the insecure, and confident alike, hanging on with a firm grip to those things that, for whatever reason, create anxious feelings of unease within us. I’ve seen fear destroy a life, and put people I’ve cared dearly for in precarious situations that they simply cannot seem to come out of. If only they could identify that fear is perception, and not reality.

By default fear wins, and only by deliberate, well thought out action does fear fail to impend us from moving forward in life. May we all proceed through the emotional obstacles that fear dispenses within us with vigor and passion, knowing that on the other side of this dark blockade of inner turmoil is a truly amazing place of confidence and success.

Catching The Ball

2010-10-12T11:04:00.004-04:00

With a thundering applause I knew my eyes were not deceiving me, Alshon Jeffery really did just make that one handed grab in a critical juncture of what might have been the most important football game I’ve ever attended in my life. The University of South Carolina standout wide receiver had just helped propel his team to a monumental upset. The crowd went wild.

Flashback five days prior when a baby faced Jeffery boldly predicted a victory against the number 1 team in the nation to an ESPN reporter, before smiling ear to ear with an optimism reserved for only our bravest youth. As the video clearly shows, Mr. Jeffery did in fact do his part to beat the top ranked Alabama team.

The ball was thrown to this budding receiver because, no matter the blanket-like coverage by the man defending him, his quarterback knew he was prepared to catch the ball. In business, often we are faced with great obstacles that are directly in the way of catching that shimmering sphere of success that so few businesses ever obtain, and if we aren’t fully prepared, fully capable, and in a place where we can excel, no matter how hard we try, we won’t be able to succeed in building a business to a successful state.

Jeffery had spent countless hours preparing himself mentally, physically, and emotionally for that moment. No doubt, his natural gifts are far superior to most in that realm, but no matter, he prepared like he was trying to catch a ball with no hands. In business, we must prepare that way. Shortcuts don’t work, outsourcing everything doesn’t work, making excuses, blaming technology, or undermining business partners surely won’t help. We must, at the end of the day, keep our goals crystal clear, and work wholeheartedly at achieving them.

Twelve years ago, as a high school senior, I was excited for a game against our at-the-time archrival, Vallaha. I remember vividly coming out of the end zone for player introductions at the start of the game screaming with excitement as I nearly sprinted to the rest of my teammates standing on the 20-yard line. As fast as I could run out of that end zone, my coach was there to greet me with some loud and clear advice, calm down. At the time I didn’t know why, I was ready to go, isn’t that how we’re supposed to come out to play the game? Years later I realized, no, we aren’t to waste our energy on worthless introductions, but rather keep ourselves quietly primed, to, when the call is made, late in the game no doubt, catch the ball no matter what’s in our way.

Here is video courtesy of Rivals.com of Jeffery’s blog-post-inspiring catch.

Polaroid Dreams

2010-09-28T10:03:00.000-04:00

If I could only remember my dreams, like I do reality. So many amazing stories are told in my dreams, so much more compelling than I could ever purposely create. Stories chock full of rich details about people and places that are often totally foreign to me in reality. Do you dream of people you know? I dream of strangers, often violent tormented tales of people going through extraordinary situations that involve life and death. As long as I can remember I’ve had, what until recently I thought of as a nighttime curse. Just the past few months I’ve concluded it may not be a bad thing to have such lucid dreams of terror and intrigue. Maybe, just maybe, if I can take a picture or two back to reality of what is happening in my dreams, something real can come of them.

As bloody as things can be in my dreams, they are often offset with calming portraits of places far away, on some rare occasions I dream of otherworldly design. Last night I dreamt that I was in a Japanese greasy spoon somewhere in Tokyo. It was no ordinary burger joint; rather it was all white lacquer from floor to ceiling. Furniture sat embedded in boxes shaped like enormous milk crates. Even the kitchen was splendidly different, with brushed tin boxes dispensing hamburgers, as a postal worker would mail into PO boxes. I briefly woke up, and then did my best to try to get back to that place, just so I could try to bring back a snapshot or two of what the design of that far off place looked like.

Naked Ambition

2010-09-21T10:21:00.000-04:00

So many so often put so much extra, utterly unnecessary, stuff on their goal list each day. Item after item, agenda after agenda, we keep stacking up books of goals until the leaning tower tips, and falls into nothing. In other words, often we are so apt to achieve so many things that nothing gets done at all. In the process an inevitable great pain ensues, primarily from knowing that, through the simple state of goal-forced chaos, not a single goal was achieved. In the wake of some humbling news this week, may I put forth a humble idea?

Kill 99.9% of what you want to achieve, and go after that .01% directly. Forget multitasking, it waters your effort down to mediocre-at-best status. Focus on a singular thing until you get it exactly where you want it to be, and then select only one more thing from the newly revised goal list. Keeping a list of only a few goals to achieve, and keeping an even smaller list of goals under active pursuit will ensure success, and in the end produce a much higher quality result than the scattered-brained gibberish that so often emerges from the overworked under slept world we inhabit.

Postscript

Listening can be a goal, in such cases, one would actually put down the cell phone, flip closed the laptop screen, and actually take time to digest what the person talking to them is saying.

Passing Ideas

2010-09-16T11:33:00.001-04:00

Great ideas dance through my mind, like a dog might a field of peanut butter. If I don’t take action on these great ideas immediately, within minutes they disappear. If I try to do them all as they dance about my mind, I end up with too much of a good thing, similar to how a dog might feel after she attempted to eat a field full of peanut butter. The gifts that are ideas never stay long enough to really let us know they are any good, yet at the same time ideas need to be cultivated diligently to stand any chance of success. In other words, at some point in the process of a great idea, you just have to say screw it, and take an educated guess as to whether a given idea will evolve into a profitable business or not.

The challenge for entrepreneurs in 2010 and beyond is not to gather information, as might have been the case in times past, circa the telegram era, rather it is to sort the glut of information that is transmitted to us each day. Business intelligence is as much about knowing what information to toss out, as it is what to keep. Without hard numbers, a business cannot exist, yet with too much of it, failure is assured. The same principle that makes nurturing a great idea possible happens to play a big part in decrypting the sandstorm of data that a typical business inherits each day, aggressive intuition.

Whether it’s a great idea, or a pile of revenue predicting pie charts, aggressive intuition will serve your needs well. Instead of being diplomatic with every idea you get, every piece of data you’re asked to assess, take what matters most and run with it. Whatever else is left over will die anyways without careful analysis, so give it an early death and move on. Too many ideas are wasted each day for lack of aggressive intuition, and far too many emails, spreadsheets, memos, and PowerPoint presentations are developed unnecessarily in the process. Be particular, be clear, and be prompt with what you do, and how you do it, and the results you seek will rarely pass you be.

I’m No SEO Expert

2010-08-31T11:56:00.001-04:00

You read that subject line correctly, I’m no SEO expert. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, for one reason or another, I really can’t call myself an SEO expert. SEO experts sit around doing expert things, you know, like going to conferences and speaking on expert-filled panels, penning white papers on the newest Google algorithm, and guest posting to industry sites like SEOmoz. Intentionally, I engage in none of the above.

If I’m not an SEO expert, and I’ve been advising clients for the better half of a decade on the subject, what in the hell am I? A loner? Outcast? Random dude with a laptop? All are at least somewhat true. But when it comes down to SEO, and what I do for people, what am I? Could I be a practitioner? That has a ring to it. Maybe I am a practitioner. Yes, that definitely sums it up, I am a practitioner of SEO. The whole reason I can’t find time for the expert panels, or the guest posts on Mashable is because I’m too busy actually working on SEO campaigns for our growing client list.

As a practitioner I don’t have to base my advice for clients on theory, I base it on experience-derived facts. Why should this be of importance to you? Well, if you care about your SEO rank, then you might care about how to improve it. If you care about improving it, I am your guy, since I’ve worked with a lot of companies to successfully do the same. As a practitioner of SEO I’ve found a few things to be true, hopefully these ideas will help spark some initiatives to jumpstart your own online marketing and search rank efforts.

