Anvil – Clothing for Good

The inertia of the anvil used in a forge allows the impact of whatever tool you’re working with to be transferred to whatever material you’re working on. In this way, energy is transformed in the process of workmanship.

The clothing company, Anvil, offers lines of organic clothing that perform a similar function. They reduce the impact of the our consumption upon the world, transforming it in way that minimizes depletion of energy. The result is clothing of extraordinary workmanship that carries in it the symbolism of the company’s name – the anvil.

I recently bought some organic cotton t-shirts from Anvil. I love these shirts. One of them seemed to be off a bit, so I wrote the company. They immediately offered to send me another shirt. In short, the company is not only doing good in the world, it’s doing right by its customers.

So we think they’re good people to do business with – you can strike a stylish pose by purchasing Anvil Organic Cotton T-shirts on [amazon.com].

Moleskine – Tactile Aesthetic Technology

I’ve decided the Moleskine is the perfect notebook.

Someone said, ‘if you don’t write it down, it never happened’. That’s my life. But my life is also photocopying years’ old piles of napkins and post-its at staples, so I can scan them in, or pulling out less portable but dirt cheap notebooks, like the bound composition books that go for a dollar or less, ripping pages out, and scanning those. Those are great for studying Greek. They’re great for pursuing a subject. Not for what I need them for right now. Filofax (or Daytimer)? I switched off of that when I became so online with my business and writing that my google calendar is my daily friend. My office is my home, and I work in the virtual world, so I’m not carrying my Filofax to meetings anymore. I’d rather carry a netbook, and use many different kinds of online documents for work – calendar, docs, spreadsheets, e-mail, etc. And then there’s social media. A filofax isn’t social – it doesn’t collaborate. You have to offload it into something else to do that.

When I look at a moleskine, the miser in me says ‘too expensive, decadent, not sustainable’. But then I haven’t looked for knock offs. The moleskine is flexible in its cover. That’s huge. You get a kind of subtle portability off of a soft, flexible cover that doesn’t come from a hardback lined blank book, which is cheaper. The ribbon marker is hugely important. You might think it wouldn’t be, but it just is. The size is crazy important. The smallest bit too big, and it’s not going with you just when you need it. The smallest bit too small, and you won’t use it. Moleskine size variations are wonderful. It’s not that you might not find a blackberry useful, for instance, but it’s not useful for every kind of writing activity. The moleskine is very netbook like, as a paper object. It says ‘write in me’, not ‘play games on me, set me to vibrate, play with me on a subway’. Also, I could throw 10 moleskines into a manila envelope if I needed to move them – a moleskine doesn’t beg to be offloaded/scanned – it’s made to keep a record of your thoughts in between its covers and nowhere else. The kind of thoughts that either become something else in a different venue (like a book or blog) or aren’t meant to be shared – only used.

And if it’s used for what it’s designed for, it won’t be offloaded in that way. It’s designed for hashing up ideas that will take a different form elsewhere – at least that’s my take on it. You write out that bit of insight that must go into a book, but it’s not the book. So you don’t have to rip out the pages, and it’s actually kind of nice to think you could go back to your notes somewhere, and peruse or research them. Because it’s not a napkin or back of a business card or sheet of paper in my leather covered folio lined pad cover, it doesn’t pressure you to do something with it immediately, or threaten to pile up and become a fortress you have to demolish. It never becomes clutter – and filling it doesn’t make it an idea brick – something that you never really revisit that just takes up space in a file cabinet.

A moleskine says fill me, I can save these ideas for you as long as you like. I’ll be here. You might even enjoy flipping through me and reading me, even before you’re ready to use some of them. It’s OK, you can open up. Tell me. I’m a moleskine.

So I’m looking at this as a piece of technology, and I want it. B&N has them when I walk into the store, which is where I’m absorbing this out of the corner of my eye, not looking directly at them. But I need what they can do, and don’t have an alternative. I need a place to form ideas – ideas that won’t form unless I’m writing them in order to form them. It’s not a diary or a journal – it’s an idea clarifier and extractor.

Thing is – no matter how much you wish it, you just don’t always have an electronic device, and an idea won’t always come to you when you can use the device, and the idea won’t always stick around while you turn on and log in to the device, or while you’re fiddling with it. And then, importanly, where is the idea? It’s a file among many files, it might sit as an attachment among e-mails about your vacation or your dog or your day at the office. It doesn’t have a context that gives it the life of an idea. It needs to sit among other ideas in an idea context. It needs to live in a place that you visit to get your ideas back, review think, think about them and have more, and not just become a digitized, numbered file.

There’s something else. Nothing reads like a paper book. When I want to cram a bucket load of knowledge into me, I don’t want to use PDFs. I don’t want to scroll. There’s something about the rapidity and flexibility with which you can scan a physical page, and flip back and forth, mark something, etc. that no device, no device, can match. There’s something that tactile touch against the edges of paper won’t approach until someone loads up a truly leather-like flexible netbook-like cover with 250 individual e-paper pages (until the monitor is a series of paper thin physical windows), and gives you a stylus, and adds a ribbon marker. There’s something about the tactile communication with a book that can’t be improved upon, I think, or won’t be for a very long time. And this is coming from someone who loves his e-books, has an e-book reader (Nook), uses a netbook, and likes technology.

In the same way, for writing, for getting down an idea extremely fast, stream of consciousness, even a tablet and stylus can’t match paper of exactly the right size, width, situated in relation with other paper in a cover. Again – a moleskine. Handwriting recognition is really cool, but no matter how fast it gets, it’s not the same. Even with virtual lines on the virtual page, texture and tactile relationships to paper are so innately human, so grounded in the physical universe, that I think it’s safe to say that some ideas beg to be let onto paper, to dance at the end of a flowing, liquid, ink-pen, to receive pressure as part of their mental construction, so that the flow out of the ink actually helps shape the idea, to receive tactile inflection – gesture, before they’ll allow themselves to be dressed up for the digitized ball. I think that even the act of holding a pen in hand changes and contributes to the type and character and subtle dimensions of thoughts we have, in a way that’s perhaps not better than, but certainly different than hovering over a keyboard. I think one way with touching my chin and cheek in a thinker’s gesture, and another way when I’m typing – I just do – the inflection is different enough to change what I’ll say and how I’ll say it. I point this out as someone with a militantly paperless office who sees his computers as an extension of himself. Moleskine.

I’m looking at [alternatives] now to see if anything is more affordable, but if I have to get them off amazon.com at $10/each, that’s what I’ll do. A bundle of 5 will last a while. Alternatives would have to meet the subtle criteria for integrity (internal consistency), aesthetic feng shui, and the elements of tactile genius that make up a moleskine. Someone with a sense of what I’m talking about will have to have made them, or else just done a good job of copying. But I see genuine moleskines in my future, too. There’s no substitute for being able to grab another one of the shelf and keep going.

Religious Bias and Tolerance at Work

One of the fringe benefits of both self-employed and contractor life is enhanced ability to maintain one’s religious traditions. For a lot of people, this is a ‘Sunday’ issue and not really a big deal. Even then, though, there are places that say ‘Joe likes tennis on Sunday, and that’s the same thing, so no, you don’t get Sunday’s off.’ I usually gave such places my walking papers in a relatively short period of time. If they don’t make room for one of the most significant aspects of human civilization and life, they don’t fundamentally grasp “work-life balance”, or what I’d call those transcendent needs that form the basis for work in the first place.

But for half the world’s population, traditions can be more complicated (or ‘rich’ if you prefer) than just one day off a week. There’s a need for time, space, differences of appearance, diet, habit, and there are other requirements. Not making room for them is shortsighted and undermines of the key things that contributes to talent, ethics, and creative and insightful thought for a lot of people.

Grooming and dress are one of the ways traditions are expressed. Whether it’s temple locks or a beard, a yarmulke, turban, or female head covering or veil, or something else, this is probably the biggest struggle with corporate life and contracting, because it’s visual symbolism, and people tend to be stupidly frightened or ridiculously biased about such things. If their fundamental premise is “what does hair, clothes, or food have to do with faith?”, then they’re biased and that bias will play a role. Corporations try to make their employees keep from annoying one another, even if they get annoyed because of their own prejudice – that’s been the pattern of discrimination – fitting in, in traditional employment, can eclipse competence and contribution. In contracting and self-employment, it’s still a challenge, but things tend to lean the other way.

Personally, I once didn’t get a national promotion that was pretty much being thrown at me after high performance at a regional level. I hadn’t met the team in person but, after I did, the atmosphere changed immediately. When I asked for feedback on what might have made the difference, when it seemed so promising, they said “the beard seemed unprofessional”. What was funny was when I said, “It’s for religious reasons. My people don’t cut their beards.” the response was “Oh, well that can’t be the reason, then. We’re not allowed to make decisions based on that. We just liked other candidates better.” You see how it is. My beard got pretty long at one point. When some of my leaders commented on it once, I asked them if they’d have still hired me if they’d known it would get that long. They said, “Probably not, but we’d have found a different reason not to have hired you.” I liked that they were honest about it, at least; pretense is so endemic in corporate life that you’re lucky to get that kind of response. This kind of thing has happened more than once, of course, over the years. I’m often given the sense that “clean” men don’t have beards, or more often that culturally compliant men don’t. I’m not culturally compliant, so they’ve actually got that part right. The beard is a traditionally distinctive sign of maleness in a culture that instead of redeeming men, asks that they mute their sexual characteristics, whether they want to or not. Ever worked in a place that required women to wear makeup and nylons? More than half the places I’ve worked do. We don’t need to pretend it’s not happening. But that’s just it – religion is not supposed to be culturally complient. Religion claims to have supremacy in one’s devotion, epistemology, and yes even in one’s work. So bias against the one, is really bias against the other.

Dietary requirements can face challenges, too. I once worked in a town where finding a vegetable was like finding a classical music station. Good luck! It was a sea of roadside fast food. Planning, forethought, and pilgrimages to the local supermarket for granola bars, nuts, and other amenities were a necessary component of on-site work and corporate life. Also, food is often a primary means of socializing at company parties, lunches, and other get togethers. If you’re Hindu and don’t eat meat, or Orthodox and fast from animals half the year, or have other dietary requirements (Muslim, Kosher, some Buddhists, etc.), you may find it easier being an independent than saying no all the time.

Prayer can be a challenge. Muslims, for instance, are required to pray several times a day. At some places, they’re accommodated, but it’s increasingly few. We were on an upswing of tolerance until people were queued to change their attitudes to be more ‘patriotic’ by being less tolerant. If your contract gig requires you to be on site most of the time, it can still be hard. But Free Agent contractors (those that bring their own contract) can often negotiate enough off-site time, flexibility in coming and going (it’s outcome based, not attendance based) or can arrange for a private meeting room, especially with a welcoming work facility.

Holy Days are different, too, among different faiths. Those of us for whom Holy Week, Ramadan or another religious time period is particularly important, can often put the business on hold for a week, or negotiate that time off from a contract gig – without having to deduct from a bucket of personal days. For employees above line level, or in a job that has some flexible time off, this can be easy enough if worked out in advance, but often it’s more of a challenge  For some environments, you only get 2-days for grief if your mom dies (lucking out if it’s close to a weekend), so time off for religious fasts or festivals can be pretty scarce.

A recent Monster article on this topic covered some similar points. We’re a long, long way from clarity on these things, when France is banning people from wearing head coverings in public and the US has a campaign against building permits for minarets. Wherever anyone is persecuted, trodden down, barred, and unfairly treated, then all of us are. Faith is nothing if it’s the hypocrisy of protecting my kind and persecuting others – and a business world cannot really survive institutionalized inconsistency on the basis of some undercurrent of majority faith and culture – it is eating away at the fabric of companies everywhere. Diversity is part of the core wisdom of successful companies – intolerant companies place ideology and conformity over long term success – they accept merely being good, not being amazing. In the meantime, smart companies are kicking their asses. When someone voices intolerance as a workplace norm, just look at your watch – it lets them know it’s just a matter of time before a company with equal resources realizes the competitive edge comes from diversity. For contractors and the self-employed, we’re already a few years ahead of some of our corporate competition in the form of traditional employees.

Three Eras of Work

I’ve been through three generations of work, so far, in my lifetime. The bootstrap era, the authoritarian era, and the era of free agents.

The Bootstrap Era: When I was young and jobless, seemingly talentless, and officially skill-less, my grandparents would describe the world of work: You go where they’re hiring, you do what they’re needing, you do what your boss wants, and you never bite the hand that feeds you. Those were the rules. If you got out of the military, like my Uncle, and “they were needing” computer scientists, you did that. You didn’t ask what you loved to do, you didn’t search yourself for the answer like all the morality plays of the time where the promising kid runs off to be an artist only to learn that his place was in his father’s footsteps. You asked what “they” were needing. It was never specified who “they” were, of course – “they” were the unacknowledged nexus of corporate, military, and political interests – but for my grandparents, loyalists who didn’t bite the hand that fed them in the great war, “they” were just “society” – or “the world”. If you were like me, 17 years old, your talents cast aside for the necessity of a job, any job, and when those talents surfaced – they had no explicable ‘resume’ of acceptable contexts to prove themselves, you went where “they were hiring” and “started at the bottom” and “worked your way up”. Supposedly, a job sweeping or tossing fries at a burger joint would result, with enough hard work, in a respectable position like assistant manager some day, and if ever “they were needing” managers, you might just, if you kept to the rules, become that (and get a house, wife, car, retirement plan, and all the things that give one’s life meaning). But the world *did not*, in fact, work that way. By the time that advice was given, the world had already changed. Fry cooks didn’t become managers. Managers came from a special centralized school, and needed at least a college degree. To my grandparents, college was for the well to do, the ones with trusts funds, so this just didn’t compute. Keep scrubbing those floors, and somehow loyalty will make you ascend. But the era of loyalty being rewarded as such had died with the pension fund.

The Authoritarian Era: When I was a bit older, I got a succession of jobs working in a business shirt and tie. My parents ‘ generation were the source of advice then: don’t make waves, please your employer, and give the corporation what it wants. But did it know what it wants? The mythical system of boss and bootstraps was gone, to be replaced by the near anonymity of the faceless attitudes steering a corporation. Reputation (which came from everywhere and nowhere) was everything, because it was a system of waiting for rewards in exchange for which you provided uniformity, nobody sticking out or sticking up too much, compliance, and moral ambiguity. The idea was to maintenance the career, maintain the resume, keep dirt off your name, and look for ways to climb. But the needs of the corporation are limitless, and demands often increase in response to the talent one brings, and they do not in fact necessarily allow one to remain uniform and quiet – they often sense and demand the exploitation of talent in a variety of ways that challenge character and potentially transform individuality and personality. The results, also, are not always clear cut. You might succeed at producing exactly the results requested, and wish you hadn’t. For example, you might be asked to educate internal execs on the use of a new software package designed for them by an outsource company, but those execs might find the software package they purchased does not in fact deliver much of what they had understood or been promised when they purchased it, and then the corporation is actually unhappy with the result, and looks upon the diligence and fulfillment with ill favor instead of appreciation and satisfaction. The moral ambiguity means right and wrong are relative to the outcome, not necessarily fulfilling what is asked. A corporation is often confused about what it wants can provide no assurance of the means of success. The corporation, too, had come to combine so many disparate communities and interactions that it could act almost like a body without a head. It could cry out for talent but reward mediocrity, only to punish mediocrity with layoffs shortly thereafter, retaining the talent and then demanding more mediocrity, which would be employment suicide. By the time the parental advice was given, authority had already become so ubiquitous that it was disconnected from purpose, and the system was taking on its greatest sources of talent from contractors who could draw the occasional firm, logical line in the sand: “Yes, we can do that; it’ll take more money or more time, which do you prefer?” But at least you got results – in the contractor, leadership – authority – came attached to competence and purpose. The system was already rewarding not people who did what they were told, but Free Agents it brought in from “the outside” – that magical place that the people came from that always seemed to save the day – people who thought less in terms of loyalty and authority than of competence, clarity, and excitement.

The Era of Free Agents: Daniel Pink, of “Free Agent Nation: How America’s New Independent Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live,” has said that Free Agents are “free from the bonds of a large institution and agents of their own futures. They are the new archetypes of work in America. It used to be that the bargain between employee and employer was that the employee gave loyalty and the employer gave security… The bargain now is that the individual gives talent and the organization provides opportunities.” What’s a Free Agent? A Free Agent is a professional contractor. Don’t think of a staff agency temp, once again cowed and controlled by two companies not one, no benefits, badly robbed of more than half their billable rate. No, a Free Agent contracts to bring in expertise, buys his own health care, funds his own retirement plan, and negotiates his own rate, which has to cover his taxes, benefits, and the rest. He bills back expenses and, at some point, in a worst case scenario, he is able to cut the cord if the corporation doesn’t hold to their end of the contract. Free Agents can work for Fortune 500 companies, for another one-person shop, on-site, remotely, travelling, locally, part-time or full or flex, and at nearly any level or type of talent or expertise. There are variations on this: some companies hire “contract employees” which basically means project workers with full employee benefits that drop off upon completion without further obligation. But in a troubled economy, hiring in any capacity has its own risks and headaches. You can’t build the core of a project team out of staff agency temps, though.  There are risks and headaches to bringing in 1099 contractors – one example: a lot of them are suing – successfully, because in most respects they’re treated like employees and argue they should be entitled to benefits – and now the IRS is cracking down with new rules on the contractor/employee distinction. It’s a dilemma, all right. I make no secret that I’m affiliated with Free Agent Source, the company that connects Free Agents with Client companies but with a corp to corp contract (no 1099), and keeps contractors in benefits and provides them a W-2 without taking half of it – Free Agents set their rates with the Client and FAS keeps a small, transparent portion to provide back office services, legal, accounting, etc. You can bring in just about anyone in any capacity as a Free Agent that way, without the problems attendant regular employment, staffing agencies, or 1099 contracting. But regardless of that being our solution, there’s a shift of culture, here, as Pink was suggesting. Whether the fabled economic “Recovery” comes one day, or the Kingdom comes first, there’s strong indication that this way of working may remain the fastest growing trend. Why not? When you’re up, it still makes as much sense as when you’re down. The Bootstrap Era is gone, and the results of the Authoritarian Era are mixed at best, and just not practical anymore (if they ever were).

