Supreme Court Rapes the Free World. Again.

Usually, I won’t make political comments, because I’m just not interested. I figure it’s all going to be awful, and I don’t buy into the illusion that chatting it up will make it better. 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. Sure, he’ll be re-elected. But then the Republicans (read 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 under the last administration, were acts of corporate power. And it’s not just a Republican thing – though they’re the poster children for the corporate state – the invasion of Serbia made so many administrative moguls rich through their corporate investments in military contracting that it really doesn’t matter what we supposedly fought for – we fought, regardless, for making the corporations richer, their party stronger, and their stooges in the executive and congressional branches personally more wealthy.

We’re looking at a successful corporate campaign to regain near absolute control of the political engine and eliminate the last hint of genuinely democratic political power that 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 then or since or wishing to become a part of the United States. Now, the very engine you prop up with your daily labor will make decisions about who is entitled to public office that are contrary to your very interestes as a laborer. Every drop of sweat you invest in corporate life is essentially invested in your own coffin.

And this, as you can see, 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….” (has health benefits and a mutual fund, unless he’s a complete idiot) vs. “I’m a freelance contract trainer…” (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. Don’t try to deny it – corporateness, corporatishness, corporatization, or whatever fun noun we want to make up, conveys not just the impression of financial stability (even though only a twit can think that after what we’ve seen in the last 4 years. Maybe we’re a nation of twits.), but also respectability, prestige, something ironically akin to what once was called honor (which should make those of you who actually have any honor vomit).

But with this master stroke, you’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, 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 memoryt, 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, you’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 you’re saying “No, they could have forseen, they were warned, and I’m mad as hell”, well you were warned too, and you should be mad, but what the hell are you doing about it? Are you 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 ask you to write your 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, you goofs!), 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. And this is my response to those who’ll write in and say “You’re making your 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 you keep denying yourself medical attention, because you’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, you dolt – they’re indications of festering sickness!), then you’ve essentially invalidated your own voice – here, in the culture, everywhere. Rational people have no need to listen to you anymore; you’ve removed the ground of your own conversation; you’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 you can’t smell it after THIS freaking disaster, you’ve got too much corn up your nose! Either that, or your head is 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. You’ve got to ask the question from outside the assumption that corporate domination is God’s will, or some such thing. If you 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 of the arse of every free person in the US, and it will dictate elections where there is no incumbent candidate, and you’ll get your executive handed to you as a line item on your pay stub, if you’re in the corporate world, and so will those of us who aren’t – the point: it makes everything the corporate world. Your 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 your 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.

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 bold 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 bold 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

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.

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 stupid things like open a coffee shop in a farming community that already has two of them (I’ve seen that done around here, though). 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.

What’s Wrong With Discounts?

I’m not a believer in discounts, unless they are part of a marketing campaign. Half-hazard discounts, because someone asks for one, force you to work harder for less pay to justify your normal price. If you’re willing to do that, just make it your normal price. I think more people respect that.

Up Front Discounts: I think everyone that’s experimented with running their own business, contractor gigs, or freelance work, has at one time or another made the mistake of offering up front discounts to help close a deal – only to realize that that wasn’t what the client needed to say yes. I’ve been starting businesses since I was 12, and I was a Sales Trainer for some years. My experience, that I passed on to my students (which admittedly isn’t the gospel), is don’t assume a transactional sale – don’t assume price is your clients’ chief motivator, or even an essential one. It’s a lazy shortcut to being consultative. Consultative sales and marketing is about discovering your prospects’ true motivators and targeting those.

It’s the same thing I learned in education (spent a couple of decades in that field) – learners are motivated by different things – there’s not one type. What some people want is an extrinsic motivator (help their business, for example, and that’s as good as money), and what others want is an intrinsic one (it might be a sense of empowerment as you put more processes under their control, etc.). Where you add value is in satisfying motivators for different prospects, and where your marketing is successful is when you consult with these prospects and know what value they most want added.

Most people that tell me they’re only able to get business by slashing prices aren’t doing intelligent marketing at all. They haven’t got well-defined market differentiators – unique areas where they add value. They aren’t being consultative with their clients to uncover subtle needs. They’re leading with price precisely *because* it’s easier than being consultative. Or so they think. It seems easier, but then they’re also working harder than their competitors, and for less pay. Add value and earn the pay you really need to earn.

Campaign Discounts: A campaign that features a discount on one item or service for getting business in the door, and then charges fair, competitive prices (yes, full price) for other services – that can be part of a smart marketing arsenal. It should never be your only strategy. But as one tool, it can be great. For instance, if you want to give AARP, AAA, student, municipal worker or other corporate or membership discounts, those can work. They work *best* when you actually partner with such organizations or local municipal agencies or corporate partners and you get promotional benefit from it that they help you with. If they’re not willing to promote/market your business for free in exchange for giving their people a discount, stop wasting your time. There are plenty of people who will – focus on those. Don’t run a renegade, all on your shoulders, campaign with nothing in exchange for your discount. Be smart – give nothing away. That’s how you know it’s right – are you consistently getting something tangible in return for the discount. If not, get out of the deal and don’t get back in.

Referral Discounts: For the average caller, walk-in, referral, or whatever, don’t give discounts. Not even for referrals, you say? Isn’t that a justification for a discount? No, it most certainly is not and should not be. I *expect* referrals, just like I expect walk-ins and calls. I learned that as a young man from a colleague in the landscaping business (I also ran a landscaping company at the time, and he was my mentor). If I’m not getting referrals, I’m doing something wrong. They’re part of the normal process of my business – they’re one of the basic assumptions of my business model. I once told this to a couple of neighbors who expected me to work for almost nothing, because I had both of them as customers and they thought I could get one more in that neighborhood, if I did all three lawns for the price of two. I was a kid, but not a stupid kid. I told them what I’m telling you. I expect to get other clients in the same neighborhood – it’s part of my business model. That’s not a reason to provide discounts. There’s always someone who will do it cheaper, they pointed out. Exactly, I said. That’s why slashing prices is ultimately self-defeating. Adding value is the way to make out, not slashing prices. If you can’t figure out how to add value to your transactions – *that* is your first marketing move, not price-slashing.