SEO is Cheaper Than Google AdWords

In the last 24 months Google AdWords has cost my company roughly $80,000. That’s a lot of money, and spending around 40k a year, from all the conversations I’ve had with others, isn’t that much compared to most industries. Today we spend nothing to acquire customers, and while overall email volume is down a bit, our sales aren’t that much affected by the self-imposed AdWords blackout. How do most customers find us? Google organic search.

For the vast majority of web businesses today ranking for the terms people actually search isn’t as hard as they might think. It takes focus, it takes discipline, and ironically it often takes a Google AdWords campaign to kick things off in order to learn the keywords people actually click when searching their business online.

Whatever the case, if you give me half of what you spend on AdWords I’m sure there is a way to get you ranking for a long time to come for your most sought after keywords. Remember, Google AdWords penalizes your business daily by charging you money for every click someone makes, SEO efforts are meant to secure your keyword placement for many years to come no matter the amount of clicks your business achieves, often without a single new campaign once the initial plan has been executed. This is a dirty little secret in the SEO industry, you don’t always need to have an ongoing campaign to stay ranked for your given keyword terms, once you are ranked, chances are it’ll take someone else just as long as it took you to overturn those results, if not longer.

Quality Content Reigns Supreme

I can’t exactly put my finger on why I’ve been so fortunate with my own SEO efforts, other than to say it has as much to do with producing quality content as anything else. Creating content people will want to read, talk about, and eventually share can make a big difference. I’ve never used an article spinner for a single page of content for any of my own SEO campaigns, and while a few keyword terms remain elusive for us, most of what we want to rank for we already rank for. Quality content means a lot when it comes to SEO.

Search Rewards The Persistent

As with quality content, you also want to produce a large quantity of it. Believe it or not, ranking in Google is 99% a numbers game. The more quality content you produce that attributes links back to your site from others, the more likely you will rank for the keyword terms featured in that content. In other words, the more articles you have written and submitted, the more links your site gets, the more your site eventually has a likelihood for ranking for whatever keyword term is important to your business.

I could go on and on, obviously, but I won’t. My point is simply that after working on thousands of SEO campaigns, it all boils down to a few single principles listed above. By simplifying your SEO efforts, you can narrow down on where you want to go easier, implement an effective campaign with less confusion, and one day be able to share the same lessons with other businesses as yours sits atop the heap for all the keywords that matter to your business.

Why I Say No To Clients

2010-08-24T15:51:00.000-04:00

My brother Clif is a fitness buff with a metabolism to match. He’s always telling me, everything is ok in moderation, while it seems that no matter how much he eats his waistline stays the same. Every doughnut I eat goes right to you know where. We’ve apparently got the same genes Lord, don’t we? While the human body is a total mystery to me, his moderation speak is applicable to more than just junk food.

I often have to tell clients no, I won’t do your project, take your money, or work with you in the future. This is something that isn’t always easy for me to do, and I’m sure many other entrepreneurs struggle with turning down business as well. It is tough to pass money up in this harsh economic climate when your next job may or may not arrive soon enough, but sometimes it just makes sense to say no.

Saying no isn’t just for those that are too busy to handle a job. Saying no can open doors to create larger opportunities for your business, by simply allowing you more time to look at things from a distance. When I started my business many moons ago, I worked hard at saying no to cold calls, and sales pitches, now it’s about saying no to clients that don’t seem like a good fit for our team, and those that seem like they could cause more harm than good. Trust me, not every deal out there is worth doing.

As with a lot of good decesions, saying no isn’t always the easiest thing to do, but sometimes it is absolutely the best course of action to help your business prosper long into the future.

Postscript-

Our business model as an interactive firm is predicated on the Walmart model of high volume, low prices. For us saying no might mean saying yes to 95 out of 100 people that want to work with us. For smaller boutique firms it might mean taking 3 out of 5 clients. Saying no is absolutely relative to the industry that one works in, the volume of business they do, and the nature of what each deal entails.

We like to say no to adult businesses, off shore pharmacies, and gambling outfits. When we’ve said yes to these businesses, for the most part, they’ve been a total pain in the rump to work with, and often caused more harm than good. There is a reason why Google blocks certain types of businesses from it’s advertising arm, AdWords, and as internet marketers it is important to pay attention to the big G, and all the rules they make.

It Just Takes One

2010-08-17T12:00:00.001-04:00

At college football practice one day, a teammate of mine was late, so we all ran around the perimeter of the field for close to an hour. This particular practice happened to occur the day after a long night on the town, a rarity for my in season playing days. Let’s just say those White Castle burgers that tasted so good the night before, didn’t taste so great after 30 or so laps around the old practice field.

Fast forward a decade to the spring of 2009. It seemed time to loosen the reins on my control freak grip of my fledgling business, and allow others to help. As busy as we were, outsourcing some of our core jobs just made sense. Unfortunately my experience hasn’t always been stellar, and to be frank, things tended to get worse the more I allowed others to partake in critical tasks that kept my business afloat each day.

A few years ago I tasked an employee with sending payments to the 65 contractors that were to be paid that week, boy was that a huge mistake. After thousands of dollars in clerical errors, and being told I was a “bad human being” through a popular rant website, the ordeal left me with a new perspective on outsourcing, and one less employee. I could literally tell similar stories all day long, the common thread though is much larger than financial losses, or the reputation of one person. It is about the team.

The lesson from that day on the field, besides not to eat White Castle hours before running, was that it just takes one person to negatively impact an entire organization. It just takes one.

With over 700 contractors working for my company today, I’m far from an opponent of outsourcing jobs, rather I caution those that do outsource to uphold a zero tolerance standard on subpar behavior, and if it comes to it, make ‘em run around the preverbal field all day to punctuate the point.

Remembering the Digital Divide

2010-08-04T12:39:00.001-04:00

Ask any professor of mine at Ohio Wesleyan, my papers were at times, how does one say this, rushed? Ask any of my professors in graduate school, and they might agree my attention sometimes drifted when it came to say documenting statistics in an effort to push an argument. But one paper, rather one independent study over a semester nearly a decade ago, really grabbed this bull by the horns, and refused to let it go. To this day I can’t stop thinking about the digital divide.

Various definitions are offered the internet for this phenomena open to your own interpretation, for the sake of simplicity let’s just call it the divide between those that have computers and internet access at home, and those that do not.

Social Media Experts Continue to Make Dumb Claims

A notable "social media expert" pontificated the other day that social networks had effectively replaced email as the form of communication on the web. In other words he explained, email is dead. Email is dead? When was the funeral? Who gave the eulogy? If we’re all communicating entirely on Facebook and Twitter, what happens to those that use the internet that are not on those networks? Will they simply no longer communicate with the outside world? Let’s hope they find a way.

Another one of my favorite notions coming from these so-called savants is that the tablet computer will replace the PC. I own a rather fancy iPad, and it can’t even save a file, has no hard drive, and as far as I can tell, isn’t able to print a damn thing, all qualities of my first laptop purchased over 15 years ago. The iPad and tablet computers though, are now the replacement for my PC that can do all those things and a hundred million more? To this I say not yet, and honestly, more than likely, not ever.

Saving Files

Forget the iPad, most poor people don't have any internet connection at home. According to a 2003 U.S. Census report approximately 62 percent of American households have a computer, with a notable 54 percent with internet access. While many celebrated this information as progress from the mere 8% access rate of 20 years prior, there is still nearly half the population of America that can’t access the internet at home to consider.

To reiterate, nearly 40% of America has no computer in their home. So we have a device problem. With no computers comes no real internet access. With fees starting at $50 monthly, those with less simply can’t afford high speed access at home, even if they had the device, which leads to a connection problem. Efforts like affordable netbooks, and complimentary WiMAX connections help, but are not yet solving the problem entirely. Sure, anyone with a smart phone can access the web, but are they really able to write papers, code websites, and do all the things one can with a desktop from a phone? It’s doubtful idea at best, even for the fastest fingers on the planet.