Your view of the legitimacy of each successive shift will depend on what era you personally are currently living in. One of the things I hope to achieve is to live always in the next era. As an entrepreneur (a solopreneur – another new skyrocketing trend well before the bust), isn’t that the goal? To live with vision, with insight into where we are going, not mistaking the past for the present, but staking (a little exhilirating risk, to be sure) on what works rather than simply on what is and what was? Well, that’s certainly a key to prosperity for a lot of people whose version of Free Agency is self-employment. It’s an exciting time for work. Maybe I always liked to drum to my own tune, but that’s getting rewarded a lot these days – it’s what companies (like Google) actually say they’re looking for. Look at Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. One of the many signals social media sends to business is that talent and conformity are often inversely related. This is good news. This is the work I wanted to do when I was a kid – work where the person doing it defines it as much as the recipient, and where the line between recipient and provider is a little fuzzier.

I don’t fault my elders, incidentally, for living in their time. It’s just that now a lot of us are taking apart the clock and asking whether it really was always the inevitable way that things worked. Time itself will tell, but some of us are already forging our own solutions.

Get Work without Hassles, Hire without Headaches

California Company Free Agent Source says, with Monty Python, “And now for something completely different…”

It’s one thing to get a new cereal, a new TV show, or even a relatively new kind of car (like the hybrid). But there are areas of our lives where newness is almost unheard of, or even considered wrong.

When someone says there’s a new kind of marriage, or a new kind of religion, people get understandably a little cautious – these are bedrock institutions of the culture. But what about a new kind of work? Not as in the rising tide of social media jobs, or the growth of telecommuting. What if there were an entirely new way to ‘hold a job’?

That’s what Free Agent Source proposes to create for anyone who would like to explore it with them in about 20minutes (the length of their upcoming free webinars) – [Note: register now: web seats are going fast]. FAS, as its employees and clients call it, has wedded the best of both worlds of modern work — contract work and regular employment.

What do employees want? Lots of surveys and studies have been done to answer that question, but overall it boils down to the security of benefits (health care, 401K retirement fund, etc), and a steady paycheck.

Contractors want freedom and flexibility (whether that’s the excitement of travel for work, flexible hours, or changing projects without the fear associated with “losing a job”). They also enjoy the lucrative tendency for their worth to go up rapidly in the market, as they put projects under their belt, compared to the perhaps steady but less dramatic ‘pay raises’ of regular employees.

There are drawbacks to both types of work. Employees worry about getting laid off, or their job being outsourced, and ending up at a temp agency or staffing company, or paying a placement firm to help them compete against the zillions of other applicants for fewer jobs. Their benefits don’t follow them from job to job either, which may mean starting over every 3-5 years. Contractors may have to contend with spending a portion of their evenings doing paperwork and bookkeeping, from accounting for 1099 contractors, to constantly producing expense reports. Contractors also have to buy their own benefits.

But what if you could combine the best of both worlds? What if you got the freedom and flexibility of being a contractor, but the benefits of an employee? What if you actually went one better – you got full benefits like an employee, but they follow you from job to job (contract to contract). What if you could negotiate using a standard corp to corp contract, skipping staffing agencies, and opening more doors and perhaps better pay? And what if the company did accounting and expense reports for you?

Suddenly new job markets (as contractors) are wide open to standard employees that normally they wouldn’t touch, meaning they aren’t competing with just everyone, but they keep the security of being employees.

Contractors get to spend their days doing what they went to work to do (whether that’s IT, project management, or whatever) and spend their evenings doing whatever they want.

That’s the vision of Steve Pruneau, founder of Free Agent Source. He created the concept of a “Free Agent” as an employee with access to the lucrative, flexible employment world of a contractor, and a contractor that benefits from the security and freedom of an employee. It’s “the best of both worlds”, as he likes to say.

Steve founded his company, with a small circle of colleagues, on the notion that it shouldn’t be as hard as it is for employees to chase security, and contractors to chase freedom, but neither party rarely actually find it. Especially in the current economy, Pruneau sees an opportunity to change the definition of work for a lot of people – to revise how people think about the relationship of worker to company.

“HR professionals, hiring managers, and project teams will benefit immensely from putting people to work this way,” says Pruneau. “If they’ve laid off people, they can bring them back to work without the risk for traditional employment, but without the hassles of staffing agencies.” If they need to staff up, he says, in a tentative economy with an uncertain future, they can do so with a corp to corp contract that protects them, gives them flexibility, but actually invites the most dedicated and talented staff. They’re not temps, they’re contractors of the company, but they’re employees of Free Agent Source. They’re “Free Agents”.

Pruneau points out that this works well for everyone. Staffing agencies typically aren’t transparent – they can take up to 75% of a worker’s pay, and you can’t see how much they’re scooping out. They also don’t support their workers with a full benefits package that’s portable between jobs. That’s not how you attract the best and most devoted talent – it’s bad for workers, bad for companies. Contractors often return to the normal workforce after a few years of carrying the taxes, benefits, and paperwork on their shoulders, and lose out on the fun and freedom work is supposed to bring. Employees hunt for jobs and then spend their time focused on keeping them more than on excelling in what they do, and treating it as a profession.

“Free Agents”, says Pruneau, “are the future of work. What we’re providing with Free Agent Source is an entrance into something new yes, but also into the next normalcy – the next standard of expectations for both workers and companies. Why shouldn’t it be fun and free? Why does it have to be hard?” Their launch is in California, and those are the questions being answered by Free Agent Source in their webinar. Anyone seeking work in California, or looking to put people to work in California, are welcome to attend free. Register at: www.freeagentsource.com/webinar

Film Commentary: The Corporation

Where the documentary “The Corporation” really shines is in analyzing corporations as legal persons in terms of psychology. It starts with the point that the 14th ammendment was designed to protect freed slaves, but was turned by the Supreme Court into an attribution of personhood to corporations. It then clarifies that we need a way to talk about corporations in terms of corporateness – corporate culture – the tendencies of multinationals – vs. just the legal structure alone. After all, Patagonia is a corporation, right?

The psychological analysis is fascinating. One of the checkboxes on the psychological report is “callous lack of concern for the feelings of others”. If an individual person – a free agent, not a collective like the corporation – seems to lack empathy, that person’s future is bleak in a society that has taken the corporation as its church. But when corporations themselves, who assume the priviledges of super persons under the law, wreak untold havoc that demonstrates a chronic lack of empathy (an absence the documentary charges is psychopathic), we laud as wise, respectable, and “good people” those who ‘achieve’ lucrative careers within that corporation. Sure, there’s the “bad apple” theory that it’s just BP or AIG, while Monsanto runs free (sure, a mere 80million for agent orange, which is pocket change, but nothing for the Vietnamese – that ‘charity’ is only for those at home). We won’t go into Monsanto’s RBGH (bovine growth hormone) and Fox News here.

When I went out on my own with my business, the person in my family one might think would offer approval did not say “Congratulations – this is what you were made for – you have invested in yourself, staked yourself on your own ethos, created your own brand, and you have a chance to do good and derive meaning from that”. No, I was patted on the back for the good job I’d done in completing a project with my last employer so that the corporation was “happy with me”. Concern, worry, skepticism about the implied hubris involved in hanging out my own shingle, but pat after pat suggesting that meaning in life derives from the approval of corporate entities.

Corporateness is the standard for approval. When a parent abdicates that duty in a society or in a family, it does so now in favor of the corporation – you’re supposed to get your approval from your boss and the company or from wearing a uniform.

It’s like that in all totalitarian societies – it’s just that we don’t like to admit that instead of a socialist collective or religious domination, we live in a corporate state. Another interesting feature, too, is that it’s presumed we don’t offer approval or disapproval of the corporation – how dare we – “that’s a value judgment” I was once told when I questioned one corporation’s instruction to deceive another – their client; no, we are meant to presume that the corporation is the evaluator of us, not the other way around. Corporateness is the moral evaluator, and individuals are the evaluated – that’s why there’s such emphasis on the clean-shaven, pastel-wearing, double-talker (how many ways can you finish a sentence with “at this time”). Want to offend a group of corporate types at lunch? If it’s your turn to pick, tell them you really don’t like corporate food, and prefer only mom and pop restaurants. There’s an almost “how dare you” for that heresy.

The documentary lists dozens of corporations we all know, from IBM to Sears, that have been found guilty as persons of federal crimes that killed and maimed countless people, and who paid criminal fines. They usually get off scot free for global crimes, of course. Now, if I did that, I’d be the black sheep of family, society, and I couldn’t get a job with the very corporation who had just done the same thing themselves. My rights to affect the legislative process in the U.S. and other constitutional rigts would be curtailed or stripped away. I would be, effectively, a lifelong banished heretic of the culture, listing felon status on every job application – relegated to having to become a better, more savvy, more cautious criminal (like corporations after their convictions) because even fast food joints wouldn’t hire me. The corporations, of course, don’t miss a day of work, and neither do all their employees who’d be pointing those self-righteous fingers.

I find the double standard interesting and ironic, and absurd in a Kafkaesque way. I’m a non-believer. I’m an atheist when it comes to the sanctity of corporateness. The doc ends up demonstrating, through ongoing psychoanalysis, that the corporation, in general, is “a prototypical psychopath” – that the “dominant institution of our time is created in the image of a psychopath”. Lack of empathy is just the beginning. As pervasive as a dominant global religon, more powerful than the most powerful nation, corporateness is in fact the underlying sense of reality behind the thinking of most people in my culture. Resisting it, spurning it, will get you shunned in various religions, doomed in politics, and attacked by the same people who call into radio shows and let ideas turn them into gun toters.

We live in a misguided culture. Today’s discussion on criminalizing “material support” to “enemies” which includes speech, is not only draconian, it’s a vindication of all those who’ve been saying it doesn’t matter which person or which party is in office – they all, ultimately, do the same things. As a general flies to the white house to explain himself for criticizing White House staff members in a context that cries out for criticism, it’s clear just one more time out of every time that we live in a culture that has subordinated the individual, the individual’s speech, search for meaning, and freedom for the mere convenience, pride, and profitability of institutions. It is not a society dominated by a single institution – it’s a society dominated by institution-ness. Criticizing in high school history classes the societies of presumably dimmer eras and climes controlled by religion, dictatorship, “czarism”, etc. – all the while a system of interlocking directorates wields a level of pervasive control never before attempted on such a scale, all in the “land of the free”. Yeah, free to choose between Coke and Pepsi. Freedom reconceived into the minimalized choice between one kind of cereal and another. You can just hear the top-40 country music drawling, “proud to be an ‘merican where at least I know I’m free.” Yeah, at least.

Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Michael Moore appear in the documentary briefly, of course. It touches briefly on rather well known history of U.S. based multinationals and their support of genocidal totalitarian governments. I just love hearing companies like IBM saying an idea is “discredited’ and “you can’t always tell or find out” instead of saying it’s “untrue”. Yeah, it’s discredited by the corporation itself, and they got rid of what documentation they could – the rest is spurious, right?

It’s interesting to watch the system get its signals crossed. 51 US-based multinationals in one week alone were fined for trading with declared enemies of the US, including officially declared terrorist regimes. You’d know the names of almost all of those companies, and be hard pressed to find a home that doesn’t contain their products. Someone related to you works for them. Someone you know works for one of them – most likely a lot of people. The film discusses the transnational character of these corporations – the fact that their loyalties are not rooted in any one nation but transcend national boundaries – some of them are larger and more profitable than most nations. It quotes someone as saying, “a coup is no longer necessary’. A protest sign outside the a world trade conference of 34 nations reads “Bow your heads. The corporations will now lead us in prayer.” Police in riot gear launch an assault on the crowd. Moore talks about Flint, Michigan where the number one job of parents of the kids at Columbine is working for Lockheed Martin, maker of weapons of mass destruction, and wonders whether violence begets violence.

Ray C. Anderson, CEO of Interface, largest carpet manufacturer in the world gave an address to other corporate types where he said: “Do I know you well enough to call you fellow plunderers? There is not an industrial company on Earth, not an institution of any kind, not mine, not yours, not anyone’s, that is sustainable. By our civilization’s definition, I’m a captain of industry — in the eyes of many a kind of modern day hero. But really, really, the first industrial revolution is flawed, it is not working. It is unsustainable. It is a mistake, and we must move on to another and better industrial revolution. And get it right this time.”

Not everyone is so positive. One person said “I think people are losing.” Acts of resistance are crushed, people are killed, children are blinded (permanently) by tear gas. But resistance continues. The film points out that Arcata, CA “capped the number of chain restaurants at present numbers (nine) and banned their future development anywhere in the city. Licking and Porter Townships in Pennsylvania made history by adopting ordinances that eliminate a corporation’s ability to claim any consitutional rights as a “person”.

I think resistance to corporateness takes many forms, but choosing just one isn’t nearly as helpful as choosing several. Ethical consumerism is important, but it needs to be intelligent, thoughtful, cautious, and in the end you’re going to settle for some level of compromise. Buying soy milk to eliminate dairy, a worthy goal, makes you a consumer of Monsanto and seed picked by near slave labour. In order to truly be an ethical consumer, you have to be honest about having dirty hands. Don’t like what Fox News did to lie about Monsanto’s growth hormone and cancer, supported by zillions in the latter’s advertising? Most likely your internet provider filed a brief in support of Fox when they fired the whistleblowers, and the latter got nothing because of it. But you need the internet, don’t you? So do I. The moment I can get a similar arrangement without using big corporate fiber, I will be doing so. Can one get entirely clean? I haven’t seen it, but I’m not above using the tools of the problem against the problem if I have to.

Protesting is important. I’d almost say that if you’ve never carried a sign, you’re not an American – you haven’t really participated in the political process – but of course, we’ve reduced “participation” to showing up once a year and filling out a punch card, so a lot of people would crucify me for saying that, and this isn’t a political blog. Staying informed is important. I’m on the hunt now for some more consolidated information sources, and think I’ve about got them – it’s not like you can rely on the “news” (It’s what we say it is, Rupert Murdoch is quoted as saying about the Monsanto growth hormone coverup). Giving your wealth (and you are wealthy if you’ve got cable, and so am I) is pretty important – it’s hard to understand all the “I support this” and “Support our that” on t-shirts, bumperstickers, radio rhetoric, and casual coffee talk when support doesn’t involve putting your money behind it, or pulling your money away from it when you say the word “against” – that’s why, if you’ve never boycotted anything, the word “wrong” is pretty much just armchair talk – a hypothetical commandment affirmed in the mind in an auditorium of ethics with padded chairs where we ‘imagine’ reality together.

I do try to be ‘nice’ or at least, like corporations, appear to be nice in this venue. Any time you talk about anything other than entertainment you’re bound to annoy someone – and even then, it’s surprising what people will do to other people over a Donkey Kong score or a Chevy vs. Ford argument (corporations are such heroes we wear their t-shirts and put their decals on everything like religious icons) – Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson, Caterpillar, Smith & Wesson, Abercrombie & Fitch, Old Navy… If you’re going to say anything against an affection that all-encompassing, an almost sexual preoccupation with corporateness, so much a part of us that it takes the form of intimate wear and tattoos – we want it ever with us – we want it as close as a lover – you’re going to tick somebody off. So, I’m resigned to it. It’s a film review – maybe I’ll be forgiven, and people won’t throw designer labels at me as I walk by. But yeah, I like this film and think it’s spot on.

Remember, though, the corporation is not work. Your work is something that only you can own. It can never be equated with corporateness unless that’s the way you want it, even if you work in a corporation. When I was a young man, I was in a line of work in which it wasn’t uncommon for the company to ask me to lie. Even people in my, then, religious group would ask me to lie, when they were involved in that business. I would refuse, even though it was argued that it’s just one corporation lying to another, but  it wasn’t just because it was wrong. It was wrong, and that was enough, but there was also a sense that I had to preserve that the corporation isn’t my life – it doesn’t own me – it doesn’t own my work. It doesn’t even own my time in that sense. It’s like a soldier refusing to obey an illegal order – that’s not insubordination, it’s justice. But in a corporate culture, it’s so easy to think a corporation can own even that.

I’ve nothing against you or anyone else working in corporate life; what I am against, along with the film, is a corporateness that presumes immunity from the same ethics and morality that applies to an individual person, while assuming all of the rights and privileges that belong to the same. I may make a “religion’ out of work” as has been charged, but making one out corporate culture takes more chutzpah than I can muster.

The DVD is on Netflix. Be sure to watch the deleted scenes.

Employment, Robbery, and Sacrificial Koolaid

The assumption of employment is all around us. I’m not knocking employment. Quite the contrary:

Rule of Work: Your work is not the venue. Whether your work is best conducted as an employee, contractor, entrepreneur, or volunteer, pursue the venue where you can derive from your work all the meaning you are intended to have.

But it’s sort of like my friend who has a Doctorate of Philosophy in Patristics from Oxford. He used to get asked, as a professor, by prospective employers in the U.S. for his transcript. He was typically met with blank, inflexible stares when he informed them that Oxford is an 800-year old university – it doesn’t issue transcripts. 75% of the doctoral candidates fail – if you make it, at all, that is the transcript. The assumption was that education is everywhere and always has been mass education, and rather than having to write books to graduate, you need to prove yourself by appealing to grades. Oxford is pass fail – for the degree, not for classes. For those interested in this topic,  you don’t even have to attend lectures (classes) at Oxford. You can sit under a tree all week and read, if you like, or just stay drunk all the time. What they require is that you read everything in your field, and take a final exam at the end that lasts about a week and is 100% written (essay form), and that you defend your thesis (which is what your book is arguing – your dissertation). That’s it. Read everything, write for a solid week intelligently discussing everything, and defend your own original idea expressed as a book which takes into account your knowledge of everything, and you get your degree. No transcript. Is it accredited? No, it’s 800 years old… etc. It’s like pulling teeth getting past assumptions.