Marketing for referrals, on the other hand, is different – that’s like campaign discounts. But that’s not the same thing as getting occasional referrals from satisfied clients. If you have a client or contact that can be reasonably expected to funnel a significant number (by significant number, I mean more than 10 people) your way, who has demonstrated this, and the prospects all fall under one demographic, you might consider offering a discount to that demographic when they are referred. You don’t have to offer it to the whole demographic, and you don’t have to offer it to the referring client or contact. That last may seem strange, but the value that client or contact is getting is a lot of promotion too, as someone who can arrange discounts through referrals. Don’t assume you have to deeply discount services for him. After all, you can also refer people to his business. Don’t trade work for referrals straight up, or almost so. If your work is stellar, there will be enough people who refer you anyway that you don’t have to keep giving it away.

Expected Discounts: Often we might hear that people “expect” discounts. Yeah, that’s because people have sold them a bill of goods. We all know someone in our family or group of contacts who will drive 10 miles to save 5-cents/gallon on gas – someone who will buy an expensive advertised/brand-name item because of a 20% discount, when an equivalent item is available regularly at 60% of that price, without the marketing. That’s the world, you might say, so don’t we have to cater to it? Not exactly. You have to correct it, and still run your business effectively – you need clients and so do I. So if you’re going to respond to it (you don’t have to, but if you are) here’s how – you have two choices:

Method 1: Don’t offer discounts like that. Offer “every day low prices”. That’s the world, too. That’s what Walmart does – it’s their slogan. A jar of mayonnaise at Walmart costs the same at regular price as one on discount at your local Homeland Grocer. Why do people go to Walmart? (I don’t – I hate them.) They go, because the prices are low all around. None of us wants to do what we’d have to do to offer Walmart-like prices, though, not if we’re ethical. I certainly won’t. So let’s say Costco prices. They’re a great, ethical company and their prices are still lower than Homeland. We won’t be bottom of the barrel with this technique (no rained-on diapers lying around in our parking lots – you want Walmart – go to Walmart – not every client is my client), but we won’t have to lure people in by constantly red-tagging items and displaying them on an endcap, either.

Method 2: Offer premium prices on everything, and discounts to everyone that asks for one. Some people won’t ask (the risk is they won’t tell you they’re concerned about the price, if you’re not consultative enough to gather their concerns – or else you’ll end up offering a discount to everyone – that’s not the method – that sounds like apologizing because your pricing structure sucks – to do this properly, you’ll have to rely on your consultation skills or take the risk). This principle, though, is the same one that says you ask more for your house, car, or flea market item than what you’re willing to take, and you agree to haggle.

Every day added value, not every day low prices: Personally, I don’t use either of these methods per se, though I’m constantly being told by both peers and other professionals and even clients that my prices are too low. So maybe I do. I have a niche partly based on a price break point, though, and I do OK. But what I like to think I do is charge one very fair price for my work – no discounts – I use a statement of work to define the scope of work – extras are extra. I have systems in place to do what I do, so I’m very efficient. I borrow processes from successful corporate models to maintain that efficiency. My profit margin is reasonable, and my clients get high value. Would I offer a discount on request? No. Would I offer one to an organization on request? No – not unless it was an offer to help me run a campaign that stood a demonstrated/proven  likelihood of bringing in at least 10 more clients ready for a full package. Would I let a customer go away because of price? Yes, I have done so, and I would do it again tomorrow. Even in this economy. Even if I were hungry.

Desperation Discounts: Even if you were hungry? I know, I keep making these radical-sounding statements. It might be hard to believe me, but here’s something I learned from a colleague (again, in the landscaping business). If you work for yourself, and you’re not making at least $25/hour, you’re working for the wrong person – go get a job. That was more than 15 years ago. You’re paying self-employment tax. You’re paying your own health insurance – yes, you’re damned well entitled to health care, so you’d better make sure you can pay for it. You’re paying for your own savings funds (let’s not kid ourselves by calling it “retirement” – the last generation to retire has already retired). You pay for overhead, equipment, supplies, services, and you’d better be spending something on marketing (a business will lose 25-33% of its clients annually to attrition – if you’re not growing, you’re dying, even if you don’t feel it yet – get your marketing in gear while you’re busy – don’t wait until you’re slow, when the pipeline will take potentially too long to build). You need to make a living wage. What, because you’re self-employed, everyone but you is entitled to a living wage? Fark no! Don’t buy into that discriminatory nonsense. If you’re thinking that way, or you’re willing to settle for that, you need to join a freelancers union or form a union of one and defend yourself  A living wage. [If you're a contractor or freelancer, by the way, you might want to contact Free Agent Source. It's sort of like a union for freelancer/contractors, but without the politics.]

So no, if I got hungry enough, I wouldn’t cut my prices continually until people came with me for that reason alone. I would add value, and keep adding value, and I’d raise – now lower my prices. Yes, in a “recession”. Everything I’ve said, every assertion is counter-intuitive to the way I was taught business by watching small, medium, and big corporate businesses whose names I can’t remember, or who aren’t around anymore. But it’s also what I’ve learned from businesses that could survive anything and have. It’s aggressively self-assured business. It’s a plan you might say is founded on arrogance – but, if you’re saying that, I’ll let you in on a secret: That’s why it works. This is rain folks, and your business is an ark. Build it strong. Build it to float. One way of doing that is add value rather than slash prices. Make it lowest-common-denominator-proof. Because the denominator is going to get lower. You want to survive? Plan to thrive.