Click Here To Unsubscribe

So what does this all mean? It means that in an effort to keep up with the tech-savvy Joneses next door we’ve built up huge inventories of unused, but perfectly good, computers, routers, monitors, and peripherals. It means that we are so quick to jump on to the next fad; we rarely harvest the full crop of innovations from the last one. It means that people that make dumb claims online annoy me enough that I end up writing a blog post / diatribe on the unfair nature of tech reporting when it comes to issues dealing with the poor.

In the past several months I’ve unsubscribed to several noteworthy tech blogs for their alienation of nearly 40% of our population, many of whom, if given the chance, could change the face of tech for the better. Here’s hoping they will one day.

Postscript- Do This Now

If you have an old computer, consider giving it to someone that can make use of it, after all if it can access the web, the world's latest and greatest technology awaits.

Personal gifting not your thing? Why not take your old computer hardware to a preschool or nursery, it might be the only one they’d have to teach America’s youngest the tool of life as we know it.

If you like to pick fights, next time you read one of those idiotic predictions about the end of email, let the author know you’d rather hear about initiatives to make the country more connected for those that need it most. Simply not forgetting them, is doing something, at least that’s my sincere hope.

Linkage

http://www.digitaldivide.org/

http://www.digitaldivide.net/

http://www.edutopia.org/digital-divide-where-we-are-today

http://www.bridgethedigitaldivide.com/

http://www.google.com/search?q=digital+divide&hl=en&prmd=inbl&source=univ&tbs=nws:1&tbo=u&ei=gJFZTNyTMYz2swOzrNSwCg&sa=X&oi=news_group&ct=title&resnum=16&ved=0CGwQsQQwDw

People Seek Implementation More Than Advice

2010-07-25T12:25:00.001-04:00

A whopping miscue of the average Jane attempting to brand her business online happens when she attempts to get into the advising business. With the scores of websites dedicated entirely to providing advice on whatever it is Jane happens to hawk these days, it is less than ideal to have her become a competitor of them. Why after all, would her potential clients listen to her, than say a team of seasoned journalists at CNET or CNN? Instead, I propose Jane focus more on helping others implement their ideas online.

Experts on the internet are a dime a dozen, implementers however, are a far smaller group. Those that help people implement an idea online for free, are nearly nonexistent online. A less crowded space equals more exposure for Jane. A true pioneer can be born, and fawned over for years to come, all from a simple change in marketing strategy.

Without Further Ado

2010-06-25T12:33:00.001-04:00

Becoming more creative, reflecting on life and its mysterious ways, and doing things for the right reasons are my marching orders for the rest of 2010. I’ve spelled it out in a somewhat cryptic way throughout the past 3 posts, but the point I’ve been trying to get at is that when you have a vision, a stance on something, everything else seems to fall in place to make that happen. Here’s what you can count on from me in the coming months.

TEA

Opening in late July, TEA will be located in the old Acme Comics space on State St. It’s going to fulfill a need for affordable ethnic cuisine, and hopefully be a great place to spend time. More details will come on this as we get closer to opening. Suffice to say, if you haven’t tried a Vietnamese Sub (Banh-Mi) then, this is a place you’ll want to check out if you live in the area, or are passing through.

Creative Video

I fired my video production partners that were taking for granted what a business relationship is all about, and have started my own company to produce viral “YouTube” style videos for small businesses. The first shoot went very well earlier this week in Charleston, and I hope to do a lot more with this throughout the summer and fall. Once we’ve got 3 or 4 shoots under our belt I’ll build a website business around this concept, till then if you are interested email me.

Another Book

Many moons ago I promised a new SEO book with strategies that have worked well for our clients in the past year. I am still committed to doing this, and might actually make this a Vook. Stay tuned for more details.

On another note, my catalogue of books should migrate over to the iBookstore later this year. I’ve been in touch with a company that specializes in this sort of thing, and we should start getting titles in the iBookstore before too long.

More Services with a Personal Touch

To know your clients is to interact with them. I’ve taken steps to get closer to my clients in the past few months, and will continue to do so for the life of my business. Learning from them is priceless, and while I don’t always LOVE what they tell me, I ALWAYS appreciate the feedback in the long run. In this vein the company will launch more client focused services this year, not only built on client demands, but with the idea of interacting with the clients on a regular basis.

Making Things Better

My dad always tells me you can always make things better, at least when we talk about doing presentations for clients at Newsplex. I’ve taken heed to this advice, and will continue to work on making our services that are currently available better, and those that are causing issues will get shut down.

If you have an idea, insight, or just want to share some feedback, please leave a comment below.

Not The Money

2010-06-25T12:30:00.001-04:00

I could care less about money, in thirty, forty, or if I’m lucky 50 years I’ll be dead. Money will buy me what at that point? And until then, is it supposed to be the end all be all? Sure I need money to pay my mortgage, bills, dog food, and internet access, but that’s about it. Having some money is essential, but really other than that I could care less.

What I do care about is winning. I care about creating winning concepts, bringing visions to life that actually does SOMETHING for SOMEBODY. In other words, I’m in love with the idea of rearranging things in life for the betterment of the citizens of life. Seriously, that’s what boils my crawfish, plain and simple.

Here is why a seemingly random few paragraphs above is so important for you to know, when you forget the money, everything falls in place in business.

When you get into a business for the money you are doomed to fail for nothing more than taking your eye off the ball, a business has and should always be about delivering a solution to a customer problem. Don’t open a batting cage in a football town, or sell firewood in a forest. Instead look at the real needs, even if they are ironically based on the depressing facts of life.

Like…

Unemployment is at an all time high, the information economy has replaced factory jobs. Now is the perfect time to train those that need it most. By giving people a path to fulfill their dreams, you can fulfill your own. The money in education, subsidized and private, is substantial. The framework however isn’t about the money, it’s about the absolute need for helping people become assets in the internet age, the wealth from doing that will follow.

Commercial real estate vacancy rates are at record highs. Finding a way to help property owners and managers fill their spaces might be more simple than one might think, people are constantly concocting crazy business ideas, and with a open-minded property owner these folks might just get their low-risk shot at trying these nutty ideas out. You, the connector of the two, have a replicatable business model that would pretty much sell itself to the thousands of strip mall owners nearing bankruptcy.

I could go on and on, the point is when you focus on helping people you inadvertently create phenomenal business ideas. Some don’t work, idealists fail all the time, but that is the norm in life, some things work, some things don’t, at least following this path will ensure that when something does work, it REALLY works.

When I Was 23

2010-06-25T12:27:00.001-04:00

Life was like a cresting wave of happiness, swelling nearly every day to greater heights than ever before. Teaching had me around incredibly optimistic individuals, otherwise known as college kids. To be able to teach at that age was a gift, being young enough to relate to the students in ways most are not was priceless. For all of us back then life was at our beck and call, ready to be tamed with our remarkable ideas and unmatched skills. The positivity of youth is intoxicating, the beauty of the campus, the tranquility of life without a bevy of clients to please, it all brought new meaning to the word relaxed.

When I was 23 it wasn’t about what you did each day as much as it was about how you did it. Were you feeling well? Was your girlfriend by your side, or were you still trying to find one? Tough questions that seemed at the time to be the weighty issues of life, framed around how you did things, and how they fit in with your peers. Friends at that age were still a lifetime equation, being so tight then, how could life ever separate us? Beautiful naivety.

When I was 23 coffee was so strong, a small cup had me up all night.

I’m 30 now, and most days I wonder where I parked my truck, or how my neighbor got his lawn to look like a PGA grade golf course. I care so much less about what others think, but just as much about being heard. I want ten kids now, back then I was terrified of the word parent, nonetheless the idea of being one.

I drink coffee now like a five-day parched traveler in the desert consumes water. A cup is never enough, and even when my hands are shaking from the insane amount of caffeine in my system I consider having more. 14 hour workdays are the mandate for the head of a small internet startup. In a way I’m the person I didn’t want to be at 23, yet feel like I’m living a dream at 30. How dreams change…

30 is cool I guess, I appreciate people more, and realize that life moves fairly quick, and that of course like most people my age, I’ve concluded I know next nothing about anything. The word expert is meaningless to me at this point in my life.

Where were you seven years ago? Reflection helps us put in context all the things we have to be thankful for. I’d be curious to know what you were thinking then, and how it all seems to fit now. Leave a comment if you wish, with your seven year reflections.