The assumption of employment, though, is similar. It’s already been elsewhere observed that employees can get a home loan lickety split with two paychecks under their belts, or one paycheck and a letter from their employer. A self-employed person has to show a history of substantial profits on past years’ tax returns. That’s how the mortgage system assumes employment as the standard. Conversely, the tax system rewards self-employed people only if they show the least possible profit and claim the maximum possible deductions. That conflicts with the mortgage industry assumption and leaves lots of self-employed people without access to a mortgage, while showing up for a job for a month results in a home loan. The system is geared toward assuming employment is the norm. What do all the forms say – government forms, bank forms, even forms at the gym? Employer. What do employment applications ask for? Past employer. Sure, you write in your own company, but most people don’t seem to be aware that the relationship you have to your own company, as an entrepreneur might actually not be that of employee. Corporate structures are varied, and you might get shares, not paychecks. You might contract for your company, etc. You might be a “member”, a “partner”, and so on.

A pronounced example I encountered was when the market ate half of my 401K, because I foolishly listened to the “stay the course” crowd (i.e. Vanguard and the traditional investor braniacs who couldn’t acknowledge reality, only throw out doctrine, and tell the rest of us not to be “immature” investors who pull out our funds too soon and don’t stay in for the long haul. In other words – the people who told us it’s better to go broke than to question the received wisdom.) Honestly, the amateur hour stuff was not smelling the brimstone in the Judgment Day that was coming down all around them. Little devils kept saying, “Nah, this is just a “fluctuation” in the economic climate.  Let’s say I had $9000 invested, and I lost half, so $4500. My employer had matched at least half of my contribution, so someone actually said to me, “Well then you didn’t lose $4500. You basically lost nothing, because you still have what you put into it.” Now THAT, my friends, is a blind, dogmatic assumption of employment as the norm. But wait, it’s worse than that. A person who sees his services as valuable, something he ‘sells’ an employer, at best, knows that the matching contribution is part of his COMPENSATION. It’s part of the package of remuneration for his work.

In other words, if your employer cuts health care, you’re getting a pay cut. If your employer assigns you added responsibilities without added pay, you’re getting a pay cut (or at least getting snowed). I like that phrase they foist off on people young enough and inexperienced enough to believe it (or just craven enough to pretend they do) – “you’re investing in your marketability in the company” . Ha. The only thing you’re investing in is your reputation for price cutting – selling premium quantities and qualities of work for the lowest possible compensation. You’re the Walmart of employees. Or there’s the similar one, “because you care about the company”. Hey, caring is a two-way street – it’s like a marriage. Would you ask your spouse to do 100% of the housework and keep a full time job, because the spouse “cares about the family”? Not bloody likely.

But this isn’t even a pay cut. My example is one of robbery. The abject, and outright robbery of the system by (well you know who is responsible, if you’re paying attention – sure it’s AIG, but it’s more widespread than that – it’s an entire sector of society stealing from the other sector) – robbery that resulted in a LOT of us losing half or more of our retirement funds. Losing all of it, for those who left their money in until it hit zero. What they stole is the same as if they stole my paycheck. That money wasn’t legitimately lost to the “fluctuations of the market” – it was robbed by the looting and devastation and plundering and pillaging of the market. I know pretty much where it is. It’s driving around the Eastern seaboard with European leather and a blonde trophy wife in the passenger seat. It’s stopping to refuel on the way to a resort and spa where I can’t afford to eat the moisturizing cream it took a bushel of rain forest plants and a dozen children making a penny a day to produce for 3000% markup and some penthouse-dweller’s name on it. And on top of that, someone has the audacity to say, “but it wasn’t really your money.” “You didn’t really lose anything.” “Your employer *contributed* it to you. Like a gift. You can’t get upset over a stolen gift, now can you?

Well, it’s not a freaking gift. It’s one of the types of paychecks. It’s part of the compensation, part of the deal. Keep in mind, it’s taxable. Now or later, but it’s taxable.

The assumption is so strong that employment is the norm, that one easily forgets that the lingo you hear around the office isn’t real. A contribution isn’t really a gift. Caring isn’t really caring, it’s working for free. Marketability means gullibility. And ‘market fluctuations’, if you happen to work in the financial services sector, means causing a blackout, then coming to your house and stealing your TV set, then kicking you out of your house and taking that too (we don’t have an ARM, don’t worry), selling your home, and then offering you a credit card with a mafia-like interest rate so you can “rebuild” your “good standing” with the financial services industry. Oh, and lastly, telling you that none of what you lost was ever really yours in the first place. Equity meets late fees and cost of foreclosure. Finally, you blame it on an act of God, vibrations, hiccups, tremors, and “fluctuations” that no one could have prevented. So now you can’t even go to Church and pray about it without looking at your priest suspiciously, and he’s thinking “What did I do?” Good thing he lost his house too, but you’re all going to be moving into his apartment because you just lost your job, and your 401K is so devastated that pulling it out should just about cover the government “penalty” for pulling it out. Prison is starting to look good, but your Priest doesn’t like that idea, and they just told prisoners they have to pay for their own healthcare. You take your unemployment check to the bank, but they won’t open an account anymore without pulling your credit, and you know where that leads, so you give a chunk of that to the check cashing place, fill up with gas at double the price when this started, and drive home to watch TV shows about people living “successful” lives (as though nothing happened in the TV universe), and you figure all those guys work for AIG or had stock in munitions. And you fall asleep hoping you’ll get that temp job you applied for, where they “try on” employees, one after another, without having to give you healthcare or retirement benefits. And your only hope is starting your own Youtube reality show, except that everyone else is in the same boat and what, ordinarily might be fascinating, is now just banal and taken for granted.

Ahem. Yes. Well, the point is this:

Rule of Work: Nothing is true if it confuses an exchange of value for value with a gift given to either party. See Ayn Rand. Corollary rule: If you got something as a result of honest work, taking it away from you without a fair exchange is always theft – calling it something else turns wages into slavery.

Yes, the assumption of employment as the normative form of work relationship prevails, but some of what comes with that assumption isn’t employment, it’s at best what the old South used to call “wage slavery” and, at worst, is just plain robbery, snake oil, machination, and exploitation. There’s nothing wrong with employment, if it’s honest, if both parties are exchanging fair value for fair value with their eyes open, in a transparent environment. But treating employment as a privilege, as though one should aspire to it independently of compensation, accept it as normal without reference to the entitlements governing every other form of trade (rhetoric venerating “the market” aside), is an additional set of assumptions that amounts to drinking the sacrificial Koolaid.

It’s bad enough to assume that life, ‘legitimate’ life, revolves around punching a timeclock or getting a salary, in contrast with the work itself. It’s unacceptable, though, to swallow down the notion that it’s really all about the love, and what’s in the contract is just Christmas gravy. Dunno about you, but I can get a turkey anywhere – I’m up for the gravy.

Rush Hour Driving Tells Us About Work Attitudes

Driving is the best modern test of intelligence – so goes a maxim of mine. The tailgater, cell phone weaver and dodger, bad merger – these have simply failed a test of basic sensibility, priority, and correct assessment of cause and effect. Something else occurs to me about driving, though – specifically about rush hour.

Look at the desperation with which so many employed persons flee their place of work. Look at the abhorrence, so carefully concealed somewhat earlier (while still in the office), expressed as an almost mindless desire to reach a sanctuary – home, as quickly as possible. They don’t even have the benefit of arguing it’s about maximizing their free time – first, because the driving itself should be free time (they’re not getting paid for it) – second, because of the way they jam up the freeway, causing paralysis to all traffic, by refusing to drive at an even pace (the break lights blink and blink again), and by taking up even the smallest available space to drive on the bumper of the person in front of them. No, it’s not a rational response.

Furthermore, one watches the anger, the vehemence, the barely concealed violence with which some work-fleers snarl at anyone holding them up (e.g. anyone driving as though they own their own experience). Those of us driving on our own time want the experience to be peaceful, do we not? Comfortable, happy – not harried, desperate, vehement, miserable. One can only conclude, therefore, that many of the drivers fleeing the locus of their work not only are not happy about being there, but aren’t happy about anything even remotely associated with it – such as going to and from. Instead of a calm, leisurely, relaxed ride home listening to something uplifting or intelligent, they’re often roaring by, killing their mpg, while playing something more appropriate for bombing villages.

We’re not counting those who are texting while they drive, etc. It’s not fair to pick the least intelligent members of a group for analysis. And it’s not everyone or employees in general. Lots of employees take a leisurely drive home, relaxing, listening to music, not stressed unless crowded by the aggressive drivers around them.

So, I’ve crafted another maxim. A “rule”, if you will. Driving at rush hour is the best test of your attitudes toward (your) work. If your work is not the primary font of meaning in your life, or if you’ve given up on even that possibility, driving in rush hour will be a hell that you inflict on yourselves or others. Hopefully, you don’t drive at rush hour, if you work for yourself – that’s like driving during bar closing – it’s for suckers, if you can avoid it. When I worked in corporate life, some of us would stay late if we couldn’t leave early, just to avoid it. But when you have to, it’s a great venue for broadcasting who you are, how you think, and what your life is about. Driving is a language, like any other, and it telegraphs your basic impulses, your room for self-control, and your real attitudes toward people and life.

I’m a big fan of the job interview where the boss makes you drive during rush hour for a ‘hurried’ rendezvous at the airport. I think it should be rolled out on first dates and when considering making friends of acquaintances. I know that I’ve ruled out friendship or collegial relations with people based on observing them drive, even if they don’t know it. Driving is a way of dealing with people – I choose associates based on how they do that. But regardless of your willingness to pass sentence as I do, driving is still an intriguing form of conversation, telling us no less about how a person regards work than how they regard the people in the other cars.

Running Out of Time

I found this in my papers (the ones that are getting digitized), and thought it a striking pre-Rules of Work taste of the Rules of Work. It’s a chapter from an unfinished novella written under nom de plume in 2005. There’s more, but this much is all I’m going to share in this venue.

Excerpt from: The Insect

Chapter title: Running Out of Time

Copyright 2005, Daniel DiGriz, All Rights.

There were no physical signs. No heartburn or chronic fatigue or stress disease offered warnings. He wasn’t depressed, or lonely, or experiencing thwarted ambition or poor job fit. Instead, it was the absence of these things that worried him. In an environment ornate with personal therapists, petty embezzlement, malingering, office affairs, antacids, stress balls, and caffeine addictions, David Doss simply felt . . . nothing.

He turned to look at Shelly Hinkel’s cube, the only one into which he could see without standing. Shelly watered her plant every day. It was fed by the fluorescent lights and a little box of Miracle Grow she had stashed behind her monitor. On her computer was a plastic Slinky. She had a calendar that, each month, displayed a different vacation spot. March was Italy. David had studied the photograph of Sorrento, city of three sunrises. He imagined Shelly Hinkel in bathing suit and visor walking up from the bay to one of the hotels, her eyes on the mountains behind, a towel over one shoulder. She breathed in the way people do when sleeping peacefully on a Saturday night, with all of Sunday before them. The odd thing was that he felt no lust.

Just below the level of busied perception, reggae drifted from Kirk Melon’s tape player two cubes down. Bob Marley’s “Jammin” seemed entirely out of place in a gray, modular world of technology and inter-office mail. The rattle of M&Ms in a jar broke his thoughts. Susan Dallas in the opposite cubicle made that sound five times a day, sometimes six. The last one popped over the rim and dropped, leaving the distinct quiet of emptiness.

David closed the file he’d finished, and the window that displayed the directory. He paused to stare at his own desk. There was no photo of family, no proudly displayed diploma, no bobble-head or mug with inspirational maxim. There was no candy secreted away in a drawer, no radio, and no hand-exerciser to justify the march of moments like lemmings over the cliff of corporate time. His area was, in a word, bare.

“You leaving?” Shelly had startled him, though there was no reason why it should be startling. “Another day another migraine,” she chuckled effeminately.

“Leaving.”

Have a good weekend!” She was clicking away at the keys. He knew she wouldn’t hear exactly what he said but only notice if he didn’t answer at all.

“Night.”

The elevator took 72 seconds up, 55 seconds down. Why David knew this, without ever having glanced at his watch, he had never questioned. Realizing that he was tapping his foot to the seconds now made him nervous.

The garage was half empty. He had stayed exactly 35 minutes over the official time he should have stopped work. The underachievers had gone home, and the overachievers were still at it. He pressed the key fob twice and heard the SUV in space 46B unlock and start. The exhaust odor was somehow comforting, though David could see no reason why he should need comfort.
When he reached his front door, he paused with the key, and realized that he didn’t remember the ride home. He pondered, trying to recall a detail. The guy in the white jeep tailgating him. But that was yesterday. The pleasant weather. But that was just a perception of every day during the past week. David could recall not a single moment in the last 42 minutes. It had been 42 minutes every day that week, except this day. Today, it might as well have been zero.

David laughed to himself and turned the door handle. So, I am all right, he thought. It gets to everyone in some fashion. This is my response to it all. I’ll put in for counseling first thing Monday morning. Then, I’ll have my pills or stress ball or slinky to get me through the day. The thought of no longer unconsciously counting the moments appealed to him. He made a double scotch from a bottle he kept for guests, but never opened, and actually spent the evening watching horror movies on TV. He even had a bath and fell asleep on the sofa in his robe.

He woke up at exactly 9:44 in the morning. The phone was ringing.

“Hello? David?”

“Yes?”

“Are you coming to work?” It was Shelly Hinkel.

“Work? Is there something special going on?”

“You tell me. Are you sick, David? You’re never late for work.”

“You do realize it’s Saturday, don’t you?”

“Wow. You must have really cut loose this weekend! It’s Monday, silly.”

“Monday? Shelly, if this is some kind of a joke . . . “

“It’s no joke, kiddo. It’s Monday. Don’t worry, no one has said anything. I turned on your computer and kind of shuffled some papers around on your desk to make it look like you’d already been in. As far as anyone knows, you got here early.”

“Shelly . . . What time is it?”

“It’s 9:45 in the morning, sleepyhead. Get up. I brought donuts, today. Oh . . . gosh, are you sick, David?”

“Sick? No. I mean . . . I don’t know. Yes, I’m sick. I don’t think I can make it into work today. Would you mind calling down to HR for me?”

“No problem. You get some rest. Don’t even worry about the donuts . . . Oh, gee what a dummy. That’s a silly thing to say. What I mean is, don’t worry about us. The company can go on for one more day without you, sweety.”

“Thank you.” David paused for just that split second that one allows the other to start to speak and hung up before she could express any more sympathy.

A commercial for microwave dinners appeared on the television. He suddenly felt famished. There were no extra dishes in the sink. The refrigerator was exactly as it had been – no more food and no less. Ducking below the cabinets, and glancing over the counter, the TV seemed to be on the same station as the last movie he remembered watching.

He made quick work with a plastic fork of a processed Salisbury steak with instant mashed potatoes, imitation butter, and frozen green beans. In fact, he nuked an identical frozen dinner for the necessary two minutes, and thirty seconds, rotating once, and ate it with equal intensity. From the refrigerator, he drained a bottle of spring water at 44 degrees from Ozark, Arkansas.

He felt an increasingly oppressive awkwardness, standing in the kitchen, staring at the diminutive living room, with no idea at all what to do! Bill Gates. That was the answer to the thousand dollar question, with twenty seconds still on the clock. The game show contestant, however, was stumped. David Doss did not want to know the answer, did not want to beat time and, as the walls began to seem ever grayer, he certainly did not want to gaze into a video screen on his first unscheduled PTO in 437 days. He decided to go out.

The shirts in the closet were organized from pastel blue to white, and overall from business casual to formal. He stared at the array for a full minute, before digging for a worn pair of Dockers and a faded orange t-shirt he’d kept from college, with a smudge of green paint on one sleeve. From a duffel, he took the tennis shoes he’d worn during fitness day, placed his loafers neatly inside the closet doorway, and paused to look into the dresser mirror. Then, inexplicably, he nudged a hair out of place and took the car keys from the valet, leaving behind his comb.

The Isuzu started easily. 2500 miles until the next oil change. He realized that he’d been staring at the windshield sticker for several seconds. He wasn’t certain how long. The engine warmed up, he pulled out of the space and into traffic.

Exit 35 took him beachside, and he drove for a minute, looking for a parking space, before deciding that almost all of them were open. He pulled in to an uncalculated spot against the cable barrier, and turned off the engine. An older gentleman strolled with a pair of setters, leaving paw and foot prints along the sand. A young couple shared a cigarette and occasional caresses, laughing carelessly as they meandered along tide’s edge. The interior of the vehicle felt safe but confining, with the sunlight mediated by tinted glass. David opened the door, pressed the lock, and left the vehicle behind, stepping over the cable to walk slowly along the shore.

He removed the tennis shoes, tucked his socks in them, tied the laces together, and draped them over a shoulder. The surf was gentle, and he walked, watching the play of foam across his own toes. A tiny crab kept pace for a few moments, and then skittered under a piece of drift. The sun’s warmth was so unlike the artificially temperate air of an office or his apartment. It rose in fractions of a degree from his feet to his head. It was a bath of radiance that gave him the odd idea of a baptism. David felt as if something that held him in check was washing away, lifted from his skin like the grime of a life spent in toil.

He ceased to be aware of any pressing purpose or bodily need. Nudging a half buried shell, he bent to rescue it from a slow decent into oblivion, and washed it clean in the water, his thumb reveling in the ridges along its surface. He suddenly thought of touching a face, and found himself stroking the smooth inside, staring into the mixed gray interior as one stares at clouds, trying to discern some familiar meaning. He did not realize that he was breathing a little faster than normal, that his eyes were a little glassier, and that he was almost smiling.

Remembering something from his childhood, he held the shell to his ear, listening for the surf. He heard nothing. It was just a shell, after all. It didn’t really make its own sound. But the illusion should have been there, telling his ears that he held in his own hands a part of the ocean, the way dusk tells the eyes that the sun is sinking rather than simply revolving around the earth. There was no sound. Irrationally, he shook it and tried again. He changed ears. It was as if the inner chamber were a prison where no life had ever survived. David threw it down and pushed it once again into the sand.

Why can’t I have this? he thought. What’s wrong with me? He remembered his confusion about the ride home from work. Depressed or something. The thought of a clinical environment made him cringe and walk faster. He began to run, leaving the space of a sprinter between his footprints. Saltwater splashed on his shins and his lungs drew sharper breaths, telling his heart to rise in his chest, pounding out a drum’s rhythm. His feet barely touched the sand, carrying him farther away from where he’d begun. As far as I can manage.