And yeah, finally, if I had to choose between working for almost nothing and getting a job, I’d follow that colleague’s advice. If I couldn’t make it work adding value and getting a living wage, I’d go work for a better boss, and think and learn and plan again, until I could determine and execute what I needed to do better. I’d get a job.

So, what’s it going to be? You’re your boss. I’ve given you my take on discounts. This was asked as a question by a client or colleague, so I’ve thrown in my volunteer voice on it. You’ve got to do what you know to do. My two cents isn’t worth a tinker’s damn in your business if you can’t believe it when your own voice says it. If you find something else that works well, and you’re getting a living wage out of it, I’d appreciate it if you shared it with me – because, while I’m willing to stick my neck out and talk, and model my business after my talk, I’m also willing to learn. Let me know, and I hope this helps.

No Mortgage for Freelancers?

All week on your local NPR or public radio station  “The Take Away” is running talk about how freelancers are treated unreasonably (I’d say prejudicially) for mortgage loan applications vs. job holders. Got an offer letter or a couple of pay stubs from a job? You’re on the fast track for refinance or a new mortgage. Freelancer? They want two years of tax return documentation indicating a high net. And freelancers are highly motivated to reduce net as much as possible, for tax purposes, by showing expenses.

So freelancers are faced with two horns – you either get taxed to death (don’t forget the extra self-employment tax) or you don’t get to own a home. The current society is structured to reward job holders and punish freelancers.

I hate this too. But it’s not going to stop me. I already figure society is out to crush me and not to help me. I consider it a given, so I’m never suprised by injustice, shortsightedness, or the general bias if not downright persecution of the individualist. Sure, if you’re a large corp, you get a lot of breaks. As a sole proprietor or small LLC, they’re going to stick it in you as often and as far as they can. I take it for granted.

But if you didn’t catch our recent article on home ownership (and other fallacies) – Mount Olympus is Dead – you might want to, if this concerns you personally. I’m not so sure I *want* to be handed anything. I’m not so sure that what other people call home “ownership” isn’t just a fairytale they tell themselves while they sleep in homes that are 90% bank-owned, if they’re average. The notion that homeownership is the prize of success is still, in my book, a load of crap. Especially if you have your head so far up your corporate boss’s butt that your job feels extra-secure.

That aside, it is a raw freaking deal. It’s retarded. It’s stupid. It’s shortsighted. And… <drumroll>… the good news is that it’s going to change. Don’t believe me? I’ll be here for the next few years, so I’ll be prepared to eat my words if I’m wrong. But I don’t think I’ll have to do that. It’s going to change, because structurally, the way in which work is conducted is going to change. Is already changing. I won’t beat that drum all over again here – we’ve said it in lots of other articles. But one line: Companies, if and when they come out of the economic disaster we prefer to call, euphemistically, “recession”, will include those that make the same stupid mistakes again, and those who have already irreversibly adapted to the new order – a more transactional relationship with workers – one that is contract-based, temporary (most jobs are destined to “become” temporary – they always were – we just pretended they were “permanent”), and one that requires individuals to take increased responsibility for negotiation and for securing needed benefits.

And, kids and kiddoes, the mortgage lending industry will respond to the changes. Perhaps slowly. Perhaps belatedly. Perhaps stubbornly (major finance companies have had their heads up their own arses over refinancing troubled mortgages and have elected to take losses rather than question their own morality and superiority – shooting themselves in the foot and homeowners in the head – we will remember this about them – we will remember it a long time). But they will, ultimately, respond – because it’s not up to them. The sheer pressure of the massive growth in more transactional workers along with the surplus of homes and overextended building will mean that if anyone does not yield, someone will simply start or create a business out of catering to the facts – financial elitism be damned.

In the short term, it may be a darned inconvenience. But so what? It’s part of the deal. It will be, regardless of whether you and I like it. And in the end, the world will have changed. I’m ready for some of that. The day we see the self-righteous lenders who denied refinancing to all those souls who could pay a reasonable rate, and kicked them out into the street, so the lender could take a stupid loss on the home because “they’re wrong – they’re bad – we shouldn’t have to refinance them – they shouldn’t be rewarded for not sticking to the deal we made with them” (yeah, those dumb farks have publicly said all of that) – the day we see them hat in hand offering loans to woo them back, or their children back, without the traditional securities that didn’t mean a damn anyway (their job and their car), some of us will be laughing. And we’ll know that, with the same negotiating power that those folks will have with income sources as the transactionally employed – contractors, freelancers, entrepreneurs – they’re better off.

I’m interested to hear how “The Take Away” topic plays out. But one thing I’m even more interested in – how it plays out in the culture of work.

Action Items: The Joys of Slicing Cheese

A colleague and I are constructing a new type of organization, and at times at the outset I felt overwhelmed and a bit paralyzed. It comes with having an enormous vault of ideas, and a need for speed, while needing also to quickly put up an infrastructure (in this case a marketing infrastructure) that is woven piece into piece. This weekend, I revisited my part of the plan, and used a GTD (David Allen) principle: I converted everything into action items. Nothing was left without a verb. If it was going to stay on ‘paper’, it would have a specific action and an assigned person. I came away with a feeling of calm and clarity. What was a pile of building blocks became a highway – a direction paved with specific, achievable, measurable exertions. Action items are the joy of achievers. It feels like swatting a mountain until everything is action items. Once that occurs, it’s more like slicing cheese.