Who Are You

2010-06-25T12:19:00.001-04:00

Who are you? Who the hell are you? W-h-o a-r-e y-o-u? The question rings in my head from morning to night, it has ever since I read a tidbit Apple Founder Steve Jobs wrote in an email last month.

It all started when a blogger named Ryan Tate shot off an email to Steve Jobs questioning, among other things, the lack of porn made available on the iPad. You can read the play by play here. Rather than the context of the discussion, I focused more on a bit of brilliance from a man full of it at the end of an email sent in defense of his ideas. Steve Jobs gave a glimmer of insight if you will, a look at what seems to be the way society is heading, into a full-blown hypercritical group of conformist followers. As you might have heard the gesture before, if you’re busy always following, how much are YOU really leading? If you own the latest iPhone or laptop, does that make you innovative, or for that matter anything more than someone that paid for a gadget? It’s what you DO with the tools of production, not how fast you got it, or how many pictures you take of it.

Who are you?

The internet makes you anonymous, you can say what you want, because who can find you behind that computer screen. What you say on the computer is exactly what you’d say in real life, right? Wrong. Of course not, you would change your tone, adjusting from animal to human at the first sight of eye balls and flesh. Your digital you is so much different than the physical you. If we could get back to the human standards of real life interactions, and away from the entitlement-centered my every opinion matters crap, we’d all be better off.

Are you a critic?

Do you judge the work of others? If you don’t like a website, are you first reviewing how many you’ve built before speaking? Or a business model, or a restaurant, or flying an airplane, are you putting in the necessary credibility check before opening up your mouth, or are you certified to speak on the topic simply because you think your opinion alone is worthy of sharing, despite the fact it might disrupt the creative process of others.

Critics stifle innovation

Those that truly want to change things are best suited to crawl in a box, turn off all media, and create. Ever hear someone that just did something incredible say they didn’t read about their achievements or struggles in the papers or see it on TV, because they shut themselves off from it all? Me too, many a great innovator has been a diagnosed recluse. Not such a wonder why they’d do such a thing if you stop to think about it.

In the day and age of reality television judgment panels and uneducated bloggers claiming journalist credentials at White House military briefings, it is so easy to feel entitled. To feel as if we are anointed to critique others, as if just our mere opinion matters, having to substantiate that opinion is totally passé. It’s just about judging right off the bat, no matter how little you create, or how afraid you are to create, since you know the exact level of unfair criticisms that can come your way.

Are you really?

So are you really going to be so quick to make your mind up about innovations that cross your path each day, and the people behind them? Are you ready to shove it down their throats for no reason other than you can? You are better than that, and you have to make an effort to be so. I’m not here writing this like I never judge others, twice today I had to cut myself off when talking with a friend about so and so, and we all have a so and so on the tips of our tongues, so let’s all get off our high horses.

If we can be better to each other in the sense that we align ourselves with principles that makes us proud, rather than weak, and motivated, rather than melancholy, would we not be better off for such a thing? Then again, this is just my opinion, and some could say I’m judging the idea of judgment, but at least my intentions are in the right place.

“By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?”

Steve Jobs in response to Ryan Tate blogger for Gawker.com

Yes to Everybody: A No To Self

2010-06-08T10:22:00.002-04:00

Yes, I’ll do it. Yes, I’ll be there. Yes, I’ll pay for it. Yes, I do want that extended warranty, and yes, I was hoping you’d bring some frozen meat to my door for purchasing. Yes, yes, yes. The more you yes, the more you end up putting a big fat no in your own plans.

A half decade or so ago when I quit teaching college speech, and forged ahead full time as an internet business creator I read that the most important word in business was in fact the word no. Learn to say no to people and you’ll get far in business and life many a book (including my own) have advised. Too many yeas and too few nays later I concur, no is better than yes.

While my plans are often off the wall, and rarely fit with what conventional minds would dare to plot to begin with, they are my plans. For this reason alone they should remain in tact. The more I’ve said yes over the years, the less I’ve been able to pursue these wacky plans, leaving me thirsty for more. Less is more, say no to most requests from others and get a yes from karma to execute your plans as you see fit.

Postscript

This blog post is inspired by the many distractionary hiccups that I have to endure each day of my otherwise fantastic life coupled with an article Jovan Washington sent me yesterday dealing with the dangers of distraction. I’m sure you can relate, and thus I write this with great respect for those that already do say no, if you are a no person, I admire you. If you are like me, always saying yes, let’s not forget the great George Foreman’s appearance on the ill-fated ABC show American Inventor, in which he approved of nearly every invention presented to him. At last blush Mr. Foreman’s grills have made a few bucks over the years.

Every Action Has A…

2010-06-02T12:02:00.002-04:00

Spring has pretty much come and gone, summer is ventilating heat here as it is across much of the country, the dog days are officially upon us. With the South Carolina heat comes reflection, it is after all easier to reflect when things slow down than it is when they speed up. Here is a reflection, dare I say lesson, on doing business in 2010.

Being self-employed definitely has its perks. Want to take an impromptu trip to Augusta to check out productivity software at the Apple store? No problemo, you’re the boss, go on your geek quest and indulge in the euphoria of utilizing the 3G feature on your iPad for the first time while you ride shotgun in your cushy Chevy Suburban truck. What’s that you hear? You have payroll due for two businesses, rent due for three locations, and a handful of rioting clients over a delayed turnaround time in services ordered? Turn the truck around, this geek adventure must wait.

While the example above is mostly hypothetical, the truth, pains, and stresses it illustrates are entirely real to me. For the better part of a year I’ve attempted to diversify my business interests in a hedge against any one business becoming victim to the economy.

Watching the Today Show this past Saturday morning sprawled out on my sofa that’s too small to fully lay down on, legs bent and all, I was privy to the advice uttered every year by a perky summertime fun expert turned TV personality. The advice to having a safe and fun summer at the beach goes something like this, when going swimming in the ocean be on the lookout for riptides, if you are swimming in the ocean and get taken by one, swim parallel to the shore, instead of towards it to stay alive. The logic being that if you swim with the current instead of fighting it, the end result will be life preserved. Much of my business ventures as of late have been riptide inspired.

Instead of boldly claiming our business is going to become recession-proof, which is a dumb phrase on so many different levels to begin with, we instead aim to navigate the recession-riddled waters of commerce with cautious aggression. Try to do as much as we can to hedge ourselves against going out of business, while still working to innovate by bringing new products and services to those that want them, this is the game plan we have followed to date. Sounds like a good plan right? Maybe not.

By cautiously but aggressively expanding we have in essence made our business vulnerable to the economy in new and different ways. Instead of dealing with one business that has to figure out how to keep customers coming back day after day, we are now forced to deal with three, or more depending on your definition of a unique business. It’s as if we swam with the current when caught in a riptide only to get bit by a jellyfish. Maybe the best bet all along was to stay out of the ocean all together.

Hindsight is 20/20, and critics are far too eager to analyze a business post problem. What is clear is that caution in business makes a lot of sense right now, staying in a core competency and executing a long-term plan also is a pretty good idea these days. Trying new things just because the economy sucks, unfortunately, is not.

Social Media Management Blueprint For Service Providers

2010-05-12T11:50:00.001-04:00

Lately, when I’m filling out one of those long unneeded forms so many websites require for registration, and I come upon the question regarding my website URL, more and more, I’ve been listing our Facebook fan page. In other words, instead of listing a homepage, a portal (collection of links), or a blog like this one, I’ve actually just skipped all that and listed the fan page of our business on Facebook as the URL. I have a funny feeling I’m not alone.

Social networks used to supplement a presence on the web for businesses, now, if you follow the trending nerd endorsed point of view, they are occupying that presence. If I own an upscale florist shop in Manhattan that never has had a website, do I want a static rigid site I can’t do anything with but post pictures and a phone number, or do I want a Facebook fan page, where I can talk with customers, past, present and future? Of course, I want what brings me more business, I want interactivity made easy, or as my Chiropractor friend from Texas quips, I want it done for you. Social networks are the new feature presence on the web for more businesses today than ever before. Static websites are still good for one thing, getting listed in Google and geotargeting tools like Google Places, but even those are being replicated by Facebook Open Graph, search, and Foursquare. In a way, we’ve come full circle.