Doubled over, a pain in his side, he gasped for oxygen. He staggered a moment, and swayed a little, feeling a strong aversion to looking behind him. His lips tasted of salt and his chest hurt with heaving. He held his knees and tried to let his pulse slow. Too hot. Just need to cool down.

“You OK?”

The glint from her earrings made him squint and raise his hand to shade his eyes.

“You do this often?”

“No. Never.” His own voice was a reasonable sound that called him back to the familiar.

She didn’t answer. He noticed first her hair, which was both red and brown, curled at her cheeks, stopping just short of her neck. She wore a light blue exercise suit with vertical white and royal stripes. She was olive-complected, five foot seven, and athletic.

He recalled the exercise room at work. “No, I don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Huh? I don’t want to . . . “ He tried to recall whether she’d asked him anything else. “I’m sorry. I’m just winded.”

He sat down.

She swung a bottle of water from a lanyard at her waist. Ozarka. “Here.”

He sputtered a moment and felt some come through is nose. Wiping his face, he looked up at her. Realizing she was still smiling, he drained the remaining ounce from the plastic bottle, and crinkled it in his palm. Stupid.

“Better now?” She was still smiling.

Ordinarily, he would have looked away, but somehow she was the only tenuous link with why he had come here. Why had he come to the beach? He realized he hadn’t answered. “I . . .”

“Feels like the end of the world.”

“What?”

“The ocean. Sometimes, I look out there” She gestured simply, but his eyes were on her long fingers. “and it feels like the place where heaven and earth meet.”

She smiled. “It’s beautiful.” She was looking at where the waves became flat and joined the horizon. It was a place that, if the eye watched it, made the ground under one’s feet seem to move.

“I don’t come very often. In fact, I haven’t been . . . I can’t remember the last time. As a child, I think, but I know it must have been more often than that.”

“Makes you forget, perhaps.” She sat down.

She bent her knees and let the water wash over the tops of her feet. Her toenails were painted red. Flushing a little, he looked at her face. He would have looked away again, except her eyes were still on the horizon. Even if he’d had something to add, he wouldn’t have interrupted that look. In that moment, she seemed a lord of the world, one of those beings that the elements of sky, of water, and earth were meant to serve. Flights of fancy on the periodic table.

“What’s your name?”

“David. David Doss. Yours?”

“Candace. For now, just Candace.” She smiled warmly.

Her ear held gold teardrops with diamond studs, elegantly out of place in the daylight.

“What do you do?” they both asked at once. He laughed, and she giggled.

“I’m an analyst,” he said. “I study sales trends for a technology company.”

“Do you like it?” She dug her fingers into the sand, making little starfish, and occasionally toying with a cured, sun-bleached bit of shell.

“I don’t really know. I think I must, since I keep going back.”

She chuckled. “He has a sense of humor.”

“Only today, I think.” He smiled, delicately, as if trying out making the first lines in his face. “You?”

“I work in a lab. Exciting work, sometimes. Today, though, I’m a beach comber.”

“You’re combing?”

“Oh, yes. Looking for winded men to run into me on the beach and drink my last bottle of water.” Her eyes were green. Or blue, he wasn’t sure.

“I didn’t exactly run into you.”

“Near miss, I’d call it. Like I said, I am the one doing the combing.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Yes, I am. But you started it.”

“True. Thanks for the water.”

“That’s OK. I’ll let you make it up to me.”

He felt in that moment as if he did want to make it up to her.

She stood and offered him a hand. “Unless you think I’m being too forward.”

“You’re picking me up?“

“Well, I occasionally pick up things on the beach. Usually, it’s just shells.” He shuddered a little and put the thought of his earlier experience from his mind. “Today, I just happened to find one that’s occupied. Besides, it’s not every day I get to rescue something from the surf. You don’t already belong to someone else, do you?”

“Huh? No.” He could feel the blood rush to his face. “I . . . no, not at this time.”

“Uh huh. Good. Well, then I’d say you owe me at least a glass of wine.”

“All right. I can do that. My car is just down the shore . . .”

“We can take mine, unless you’re planning to run all the way back.” She put a slender hand on his back. “Remember, I don’t have any more water.”

Her touch was electric. It crawled between his shoulder blades and up along his neck until he shuddered a little, without being able to help it, and hoped she didn’t notice. “You’re making fun of me.“

“Who’s making fun? I’m truly worried that I’ll have to wave down cars and beg for something cold and refreshing.” She displayed an immaculate set of teeth between lips that were, he realized, naturally red.

“All right, let’s get you a glass of wine, so you’ll forget about this … Say, you aren’t hungry are you?”

“I could eat. But really,” she grinned, “it was just a little water.”

“Come on,” he said. He slid his feet into his shoes without bothering to tie them.

“That one’s mine.” She pointed at a white mini-van parked the long way against the barrier.

He looked down the roadway where it seemed his own vehicle was a speck in the distance. Then he realized, as the speck moved in the opposite direction, that it wasn’t his. In fact, he’d run far enough along the shoreline that the road curved away out of sight.

She opened the passenger door for him, holding it with a silent smile. The interior had that vague new car scent. He leaned over and tried to open her side, but he couldn’t find the button that controlled the lock.

She slid in, buckled up, looking to make sure he had done likewise, and turned over the ignition. Her key ring had no fob. It was just a wire loop.

“New?” he asked, as she made a U-turn onto the roadway.

“Hm? Oh, yes it is.” A cyclist passed with a slight nod, going in the opposite direction.

The center line curved around a bend, until he saw the tow truck backing up to his SUV.

“STOP!”

“What? What’s wrong?”

“That’s mine! I’m getting towed!”

“Are you sure? Maybe he’s just . . . “

“STOP! Please.”

“Maybe I should have a talk with him.”

“I don’t see why, it’s my car . . .”

She grinned at him devilishly.

“Oh. Well, I still don’t see why he should be towing me. It’s free parking here, and its only been parked three hours.”

“I’ll enjoy taking care of it.”

She left the minivan running a few yards from the truck. In a moment, she was talking with its agitated driver. Her arms were at her side, but her hands balled. The driver appeared unable to comprehend what she was trying to convey.

David pressed a button on the armrest and rolled down the window. He could hear her saying, “You’re early! Can’t you people do anything right?”

She took a cell phone from her hip pocket, flipped it open, pressed a button twice, and held it to her ear. “I’ve got him, but your guy is fucking it up. Tell him he’s made a mistake.”

He felt frozen in a dream, in which she was suddenly less friendly and far less of a chance meeting than a moment before.

The tow truck operator wore a black tank over heavily tattooed pectorals. The driver looked toward the van and saw David watching through the open window. His pulse raced. Candace turned to follow the driver who now trotted toward the van. Time broke to the beat of his footfalls, two per second across pavement.

“Idiot!” Candace screamed. “Get my keys!” The face behind that voice was contorted in rage as David sprang behind the wheel, dropped the van into drive, and accelerated just short of spinning the tires, whipping the van around and back onto the roadway.

Adjusting the rearview mirror, David saw the cyclist turning in to join Candace and the driver leaping into the cab of the tow truck. He mashed the accelerator and sped to 95mph, forty-seven seconds from the onramp.

Sliding into traffic, he passed the next exit, and made it to the left lane with nothing familiar in the rear view. He slowed to 80, only then realizing that his hands were shaking on the wheel. He stared at them until they grew calm, and considered going home.

For a moment, he couldn’t remember where he lived. When the address and then the exit appeared in his mind, he found that he didn’t want to remember. He flipped on the air conditioner and buckled his seat belt as the mile markers went from high to low.

It was 6:45 when he realized he was no longer in the same state.

Additional Rules of the Church of Work

Rules of Work started out as a project of thinking about work and what it means in the wake of the economic collapse in my country – one that put me out of a regular job and set me on the path to self-employment. Like all of my web sites under many and various pseudonyms, it is also a self-authored instructional manual for my life and a personal manifesto.  When I write “you must” I really mean “I must”. It’s a contemporary writing form that you find in such works as those by Chris Guillebeau (How to be Awesome, A Brief Guide to World Domination, 279 Days to Overnight Success). It is the journal of what you mean to do – what you have decided you must decide. It’s the eschatological and prophetic writing of the personality – it is one’s future outlined in the form of one’s intention. This has been a week of particular inspiration, so here are some of the principles I want to assert. Each of these is its own mini blog post, but I include them here in one, for convenience.

Reach forward instead of reaching back – prefer goals to nostalgia. I’ve spent a good chunk of my life on a quest – trying to re-acquire TV shows from my childhood, music from my youth, and to revive or relocate relationships from my early manhood. But those TV shows have lost their fascination, that music has lost its context, and the previous relationships have long since lost their substance. I was looking to consolidate and add up the parts of my past that seemed best – seemed most like bright spots – and when I had them in hand, they had crumbled like houses made of sawdust. Today I stopped in to a store that specializes in media from the old days – from Atari cartridges to movies on Betamax. Within moments, I realized I have moved on. There was absolutely nothing there that held any interest. What has changed is that I’m looking ahead. Not that I am unaffected by the past – not that it doesn’t hold agony and power – but that my aspirations are not there. Another thing that finalized this was a failed attempt to reconnect with my father. I realized this week that I had to cut my own rope and sail on, and also that I had only just now cut it by, having accepting that he was never going to do his part and cut it for me, drawing new boundaries.  I have drawn and stuck to them, and stuck to them some more, and I find myself at last on the open ocean in that final arena of the past. And just as holding back had negatively affected my old outlook on my business, letting go and cutting loose has finalized a new one. It’s been a rough week but with ultimately beneficial results.

Risking a life of the imagination means shaking off a passion for safety and certainty. By “imagination” I mean not fictional or ‘unreal’ but a life that is the repository of what you’d hope for, reach for, strive for if you didn’t have anything to worry about. Have you ever asked yourself that question? What would you spend your life upon if you knew that you could not fail, knew that you would succeed in it, knew that nothing could harm you, hurt you, derail you, or destroy you. In my religious tradition, we might ask, “What would you do if you had no fear of death, nor of all its manifestations as suffering, pain, loss, and frustration?” Imagine yourself at the end of your life, standing up to accept an award for success, and having one chance to state your motto – the slogan under your identity – the “it’s the real thing” under your Coca Cola logo. What would it be? That too is this form of writing. Would your speech be: “Thank you very much. I’m glad to be here. I have always lived by one overriding principle: I have successfully evaded all the suffering I could. This is what I have achieved. I thank you for the award. I can die now, a successful and happy individual.” I’m not knocking it for someone else, truly, if that’s what they really want, more than anything – merely to avoid the risk of getting hurt. But it’s not what I want. A colleague of mine says, “People that insist that you live by that motto never do anything.” He has a point. They are not asking you to gear yourself toward doing – they’re asking you to gear toward avoiding, evading, and dodging an endless assault of life’s potential bullets. Ill health, financial ruin, people not liking you, their own disapproval… and on and on ad infinitum. That last because the possibilities for failure are all consuming and never ending. A life spent avoiding things is a life spent dedicated to things that do not exist – on making sure they never exist – a life spent making sure the monster under the bed never acquires actual substance. It is not, in fact, a life spent on bringing things into being. I know hurt very well. I’ve had many times more than my share. But I would relive every moment of it again gladly for nearly any of the moments I have now. But if I’m going to spend my life dedicated to things that do not currently exist, then I’m going to spend it on the life of my best imagination, not my worst fears. I’m going to spend it energized and enervated by desire and determination to achieve what I dream of most, not evading what haunts the nightmares of others. Again, I’m not knocking that for you, if you want it differently, but it must be our own dreams by which we live our own lives, not those of our parents, our bosses, our teachers, or anyone else. We must each be free to dream our own dreams, not lash ourselves to the mast on the dream ship of another captain. For me, I would rather spend myself running toward life than running away from death.

The only life you have is the one you are living right now – choosing the future is choosing today too. The Orthodox saint Maximos the Confessor made a philosophical and religious observation that I have found incredibly liberating and empowering as I evaluate the philosophies offered up by others. He said that hypotheticals don’t exist. Put another way, what you are afraid of that might happen to you does not occupy the reality governed by the desire you are currently working toward. The latter is real, in that it governs your life right now, and it cannot share that governance with the fearful awe of the hypothetical – it’s one or the other. To reverse this order is to live a kind of non-life governed by as yet unrealized terrors. In the Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King, character Andy Dufresne makes his escape from prison by snaking his way through the foulest imaginable sewer pipe. In an almost mysteriological expression of what redemption really is, baptismal symbolism intentionally intact, Andy ‘crawled through a river of slime and came out clean on the other side’. The question I would put to Andy is “If your life ended a moment later, would the effort, risk, and every moment of planning and execution up until then have been worth it?” I have already given you my answer and, in terms of suffering, my life for some 40 years has not been that different from his, except in the particular facts. There’s a sense in which merely living more of life in a hypothetical future is less important than living life at all. What would your answer be? In other words, if you ask yourself, “In your own judgment, which is the only one that matters, would this moment of your life have been worth how you have lived, what you have sought, and all that you have aspired to, if you knew you were about to die?” If your answer is “yes”, then I tell you that you are a success. This is the only measure, in fact, of success, because it is the only one that you can entirely and truly own. There are people who are brutally robbed of this by others. The Thai girl-child sold into sexual slavery for the pleasure of affluent foreign visitors. A host of other creatures throughout all of history. I offer them no quasi-religious positive thinking solutions that tell them that if you just have the right attitude your life is fulfilled. I offer them no merely spiritual “Heaven is all that matters” scenario. Your life matters right now, Heaven or no. But I offer no such solution, because neither I nor you can tell another what their life means. We must each answer the question ourselves. And if we have been robbed of it, and have fallen and failed, if despair and the will of others has overtaken our lives, then we may very well answer “no”. And that is truly hellish, and words won’t make it otherwise. All lives have meaning, whether or not they are fulfilled. The one question may be religious or philosophical, but the latter question is deeply personal. We may have been so blinded by others who keep us psychologically captive that we only know a world of shit with no exit at all. I lived a childhood like that. But even that past is gone, and will never exist again, and is not my life, however much I am informed by it or scarred by it. There’s no hypothetical life in the future, either, as much as I choose to direct my life forward toward my desire and not backward toward my fear. The only life I have is the one I am living at this precise moment. And I am truly grateful, because I judge it a bright and shining success. I have been permitted mastery of the moment, despite the obstacles.

Think in terms of success not of failure. I have defined success, indirectly, as a life directed toward one’s deepest desire, one’s highest hope, one’s brightest dream, and not toward one’s darkest terror. With that understanding in mind, I find that a successful life is one lived with the intention to win rather than the contemplation of losing. The “realists” will offer a toxic antidote to success. They will tell you the wise person lives a life of caution, of care, of concern for the possibility of disaster. But as a successful man, able to consider my life a “win” even if I drop dead as I write this, I can tell you that I have found quite a contrary principle to be true. A life focused on your dreams – a life of imagination and hope at the *expense* of a focus on potential disappointment and discomfort – does itself protect you from the very things others are concerned and cautious about. Let me give you an example: I do not spend much time thinking about my clients leaving me, my business going bankrupt, or getting too sick to work. A “realist” would say these are ‘healthy concerns’. I argue they are an infection upon a healthy and going concern. And I bend that meaning intentionally to make a point. When I focus on being awesome at helping my clients succeed, I find that they keep me in business. When my attention is on the delight and triumph of making my clients money, I find that I make a living. When I dedicate myself joyously and enthusiastically to what I love (which is what I choose to do for work – and if you love something, I recommend you find a way to do it for work too), I notice that I actually get healthier, that I develop a strong resistance to the things that have tended to undermine my health (fear, stress, despair), that I’m more motivated to engage in and enjoy healthier activities (like exercise and a better, less desperate diet), and finally that (financially) I’m better able to do about the only thing left that any of us can do to compensate for some kind of injury or illness (i.e. buy healthcare). Sure, my hands could fall off, and I couldn’t type. But I notice that once I accept that I will always do all I can to pursue a life of meaning and joy, I find myself far more adaptable – far more certain that I’ll always be able to pursue those things regardless of what life throws at me. A more concrete version of this: I have zero fear that I’ll ever find myself unable to start a business, precisely because I am always open to seeking meaning in anything, and then doing it as a vocational pursuit. My original maxim, folks – the primary rule of work – has always been: “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing as work.” So if my hands fall off, I’ll make videos. If I lose the power of speech, I’ll draw cartoons with my toes. If I lose those too, I’ll tap out novels in morse code for my secretary with whatever bloody stump is left. And if my brain caves in on itself, well I’ll create fabulous worlds in my own mind which is, after all, the source and repository of all the joy and meaning I can find. Whether you think the afterlife is just food for worms or what, while I live, I’ll really live, and nothing is going to take that away from me. And if it did, I’d still say it was worth it. If this moment right now is worth all my past, then it’s worth whatever the future holds as well. So why exchange an inexchangable, incomparable, irreplaceable life that’s worth having at the expense of all the bad things that have or might happen, for a life that’s actually focused on all those bad things that might happen? The notion of a “healthy fear”, friends (call it “caution” or “concern” or disguise it as whatever canard you like) is toxic. Fear is the obliteration of all that’s healthy, all that’s joyous and full of meaning – fear isn’t what leads to a successful life – fear is the antidote to life. If I let fear govern me, I’ve already given up, and all the moments ever after wouldn’t be worth living. A life focused on achieving your dreams is unburdened by a sense of defeat. In fact, most of the other successful people I admire say that a kind of “arrogance” toward danger – a heady confidence – a disbelief and scorn for the possibility (and acceptability) of failing (not setbacks, but utter and irretrievable failure) – is actually a necessary trait in success. By implication, the stubbornness to get up and go forward again, no matter what happens to you, is also a required vice. I used to run contingency scenarios in my head (what the CIA calls “games”) – what I would do if I was homeless, to proceed, to go on. Psychologists prescribe this as the antidote to fear – you think about your worst fear happening to you, then you think about what you are going to do next, and so the fear begins to lose its power over you. You can see your life beyond it – see your life in terms of your goals, your intentions, your desires – not in terms of your fears. Would that such light had governed the U.S. in the previous presidential term. Recently I heard that Jackie Onassis was asked the same question – “What would you do if you lost all your wealth?” – she answered, “I would take any job I could get, and save up $300, buy an excellent suit, and go where the rich people are.” She could lose it all – we’ve seen how economies of scale go under quite recently, if we’ve seen anything – and yet, she’s not afraid – more importantly, she’s not focused on fear – she’s looking the other way – the thing the fearmongers always tell you not to do.