Not only are action items good for me, they’re good for clients. It’s something borrowed from effective business in the corporate sector. Provide your client a list of deliverables you’ll deliver, and a list of specifics they need to deliver. All projects depend on both, because sound projects are ultimately collaborative. Then convert your own list of deliverables into specific actions. Don’t leave them alone as outcomes – list the steps, for yourself, to complete them. After that, it’s just a pot of tea and your favorite background noise, with clear direction on a clear day.

Starting a Business Blog That Doesn’t Suck

“I’m a landscaper or plumber – how do I start a business blog? Who would want to read it?” Exactly. Or maybe. I hear that a lot. It’s a reasonable question. “And if I write it, and I don’t know what I’m doing, won’t it suck.” Probably not. It could, if you don’t keep an open mind. But it won’t otherwise.

So how is it done? That’s the first part. Let’s give a couple of different examples:

Let’s say  you’re a plumber who does gardening on the side: You might do a plumber blog, but you might add more value by doing a niche blog on your related interest – gardening (both are vaguely related to home ownership), and then have a sidebar offering your plumbing services, and linking back to  your main site. What drives blogs is “passion” for something in particular, consistency (these two tend to be deeply related), and perhaps a touch of presumption (the willingness to treat your most recent observation as something that might have value for other people).

I’m an internet marketing consultant. I write a blog about work. I didn’t really know what I wanted to blog about. Like a lot of people, I ended up changing the name of it as I settled on a theme. In fact, it used to just be my personal everything blog, until I realized what I was doing with it, and split it in two. Now it’s very thematic. Areas where I do a lot of thinking or have a lot of observations are prime blogging areas. I started out blogging about whatever, inserting whatever I was thinking about when I was in the shower or driving, and then I noticed a pattern starting to form that clarified my mission. My blog is about work, especially self-employment, contracting, and the culture’s misconceptions about work. These topics sort of bleed over into my business though (my clients are often entrepreneurs), and that lets me add value.

You’re a real estate appraiser and you want to focus on a search engine optimized blog on your main site: Ok, so you need several things. 1. the content has to be original. Cutting and pasting will not only get you in legal trouble, it’ll get you drowned in Google. Don’t do it. 2. the content has to be relevant and search-term rich (you need all your various place names – towns and counties you serve, and all your various services – divorce appraisals, estate appraisals, as well as words like appraiser, appraise, appraising to show up over time in various blog posts). 3. you have to be consistent. A blog post a month is a search engine and social network marketing death sentence. It’s a blog-coma. So how do you do that well? You give yourself an assignment that every other day, busy or not, tired or not, turned off the computer already or not, you’ll sit down and ask yourself what you thought about today, and pick something from a list like this one and write one 200 word post.

• A common misconception is… (clarification)
• A little known bit of information is… (fact)
• A service we offer that is often underused is… (option)
• Something happened locally today that affects all of us… (news & analysis)
• Today, I was thinking about… (insight)
• Here’s a tip for those of you… (advice)

So those are three examples. You might have different ones. But you get the point. But I sound like crap, and write worse than that, you say?

In other words, how can it not suck?

The failings of most small business blogs are that:

• they try to sound corporate instead of personal. Don’t compose – it’s not prayer – just write like you talk on the phone or when you’re comfortable. Use a conversational tone.
• they’re just a lot of sales copy. It doesn’t have to be badly worded to suck. It can pass legal, HR, and Stunk and White’s style guide, and still be crap. Give something away – don’t horde your thoughts, don’t pander, and don’t just keep shlepping your services – you’ve got to add value. What were you *really* thinking about today? Now why would I care? Or how is that related to your work?
• they have little expertise in your area or flair in their writing style – can happen when you hire someone other than you to ‘keep up with it’ (some of us are professional bloggers who specialize in research and flair, but just getting your nephew who is computer savvy is usually a bad idea). The best blogs though? They’re written by you. Hell, I don’t even spell check a lot of the time. Yeah, I know, that’s unprofessional. That’s why sometimes I don’t do it. Sometimes I’d rather be genuine, responsive, and dash something off in the moment than impress you with the fact that I too have an electronic spell checker installed.
• they aren’t updated consistently – happens when you aren’t passionate about what you’re writing – or, honestly, when life gets out of whack – when something hits you hard (sickness, a flood of business, whatever) and you don’t stop to eat, shower, or blog. If you want to be really successful? Don’t shower until you’ve done  your blog post. Or no coffee until you’ve posted. Or you’re not allowed to brush your teeth… you get the point.
• they aren’t updated at all – happens when you convince yourself you can’t generate 200 intelligent words, but still managed to get certified in whatever you do for a living. Is that too blunt? Good. Because I don’t believe you. You might be OK with that, but it really doesn’t matter what I think. Blogging, or at least dynamic, original, relevant content, is not just an option if you intend to market seriously online. It’s a requirement. Anyone that tells you different either isn’t paying attention or is selling you something I wouldn’t wish on an enemy.
• they aren’t original – lots of copied content – bad for you (legally), bad for searches (Google will bury you – they don’t get where they are by presenting duplicate results), bad for readers (it’s a snoozer)

But the number one failing of all time? They aren’t creative enough. In other words, they sound like dry lumber. You’re not thinking outside the box. You’re falling back on that older culture that says anything with character hanging out of it might risk someone not liking your business. Folks? To *Hell* with that one. If you’ve not had your head buried in the sand for the last few years, you’ll know that blogs, Facebook, and Twitter have changed all of that. A little edge, a little scruff, some rough sides hanging out – those are now exactly the reason lots of small, up and coming business are getting attention and corporate blogs make you want to scratch your eyes out from boredom. The answer is somewhere between shock jock and school cafeteria food, but the message is Stand Out!