Before the web people communicated through rudimentary bulletin board systems, known to many a geek as BBS. When using a BBS one could navigate the site by typing in commends, if you knew a few commands, you could get your virtual self to a chat room, and chat with others for as long as that old modem of yours held the call. Luckily, somebody, somewhere realized that not everyone wanted to know how to type commands into a C:. Shortly thereafter Netscape arrived in all its glory, a full blown graphical way to utilize the internet! Shortly after that, somebody realized that hand coding websites wasn’t for everybody, and thus online website builder services were born. Instead of having a website on their domain (URL) businesses could simply build a simple site on a third party site, and share the domain name of the website builder. In essence, many business owners wanted the done for you model, rather than enter the treacherous do it yourself waters of website design.

Fast forward ten years and convenience continues to be one of the many reasons why businesses prefer to go directly with a social network. Even if they do build their own homepage, or pay someone to do it, that website often works very hard at getting you to click right back over to their Facebook fan page, Twitter account, etc. Social media is as important as it’s ever been, and it will continue to evolve, allowing many businesses and brands to do most of their interactive marketing and branding on such sites.

Eleven months ago we launched our Social Media Management Service, in my opinion the most forward leaning service we’ve ever offered, with much pomp. We had a lot of positive interactions with leads, many clients signing up, and many more promising to do so in the near future. Nearly a year later, the business is as strong as ever, and here are my thoughts if you wish to enter it.

Embrace Market Leaders

There is an over correction in design and user experience (UX) of good websites that are trying too hard to become Facebook clones (LinkedIn anyone?) Work hard to sort out the winners from the losers. Market leaders are those that created the market, Facebook and Twitter are two examples, almost every other social network doesn’t count at this point. If you are working with clients overseas, exceptions like Orkut apply. For the most part, clients rightfully so, want you to put their business where the people are. Don’t over think this premise, simply oblige. Put the clients where the people are, and where the voice of the business can be heard clearest.

Secondary social networks aren’t bad, but they aren’t in the first tier for a reason. Make no mistake about it, your social media management contract is on a tight leash, focus on where the people are actively conversing for your client’s industry, and go there. It’s not how many social networks you sign up to manage for you client, it’s how well you manage a single network that will have your client seeing a positive ROI from the get go.

Ignore Most Pundits

Just last night, ironically on Facebook no less, I noticed someone with no earthly credentials as a techie review not one, but multiple tech products. I’m sure they are a good person, as are most idiots, but that doesn’t mean they know anything about social networks, hardware, or internet marketing in general. There are so many “social network experts” today that the phrase is as overused as it is inaccurate. Unless the person created the social network, the hardware it’s being accessed from, or both, don’t listen to them.

What your client will want from you is simple, and often it has nothing to do with the latest Twitter app. Our clients fall into two categories, they either want to make more money through the networks, or improve their online reputation. Achieving those goals has much more to do with internal strategy, as in what do I say to make them look good, than it does with external tools, such as the MiFi mobile hotspot that lets me tweet from the Porta-Potty outside the Lakers game.

Promise Little Results Deliver Lots

One thing predictable about social media management is how unpredictable it can be. We’ve had clients that we thought were going to be tough to manage, like a Bohemian private jet broker that has been with us as long as we’ve been around. Other clients we’ve had that we thought we’d for sure knock out the park, like the Times Square tourist trap, how tough can it be to get people to check out a five story, been there for decades, chotsky store in Times Square? Apparently pretty hard, the client canceled their contract after just a few months of service.

So take it from a company that has been there, promise little, tell them you’ll do the deliverables each day, and work your hardest at getting them noticed online, without promising any fixed return on investment, improvement in brand awareness, etc. Being honest from the start, and delivering a lot down the line will give you credibility moving forward, and as illustrated above, like a lot of things in life you never can tell when a social media campaign is going to take off.

Charge Appropriately

The biggest thing that has evolved in social media management is the need at all levels of commerce for it. Large businesses like banks and department stores need it just as bad as the hotdog cart vendor. Scale your services for the target audience you hope to appeal to, and you’ll be better off for it. Since we launched what we believe was the first social media management (action) service of its kind, that did more than monitor a social media presence online, we’ve seen hundreds of different iterations of the service both online and off surface. Even some people that hang out in our company owned coffee shop are social media managers for businesses around town, and they aren’t employed by us! The water is great, there has never been a better time to get involved in helping businesses build a presence on the web through social media marketing and management.

Network

As I’ve alluded to in the past section, there is room for everyone in this business. Some businesses we are in, we love the fact that there is virtually no competition, this business not so much. Competition in this realm helps everyone, and will eventually go on to assist in creating a set of industry standards, and hell, maybe even an association of social media managers one day. So rather than give our competitors the cold shoulder, we welcome the chance to network with them. Don’t stop with us, network with other companies as well. The more social media management tips and tricks that get shared, the better it will be for the businesses we manage, which in the end is why we do this to begin with.

Quiet Suffering

2010-05-05T12:25:00.001-04:00

Make no mistake about it, there are neighbors of yours suffering right now. There are people that look totally fine, act like nothing is wrong, and portray an essence of ironclad security that in reality are in total and utter anguish right now. Welcome to life in post-recessionary times, where on the surface everything is on the up and up, while in reality many are on the down and out. In order to understand why I think this, and what it should matter to you, we need to look at the past three weeks.

Three Weeks Ago

I love Atlanta, forget what everybody says about the traffic, Atlanta is amazing. Diverse sections of the city offer delicately prepared fresh Vietnamese food, round the clock Korean BBQ, and of course deliriously good Mexican food. The city has art, shopping, and unfortunately it’s fair share of criminals.

I’ve probably visited Atlanta two dozen times in the past five years, never having a single encounter with crime, unless you count that Black Friday when two female shoppers at Lennox Mall almost had it out in the parking lot over the only remaining spot. Never a single incident in five years, until 3 weeks ago. In a secure garage under the Westin Buckhead my cheap not-that-great-anyways GPS unit was stolen. Nothing else taken, no windows broken, this was a fast crime no doubt. We weren’t able to capture the criminal, but the timing of the crime was inescapably clear. For whatever reason, now people will steal, and they’ll steal expediently in a posh garage sitting on posh grounds in a posh town, they obviously feel like they have no other choice but to take the risk and steal.

Two Weeks Ago

People are always looking for work, but crowds of applicants this voluminous are rarely seen by a small company such as mine. In the past two weeks we’ve had over 300 applications for work from well meaning souls, many of whom have clearly stated they have infinite time to do work because as of right now they have none. Even some of my successful cohorts have asked for jobs, clients too. Everyone is looking for a way to get back on their feet it seems, yet it is unquestionably hard on their pride to ask for help.

Last Week

I loathe moving, hate it as much as I can, and find it utterly useless. It’s not gratifying, it’s not fun, it’s not quick, and no, it isn’t over when you thought it would be. In short, moving is the hazing one must endure before being initiated into the new homeowner fraternity. As a curious soul that believes everything happens for a reason, I look for value in situations both strenuous and stress-free. In this particular situation, my recent move from one Cayce, SC home to another, I noticed a disturbing trend, as quick as I could throw away a piece of furniture someone would have their hands on it, ready to give it new life. Most would be thrilled with this guilt-free giveaway, but for me it was a bit too simultaneous to leave me feeling free of the old.

Who knew tossing out my favorite easy chair would lead me to a conversation with a teary eyed father that had no furniture for his daughter’s first home? Or that giving away my old blue bar stools would lead to an encounter with a frustrated next-door neighbor that was not only out of work, but also out of finding work due to union constraints. Shocking, the amount of joblessness right now, in the era of the $700 iPad, so many can barely pay their bills, nonetheless keep up with the Joneses.