Toxic attitudes are the poison potions that kill meaningful work – shun them as heresy. I don’t know how to explain all of this in a way that breaks through the conceptual barriers of those who urge a focus on safety, security, and certainty. What they offer is a life that might achieve all of those at the expense of everything else, even of truly living. I don’t know how to convey that a life focused on your heart’s desire is the safest, securest, most certain life one can live. They won’t hear it. The non-life of evading nightmares is incapable of processing the actual living of pursuing dreams. Even though if you do the latter, the other will take care of itself. What they want of you is not that you will be safe, but that you will think like they think, that you will see the world as they see it, a terrifying obstacle course where the only value you have is existence itself – the moments you can steal wherein you don’t suffer. You’ll never have enough money in the bank, never enough insurance, never enough fright to satisfy their worries, because it’s not about that – it’s about a shift in direction. You focus on dying, not living. I really believe that such a teleology, and it’s accompanying semantic, is so toxic that it can only retranslate the attempt at life, of transcending despair, into a perceived foolishness and a detachment from the world that its epistemology asserts is “real”. We do not occupy the same ‘ground’, to use the philosophical term. We cannot really argue or have a discussion about it, because we don’t really share any common assumption. As John Duns Scotus said, unless we have at least one shared premise, we cannot even really converse. A life lived obsessed with safety is a life hovering over the abyss of all possible Hells. The life we’ve been describing is that narrow path to the one and true Heaven of meaning and otherwise inexplicable joy. It is not without reason that people in my religious tradition say that we must find the thing that calls out to us to do with ourselves from the deepest part, not the surface – that ‘vocation’ that is built into our individual clockworks by whatever has created us as individuals – distinct from one another, and we must do it as our very salvation. Our work, the work that comes from the deepest part of the soul, and from the frame – the very tangible and historical character of our bodies subsisting in time, is our soteriological participation in the uncreated energies of God. It is the way in which we experience the joy and hope and faith of angels and saints. In short, what we are meant and made to do is what we are meant and made to do, and it can be enjoyed for good or distorted for evil, piloted by hope of life or scuttled by fear of death. Trying to claim the latter is the source of meaning is really our only heresy, summarizing all the others.

Work is a church. I have been casually accused of “making a religion out of work” – to which I can only reply that it was always religious. What deserves more of our fervor? What requires more of the joy of our sinews, the hope of our being, the affection of our consciences than a life dedicated to do what one’s very cells and membranes, harmonized with the intelligent perception of the soul, cry out to accomplish? And the epistemological attitude necessary to such a life is one that looks forward (eschatology) to the worth of the heart’s desire rather than backward to the nostalgia of an already spent youth, that risks the theoretical safety of avoiding hypothetical failure for the present certainty and beatific vision of a world conceived and so experienced without fear (soteriology), that dwells by intention in the incomparable worth of the present (phenomenology), and abides in the expectation of glory as one’s present assurance and purpose in living (teleology). Atheism in regard to work can only tell you what might not succeed. It cannot account for the inner force that determines otherwise while simultaneously defining its own standard for success. I have always disputed reaching for empty faith – the kind that merely builds and hopes – invests in a coffee shop in a town of twelve or opens a hair salon on the invisible hind end of a shopping center (by the dumpsters) because I just really want to run a successful organic java joint or really like thinking of myself as a famous hair stylist. Those aren’t the inner voice – they’re the denial of it – they’re the very fear we reject turned into a program of despairing refusal to apply the whole self – they are the leap of the body without the mind, or the desire without the work of the sinews. The Christ, when invited to throw himself off a cliff after a vision of achievement without religious dedication, devotion, and sacrifice said ‘You don’t dump your own involvement and let God or the forces of the universe take care of everything else.’ But in rejecting that kind of attitude, he rejected fear in kind, and so a very different understanding of faith would be articulated by one of his apostles: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for.” In other words, there’s a kind of “faith” that involves the whole self – the hopes, dreams, aspirations, intentions, desires, determination, and complete commitment of the faithful – and what you have when you invest those things is a life lived with assurance – with a kind of certainty of success that can seem counterintuitive to a vocationally atheistic denial of meaning and focus on the hypothesis of the abyss. So if that oddly less desperate freedom from doubt is what we mean by “faith”, then yeah, I think faith is essential to success – I think it’s the very sign and representation of success. And I think every day of a life lived with that kind of faith is a day worth living even if there are no more days ever again after that. Every such day is the recapitulation – the sum of all the other days that ever were or might have been – totaled as a successful life, as though all the things that have ever been or will be for you have “worked together for good”, despite what they might have meant individually and taken out of that perspective. My great grandfather, an agricultural man, had but one wish in his last years – to die with his hand set to the plow, so to speak. We found him at the woodpile, ax in hand. That is holy. A monk’s work is to pray endlessly for the peace of the world. A priest’s work is to serve the Incarnate God to the people. And our work, we who are neither priests nor monks, is to carry every bit of the same meaning and dedication to all the days of our lives. I hear people saying the goal is to put up with work until you can afford to just play. Religious or not, they talk of work as a curse placed upon the first man – “by the sweat of your brow, you’ll make your bread from among thorns”. That’s heresy. The goal is to find no difference between work and play. The first man was made to do one thing – “tend the garden and keep it”. It’s not work that was the failure – it was what man did to change the garden – to alter work and make it an agony. The original work, and the work many of us find in our hands today, is a church.

Venerate the evangelists, not the skeptics: A religious philosopher with whom I disagree in almost every respect was once casually asked “What would you do if you knew the world would end tomorrow?” In the supreme moment of clarity, concentrating on his work, he blurted out “I would plant a tree.” In other words, ‘I would do whatever I was going to do anyway. If not, why am I doing it at all?’ My wife, who is a hair stylist, and is one because that is the complete joy and absolute delight of her vocational life, without knowing of this account, told me today that one of her clients asked her what she would do if she knew she would die tomorrow. She answered, “I would show up for work and take hair appointments.” When I look at her, I see that rapturous grasp of work, one’s true work, the destined work of one’s hands, as a font of meaning, that abiding assurance of a life lived to its fullest because, while she is not yet entirely as famous as Tabatha Coffey (most awesome stylist on TV), she lives every day with the fearless abandonment of a caution for failure, the almost reckless attention to what it is she is doing, and the happy disposition of someone who figured out what she’d rather do than anything else and then wouldn’t let anyone talk her out of it for anything. My wife is a saint of the church of work. She’s a religious icon of the gospel of vocation. When I met my wife, I made it my mission to help her find and fulfill her vocation as the highest and best devotion I could give her as a life partner. And to witness her utterly happy, while I myself am utterly happy, each in our primary pursuits, each in how we spend the majority of our waking hours, is not only supremely gratifying, but means that neither of us is ever without an immediate example of why we bother to get out of bed in the morning. This is the way of my house, the way my household greets the day. It may hold no shine for some – it may not be what they want for themselves – but no amount of skepticism as to its reality can detract from lives lived in the continual experience of it. Real is not “realism” – real is how we are actually living. And belief, my friends, is properly that which corresponds to reality, that which is verified in the lives of the believers. Fear,  by contrast, has no reality. It is the illicit preoccupation with the hypothetical. Be atheists about our belief, if you want, but denying something is not the same as that something failing to be real. Like St. Paul encountering the Messiah on the road to Damascus, I can only tell you what has happened to me and how it abides with me still and, as I believe, ever shall. Amen.

So, as I say, a fruitful week. Seven new rules of work, and no doubt more to come.

Confessions of a Quiet Home Office Worker

I do project work and consulting, and my office is one of the largest rooms in my home. Like a lot of home office workers (I prefer “home office professional”), I always have multiple projects at once. So working all the time is just part of the deal. If I’m not working on a client’s project, I’m working on one of my own. This is not a complaint – far from it.

Blast from the Past: Rule of Work #1: If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing as work. It’s a good life. A life of constant meaning.

That said, it can be hard to convey the particular circumstances of it to people looking in from the outside. It might be explaining to someone why you aren’t treating e-mail like chat and responding instantly, or why you’re selective about volunteer work and need to get paid for your core competencies (you know that auto mechanic who is always getting hit up to help with friend’s cars?), or just that yes, as a home worker, you are entitled to sleep, go to the gym, and spend time with your family – you’re not giving that up and sitting there waiting patiently for any word to drop from your various contacts, clients, and colleagues. My wife and I recently had to establish for her business that yes, it’s OK, and absolutely necessary for a hairdresser to take a couple of days off per week and get enough rest and down time. But aside from the basics – what your work is (avoiding mission creep), and when you do it (avoiding the “on call” nightmare),  the simplest way to define your work environment and work process is to outline your approach to the atmosphere of constant communication. So here, in brief, is how one office works. These are the terms of my self-employment:

Hours Flexible: I might be working at 3am or in bed by 9pm. I might sleep until 4pm, which might be sleeping 5 hours or 15. I work off of appointments. I make them, keep them, and then the rest is up to me. Of course there are deadlines, but they’re flexible. We’ve all heard “under promise and over deliver”. That’s deadlines, too. If I say something usually takes two weeks, it’s because it usually does. But if a blizzard wipes out the internet or power, then it is what it is – we don’t swear by deadlines, and we don’t miss them. Also, with any kind of project work, your own deadlines have to account for client deliverables. If clients hear “usually two weeks, assuming all your deliverables in place to start” and they send their pieces 13 days in, you tell them “about two weeks from now”. If you get it earlier, well and good, but fixed deadlines are a source of ruin – our deadlines are like our work hours – they’re movable feasts. Hours flexible and by appointment means too that I avoid phone tag. I set phone appointments and I don’t miss them (I’ve missed only one in the history of my business, it was with a friend, and I’m still embarrassed by it). There’s nothing worse than burning time for everyone by getting together with clients “whenever”.

Not On-Call: Personally, I never answer the phone, unless it’s my wife. I know that’s radical, but it works in my line of work. For one thing, I’d never get anything done – I’m actually working on clients’ projects, after all. For another, I’m a consultant, so I charge for phone time, and so I call outbound only, by appointment. Other than that, voicemail messages are transcribed instantly and sent to e-mail, where I respond to them while multi-tasking, without interrupting scheduled projects. I set appointments by e-mail, so everything goes smoothly. When I picked up the phone and answered all my inbound calls, I got unplanned (so un-billed) calls 24/7 – picking my brain, asking for advice, seeking a “how to” that “shouldn’t take long” (“you’re a mechanic, can you just listen to my engine for a sec – I know it’s a weekend…”), and I lost tons of hours I’ll never get back to “I just prefer to work exclusively by phone” – even for the most trivial matters. So I stopped. I’m not a call center. I can always hire one, but then the price has got to see a 400% increase. Seriously – I save bookoo buck for my clients by NOT putting Suzie or Jim or Karesh on that phone 24/7. So now when someone calls my business line, I get it as e-mail, and that also weeds out the spam calls, which is a nice bonus. And it converts a synchronous medium (“I want you *right now*!”) into an asynchronous one (email response: “I got your msg. The answer is yes.” or “Thursday works better for me – how about 2pm or 4pm your time?”). Besides, frequently I can actually respond faster – instead of wasting everyone’s time playing phone tag, I often get an e-mail response out without missing a beat (but again, I don’t promise it).

Blackberry Not Included: I don’t use mobile devices. Again, if I did, I’d never sleep, eat, or anything else. I’m not part of the Blackberry culture, and not because I’m somehow technologically challenged or old-fashioned. It’s because I don’t want to be stalked by every little concern, wish, or personal observation everyone in my “network”  might have. You’ve seen those commercials where someone introduces the crowd behind them: “this is my network”? Really, that’s exactly what it’s like for a lot of people. I can’t get work done that way. If you were in an office, would you hire the person who is always on their phone to work on your team? Neither would I. How about this: do you take your “device” into the john with you? That’s what I had to do when I answered my phone all the time – if I took e-mail along too, I’d literally have to shower with it. E-mail is in one room and waits until I see it. When I leave that room, it’s family time only. I don’t promise clients always-on response time, I don’t send out a general announcement just to take a day off to myself or with my family, and I don’t apologize “for just now getting back to you” after 8hrs because a lot of people treat e-mail like chat, spend all day in Facebook, and keep their earpiece on and Mobile e-mail vibrating in a holster. I treat myself as the busy president of my company, not the Blockbuster cashier of my company. The results are, I communicate effectively, selectively, and I accomplish things my clients need, generally by the time they have to ask. And above all, I get peace in my work.

Rule of Work: It is always, always the goal to work on, by, and according to your own terms. You’ll compromise, but if there’s no end to that, it’s not work, it’s servitude.

Terms of Self-Employment: So, when I hired myself full time, those were the terms I accepted and I have insisted on abiding by them. It’s different than how a lot of self-employed people work, I know. I don’t begrudge them their e-mail holsters, as long as they’re not doing it while driving – and then of course I think they’ve got a screw loose (look at how they’re weaving over the line). We’ve each got to define our own office rules – the terms of our own self-employment – how free we are, how harried, how much of our lives belong to who and what. How effective we’re going to be vs. how thinly spread. My wife finally deciding on two days off to reset, means she’s stellar all the time, not stellar for 10 hrs and tired for 2. Maybe, though, by drawing a circle and defining some time as exclusively ours and our families’, some part of our lives as immune to the interests of others – by not defining self-employment as a modified form of wage slavery, where anyone with a communication device can wind it up and make you jump as surely as a foreman in a yard – where you’ve traded one boss for hundreds – maybe we’ll all encourage one another to hold the line for the dignity of our professions in the face of all the incessant yacking. If you don’t think about communications, you’ll spend so much time on the phone and in e-mail that may have stopped doing what you love. And what good is that?

Rule of Work: How you handle communications will determine whether you do what you love or merely talk about doing it.

Freelancing vs. Mom’s Couch

CBS was talking this evening about the growth of freelance work – projecting significant growth over the next couple of years. What was striking was how negative the reporting seemed. One of the two people interviewed was saying “the important thing is not to be idle” and the reporter presented freelancing as being just one rung above collecting unemployment – with employment clearly being preferable to freelance work, the moment the former is available. The entire piece presented freelance work as a regrettable sentence, a misfortune, and implied that somehow it means less money. What are these people smoking?

What we’re seeing is a lull in the parental relationship between employer and employee, and I think that’s a good thing. But it’s like listening to 30-year old men complain that they can’t live in Mom’s basement forever. The idea that employee status is superior, is the goal, is in fact the pinnacle of success in our culture is assumed, as an unaccountable absolute. Didn’t we just learn the opposite? Apparently not. This is my biggest gripe with those who keep saying, “it’ll turn around soon” – like Napoleon – “this’ll all be over by Spring”. Besides the fact that they’ve been saying that for the last two years, a tiptoe through the tulips faith-in-magic kind of optimism that has no basis in how economics really works, there’s no real learning – no real sense of cultural repentance – it’s as if there were nothing wrong with the system as it was, and this is something that just happened to us. It’s like listening to a culture of perpetual adolescents who ruined their credit, present it as if they just had some bad luck – the universe didn’t smile on them, and are clearly going to be shopping like mad as soon as they can be, applying for that credit card the moment they’ve got a chance.

There are three lessons of this economic event for adults. By adults, I mean those of us who aren’t looking for yet more dependency on the cultural parents that failed us so spectacularly. The first is that you obviously can’t dump trillions into a global policy of invasion and not break the empire’s bank. This is not primarily a political blog, so we’ll just say that and set it aside, but if we don’t believe things just magically ‘happen’ to us, we’ve got to say the cost of hubris is a factor. The second lesson is that it’s your fault, all this, and my fault, and we all share in this fault in some way. It’s silly to explain it as just a few rogue bankers, or the entire lending industry, or an irresponsible bunch of poor people (if you’re that type). You did this too, and I helped, so adulthood means not blaming everyone *except* ourselves for “getting us into this”. The third lesson we’ve mentioned before – all the BS that gets parroted from previous generations about job security, education being the ticket to vocational wellbeing, economic stability being the same as having a job, etc – it’s hoodoo – and we can’t go on believing in the face of empirical evidence.

What this economic shift offers us, actually, then, is a chance to grow up – a chance to get ourselves a little cleaner – an opportunity to live soberly. It’s interesting to watch even those who pride themselves in the rhetoric of self-reliance wail about “jobs”, as though that’s all that matters – someone coming to bail us out as individuals, all the while lamenting the “bail out” of the banks (which we all generally agree is a looting). Jobs. What’s wrong with going freelance? The CBS piece linked it with the notion of a lowered wage standard in most jobs. Well, that’s likely true, wage standards are likely going to be lowered for some time to come. Partly because we used an unprecedented portion of our economic potency to take over a number of pipeline routes and petroleum deposits in the Middle East. But are we really saying that the big disaster is we might end up working for ourselves? Or freelance?

And the notion that freelance work necessarily pays less, I find dubious. At first, some of it will. After all, there’s the silly notion in some corporate circles that freelancers are less valuable, more transient, and somehow ‘deserve’ less than employees. Sensibly, the opposite is true. We pay our own benefits, our own taxes, our own expenses, and there’s cost involved just being freelance. On top of that, you survive by being superior. Someone wants to pay me employee’s wages, and the discussion is over – it’s got to be a lot more. Desperation is going to make some people foolish in what they’ll accept, and they’ll price sell. OK, for a while. But it won’t last. A lot of us are going to get strong, while they just get robbed.

First, think about it – shouldn’t you, if you were a freelancer, be entitled to what they’d pay a staffing agency for a temp? I don’t mean what they’d pay the temp – I mean what they’d pay the agency itself. You incur the same costs, so damned straight that’s what you should be paid. Probably more. The staffing agency won’t pay for your doctor bills – you’ve got insurance costs to cover.

Second, the shoe is going to shift feet. As the number of freelancers doubles, we’re going to find new ways to organize, connect, and consolidate resources. The Freelancers Union is seeing a nice influx about now. The growth of social media indicates that a coming trend is for any set of disconnected people fending and fighting for themselves to, as they grow, utilize the attitudes and techniques of social media, which in turn will further that growth, and in turn further consolidate their ability to support one another, act in concert – in mental, emotional, and physical unison. In other words, what’s coming is an initial feeling of desperation followed by a transferrance of clout – a shift of power – from the employer to the contractor and to the freelancer.