Are there people who get pissed, because they don’t want to hear the answer one of my blogs is giving to a question they have? You bet. For every one of them, there are three who are glad someone said something, anything, beyond “There are many solutions to these complex issues. Which one you favor will depend, invariably, on you.” Vomit. That’s vomit. No one digs that kind of glop, especially not in a post-blogging online world.

But it doesn’t have to be controversial, if you’re not an idea person. There are excellent, well-followed, highly-popular blogs on gardening, vegetarian cooking, deep sea fishing, older US-made motors, or whatever you want. If you have to, do what I did. Start a blog about nothing. Seinfeld was a show about nothing, and it only stopped making new seasons because Seinfeld wanted to go out on a high note. It won’t stay about nothing for long. I made my blog an avenue of self-discovery, self-knowledge, and self-understanding. What I got out of that was direction and meaning. If you’re done with self-knowledge, I don’t want to tell you. I figure if you’re there already, you already know enough to know what you want to write about, what passion drives you, and you don’t need my advice. And for everything else, there’s Mastercard.

By the way, some people get hung up on the word “blog” or “blogging” as though it were some sort of subculture (it started that way, and now Chrysler and Pepsi and Oprah are doing it).  If you want, you can call it dynamic site updates. Whatever you call it, it’s not enough to do search engine optimization, anymore, if you want to maintain an audience. It hasn’t been enough for years, now. It’s just that no one came out and made the announcement. It’s sort of information that’s leaked out into the reluctant culture a little at a time, like e-mail.

Prices: To List or Not to List?

Personally, I rarely publish prices for services, because I think it encourages price shopping, and creates a climate where I can’t add value, and so I can’t compete. With pure price shopping, I’m competing even with unscrupulous and dishonest service providers and even with incompetent ones. I don’t want to make only what they make, and I don’t want my services valued according to the lowest common denominator.  You don’t either do you?

When someone calls and asks me off the bat what I charge, I ask “for what, exactly?” After all, I don’t even know if they want pure consulting or one of my more tangible services. And if they have no idea, I certainly don’t – that’s why there’s a client consultation. If they ask me what my minimum is, I say a dollar. Then I explain that it depends on what’s needed and what we agree on. I won’t talk price until we’ve done a consultation, because I’m not selling an interchangeable service that you can just pick up anywhere. I’m adding immense value, bringing unique competence, and part of that is assessing the real needs and shaping them if need be. Sometimes a client will actually ask for something they shouldn’t buy – not from me, not from anyone, but they’re missing something that would cost them less, and do more. I don’t sell things they shouldn’t buy, so I’m comfortable with telling them the truth. But to add value, I’ve got to assess their unique needs.

Plus, I want to be the guy they turn to down the road – not just a wham bam thank you ma’am. There are other things I can do for most clients, that they’ll recoup in returns many times over. I want them to have the benefit of that, and I want the repeat business. Price shopping on services is for a purely transactional sales relationship. It’s not for a consultative one.  And remember, anything purely transactional can always be outsourced to someone cheaper than you. All service businesses that intend to stay not only competitive but lucrative, and yes do good in the world, need to be consultative in their culture.

The mentality that motivates consumers to price shop is the notion of interchangeability of services – something borrowed from the product-world. But a marketing plan or a creative design work or an appraisal report process aren’t really products unless you turn them into products. They’re services, and services allow for a wide range of added value. The misconception is so prevalent that even clients will sometimes tell me their own services are interchangeable with everyone else’s.  That had better not be true, if you intend to do any real marketing. Seriously. The success of any marketing plan depends on  your market differentiators. How do you add value in ways the other guys don’t? Do you guarantee a reply to all queries in 24hrs? Do you offer proactive status updates? Do you have extremely refined professional processes that involve your clients? Do you give them deliverables that enhance your service? Is the level of consultation you provide above and beyond the competition? Where do you add value? If the answer is “nowhere” or “I don’t know” then that’s job one. It’s the very first step to your marketing. Nothing else matters until then, because you really don’t have anything to sell that I can’t get down the street. And industries don’t stay that way for long. Then it’s back to price shopping, driving value ever lower, until some smart individual decides to add value and charge a living wage.

Listing your prices for services can short-circuit your attempts to add value by skipping that discussion altogether. It’s like starting the conversation with a discount. Do that, and everyone expects a discount all the time. Besides, it’s hokie. People think, ‘why didn’t you just quote your real price, instead of acting like it’s got a discount bundled in’. People who add value to services don’t have to play those games. That’s a habit picked up from product vendors who use sophisticated supply chains to drive costs ever lower, and most discounts are in exchange for something. It’s not really appropriate as a regular practice for a service entity that intends to survive, let alone thrive.

When I was in Inspector school, the owner of the business responsible for our education explained that he cost more than his competition, and had clients banging down the door. I don’t want to give away his whole farm. But I’ll tell you what he told us, and I’ve taken it to heart. He said when people call and lead with a price question, he tells them the number and then immediately asks (before they hang up), ‘Now I’ve told you my price, can I have 60 seconds to tell you what more you’re getting for that price.’ Then he tells them the three ways his company adds value. Those are his market differentiators. If you’re marketing to an internet audience, those had damned well better be on your home page, buddy. No mistake. If you *are* going to publish prices, either make it easier to get the “How we’re different” part than the price list, or embed those differentiators into the list itself. That’s called packaging. Don’t say I’ll do a 1004 appraisal report for $350. Say  you get premium 1004 service for $350 that includes: [list of your added benefits]. If it’s just the report, someone will do it for $325 any day of the week. And if I need 10 a month, that’s $250/month difference.

If you don’t have any market differentiators, change your processes a little and create some – again, that’s your first marketing task. And not that I’m trying to pump my own marketing consultant services but, if you need help figuring out what that is, that’s what marketing consultants do, among many other things. Get one. Get me, if you like. But if you’re lost, get someone.