Now

A coffee shop attracts all types of people, those with the most time on their hands are often the ones that stick around the longest. While my encounters are different here, I’m busy running my PR company out of the back, they still humble me. I see those that aren’t finding work they used to, and those that desperately seek it. I see why my dear South Carolina is so high up on that national list of unemployment rates. I know that if this little coffee shop carries on, and makes it, the purpose of it will be to serve those that need it most. And if not, it’ll be a victim of the same economy that brought those people to us in the first place.

As I see it, quiet suffering is all around us. Sprinkled in with the happiness of spring traditions like school coming to an end, and plans of summer vacations are people that simply want to earn a living again. It’s not that the recession didn’t make all this a reality years ago, it’s that now, as many start to pontificate that the recession is over, I make it known my thoughts on the subject.

You & Me

Just because people don’t speak of their troubles, does not mean they do not exist. Just because they don’t call for help, doesn’t mean they don’t need it. So here is my call to action, let’s get out, let’s do more for others, and let’s not let the quiet convince us everything is okay when it’s so obviously not.

Meeting Space Available @ My Office

2010-04-19T11:13:00.001-04:00

Explanation of New SEO Service

2010-04-13T08:57:00.001-04:00

Sometimes the best way to understand why the services my business offers are so unique, you have to read deeper into the problem that they aim to solve. Here is a recent email showcasing both an issue for people attempting to gain rank in Google with blog commenting, and our company's off the chain $25 solution.

Begin email-

My Newest SEO PageRank Building Technique $25

Hi,

SEO is a funny thing, right when you think you've got it all figured out, good old SEO lets you know that there are a few things you might have missed. This was the case not too long ago as I was turned on to an outstanding SEO technique that was cheap, effective, and as white hat as they get. But before I get to the technique, let's look at the often idea crushing concept of the group mentality.

If ten separate people tell you a movie sucks, are you apt to go see it? Chances are, especially if these 10 people are credible friends of yours, that you'll opt for another movie instead. Did you get specifics from your friends on the time they saw the show, the theatre, the row their seats were in, the temperature of the popcorn, and all other minute details? Of course not. You just take their word for it.

Blog comments and SEO have often had a dicey marriage. While blog comments are a good way to get traffic to your site if they're placed on the right blogs, the SEO value of the links in those comments is usually zilch. Yep, those blog comment links are worth nothing, thanks to a clever bit of code known simply as no follow. Originally intended to help keep spam at bay by having Google ignore the value of links in comments, the no follow code became widely implemented into most blog formats you see on the web today.

So what does this mean? It means that if you have a off-the-shelf blog program like Wordpress and you publish a blog, the link left in a comment is worthless in terms of SEO. Now in terms of traffic, in my opinion, it can be worth a lot. But in terms of pure SEO it's worth nothing. Adding insult to injury is the fact that blogs often have high PageRank due to the incredible amount of fresh content on them, so if, big if here, if the blog did count a comment link it could really help push your site up the SEO ranks. And, if, the blog allowed multiple links in anchored hypertext to be placed on it over and over again, month after month, that would additionally help your SEO rank. And finally, if a multitude of high PageRank blogs allowed for comment links to be counted by Google, well then, you'd have yourself a PageRank building strategy that is second to none.

Say hello to do follow plugins. Picture do follow plugins as a handful of super absorbent paper towels that cleanup the wet SEO mess that no follow code spilt all over high ranking blogs. When a publisher installs a do follow plugin on their blog, they are essentially saying, hey, use my blog to help your SEO rank, it's cool with me.

Now, this technology is still in it's infancy, most people after all have never heard of no follow, nonetheless do follow, and most blogs are still set to not count links in comments as something of value. So it takes a trained eye, and someone with time to kill, to uncover and post comments with links on all those do follow blogs that might help your site gain PageRank fast.

Enter Do Follow Service, the easy way to have your PageRank and SEO rank built up for you for as little as $25. This service brings simplicity to the complex world of blog commenting for SEO value. Simply visit the site below, sign up for as many comments as you want, and let us do the rest.

Get all the incredibly cool supercharged SEO strategy information here-

http://www.dofollowservice.com/

Best,
Clark Covington
http://www.dofollowservice.com/
Phone: 864-641-1856
Email: TalkToClark@gmail.com
Web: www.ClarkCovington.com
Facebook: www.Facebook.com/ClarkRCovington
Twitter: www.Twitter.com/ClarkCovington

Making the Most of Spring

2010-03-17T18:31:00.001-04:00

Some pollen snuck its way up my nose the other day, I sneezed, spring had announced its presence. How was your winter? Great, crappy, somewhere in-between? What’s the game plan for the Easter season, more of the same? Let’s hope not.

The beauty of routine is derived from the way we get extraordinary tasks done effortlessly. How did the dogs consume that 40lb bag of food in a week? One heaping stainless steel bowl at a time, that’s how. An uglier side of routine is the way it defeats our creativity, undermines our risk taking ability, and shuts down our extracurricular ambitions, Cantonese lessons anyone?

Make this spring as productive as it is different from any other spring in the past by embracing what I call bonus time.

Bonus time is that short glimpse of time before you go to bed and when you wake up that belongs entirely to you. I recall a story the pastor of my church told a few years back about how he finds 5 am the absolute perfect time to talk to God. No interruptions from others via phone, email, or in person gave this preacher the perfect time to connect with the Lord.

Devine inspiration is a funny thing, turns out at 5 am much can get done. So too is the case at 1 am. If you often end up on the losing end when battling for your time throughout the day, use these bonus spaces of time as your place to do what you so badly want to do.

New SEO Book Outline

2010-03-11T16:16:00.001-05:00

New SEO, new era SEO, the new era of SEO, all are possibilities for title of my new book detailing the latest strategies, in, you guessed it, the world of SEO. For those that care about gaining and maintaining a presence in Google, and prefer straight talk instead of bibble babble posturing like most of these SEO firms offer, here is a short outline of what you can expect from the new book.

The format-

To call this a book is more than generous. It’s more like a workbook, or a guide, maybe a guidebook? It’s a short, to the point, use it, write notes in the margins, and then pass it on to a friend when done type packet of information. Each chapter of this opus will address a given newly minted SEO technique in the following three ways

-What It Is

-Why It Works

-Do It Yourself Tips

The crux of the piece-

How to Rank Quickly in Google for Little to No Money

Intro-

Why A New Era of SEO

Cost should not be an issue

Time to rank should be much faster than before

Focus should be on Google exclusively

Chapter 1-

Blog Comments Followers Allowed

Chapter 2-

Social Network Assets Robust Web Footprints

Chapter 3-

Frequently Updated Blog Content

Chapter 4-

Video Tags, Titles, and Distribution Methods

Chapter 5-

Selective Article Links

Chapter 6-

Everything Google

Chapter 7-

CMS Websites

Chapter 8-

Press Releases with Free PR Directories

Chapter 9-

Video Distribution Intelligently

Chapter 10-

AdWords For SEO

Conclusion and summary

As people become more sophisticated at searching things online SEO becomes easier for the business owner.

You no longer have to think in terms of ranking for a singular phrase, think longtail for easy obtainable results.

Regional businesses have the easiest ability to rank out of everyone.

A lot if not all the ideas in this report are available to you for free and can be done by you for free, or very little cost.

Coming in the near future to your favorite online bookstores.

Simplicity by Coffee Maker

2010-03-05T08:22:00.001-05:00

The other day I was asked an odd question, what’s your favorite coffee maker? Maybe the question arose because the person asking it knew what a coffee freak I am. For those that don’t know, I run my business out of a glorified coffee shop. My taste in coffee often is quenched by strong bold blends. I like Kona, and Colombian. I enjoy multiple cups a day every day. My coffee brewer of choice? A $7 red coffee maker I picked up from Target a year ago.

This cool red coffee maker stands out in my otherwise black appliance filled kitchen. The design, while nice, is not what makes this coffee brewing machine so special. The simplicity of the machine is what makes it such a notable piece of mechanics. When asked to explain why I liked this cheap coffee maker from target so much my answer was as enthusiastic as it was immediate; it’s simple to use I explained.