What’s beautiful, from a freelancer’s perspective, is that they don’t see it yet. Opportunity is glowing in the dark, and they don’t see it. And this will help further the future of freelancing. The other thing that’s going to happen is an intellectual and emotional campaign to retain employer-like control in the context of contractor and freelance relationships. Be ready for it. Yes, it’s already there. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. But not to worry. The social media trends would seem to indicate an incredible likelihood of taking this out of their hands.

So, I’m not ready to lament about being out on my own, or wax nostalgic about mom’s sofa. I’m not sitting around and mourning the growth of freelancing and looking at it as a social problem. For one thing, some of us are thinking about how to make it a source of prosperity. For another, the freelancing trend offers genuine hope for a more mature, more self-aware, more ethical set of relationships – a more equitable exchange of value between service providers and service buyers.

Instead of standing out there shouting “jobs, jobs” with the obfuscators, the anti-benefits crowds, or the people who are just going along, why not ask for reduced taxes on the self-employed, and opportunities for access to the same kinds of benefits (especially group health care) that employees have long relied upon? The Freelancers Union, Free Agent Source, and congressional legislation allowing the self-employed to act as groups for purchasing healthcare all seem like positive directions for this.

I’ve only one thing to say to the CBS group about their report: I hope to remain *unemployed*. I’ve no problem with employment per se, but it’s not the holy grail – doing what you love for a fair exchange – that’s the target. I like being freelance, or self-employed, or an entrepreneur. I have no desire to trade freedom and prosperity for the illusion of security – if employment is an end in itself, rather than meaningful work, great pay, good benefits, and diversified sources of income, then why? Just because Mom has a nice couch? Relying on a single, canned income source wasn’t a good bargain at the start of this thing (just look what happened). It’s not a good bargain dealing with the fallout. You CBS guys should look on the bright side, or at least acknowledge that there is one, even if the cost was, in the estimation of many of us, unacceptable.

Business & Client Expectations – The Arena of Technology

One of the realities of client – company relationships is that, not infrequently, clients may not understand the meaning and significance or processes, protocols, technologies, and media that you must use precisely to maintain an efficient and effective set of client relationships. This can be especially true, if they or you work in a single-person or small office environment, or work from home. The other thing that can happen is that you and I may not understand the significance and meaning that clients have associated with technologies. We’re each working with  our own assumptions, and there’s a disconnect between business assumptions and client expectations.

In the area of technology, this is particularly common. The now classic book net.wars discusses how the internet came to be initially as a community of people who had certain protocols and standards for interaction that prevailed until online services (chiefly AOL) opened their gateways to the internet, spilling the first wave of people into the net who hadn’t played a role in creating these protcols, and largely weren’t aware of them. The best example is, of course, SPAM. It was AOL users, when first gaining access to usenet groups, that began to flood them with the first SPAM, starting a mutation of what was previously a more open and purely collaborative community into one that was necessarily more restrictive and protective. The F.A.Q. is a less negative example. The protocol for interacting in any forum, BBS (bulletin board system), or newsgroup has always been to first read the Frequently Asked Questions (F.A.Q.) before posting new ones. This both respects the users – keeping their attentions from being flooded with repetitive material and demanding redundant and wasteful effort in a collaborative environment – and also conserves storage, bandwidth, and general traffic over networks. If you came from an online service, however, it was provided initially by a corporation, not a collaborative community per se, and your expectations may have been to be able to post your question without reading anything at all, and to get an answer back from a customer service person. When the paying users of online services were let loose onto the more or less free internet, one of the things they brought with them was the view that discussion forums, newsgroups and the like were “help” forums, not *collaborative* communities.

The rules for each are different, obviously. In a collaborative community, you take into account everyone else’s time, attention, and interests before you post. The emphasis is on sustainability, more self-sufficiency and self-directed learning, and new questions and discussions should do what created the net in the first place – add to and extend what has gone before – grow it – further the development of the community itself and the technology that sustains it. In a help forum, the goal is to get your question answered quickly by an expert, regardless of whether it has been asked before by someone else. The result of these differing expectations was, as you can expect, that the original netizens (a term reflecting a sense of citizenship and civic-community responsibility – adherence to sustainable protocols for behavior) – the original netizens often viewed the newbies as uncivilized, arrogant in their demands to be spoonfed assistant by what are essentially volunteers and in the continual complaining over how things work, often without a lot of understanding of why some things are in place. The ‘newbies’ from the online services often viewed the original netizens as arrogant, “techno-geeks” who think you’re inferior or unintelligent if you don’t understand things, and too arrogant to “help” when there’s a document somewhere that explains the answer, and another document that explains the terminology used in the first document – which is of course, quite natural if these documents developed naturally over time, contributed to by a growing community of people who gradually learned their way around in a new society rather than paid $25/month (in 1993) for fast “walk-throughs” from large corporations like Prodigy, Compuserve, and AOL.

It’s no secret where my sympathies lie. I think you don’t barge into a community and demand it accomodate you as you pitch tent on people’s front lawns. And of course, having been involved relatively early, I have a strong respect for self-sufficiency – for people taking responsibility for their own needs to learn more – and for people who make an effort to learn instead of just demanding “walk throughs” all the time. But of course, I’m glad there’s a demand for training – I just insist that it be something we pay for rather than treated like something everyone else owes us. Community is where you collaborate by trading value for value – in that sense, you’re paying there, as well. If you just want the answer, not the community, and don’t want to contribute, then it’s got to be dollars.

A lot of the online communities have been transformed under the sheer pressure of humanity onto the internet, but a few exist now as services with paid memberships, precisely on the theory that if you pay, you’ll freeload less, though they work very differently than the service-oriented ones of the past. I’m thinking of a particular community that is mostly West Coast.

How does all this apply to business and work? Well, it’s precisely differing expectations that have to be managed in client-business relationships, and technologies and assumptions of protocol are the arena for working that out.

E-mail: Those of us that came from the world of typewriters and faxes, may not be aware of the many protocols. I have a colleague who used to try to treat it as chat. If I refilled my coffee before replying to an e-mail, I got back a bewildered response, a mere three minutes after the previous message, “Are you THERE?!?” Most of us know better, but a lot of people treat it like a walkie-talkie. Ever gotten or sent an e-mail that just says “OK”. Not every statement needs a reply. Then of course, there are people who don’t reply when they should. You make a substantive point and just never hear back from them. “Well, you didn’t ask a question.” All-caps is another one. It’s difficult to tell if it’s for emphasis, or if you’re shouting. So we end up sticking emoticons (smiley faces) on everything to make up for shouting. That piece of netiquette is well known. In corporate life, everyone loves to make fun of the person who hits “reply-all” to an e-mail from the CEO for a one-word response “OK” that then goes to all 5,000 members of the organization. It’s even worse when someone puts you on their “mailing list” and includes your e-mail address in the TO: or CC: line along with everyone else, effectively handing that ready-made “mailing list” to all the multi-level marketers he knows. Ever get that joke someone you know mails out to everyone in their address book? You know, the one containing that virus you got? Same thing.

Telephone: A much older technology, of course, but it has in fact evolved greatly. More and more of us are ditching land-lines for cell phones, or ditching cell phones for SIP phones (SIP is an internet protocol for telephony), etc. I make all my outbound business and personal phone calls in Skype. My inbound calls come to me as transcribed e-mails, allowing me to not interrupt my workflow. I don’t have a land line. And my cell is for emergencies, or for calling Google to get a phone number or address, if I’m away from home. But the way people talk on telephones has changed, too. My wife is a hair stylist, and a lot of her clients prefer to make appointments via text message. Cell phones are creating massive causes for car accidents, too – the mobility of communication is changing the protocols people follow. Some people think nothing of driving in two lanes while they chat about who is dating whom, or talking in a loud animated manner about things you’d expect to see on Phil Donahue when they’re inches in front of you in line for a cashier. I don’t even bother calling most clients on their land lines anymore – they don’t know why they have them, and neither do I, since they don’t answer them. The land line is more like “the voice mail line”. If I need to get through now, it’s the cell. But how business is expected to use the phone, even small business, is largely shaped by large corporations and paid subscription services. Sometimes people wonder that I don’t answer the phone 24/7 or have a staffer doing it. I can have someone do it, but you won’t get the expertise, so it’s just an appointment booking mechanism, and then the price of our services to the client has go to go way up. The overhead of having that staff around the clock as well as making all those appointments, and then hiring someone of equal talent and experience to keep them or else to do the work we’re doing for clients, means we now pay five salaries instead of one, just to answer the phone.

I figure not every client is my client, and just don’t do it. It keeps our costs to the client lower, my headaches fewer, and that’s a win-win for our target audience. As a small business, I don’t let large corporations set all the standards for me. After all, if we copied the way they build web sites, our clients’ marketing would suck. Small businesses have more flexibility to be more responsive than the large corps, and their advantage is in using it, not tying on tons of dead weight just to be “respectable”. If you want that, quit your business and go get a job. If you want to run your own shop, run it like your own shop. But you see, that involves considerations about how to manage expectations between company and client, specifically in the area of technologies. And should we, you may ask, put so much emphasis on technology as the arena for working this out? Yes. Yes, because what is contemporary technology in business all about? Primarily it’s about interactions and interactivity. From Twitter to live documents (like Google Docs) to Skype, it’s about connectivity, community (there’s that word again), and sociality (made that one up), and yes between company, client, and actually the rest of the world at large. And when that’s the case, when it’s a revolutionizing set of changes, as I believe it is, all these questions about our assumptions – our expectations – the protocols – the “rules” (as I like to frame them) – of our interactions come up. One of the things I’m continually talking about with my clients is how to be successful doing internet marketing in social media. The prime protocol – the primary rule – #1 – is don’t spam your audience. Don’t pitch them. Don’t confuse marketing with advertising. The surest way to alienate them and find twitter and facebook “useless” (which is something you convince yourself – not something that’s really what it is), is to keep telling them what you offer and how to get it. Instead, the protocol for social media – for the new Web 2.0 communities – is much, much more like what it was before 1994, than what it has been from 1994-2007. It is to give something of value away. To contribute by giving away your insight, analysis, information, expertise, and build a community through social contribution, drawing on your background and experience, earning you the place of resident expert. People who do that have no trouble ‘finding’ clients – the clients find them. The people who spam, find themselves in a pulpit without a congregation.

My advice, read two books. Tribes by Seth Godin, and net.wars edited by Wendy M. Grossman. Get yourself the picture of where we’ve been and where we’re going. It’s strongly related, because people are social animals, even the least social of us.

IM (instant messengers): Ever been in the middle of a really important thought, or activity, or finally trying to shut down, and up pops that <beep> instant message with “Hi. I saw you online”? Yeah, me too. It’s why I stay invisible all the time. Synchronous communication is for the absolutely lowest level of support in your organization. That’s why there are automated chat clients that do “automated support” for you, using artificial intelligence. If the chatter asks, “How do I reset my password?” the chat client dutifully responds with the link to the instructions along with some nice verbiage – “I have it right here, sir.” (it gets your gender from your client file, or guesses it from your name). If you have time to play that role in your business, by all means, put up one of those “Talk to me instantly” widgets on your site. I find synchronous communication to be a workflow-destroyer and, while it’s easy for clients to add me, I don’t use it for clients, I use it for staff. With e-mail, I can keep some structure and flow in my life. As an asynchronous communication form, it lets me have more than one client at a time, which is necessary to survive at all. I eliminate the expectation of instant responses, and usually set a standard of a reply within 24hrs. Ever seen those auto-responders that say “I’ll get back with you asap?” I don’t use them, but I understand why they are there. For one thing, the worst thing you can do to spam is auto-reply to it, thereby confirming your address as a sale-able part of the list, and exponentially increasing the likelihood of further spam in a never-ending snowball of e-garbage. Think before you automate. Some of us who have automated other things have, occasionally made mistakes, only to come back and find a serious mess on our hands. Wow, I can’t even tell you about a couple of things I’ve totally &*^%$-ed up that way. Automated payments, too. Remember that thing you thought you cancelled a year ago? Automate the expense, automate the payment, automate the renewal – argh! Anyway, managing client expectations for communications – synchronous vs. asynchronous – response time, times of day, etc. is key.

One of the things I always struggle with is how you make sure your clients know you work with multiple clients at once, so no you can’t stop and do six hours of straight work on their project on demand, just because they took the day off to focus on it. You may have six clients’ projects to touch that day. My best solution right now is to focus on turn-around time and response time. By conveying average turnaround time, up front, I am leaving myself free to have enough clients at once to survive, and hopefully communicating, at least subtly, that one client’s project is not all I’m doing today, one at a time, etc. If you’ve got good ways to get this across to set client expectations, please comment and add your advice.

Reminders: I send out action items frequently, and reminders if I haven’t heard anything in a few days. It’s interesting, because large corporations do the same thing, of course – I find the majority of clients appreciate it. Sometimes, if they’re feeling harried by other work obligations, and you’re dependent on them for deliverables to complete the project, they can feel pressured. Moreso, actually, because you’re a smaller business, your reminder is more personal, and it altogether seems more personal. This can prompt another exchange over it not being pressure, but just being what one client termed “due diligence” – staying up on it. We do what we can to manage the feelings of the recipient, but there are limits. If you’ve got ideas, please share them.

Online Documents: One of our solutions to the above issue is live, collaborative, online documents (like Google Docs). We’ll share a list of action items and other project documents that we maintain online in a secure environment, so they can at any time see the updates. The challenge is, of course, not everyone is yet used to live documents. Most people still think of documents as something you possess, that may be on your hard drive, rather than an interactive construct that you share and collaborate on and maintain. The former is the Microsoft mentality, who finds themselves haplessly trying to copy Google with Live Docs, though without the fundamental reasoning behind it, and the latter thinking – much more in tune with Web 2.0 and with how businesses really need to work to be efficient and effective – is Google’s. I’ve seen large corporations struggle, to much amusement, with sorting out and exchanging and collaborating on different versions of documents as e-mail attachments, meaning no two people can work on the same document at once (it’s “checked out” to use Microsoft’s early term when they first tried this), or else you can, but then you have to have another person who reconstructs a new version of the document out of the pieces worked on by each team member. That’s 2009 productivity for ya! So many useless jobs that technology gives us a way to live without. All it was waiting for was the motivation to waste less money. The only comforting thing for those of us that compete with big corps, is the assurance that they’re just finding different things to waste it on – it’s moving the peas on the plate, not making them disappear. Anyway, if you’re really, really not experienced with much beyond e-mail, the concept of a shared document, and even creating an account or logging in to see it, may be new to you. A lot of people get stumped, so it’s not the only solution. We fall back to e-mail until those clients’ own companies’ needs demand that they catch up.

Filing: That brings up e-mail again. Ever been asked for the same e-mail again and again – the client can’t find it, or deleted it, or doesn’t know what folder he put it in, etc.? It slows him down – he has to e-mail you to get his e-mail. And of course, it takes a bite out of your productivity and efficiency. This is why you’ve got to charge a substantive fee for your work. Because you’re going to serve as either tutor or efficiency triage for a percentage of your clients – one or the other. I’m not trying to pick on clients. I like my clients, and you probably like yours. What I’m saying is that we also have to talk about, and they about their clients, how you manage those expectations and what are the results. If my client is a real estate appraiser who is constantly having to stop during the day and take “What’s the status?” calls from his clients, he’d benefit from pro-active status updates – which is something my company uses, too. You get your clients started, then when they call, you wean them off of the phone, “Oh yeah. I sent you the status this morning. Did you get my e-mail?” Not an accusation, just always including the point that there’s another process already in effect, that they’re being taken care of. In the same way, we provide pre-designed tutorials at the completion of every project. And the tutorials indicate that custom instruction is also available for a reasonable fee. That sets the expectation. Before that, some clients would wonder why hours of custom instruction weren’t included in the spec. Now, we set the expectation by being proactive and also offering alternatives. That’s not all we do, but it’s enough to make the point here. Offer self-sufficiency and self-directed learning – offer the F.A.Q., so to speak – but make the “walk through” available for a fee. That’s the hybrid of the two protocols we described at the beginning.

Calendar Items: We send these and not everyone knows what to do with them, which is to be expected. They’re a protocol in corporate life, or in large offices with shared networks (server-installed e-mail/calendar applications like Outlook) where lots of meetings take place. Still, it works more than it fails. Some clients treat it as a confirmation, some as an invitation, and some as a calendar item. We love it. Rarely, but still sometimes, we get back “what am I supposed to do with this?” or the client gets confused over time zones. More commonly, because the client isn’t using these productivity tools in his own office, the client forgets about the appointment and is surprised at our call, which is exactly why calendar items were invented. Whether you are a one-man shop, a contractor, or working in an office of two people, calendar items can increase your productivity and minimize disparities between business-client expectations. I recommend Google Calendar. It’s faster and easier than Outlook (time is productivity), it’s compatible if your recipient uses Outlook, Lotus Notes, and a host of other e-mail/calendar applications, and it offers extra features if you’re a Gmail junkie like me.

Attachments: Ever ask for a .jpg or .gif and get a word document? Sometimes, you can’t even pull the image out of it without Microsoft reducing the quality down to garbage. Ever send an attachment, and your recipient has trouble viewing it? That’s why PDFs are helpful. Send a .jpg or .gif which is smaller and quicker, and your client might open it in Microsoft Picture Viewer which comes with Windows. Not only is the size it shows not real (it scales it without telling you), but your client might have trouble even finding an application to open it. What if it opens in Paint for them? It can be slow, and confusing. In the area of graphics, for that matter, it’s a very large number of people who can take photos but can’t locate them on their hard drive to attach and send to you, let alone crop or resize them (especially if Picture Viewer is displaying an scaled down size, when the real size – if they take photos at full resolution – is bigger than the wall behind their monitor). Attachments can be a pain. What I do is keep an eye on what my clients use every day, in their own profession, and that’s the format I prefer for that client group. If in doubt, I send PDF. A PDF printer driver is essential. Without it, your Word doc is going to open in Open Office, or vice versa. Your .jpg or .gif may be hopeless. Your Excel sheet may open in Excel, but if their default template is messed up, all the columns might get reset to standard width or something like that. What if they’re on a Mac, and you’re not? It’s not worth it. I manage client expectations by sticking with a cross-platform file format like PDF.