So price lists for products? It’s immensely frustrating to go to the store and find the things I need not marked. But you and I aren’t K-mart, are we? We’re not even a fish market, where it’s just about haggling. We’re consultants, you and I, or at least consultative, regardless of what service we’re providing. Lets act like it. See you down at the club.

The 2-minute Resignation Letter

Here it is, time to write another resignation letter for a family member. This is sort of my area, so naturally I reach for the most tiny, most dull, most trivial versions there are. Yes, I’d like to say, “you people are tards who are running your own business into the ground by rewarding mediocrity and using some of the dumbest attempts at emotional manipulation there are – what were you thinking?”, but no I won’t say that. The best response to a business that’s no longer worth your time is to just take your participation elsewhere or else build a better one – not necessarily a bigger one or one as big, but just a better one. Even if it’s just one person and honor, it’s better than one with all the furnishings and none of the ethos that makes any size business great. Greatness isn’t always in the best location, and frequently it answers its own phone.

Still, in my ongoing search for ever more minimalist templates for firing an organization and letting a company go, I came across this one. What the letter says (not how it reads) is that I dictated it to my small child, who is sharper than the recipient, and I included drawings in case you get confused. Now that’s a very good letter, for when you really mean it.

I’m not sending that version, but I’m also not sending the kind that worries about leaving a lasting, but false, impression. What my version will boil down to is the following elements:

1. Effective Date: With your last words, demonstrate your effectiveness. For yourself. They probably don’t realize what they’re losing, and won’t.
2. Explanation: “Positive” but indirect. Not “I’m going somewhere better” but “I’m needing to take the next step in my career”. There. You’ve just said that you’ve realized that better doesn’t exist where you are. But you didn’t say that exactly, you said you were taking care of business.
3. One positive thing about where you worked: Even if it’s just “I learned a lot”. That can mean anything. Courtesy is the least you can do for yourself. Always opt to feel civilized, regardless of whether the place you’re leaving is civilized. That way you don’t take any of it with you.

Onward and upward. That’s the resignation letter I favor. If you can’t write it in under 2-minutes, it’s too much.

Blog vs. Debt

One of the things I like seeing about this economy is the spirit of resistance and, often enough, of triumph that is coming in response. You can see it in the blogosphere. There’s a lot of bullshit out there, about how it’s going to be ‘over’ in a few months. I don’t think so. We’re never going back, folks. It doesn’t matter what people will say when they feel it’s safe to go back into the water of gratuitous waste, dishonest lending, foolish borrowing and general overextension of everything. It won’t be ‘over’ – it won’t be ‘recovered’ – it’ll be different. And I believe different is already here and here to stay.

One blog I found recently really turns me on: Man vs. Debt. It’s written by an amateur and that’s one of the things I like about it. Not every post is a winner, any more than it is here. Some are stellar. It’s real. My favorite is the one on how he decided to sell anything in his house that wasn’t nailed down – from diaper pins to soap dispensers – on ebay and in garage sales. A family member told him that surrendering their possessions would feel like “going backwards”, but he said that being in debt is being backwards – getting out of debt is moving forward, and they can always buy the things they really want again with cash once that happens. What a radical break that is with most of society in the West!

Aside: I live in the Midwestern United States, and here the value system is to get as big a house as you can (almost everything centers on the acquisition of a house), on the most land you can own, and then spend the rest of your life shopping at Pier One Imports or Walmart to fill it with as many things as you can (no empty space – it’s not allowed), and then die and give it all to your kids, so they can have an estate sale, and use the money to rinse and repeat. It’s Noah’s Ark syndrome. Build or acquire a really big structure and fill it with your own copy of everything – two of each. You need a dining room table, and a little kitchen table too. You need two cars. You need at least two TVs. Two telephones. And so it was that all the Noahs signed mortgages, as if theirs were the true ship into which two of every kind of possession must go, and they filled it with two of everything, and closed the hatch. And one day they died in there, and I bought their TV at an estate sale for $20, watched it for a year, and then sold it for $10 in a garage sale. I don’t think the rain is coming to wash away all our possessions. I don’t think we’ll never see furniture again, if we don’t acquire more of it. And what I like is neither do people that write blogs like that. They’re busy casting things out of the Ark! Swim! Swim, you useless curios and pieces of fiberboard crap! Swim back into the stream and be gobbled up by people who are building arks for the end of the sale!

I digress. Another example of some amateurs going at it is the spunky, youthful Five Girls Ditching Debt. Might as well be Spice Girls in my book. Ooo la la! No sooner do you click on these babes’ site than you see pledge #1 – follow David Ramsey’s Baby Steps. Damned straight. They got me out of credit card debt. The rules, not the five girls. Think of it like an exercise journal where  you maintain the will to victory by the sheer chutzpah of posting your goals and your progress on a public wall for the world to see. It’s like talking trash to yourself. Yeah, I’m going to kick debt’s arse! You hear me debt? Watch me! You got something you want to say? Yeah, I’m telling the whole world how I’m going to take you down after school. You’re mine, debt. What, is that a tear in your eye? No, these girls aren’t bullies. Bullies are just pussy cats who can’t deal with their inner softness. These girls are gym-kata fighters with the foo of debt erasure. I wouldn’t bet against them. Sissies would have just found a sugar daddy to pay things off. The five are keeping it real. Gutsy broads, all of them.