This coffee making contraption has a single button that functions as both the on/off switch and the brew switch. When the machine is on it brews, when off it doesn’t. It’s as simple as that. Creating great websites is a lot like replicating the genius of design and function this machine so eloquently displays day after day.

Make your website do everything it needs to do in the absolute fewest steps possible. Let it stand out among the others by allowing for great design and colors on the page. And finally, make it affordable, whatever it is, the spirit of the internet is rooted deeply in affordability, so make your pitch one that focuses on value. Follow these rules when building a website and success will surely start to drip your way.

Measuring Momentum

2010-03-04T12:50:00.001-05:00

Momentum in sports is everything, the more you practice the better you play in the game. In school momentum is incredibly important, the more you study for that history test the more likely you are to remember the answers to the toughest questions on it. Momentum in business, big surprise, is just as important.

Running a company is as much about championing momentum as it is anything else. If you’re a small business, make sure to share your momentum building goals with everyone on your team. If you’re a big organization, delegate to managers and stakeholders to share the same momentum building messages you’ve shared with them for so long. Make sure those messages go to every other member of the organization.

Without someone creating measurable goals of success regularly in a business, and delivering consistent praise upon achieving them a company might as well shut the lights off for good. Business today is competitive, as so many scholars have already noted, but in the information age it’s less about being the bear and more the fox. Being clever, especially online works wonders. You no longer have to spend a fortune to have the momentum building tools the big guys use.

Try to understand how people relate to one and other, and, gasp, relate to you. Find out what works and what doesn’t when it comes to creating a momentum building standard, and then pursue building it as fast as humanly possible. Whether it is a set of weekly goals, monthly goals, or simply a daily client satisfaction meter, anything that can show positive momentum is worth implementing.

Just as we feel warmer looking at a rising thermometer on a cold day, so do we feel more productive when we see the winds of progress lift the sails of our slowly rising vessel as it recovers from the recession.

Postscript-

Several months ago I became sick of not being able to illustrate to our team members how dramatically our daily sales reflected upon the health of our business. With no real way to share sensitive data such as our daily sales on regular basis via off the shelf web programs, I had one created.

One week later we were the proud owners of a website that updates our daily sales numbers in real time and translates them into an easy to follow line chart. All members of our home office have this chart on their desktops throughout the day, solidifying their ability to take part in the swings of our company momentum. When we miss a sales goal for the day we all share in the burden of making sure the next day it is reached. When we surpass our sales goal we all know it in real time, often causing for lighter moods around the office. Our future growth is not assured by this measure, but our understanding of it and full participation in it is.

Favoring Bad People

2010-02-24T10:44:00.001-05:00

I admit it, and you should too, sometimes we flat out like bad people. We get a kick out of people that are often liars, thieves, and philanderers if not worse. We find them interesting, we want to talk to them, and, gasp, be liked by them. Bad people are people too.

In the recessionary business climate of today there are simply too many reasons to like a bad person. They’ve got money, albeit shady details exist about where it came from, they’ve got friends, think pirates, and they often have connections in high places. In other words, bad people can be good for business.

I’m not suggesting you reach out to your local mob boss and ask to become part of the family, no, rather just admit you’re intrigued by them. You think they’re cool, and if you could, if the wife or husband would let you, you’d probably ask them how their business would benefit from whatever it is you’re selling.

In the end, regardless of religious belief we all fall into an existence on this earth where bad and good coexist, honesty can be the first step in dealing with that fact.

PTF Book Free

2010-02-16T23:10:00.001-05:00

You read that right, grab my new book for FREE by clicking HERE. For those that don’t trust the highlighted word, here is the actual URL where you can grab it-

http://clarkcovington.com/PTF.pdf

It’s my gift to you. I hope you enjoy it. If you find it worthy, please review it on Amazon by clicking HERE when you are done.

5 Internet Biz Tools I Can’t Live Without

2010-01-29T10:41:00.001-05:00

It’s not my style to post too many of these reference style entries. For one, there seems to be more than enough of them peppered across every possible social network on the internet. I think the other day I caught a headline for one blog post being linked on Twitter that read, 5 ways to never get mad again. Never get mad again? Unbelievable! Who knew using a new Facebook app, or Twitter tool could alleviate all my frustrations for a lifetime.

So, with a thoughtful consideration of your time, and of how numerous such lists are, here is a short scribble of things that every internet business owner should use daily.

Basecamp

No other software has helped my business grow as much as Basecamp by 37 Signals. When Corena Golliver, a peer in the online writing biz, informed me of the powers of Basecamp nearly 3 years ago I was instantly hooked. The key to this software is its simplicity, everyone in my organization (800+ people) use it almost exclusively to converse about projects, upload files for sharing, and of course get paid.

Do yourself a favor and check out Basecamp today by clicking HERE.

Google Docs

I’ve purchased more copies of MS Office than probably anybody else in the Carolinas these past five years. As a content producing company we rely on MS Office heavily for keeping everything up to industry standards. However, when it comes to information sharing, keeping track of everything from what our contractors are owed this week to what our staff is doing for vacation next Christmas Google Docs is the tool to use.

The magic of Google Docs is in the sharability of the program, anybody with a free email account from Google can create, manage, and share documents, spreadsheets, and more. Collaborative editing in real time is another game changer for those that want a leg up on the competition, and aren’t able to physically huddle around Candy’s iMac monitor at amazingly grey cubicle number 8.

Check out Gmail and Google Docs HERE.

PayPal

Many people hate PayPal. Our business has processed 7 figures worth of payments with them and they still give us a hard time when a gentleman of Nigerian decent orders a few thousand articles. How dare them! Well, ok, some of our deals do look a little shady at first blush. PayPal in all honesty is the absolute best solution to processing payments online for those not wanting to get a merchant account.

If you are one of the few people that haven’t tried PayPal I encourage you to sign up for free even if you have nothing to sell now, you can always figure that part out later. If you have tried PayPal and written them off like many people have in the past, it’s time to give the ole PP another look. Check them out HERE.

Reseller Hosting

When I first started building business related websites in the early 2000’s I signed up for a hosting plan that cost $50 a month with a well known internet marketer. Guess what? I got ripped off. Hosting should cost you little to nothing. We use a company called Host Nine which provides what is known as reseller hosting for as little as $19.95 per month. What is reseller hosting? It’s an account that allows you to create hundreds of hosting accounts for the websites you build, as long as you are in a niche industry even the smallest reseller account ($19.95 monthly) will net you half a century worth of websites hosted each month. Why? Because most websites are lucky to get 20 unique visitors a day, if you can average many more than that for each site and still not pay a dime more to host them. Even if you setup just 40 sites on the smallest plan it’d be like paying 50 cents per website in hosting fees each month, not bad!

The only way we could build dozens of websites each year and host them without fear of bankruptcy is with an affordable hosting plan. A web business is cheap if not free with the right hosting pay (Host Nine) the right payment processor (PayPal) and the right niche (your expertise) marketed where people spend time (Twitter and Facebook) online. The first step in that process is affordable hosting.

The hosting business is all about ignorance. The less you know about web hosting the more you end up paying. The more you know, the less you have to pay. Get educated on the possibilities of reseller hosting by clicking HERE.

Good People

What I use proudly everyday is good people to represent my company, our various brands, and the work we do in the community. With great people in my home office, and around the country, I am able to honestly tell people we are the best choice for their internet marketing needs and mean it.

So there you have it, enjoy the advice and send me a link if you come across that dubious “never get angry again” list.

FTC MANDATED DISCLOSURE

In light of the recent FTC mandated compensation disclosure I’ve taken the time to list out the little penance I might receive from people reading this blog post. I am an affiliate partner with 37 Signals, the company that owns Basecamp. If you sign up with their service I’ll receive a small commission each month. Host Nine is also a partner of mine, and any purchase with them will result in a small commission paid to my company. I do not own Google stock, nor am I an affiliate seller of their free services. PayPal and Rufus Space Industries, INC. conduct business together but are not affiliated in any type of profit sharing way. Good people don’t pay me anything to mention them, I actually pay them.