Social Media: What about Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn? I’ve had friends write things on my wall that I’ve had to delete, because my clients see them. I’ve had clients spam me, just like I’m one of their clients, because they’re hitting their entire contact list. It can be confusing if you haven’t learned the protocols and netiquette of being a netizen to graduate to understanding effective use of Web 2.0 social media. That’s why we teach this stuff, and provide consulting on it, etc. It can be used effectively, and it can be frustrating if you charge in not knowing how to do it effectively. I set up a blog for a colleague who promptly created an ideological flame war with it. I knew it would happen, but it was actually a good learning experience. You bring the assumptions of what you’re familiar with in other venues, and have to discover that “how the world works” isn’t really how it works – it’s just how it works in one place, at one time, among one group of people. The world is big. And if you see the world as big, the world is bigger. Remember, as we wrote about personality types and personality-based marketing, you are not normal – 75% of your clients are specifically *not* like you – they have a different set of assumptions, needs, and a different focus and direction. If you market to yourself, you sell 25%. Better put, you rule out 75% up front and pitch to a quarter of your audience. If you market to everyone, you’re at least reaching all those that are currently in your auidence with your message – then whether you grow your audience, and how they respond, is about the other things. The world isn’t the “how the world works” – that’s just my version – the quarter I’ve carved out. The world is also the 75% you don’t know. Anyway, after eventual frustration, the blog became an abandoned blog, like so many. But now the opportunity exists for him to rebuild, taking lessons learned – not overreacting by restricting discussion – monoblogs are overrated – not simply dumping the entire medium – “social media doesn’t work for me” – no, you weren’t working for social media – it’s you, not it, that must adapt, or else yeah, you’re tossing that audience away – that’s ok, more for the rest of us. Not to be cute, the point is that it’s a learning curve. Social media, whether for you, or your clients, is not Web 1.0. It’s not a “web site”. It’s not waiting for you to charge in with your existing assumptions.

It’s like 1994, when AOL allowed their users access to the internet. Do you go in and alienate the people that are already there, or do you choose to humble yourself, learn, and gradually come to understand the rules – the protocols of community in the new environment. Do you park on someone’s lawn or do you check into a hotel, visit the diner, and get to know the local vibe? Social media is a great venue for learning once again to learn, to become more self-sufficient in technology and, if you do that, you get to build amazing business potential. Rember the first spammer, who saw the gateway to the net as a license to blast every Usenet newsgroup with advertisements for multi-level marketing? That could be you, also. Ever seen a blog that was a series of ads? Or just a huge portrait of an otherwise boring personality? Here’s my favorite color this week. The rule is value. Give it away. Contribute. Focus on that, and only that, and all the rest follows. Your brand isn’t your logo, it’s what you say and do, folks. Social media is a great clarifying process. Your brand is who you are. It’s the substance too, not just the image. It’s the man and the mask – it’s both.

That’s it. Yeah, I know my writing style is unusual. It’s not wrong, tho. It’s part of the delightful incongruity that is me. As always, I hope it was helpful.

Supreme Court Rapes the Free World. Again.

Usually, I won’t make political comments, but in this case, they’ve walked into territory we’ve claimed as our own, so here goes:

The latest move by the Supreme Court to lift all corporate limits on campaign contributions is clearly aimed at preventing a repeat of the Obama election, who didn’t put them in office. Sure, he’ll be re-elected. But then the corporate stooges will make their next serious bid to regain executive power, and they’ll utilize the funds from the almost unlimited treasury of the very thing they’re about – corporate power. The wars of invasion the US is fighting are wars of corporate power. The wholesale elimination of environmental controls over the past few years have been acts of corporate power. Corporate investments in military contracting is so prevalent that it really doesn’t matter what we supposedly fight for – we fight, regardless, for making corporations richer and more powerful.

We’re looking at a successful corporate campaign, in this case, to regain near absolute control of the political engine and eliminate the last hint of genuinely democratic political power. It is no less significant than the Supreme Court ruling that invested corporations with the keys to the state in the first place, namely Santa Clary County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad which entitled corporations to full personhood in reference to the 14th ammendment (thereby making them super-persons). In that case, the Supreme Court (and we let them do it), made corporate dominance the law of the land in the U.S., and it has radically altered every institution, political, religious, social, that has any legal status at all, not to mention the lives of every person born in the U.S. then or since or wishing to become a part of the United States. Now, the very engine we prop up with our daily labor will make decisions about who is entitled to public office that are contrary to our very interests as laborers. Every drop of sweat we invest in corporate life is essentially invested in our own coffins.

And this, of course, is in our realm of conversation.

In our culture, corporate affiliation automatically conveys some sense of legitimacy. Try this on: “I’m a trainer for the Rand Corporation’s division of personnel….” What do you hear? Respectable – has health benefits and a mutual fund. vs. “I’m a freelance contract trainer…” Hear it? Probably out of work, scraping for just about any gig he can get. Now let’s modify that: “I’m a freelance contract trainer, currently working with Fortune 500 clients like IBM…” It’s a little different, isn’t it? It’s a lot different. Corporateness, corporatishness, corporatization, or whatever fun noun we want to make up, conveys not just the impression of financial stability, even after the last 4 years, but also respectability, prestige, something ironically akin to what once was called honor.

But with this master stroke in the Court, we’re feeling the first wave of what will, in some years, further marginalize anything independent, individual, or unaffiliated. Remember, we always acknowledge that, in our frenetic, reality TV, mass media culture of constant personal stimulation, that we don’t even have a one year memory anymore – we’re tired of hearing about Haiti after less than a week, though most of them will be worse off, not better, in that time, because the water will run out and they’ll be homeless. We’ll remember that we don’t have a memory, but we won’t remember why it’s important. And we won’t remember this wave, this point of launch as the revenge of the corps, when they have seized such an unparalleled and unprecedented level of cultural control that we’ll look back at the days when people commented on it derisively and think they were being too gentle. Or, if they’re as successful as they’d like, most of us won’t even feel it – corporateness will be our point of reference, our context for thinking about all problems – including corporateness – and we will be like the soma-eaters in a Brave New World, or more like the devourers of technological media in Fahrenheit 451.

Make no mistake, we’re looking at, if not reversed, the financial acquisition of the political system in the US. ‘It was already acquired long ago,’ cultural critics like Noam Chomsky will say. Quite right. No disagreement at all. And that acquisition makes this one possible. I’m only commenting on the blatantness of basically saying it’s OK to buy elections, local and national, and to purchase policy. If this were Sicily, and we took out the word “corporations” and stuck in “mafia”, we’d be appalled. But the testament to corporateness being the reference point of all our thinking, is that we are incapable of being appalled. In fact, we look at such statements as “extreme” (corp-speak), “exaggerated” (corp-speak), and we’re willing to put on our little pastel shirts, and shave our chins, and eat our crappy fern bar lunches (and think that’s food), like the effete wusses we have become, the corporate little boys we have made ourselves, and repeat the same kind of mantras we did before the financial collapse. Back then, the naysayers – and there were plenty of them – were just exaggerating, just overreacting, just extremists (when they wouldn’t shut up), and the resulting millieu is one in which corporations can’t be wrong even when they’re wrong. It was an “unforseeable” situation. And if we’re saying “No, they could have forseen, they were warned, and I’m mad as hell”, well we were warned too, and we should be mad, but what are we doing about it? Are we still just propping up the system, like a blind earthworm who bangs his head against the wall of the maze and never learns to turn right or left? Even an earthworm would have randomly gone a different direction by now. We’re caught up in it – that’s no lie. We’re all cogs in the corporatey pastel of our culture.

I don’t have a prescription, so don’t think I’m going to say lets write our congressmen. Hell, he’s one of them, more likely. Look at those dumb farks in Massachusetts who just elected another one of them. And every one of the self-employed among them should just turn around and shove their own foots all the way up their arses, because that’s what they just did to themselves politically. In the film, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” (based on the book), the premise is that places like Kansas, once populist centers where people pursued their own interests in politics, have become suburban sprawls where people are indoctrinated (often in their mega-churches and religious circles) with an ideology of defeat. They vote against their own interests, propping up the very institutions that deprive them of proper health care, sanitation (which is what environmental cleanliness is, of course), and further political opportunities – institutions many of them believe have some innate, divine, manifest right to power and to having their way. In other words, Kansas has become a corporate state.

No, no prescription. I’m not even obligated to offer a prescription, if I had one. I think the whole system blows. What I know to do is stand here and say that there is another way to think. That there isn’t just one way. It’s not that I’m making my opinion the gospel.” No, I’m not. I’m saying that almost all the opinions out there are coming from one thing, the presupposition of corporate life as the context, of corporate dominance as the basis of society (even if they don’t admit it, that’s what they’re saying), and that it is possible and healthy to get outside that context and point out how it’s harming the very people who hold those opinions. It’s like Scientology or faith healing. If we keep denying ourselves medical attention, because we’re not supposed to be sick in the first place (I’ve known people who just kept saying “I’m not sick, these are only symptoms” – That’s what symptoms ARE – indications of festering sickness!), then we’ve essentially invalidated our own voice – here, in the culture, everywhere. Rational people have no need to listen to us anymore; we’ve removed the ground of our own conversation; we’re reasoning in a circle: “corporateness is good because corporateness is good, so even if it’s killing us, corporateness is good”. Wake up and smell the turd pile, Kansas! If we can’t smell it after THIS freaking disaster, we’ve got too much corn up our noses! Either that, or our heads are buried exactly where a corporate-dominated US wants it to be – guess where!

My opinion is just that we need to be able to formulate opinions outside the context of pre-determined, presupposed, corporate life. If we can’t, everything we think is just begging the question – it was logically invalid before it started. And that isn’t really my opinion. It’s a basic tenet of all thought – so denying it is removing the ground of thought in the first place. We’ve got to ask the question from outside the assumption that corporate domination is God’s will, or some such thing. If we can’t, it’s just an ideological crack pipe, and we might as well all get high together, because life is going to be short, sick, dirty, and self-defeating. The Supreme Court ruling yesterday is a missile right up the arse of every free person in the US, and it will dictate elections where there is no incumbent candidate, and we’ll get our executive handed to us as a line item on our pay stubs, if we’re in the corporate world, and so will those of us who aren’t – the point: it makes everything the corporate world. Our grandkids will look back and wonder at the absurd, backwards arrogance of anyone who thought they should live as a free agent. And free agents? They’ll exist, but not like now – they’ll be just the outsource workers for an entirely corporate reality – a way to dump the tax and benefit burden on our shoulders and mine. I don’t have an action plan to fight this, for one reason: I don’t think there’s enough people who think any differently left. Prove me wrong. I’ll be more than happy, if you do.

Reclaiming the Meaning of Money & Time

A friend and I were talking the other day about how we’re so used to thinking, as employees, of everything as net. The company takes out taxes and healthcare, and what’s left – that’s what you live on. But when you’re self-employed, you pay self-employment tax on top of your income tax, and you have to bank that out of every deal. So If you made $400, you really only made $200. And then you’ve got to buy healthcare out of that. If you made $400 only 10 times a month, and sock away half for taxes, and pay $250 for your half of the insurance (that’d be really cheap),  your $400 is now $150 “net”. $150 of employee-equivalent pay.

A lot of employed folks would look at this as a good case for not going out on their own. It’s actually the best case for why freelancers need to charge high rates. You just can’t do it for nothing. And what, freelancers aren’t supposed to have healthcare, or savings, or be able to eat? So, the goal is to figure out how to bring those fees up. Seth Godin offers a great quotation (don’t remember his source): “There are two kinds of companies: those that want to lower prices, and those that want to raise them.” Those who shoot for the bottom, price-cutting, price-selling, appealing to price shoppers, and those who look for ways to add value, be the best, and raise prices. I’m with the latter. And I encourage my family members to hold the line on that, too.

I looked in on a conversation in LinkedIn where a person offered a service for $100, no conditions, to anyone, regardless of criteria. I provide the same service, and I can tell you it’s twice that, minimum, to do it right and do it consistently. I didn’t respond – no need – the entire community of freelancers jumped on him, asking if he realized that this wasn’t sustainable, that by aiming for the bottom he’s just appealing to the guy that wants it at $95, and encouraging the person who’ll do it for that, and not have healthcare, and not eat right. They ate his lunch – I couldn’t believe the amount of traffic pounding this guy down. He didn’t get it either. Bills himself as the president of his company but made a crass, rookie mistake in public, and should have copped to it quickly but wouldn’t. Who hasn’t done that kind of thing in one form or another? So you have to feel sorry for him, but wow – he made the 2nd mistake too: he just kept holding the line. “If someone doesn’t want my services, they don’t have to buy them.” He was missing the point.

A lot of us have had a prospect walk away because the price was obviously too low. And they’re right to. You can’t sustain good, consistent work that way, and companies that are in this for real want good, consistent work. They don’t want to watch a price cutter self-destruct, which is where it leads. A family member is a hairstylist, and a friend of hers comes from the Supercuts environment. The price difference is shocking. And you can’t invest in growing your business if you’re geared for the bottom. And once you do that, it’s really hard to break out of it. You can’t win, without retooling, infusing your business with some funds and a lot of effort, and changing the way you do business, willing to lose some clients. It’s a rough road to hoe if you’re taking care of a family and depend on repeat business; I don’t envy it. But that’s what Supercuts, superstores, super-anything does to an industry – it leaves its people scraping the bottom for the cheapest prospects there are, without decent health care, with an impoverished diet that takes years off their lives, and having to explain to people that work is worth something.

There’s a related principle. Not only is the compensation model for freelancers really fundamentally different than for employees… and we all know this, but when you’re rearranging your life accordingly, it’s something to meditate on and ponder… but so is this model for time. If you spend 8hrs at the office, your ‘work’ is presumably done, because your work is defined by the man. Your work is your job. But it’s really not done. You still have to pick up the kids, wash the car, buy the groceries, go jogging, and all the other things you do. What the freelancer realizes is that these are work too.

Occasional clients think a freelancer should be waiting at his desk at all times, when they get back to their office, ready to respond in an instant. “Where were you yesterday?” You don’t take vacations, don’t take a day off, don’t go to the gym. You work when they work, and you work when they sleep, because 24-hour turnaround is in demand, too. But that’s not sustainable. What, freelancers shouldn’t get 8hrs sleep or go to the gym? You can’t hire an assistant to work out for you, or get proper rest so you stay healthy for another day. The real story is that the model of work has been distorted somewhat by separating it from the home. I’m not suggesting there’s something inherently wrong with office work, just that it doesn’t explain, describe, or account for everything. The truth is that when a freelancer cooks the meals, provides the transportation, goes to the gym to stay healthy, or just engages in personal hygiene (how long does your full regimen, day and night, take from your day?), that’s work.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Work is what you do when you wake up, and what you do before you go to sleep. Not that there’s not room to go read a book and rest, but that rest is part of the work, too. If you read, it’s fuel. If you rest, it’s preparation to work – it’s restocking the shelves. When you relax, it’s to be ready for the intensity and energy. Same thing if you blog, folks. That’s the truth. In my case, without it, I can’t think at the pace that’s necessary to do what I do for clients. We’re *whole* people, and we need a *whole* life, sustained by work, involved in work, and linked to our work. This is yet another reason work had better be a primary source of meaning your life.

Income, though, is not what’s left over after the things that sustain your life are taken out – like healthcare. Income is what you use to take care of your whole life, including your health. When you short the one, you’re shorting the other. Likewise, time for work is not the time spent on a task someone else makes you do, or a task that you have to drive to get to, or a task that directly impacts your client. Time for work is time spent on the entire person, the *whole* source of work, your whole life. It needs to be balanced, thought out, and reasonable – you can’t just sleep for two days every week and expect, in most freelance scenarios, to be successful. Even if that’s the sum of leftover time, what about riding your bike and, again, personal hygiene, etc.? Time spent on work is, appropriately, time spent on your whole life, precisely on *keeping* it in balance, keeping it functioning at optimum, and in keeping with the very things you need to get paid for. I get paid so I can buy healthcare. I spend time and the gym so I can stay healthy. You can’t throw either one over your shoulder.

Get paid a lot, work 16 hours, not 8 (or acknowledge that it’s work) and, though you’ll then realize that our taxes really are obscenely high, you’ll at least be able to explain what you do without feeling quite as harried. A little harried maybe, but not because there’s no reason for half of it. And no, you’re most likely *not* overpaid.

Google is My Hero

You know, we’ve written a while back about how Google stood up to the Chinese totalitarian government by refusing to turn over dissident information on demand, while other companies like Yahoo bent over and dropped their shorts, handing those kids over to decades-long prison terms without even a cough. I’ve sent out gmail invites to all my Yahoo contacts with just that info. Some switch, some don’t. With Google’s motto, “don’t be evil” and Screwhoo’s model of secret prisons, torture, and rewarding free speech with reporting on its members, you get two kinds that stick with Yahoo – the ignorant and the indifferent. Which are you?

But now Google’s doing it again. While other companies never peep a word about government hacking into mail accounts, Google blows the whistle and points out an ongoing pattern of hacking from Chinese government IPs. It’s doing this in the face of censorship demands that, so far, everyone has honored to some degree. Google’s now saying ‘enough is enough’, and we’ll pull out altogether (leaving you in the dustheap of information history – you farks) before we’ll cave. And in fact, they’ve stopped censoring results in China.

If we spent as much time studying the heroes of information ethics as we do heroes of ancient Greece, Google would be our Hercules. As a member of the Google nation, I feel more affinity with her than with my own body politic. More a part of her culture than the culture at large. What’s this got to do with work and the world of work?

Everything. Ethics is everything. Righteousness is everything. The world of work could use a healthy dose of righteousness. Not self-righteousness. Think Microsoft there. “We have done this, so we are entitled to what we want.” That’s entirely different. That’s the culture of expedience. But goodness, we need, for our work to be a font of joy, for it to be a primary vehicle of meaning, to be like Google. I meet people all the time who “love their jobs” and “find meaning” in them, but sometimes when they describe what they’re talking about, it seems to be the ability to afford Starbucks every morning, or eat $15 lunches, or to be thought of well in society. They’re not describing meaning or joy at all. They’re describing gratification and convenience, but not meaning and joy. And there is a distinctive difference.