I love what people are doing to revamp their lives, hack society’s assumptions, and rethink the world of excess. It’s a revival of sorts, folks. And you can see the little conversions, the little salvific acts appearing all over the place. There’s a revolution goin’ on. I’d like to see Thomas Friedman shocked one morning to wake up and have to amend his friggin 37-CD set on the “Flat World” by saying that the US is starting to outdistance Japan as a nation of savers and investors. Not because I’ve got a flag up my butt and I’m waving in the patriotic wind, or breaking wind, but because it’s good for us, man. The times they are a changing.

The new wind is get up and liberate yourself from the bondage on debt. Paul Simon should make a new version of his song – call it “50 Ways to Leave Your Banker” – “Just drop off the key, Lee, and get yourself free.” That’s right, folks. Say it with the Beatles, too: “One thing I can tell you is you got to be free.” These guys (and at least five girls) are the “drop out (of the economy of economic serfdom) and burn your draft card  anti-debt protesters” of the new economy (today the draft is your credit card – it sends you off to Sam’s Club for a three year stint facing down the enemy of interest). These are the radicals. Don’t underestimate their potency. Hear them roar.

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A Song of Strength

Some of you aren’t notably artsy, and would prefer I keep most of the posts confined to the propositional, I know. And I think the philosophy of work is cool, too. But, well, what can I tell you – not being able to cut off the other parts of my life is exactly the reason I don’t feel particularly comfortable in corporate life. I like to be an integrated person, with all the weepy, sad songs and emotional stuff, the geeky sci-fi and frenetic eccentricity, the notes on the finer points of oat bran and other subjects that reflect a general interest in life, and everything else, which I think all bleeds with our attitudes about work. The activity of our souls is all-consuming, and the work of our hands comes from that source, like fire from a furnace. If you don’t get that, you don’t get work, I think. It’s like picking up the Wall Street Journal – it’s got some of everything, because everything matters. Incidentally, I think it even has recipes, so watch out – I’m liable to give you one for vegetarian keyboard snacks. Anyway, here’s more of the artsy, emotional stuff, because it’s what I’m thinking about at the moment…

The full-length caveman video for Three Doors Down: “Let Me Be Myself” was designated the offical video for the Rules of Work blog. I’ve decided to designate Hands by Jewel as the official Rules of Work blog theme song. It’s got everything that the ROW theme song should have. If you’re skeptical at this point, I present you with just one line: “I won’t be made useless; I won’t be made idle with despair.” For some of you, laid off, worn out, or pushed to the wall, and wondering whether you can reach down into yourself and find whatever it takes to go out again and look for work, or to offer your services up in the marketplace as a contractor, or to make a run at your own business, or just to face another day pillaging your inner resources for the calm, the wildness, the raw gut, or whatever it is you can find to keep swinging at the bag that is the daily grind, this is the right sentiment.

I don’t know what you’re facing. I’m facing the simultaneous thrill of running through an open field – the sense of unprecedented freedom – and likewise  dodging the sharp knives that are the temptation to fear, the attempted bludgeoning by paralyzing worry, and the raining arrows of  proffered self-doubt. Did you think otherwise? If you’re not tempted by these, I think I would worry about that. Why is it so hard to admit temptation? I think the religious traditions that prevail here treat temptation as a failure of character rather than a universal situation that clings to anything it can find – anything that moves anywhere at all, leaving us finally enticed by a desire for absolute stillness, which in medical terms is called a coma. I am tempted. But I said I was dodging the knives, right? And that’s what I’m doing. What about you? Anyway, I think this song is perfect. “Not to worry, because worry is wasteful and useless in times like these.” I think it has all the ingredients a recipe for courage needs – beauty, tenderness, just enough defiance, and a firm resolution to prevail. Way to go, Jewel.

Theme Video Update

Update: The video link on our designated theme video [original article] broke, due to the mysteries of YouTube. It’s restored now.

Freedom Wears a Watchcap

What is home-worker fashion? One of the things I’m curious about, for those of you who work from home all or part of the time is: what do you wear for working? Pajamas? Overalls? Tuxedo? A speedo?

One of the wonderful things about working from home is that you can eat what and how you want. No more bowls of office candy or cold pizza delivery in the break room, if you don’t want it. If you want crab salad on crackers, that’s what you can have. If you want peanut butter on apple slices, you can go for it. Working from home is an opportunity to be healthy, pleasured, and comfortable in what you eat. You can even take a break at the gym or on the exercycle (or keep working, if you’re one of those with the netbook mounted on the handlebars). Likewise, if your thing is a mug of coffee with Irish Cream and a pipe, you’ve got that too.

You also get to listen to what you want in the background. Everyone realizes that. If you want wild, wailing women, they’re right there with you. Not the kind in your HR department, but the kind on your CD. If you want Dillon and Springsteen, they’re your work companions. If you want Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers in the background on NPR, they’ll happily keep you company.

One of the most comforting things, to me, is that you can also wear what you want. I’m currently wearing sweat pants, a painter’s t-shirt, a fancy warm overshirt, a cashmere muffler, and a watchcap. Why this getup, you might ask, and would I really answer the door in it? Yes, quite confidently. The watchcap because, if you’re from the North, you know that if your feet or hands get cold, you put on a hat. I keep the house barely heated to stay alert and save money, and I wear a hat to start, because I won’t want to stop and get one later. The sweat pants because I think men’s pants should move with you, not against you, when you work (think uncrimped), and I’m sitting in an office chair. The muffler because, besides the fact that I personally am incontrovertibly stylish, it keeps my neck warm. If there’s one thing that’s distracting to a brilliant thought in formation, it’s a chill at the neck. And the rest because it’s just comfortable.