Give Them What They Want or Go Home

2009-12-22T13:25:00.001-05:00

As an owner of a coworking space I’ve found it both entertaining and enlightening to talk with creative professionals around the world about how they work. My agenda was as simple as it was transparent; I wanted to know what people were after in a workspace away from home. Specifically what would make them ditch Starbucks or their living room and actually pay money to work somewhere when for all intensive purposes they could just work from either of the above places for free? Words were not minced, and the demand for this market has been crystal clear so far. People want the café culture with the privacy of an office. They want to step out of a private room they call an office and mingle with people, share the conference room, network, and so on. Equally important to them is the ability to slip back into that private office whenever they have a call to make, a chapter to write, or an urge to be alone.

There are many parallels I could draw of how coworkers are wanting both ying and yang out of a workspace, here is one that’s fresh on my mind this weekend.

Being in Orlando recently I couldn’t help but notice the gusty winds that only seem to blow this hard in Florida. In Columbia the winds are subtle, often making a meager attempt to push away stubborn bouts of humidity that aren’t planning on going anywhere anytime soon. On the contrary in Orlando the winds are filled with crisp streams of air that invite you to stand in them for awhile, and for lack of a better phrase, enjoy the breeze. So there I was last night in the pool-centered courtyard of my hotel dipping in the hot tub, moving towards the pool, then back to the hot tub every few minutes. What made each so refreshing was the existence of the other. The hot tub was nice because when I was too warm I could hop into the pool and cool off. Conversely, when the pool got icy I’d hop out and spend some more time in the hot tub. All the while the Florida breeze was there to remind me that life outside these water vessels wasn’t half bad either. Coworking, and the relative demand for offices is a lot like this trifecta of fun. You can fully enjoy one because the other isn’t far away. You can be chatty in the common area because just steps away is an office with a door on it, a door will help block out unwanted conversation when it’s time to get down to business.

Rather than push people into membership plans they don’t want, or in other words, be “right” about what was first anticipated as a good way to create a coworking space, I am determined to give people exactly what they’ve asked for.

As I see other coworkers and owners discussing the merits and perils of offering private offices in their spaces I can’t help but cringe a bit at their lack of ability to understand what’s in demand. People will tell you what they want, and a good business will listen intently and respond as close to instantly as possible. A bad business will try to force customers to do things they don’t want, which never works because, in the end, they’re paying you for what they are after. If they want hot and cold, public and private, or anything else, it is the duty of the business owner to give it to them. As these businesses continue to ignore this request from their clients I simply hope others won’t. Coworking is a great concept because it allows people to work more on their terms, but it can be stifling if the powers that be won’t let them have what they seek, as it was in the first place the point of this whole thing to begin with.

Postscript- What does this mean for Clark’s Office? I’m not entirely sure yet, but I’m thinking along the lines of an open coffee shop up front and private offices in the back. For the several locations that I’ve currently been in talks with owners about opening I believe this hybrid model will also fit, if space is an issue look for a office-friendly coffee shop model to emerge. Either way, we’ll do our best to meet the need of those that sign the checks.

Authenticity Please

2009-12-11T10:24:00.001-05:00

The mountains can’t hide who they are when the sun raises above them. They aren’t the beach, they aren’t a city, there is no way for them to disguise the bouldering truth, they are mountains. The trees that populate these hunks of stone are also caught red handed being trees. There is no question when the sun comes up a mountain looks like a mountain, a tree like a tree, and the beauty of nature is never really any more clear than at that very time. Coincidence perhaps that these gems of nature are at the finest of fine when light first exposes what they really are? I think not. Unfortunately people using the internet aren’t stuck in the ground waiting to be highlighted by a gorgeous sun every day, they can, and do work hard at convincing people they are something other than themselves.

As I’ve spent more and more time on social networks in the past year I’ve seen people I know, dare I say well, acting as if they’re somebody they are not. They’re not fooling me, but could they be fooling you? The beauty of the internet is that people are free to try anything they want, the danger of the internet is directly related to this principle as well.

Being authentic online will not only win you more readers to your blog, or followers on Twitter, but it’ll serve a larger purpose of creating true credibility for you and your business. Instead of pretending to be someone you’re not, which you probably aren’t as good as you think you are at to begin with, try being who you are in the real world when you go online. The more authentic you are the better you can expect your plans, goals and dreams to take shape.

Protect The Flame Available Now!

2009-12-01T14:55:00.001-05:00

Get it from Amazon.com NOW!

200th Blog Post

2009-11-26T11:45:00.001-05:00

So Blogger tells me we’ve hit the big double century mark. The first iteration of this blog was a simple white template with an aerial view of a glass of Coke on the rocks with a headline that read Creative Journal. The header kind of felt right at the time, these small islands of ice floating in bubbly cola fighting to stay afloat. Four years later not much has changed.

We’re still fighting to stay afloat. With any business in any climate becoming a market leader is incredibly hard, and keeping that status is even harder. While we are still the leading SEO article writing company, press release writing company, and social media management company in the world, it hasn’t been easy.

As the business has matured I have started to wonder more and more if we are at a critical mass, have we done as much business as we can for a self funded private company like ours? Would the next step be to seek investors? The answers are not clear to me, but the questions seem to enter my mind on a daily basis.

Surely we’ll be involved in affordably helping businesses and authors gain more exposure online in some fashion.

What’s Next

Clark’s Office is now in full operation, and the feedback from it has been marvelous. People genuinely seem to like the design of the place, and it has an energy that is as positive as it is productive. We’re looking into building a larger executive office in the old kitchen of the building, more to come on this soon if it materializes.

Protect The Flame should be published next week. More to come on this as it comes out.

A bevy of new services will come out of our company in the next several months, including a long awaited web design and maintenance business, a suite of services handpicked for auto shop websites, and a play on social networking that allows people to connect without pretense. All and all it should be a good final month of the year.

Happy Thanksgiving to all that read this blog, you small but growing contingent are wonderful in your support of all that we do.

A Work of Summer

2009-11-17T10:44:00.001-05:00

Let’s just say I had some time on my hands this summer. It wasn’t the best summer of my life, I was as antisocial as I’ve ever been, and most of my energy went into my work in some form or another. My way of dealing with loneliness is putting 200% into my work, and letting the feelings numb up until they disappear.

As a company we launched a few new websites, moved offices, and continued to grow. As an individual I spent much of the summer reflecting on the idea of success. What is success? How do you achieve it? Are you successful if you get what you want but lose other things you wanted more in the process?

Without having the answer to any of the questions listed above, I started to reflect on my on strategy on how to reach a seemingly impossible to achieve goal. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there was a fairly straightforward game plan to making a dream a reality. Work hard, sacrifice things you enjoy for things you love, and then double up and work even harder. Ignore naysayers, and push past self defeating attitudes, and never quit, no matter what others tell you is possible in your own life.

Feeling like a walking talking cliché, I took a step back and wondered if there was a way to punch through all the overused self help jargon, and offer up real advice that actually could serve a person trying to reach something monumental in their life. Protect the Flame was born. A simple book that tackles a tough problem in society today, staying focused in the age of distraction.

I’ve included the back cover copy below, the book is set to go on sale in two weeks.

The ultimate paradox of living in the information age is that with all the wisdom made available to us, it is as hard to achieve a dream as ever before. Could simplicity, hard work, and detailed planning be the answer to achieving a lofty goal? Author Clark Covington thinks so, and in his new book, Protecting the Flame: A Practical Guide to Making Your Dreams Come True, he describes the same detailed game plan he has used to make dozens of his own far-fetched dreams a reality.

Learn the real secrets to achieving lifelong goals by subscribing to the simple methods of getting things done illustrated throughout this book. It explores everything from the importance of the 10 Commandants to why eating fajitas on Friday night can help your dreams come true. The book intricately weaves instructional advice with relevant anecdotes that are sure to entertain, enlighten, and, most important, educate. No other book will show you how to achieve your dreams in such a candid, down-to-earth style as this one. For every dreamer in the world, this is your handbook.

Thick Skin + Persistence = Results

2009-11-11T11:41:00.001-05:00

If you want something bad enough, online or off, thick skin and persistence are the keys to making it a reality.

Period, the end.