I’m convinced that joy in one’s work comes partly from doing it well and partly from one’s work being a legitimate contribution to the wellness of the world. To wake up and work dishonestly cannot convey those things, regardless of the shifty guys that tell you they’re OK with it (that’s a commentary on their absence of the basic moral equipment, not a commentary on work). To wake up and contribute nothing, to neither lesson the agony of the world nor contribute to the mercy in it, cannot convey meaning. I don’t mean the cheesy substitutes of just making people feel good. Junk food makes people feel good. It also makes people obese, shortens their lives, and contributes to their suffering. And I don’t mean doing whatever for a corporation that “gives something back”. The fact that there’s an annual United Way drive or toys for tots walk or whatever, while good, aren’t the same thing. Nothing wrong with that – we’re just saying that the work itself should be a contribution too.

Work, for us to really feel it like we were meant to, like we’re built to, must shape the world into wellness through our day in and day out activity. The Christmas bonus doesn’t make a lousy job great, and the annual drive doesn’t grant the employees of an otherwise morally useless entity the kind of meaning in their work that they are designed for. To wake up and be a force for righteousness in the world, that’s a necessary path to the meaning derived from work. Substitutes need not apply.

Life is too brief to look back and ask why we’re clinging to something, to anything, if we can’t derive the primary experience from work that we’re  meant for. If it’s just an income source, or just something to be endured, or if it’s about as subtle in its attempts to compensate as an oil company that gives a few thousand to rain forest funds, we’ve got to change directions, don’t We? Look at Google. That’s what heroes are for. They’re there to give the rest of us an icon of what we want to be like.

Have you told your kids about Google yet? I’m serious. Why not? I’m talking about what Google means in the world. Microsoft puts people into bankruptcy for treating the software someone buys like they own it. Google frees people from prison by protecting their files from torturers and totalitarian regimes. Who’s the best example?

The Power of Negative Thinking

I tend to solve problems like Sherlock Holmes. Negatively. By removing things. By denying and rejecting things. As Sherlock said he did, I eliminate all the impossibilities and am left, for whatever it may cost, with the truth. But sometimes, when you’ve eliminated all the impossibilities, there’s nothing left. The problem is simply impossible. At that moment, you can dream the impossible dream, or you can decide it’s unsolvable. I prefer, against all advice from the Norman Vincent Peale types, to decide there’s no solution. I find, when I do that, in fact, it’s an incredibly powerful problem solving tool. Immediately, upon deciding there’s no answer, a weight is lifted. There’s no need to agonize like the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there. You’ve taken off the blindfold, light has filled your eyes, and there really isn’t a cat. Thinking negatively, accepting the negative, accepting the absence of hope is actually a key to the next thing.

Some of the best solutions to problems have come to me, because I decided they were impossible to solve. And I was right, they were. Now, now some of you sticklers will immediately try to point out that I merely *thought* it was impossible. Nope. Have you ever tried to turn a rusted bolt with nothing but a spaghetti noodle? It’s impossible. Don’t say “nothing is impossible”. Yes, it is. Don’t say that negative thinking will guarantee failure. Thinking you can turn a rusted bolt with a spaghetti noodle will not only guarantee failure, but believing with all your might that you can do it will leave you with a different kind of failure – bewildered dementia. Don’t be neurotic – don’t believe for the sake of believing – just let go. It’s impossible. “Because you’re using the wrong tools,” you might say. Well, duh. We didn’t say turning a rusted bolt is impossible. We said it’s impossible with the tools you have in hand. We didn’t say rusted bolts cannot be turned. We said that real problems, problems we really experience, as we really experience them, have certain parameters, certain essential characteristics – and they are sometimes truly unsolvable within those parameters and characteristics.

And that’s no light thing. Don’t go “aha!” and then proceed with the psychobabble, which is really the lingo of the neurotic who’s been given credibility by quoting books written by other neurotics who managed to earn PhDs. No, it’s huge. Telling a child slave in Thailand that if you just believe, you too can be free, is like a kick in the stomach. Telling the mother whose uninsured child is dying of leukemia that if you think positive thoughts, a solution will appear (and presumably, if it didn’t work, you didn’t think hard enough) – that’s just obscene. It’s no different than faith healing for petty witchdoctors who want your pocket change and any smokes you’ve got on you. No, sometimes there are no solutions. Accepting that is actually incredibly helpful, sometimes.

It’s only when you let go of the impossibilities of the unsolvable problem, acknowledge that it’s a catch-22, rock and hard place, conundrum, paradox, or what have you, that you are truly free to begin to reconfigure the problem altogether. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to sell you some Tony Robbins always-smiling pitch about how that, miraculously, will be the salve for the grieving mother. I’m not selling the schlock that if she just adopts a different mental attitude, or a new perspective, or looks at in a different light, she won’t really feel irrevocable and life-crippling grief, and that the loss of her son won’t matter. And neither should you. If you are selling that stuff, you’re a bonehead, and you need to spend a night or two sleeping under a bridge and get a clue.

What I’m saying is that sometimes some problems really are impossible, really don’t have solutions. And that accepting it sometimes, not always, but sometimes leads to a new configuration of the problem. Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to solve a pretty important problem, the results of which have really been devastating to my life. I have racked my brain. I have constantly made runs at the impossibility of it. I have attempted the impossible, knowing it was impossible, so important is this to me. None of the solutions panned out, because they never really were solutions. They were attempts to create reality, rather than accept it. Recently a pretty darned good solution came to me. I woke up one morning, the wheels of my mind having been turning all night in my sleep, as they so often do, and I knew.

It’s not the solution to the original problem. The original problem was unsolvable. It took the power of negative thinking. It took deciding there’s no answer. And in this case, as it would not with the grieving mother, the solution came as both a solution, and a reconfiguration of the problem so that it could be solved. Distinctly, though, the answer came first, the adjustment to the problem, so the answer would fit, came moments after. By rejecting positive thinking. By thinking in a decidedly negative manner – eliminating all the illusions, the faith, the wishing, the insistence that there must be a way, I paved the way for the problem to be reconfigured to meet a solution that was better.

Some would have me go back and sit in the unsolvable problem and squint, grunt, and groan until I give birth to a proof of their theory. That all things are possible, that every problem has a solution, that every question has an answer, that all things can be solved, so that all of reality fits neatly arrayed on an organized shelf, put away in time for dinner. This need to insist that the world can all be rainbows and that the fundamental human problem is not enough belief – that, to me, is a self-defeating and world-defeating argument. We have aeronautical flight precisely because it was impossible that the first aircraft could fly. We have warning labels on cigarettes, because the human body can only withstand so much abuse. Did you see Supersize Me? It’s impossible to eat at McDonalds as much as that man did without doing serious harm to your body.

The world is full of wonderful impossibilities. And it is only by accepting these that we are free to discover the fantastic potential in that which is actually supported by logic and the laws of existence. Psychologists have a word for people who see everything as possible, which is to say that anything is also plausible (it really is the same thing). Neurotic. When you believe it’s possible to jump off a roof and defy gravity, just as you believe it’s possible to make a tuna fish sandwich out of tuna and bread, you are not living in a way that’s productive, or beneficial. You’re living, if you live long at all, in a self-destructive way. The most positive thing, sometimes, is to be negative. The most productive and helpful thing is to have a healthy view of the impossible.

Once you do, you are free to find things of value in life that may be far more significant to you than either making a tuna sandwich or jumping off a building. You are free to find an incredible wealth of possible things. You are liberated from the impossible; you are liberated unto possibility. And that, my positive thinking friends, is the gift of a certain negativity. Of a certain rejection of what is not, never was, and cannot ever be. You can say I’m crushing hopes, but I say that I would prefer something more important than hope – I would prefer the thing that one would ask me to hope for. Why would I want hope, for hope’s sake? Hope, in and of itself, just for the sake of hoping, is closer to torture. The man in the room hopes to find the cat that isn’t there. The prisoner hopes for the water that is instead poured out on the floor in front of him. Hope itself, for its own sake, is no great shakes. But the finding sight instead of the cat, for the light to go on, rather than to search and hope in darkness, to be freed from the prison rather than hoping for the water, that’s real. That, in my book, is better than hope. Sometimes hope *should* be crushed. I don’t begrudge it to that mother whose son is dying, to the child being trafficked in a brutal country. But the notion that it’s somehow more important than reality, more important than the thing being hoped *for*, is an obscene thought too.

I’m not saying “it is what it is”. That’s obvious. A=A. That’s Aristotle’s Law of Identity. It means that there are a finite number of solutions to any problem, because any problem has a finite definition, a finite set of parameters which you settle on when you articulate or conceive of the problem. When you’ve exhausted them, if you haven’t solved it, it’s unsolvable. But I’m saying that, even if you missed one, even if you overlooked a possible solution, sometimes deciding that you can’t solve the problem, not within the parameters (after all, your own memory, ability, intelligence, and energy are parameters of the problem, too) – even then, it can be helpful to decide it’s impossible. Some of my best insights start with “I dunno.” Some of my best problems – the wonderfully solved kinds – come out of an unsolvable problem. And some of the answers to ones that I have solved, came from deciding they couldn’t be. All it takes is the willingness to keep one’s mind open to the impossible, while not being willing to jump. Standing on the edge of possibility, without going over into the abyss of all things being equal.

It’s easy to think an unsolvable problem is the end of the world. I prefer to be OK with it, and to deliberately keep an open mind. I might have missed something. The world and all solutions are finite, but so is my own mind – I’m fallible. Besides, I might not always need the problem solved. Another problem may come along and make it superfluous. How you’re going to afford a new orthopedic mattress with no income just doesn’t matter anymore when your house goes into foreclosure. And no, my mattress is fantastic, please do not mail me one. What I’m saying is that there’s a certain creative and intellectual freedom that comes from saying, “this can’t be done” and letting it rest at that. I find some of my most creative material comes that way. “I can’t get out of corporate life in the next 6 months. I’ve worked out all the possibilities, all the angles, and I’m stuck. It just can’t be done.” I was right about that. Absolutely right. I got out in two. Six would not have worked. But until I accepted it, and tooled up accordingly, for another year or two in the corporate sector, I didn’t come up with the path to transition almost immediately. I’m so, so very glad that I accepted the impossible. My negativity came to the rescue again.

Simple Green Productivity – Hibernate

How many nights have you gone to bed and left the computer running. Not because you were downloading some file – how long does that take anymore, in an era of broadband? But because you had a number of things open and needed to pick up where you left off?

Actually, the original way that most of us tech types did it was to leave the PC running 24/7. In the old days, you put more wear and tear on the hard drive (which was then considered the central part of the machine – now it’s the cloud – the internet itself) – more wear and tear by starting up than by leaving it running.

I got my electric bill last month and while the main PC contributes only a bit to it, it’s enough to notice the nights I left it running. Why the heck aren’t you using standby or hibernate, you ask? Exactly. I could kick myself for all the months I didn’t. But I’ve started up again and now I’m using both.

Standby just puts it in low power mode. It *seems* shut down, but it’s really using just enough juice to keep your place. I launches faster when you come back in the morning, but if you have a power loss, you may be in bad shape. Hibernate stores everything the way it is (I would still advise saving any office documents that might be open – you can leave them up – just hit save, in case there’s a problem). It comes up a little slower, but a power outage may not lose your work.

If it’s just browser tabs, standby works. After all, good browsers like Firefox and Google Chrome will know if you have shutdown improperly and offer to bring the tabs back or, in Google’s case, just do it. Google is smarter than Firefox currently. You can set it to *always* bring back the last tabs that were up. Neither browser does one thing that would help a lot, though – allow you to hit a button and save current tabs for next boot. You’d think, but none of them do that, yet. You can bookmark all tabs to open at once, but then your bookmarks get cluttered up with temporary work.

So, in my office now, hibernate or standby are the rule, not shutting down, and not leaving it running. What are your green productivity ideas? Comment on this post.

Bookmark Productivity Tools

If you live on the web, or work on the web, or both, you know you need bookmarking. Yes, I know that google is the ultimate reason why you wouldn’t. After all, why bookmark if it’s all already stored in google. But even google results aren’t quite *that* personal. And bookmarking is a productivity device. I need fast, efficient bookmarking with powerful organization, so I can get all the sites I’m interested in off my screen and into actionable folders or reference archives. I may not need that online fax tool I stumbled across just now, but I need it later. And having 40 tabs open because I plan to research a couple of topics soon, is too much of a burden on work – I need to be able to dump them into action item folders. Bookmarking should work very much like an RSS reader, and less like it does in the built-in browser favorites motif.

If you *are* storing your bookmark in your browser, like I used to do, what happens when your operating system or your hard drive crashes? There are services, but one of those services is google itself. Install google toolbar, and start using the built-in google bookmarks button to store your favorites. One of the nice things is the ability to bookmark all your tabs at once under a category. Besides, bookmarks are hardly ever revisited without better organizaton.

I’ve been finding google bookmarks a bit slow to respond these days, though. Can’t tell if it’s google, firefox, some plugin, or all of the above, but I want to save and close, not save and wait. I need faster bookmarking. And bookmark management is just as important. Without bookmark management, I might as well be storing it in notepad. As much as I love google bookmarks, it’s got functioning management, but nothing stellar or very convenient, even if navigation is lightening fast.

I’m a member of quite a lot of social bookmark sites. I won’t do delicious for personal use, because it’s a yahoo property now. Furl is gone, though they’ve been replaced by Diigo which is pretty cool for social bookmarking for other reasons. I’ve got their plugin installed. So I went on the hunt for something to replace my google bookmarks, as a primary bookmarker, until they get it prioritized higher. Besides, while delicious is the obvious choice for some people, it doesn’t have the organization features I need – it sacrifices those in favor of the social aspects. So here’s what I found that would work:

Spurl: Survives where Furl didn’t. And Spurl has some pretty nifty features. It stores a cache of the page, much like google. And it’s got those nice social sharing features, plus a clean, fast, stellar interface. It’s the organization tools that make it worthwhile, though.

Blinklist: Mostly about the interface and organizational tools. The list organization vs. folder/category is not for me. I like it in e-mail, but in bookmarks I want my folders. For one thing, I bookmark sites as action items. I need to have folders for better organization. But the interface has got some nice customization features to it, and they’re fast.

Gmarks: This is my new tool. Like all social bookmark sites, its both a browser plugin and a web site, but the site in this case is actually google bookmarks. It lets me keep google bookmarks ,but gives me very fast linking, great organization and great management features in a sidebar. With a Gmarks browser plugin, google bookmarks is redeemed, and is now my confirmed bookmarks manager. I commend it to you highly.

That said, I’m keeping an eye on the other two. I think they’re better than delicious by far, for real bookmarkers, so check them out if you just don’t want to use the google stuff. Oh, and bookmark Rules of Work while you’re at it.

Opinion: I’m thinking about  engaging in conservation of links, by leaving out links to sites when we already provide the name. Everyone’s got google now, so just typing any one of these in your browser bar or google search bar will bring up the site for you. Links to everything are just, I’m beginning to think, old fashioned. Besides, you don’t know if they’re going to open in a new window or not at a lot of sites, unless you go to the trouble of right clicking and all that. Time will tell, but I’m interested in your opinion on this. Besides, too many outbound links give away search engine juice, in case you didn’t know.

ROW Spotlight: Kiva – You Can Microlend

Have you heard about Kiva? Kiva is a free web site that lets you provide micro-loans (in amounts of $25) to impoverished entrepreneurs needing investment to make their businesses thrive. The entire loan amount goes to the entrepreneur and is facilitated through Kiva’s partnership with local micro-lending organziations in each country. The micro-lending organization collects interest and you are repaid the principle on the loan. You can voluntarily donate a couple of dollars to the Kiva site to keep it going, when you check out. These loans go to people with demonstrated entrepreneurial success, but who are so poor that they lack the means to get anything but an exploitative loan to invest in supplies, materials, or equipment, were it not for Kiva and you. When your money is paid back, you can re-lend it. We have a number of these loans in play and have been paid back many times and re-loaned again to new entrepreneurs. It’s a simple check-out cart system.

Example: Kossi in Togo needs $1200 for a new taxi (his old one is on its last leg). With this money, he’ll be able to feed his family for some time. He’s not looking for a hand out; he’s just asking to borrow a little and repay, because in his country the cost of a new taxi is pretty hard to come up with all at once. If he can keep working, because of you, me, and Kiva, he’ll be able to pay it back as he continues to earn income. (Update: The loan was issued, and Kossi is now at 92% repayment on this loan). You loan $25, and over the next week or so many Kiva lenders also put in $25. The total is reached very quickly, and the microlending organization is funded to provide and administer the loan. over the next 6months, year, or whatever the loan terms indicate (the terms of Kossi’s loan were 26months), the borrower pays it back, you receive the $25 back, and you can either withdraw it then or re-lend to a new entrepreneur. You can fund a loan with your paypal account, credit card, or other means.

Example: Surayo in Tajikistan makes women’s wear out of her home. As a contractor, her business has been growing, and she needs a loan of $700 to buy special material to increase her line. She plans to eventually open her own company producing and selling clothing, and she needs the material to make her own stock of clothes to move in that direction. You loan her $25. I loan her $25, and a lot of other people do as well. These are pooled into one microloan, which she gets as one sum, expands her business, and is able, with this kind of help, to get farther from poverty and closer to creating income that can not only sustain her but possibly employ others, while it contributes to her economy. Update: Surayo’s loan was issued and it’s 100% repaid now. She’s wonderful!

We’ve been lending through Kiva for a few years. It works, it’s honorable and straightforward, and if money is tight, you can lend with confidence, because the loan default rates are slim – most lenders repay, because they really are trying to build their business. What’s more they are building a business that’s thriving and in demand in their economies – they’re savvy, smart people who know what their clients are demanding, and just need some funds to be able to deliver it at the rate of demand. They don’t do unwise things like open a coffee shop in a farming community that already has two of them. At most, you risk $25 at a time (though you may want to fund several small entrepreneurs – it’s easy to fall in love with these people – they’re family), and you can make a dent in poverty by helping people get a handhold on something real – their work. Visit www.kiva.org and you’ll see what I mean. We’re committed participants.

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