So what do you wear? Do you do the tie at your desk no matter what thing, because it helps you with the psychology of it all? I did that when I was in sales, and I think it works. I felt professional, and I acted professionally. Clothes are a part of the mind’s picture of itself. They contribute to mood just like food and music do. Dressed to the nines, I felt confident, cool, sharp, deliberate, and sexy. Yes, sexy – that word we couldn’t say if there were an HR department in our home office. Sexy, despite the Victorian hypocrisy that prevails in corporate settings, is part of being effective too. If you feel sexy, you feel effective, potent, able to accomplish what you want and able to obtain what you desire. So dressing to feel sexy is a good idea too, as long as you don’t chase that rabbit too far and end up at your corner store hitting on cashiers during your break. I have friends that should slob up a little before they go out.  At least the married ones should.

Wear swim trunks and put the laptop by the hottub? Is it TV trays and night shirts? Are you “business casual” and, if so, do you have casual or Hawaiian shirt Fridays? Do you hammock up, like “The Todd” in Scrubs? Do you work in the nude? Is your attire now reflecting every sports team you’ve ever adored, from football jersey to fitted baseball cap? Do you wear whatever you passed out in the night before? Is it your chance to put on sequins and pearls? Are you dressed like Ozzie Nelson or Kramer in his apartment? I don’t actually want to know, tho if you want to leave a comment and tell the world, that’s fine. I’m more interested in whether you’ve thought about it.

What’s it like to be free? How does freedom dress? What does freedom eat and drink during the day?

In case you were wondering, I’m having minted green tea and have a movie  Sex and Death 101 keeping me company in a little window on my left. No, it has nothing to do with what I said above – it just happens to be my latest pick. Yesterday morning’s was a really awful horror flick, and earlier I was listening to an up and coming new artist (one of my wailing women).

Freedom. Here, freedom wears a watchcap.

Sell more than you save

Rule of Work: If you must choose, sell more rather than save more. Both are good, but it’s a matter of priorities.

As I contemplate “quitting the day job” (OK, so I’m not quitting – the project is at completion and I’ve finished – but I’m referring to not replacing it with another one), I am automatically cutting costs, and preparing to cut others. The obvious large chunks. Some of the small ones if they take no effort to dismiss.

The other night I spent an hour to save more than $100 in the coming year, for instance, and am feeling pretty good about it. It’s money I had no need to spend.  However, let’s analyze that. At $100/hour, someone who does contract work might be feeling pretty good. In fact, it might be tempting to say it’s better than $80/hour working. I’m not so sure. Cutting a cost didn’t enhance my marketing. It didn’t send me referrals. It didn’t add to my portfolio or create the potential to add value for added fees. All it did was remove something.

To further illustrate this, who of us hasn’t spent more than $100 on our marketing? If not, what are you waiting for – this isn’t Field of Dreams. How much would you spend to get a client? Per client? $100? I might. Especially if I was hungry, I might. So which would be better – saving $100 or getting a client?

I’m a fan of cost cutting. I respect cost cutting. I have to engage in cost cutting or my business will die and I will end up working for someone else’s business, helping them… hmm…. I won’t be helping them with cost cutting. Most likely, I’ll be helping them sell. That’s the only reason to hire me – I can sell at a time when businesses are cutting costs.

So the point is to turn that ability into an asset for one’s own business. All of us can sell, or else we employ really good people who can sell for us. But we’re all in the business of selling something. Products, services, or just our charm and good looks. Well, actually I don’t have much charm. It’s a question of focus. The focus, especially now, especially when this economy can rear up and try to scare us, and the temptation to make it about cutting costs pokes at us. Again, if we focus mainly on cost cutting and not sales, we’ll be out selling someone else’s widgets before long. This is exactly the time to be selling our own – to spend our “off” hours not dozing, not lazing around, not waiting for clients, and not even searching for that last penny to save. It’s time to beat the bushes harder than ever.

You remember the parable of the talents. I hate to use a religious metaphor so soon after having used another one, but it’s that or a reference to Disney, and they’re not making metaphors as well as they used to. You can bury that talent in the ground, and not spend a darned dime. You can cut costs so low that nothing costs you anything, and hang on to what you have. Or you can do what the righteous do. You can go out and invest. Invest in your business. And seek the reward that comes to the faithful steward. Remember, your business is something to which you have a responsibility to be loyal, faithful, dedicated. You owe it, in the same way you owe praise to whoever cooks your dinner. So  you can’t just bury the coin and sit on it. Faithfulness to your business means tend the crops, thresh the grain, bring in the new wine, and so on.

For those of you who are religious, I’m not saying your business is the highest good in the universe. It’s just the highest good when it comes to your work, if you happen to be a business owner, precisely because it belongs to the Chairman of the Board – and I don’t mean Frank Sinatra. Food is meant to be eaten, it’s for the good of your body and soul – it’s not for putting in a glass case and gawking at. Same thing with your business. Nourish it, tend it, and let it nourish you back. At least, that’s what I’m going to do.

I’m not really giving advice, even if I seem like it. So don’t go thinking I know anything about where the market’s going and all that. I’m pretty pessimistic about that. I’m optimistic about where I’m going, and partly because I choose to see this market as an opportunity. I’m really writing so I can ponder the things I’m going to do to not merely ride through, but to try to prosper during a flood. And if I borrow a religious metaphor or two, it may be because I find myself praying quietly “Lord have mercy”, because it’s an awfully audacious thing to set out to do and, if there’s something I’m afraid, of it’s pride. Arrogance? No. But pride, yeah – that’s one expense I can’t afford. What I can afford is the determination to market my work with more effort than I use to protect it or myself. It’s a risk, but this seems like a moment when gamblers bank on rules like this one which,  put another way is: sell yourself long when the chips are low. But I like to keep my rules metaphor-free: sell more than you save.

The Unseen Light

You know, the agonizing thing about knowing you can build a business, knowing you have the courage, the intelligence, the talent, is not having the right idea. Don’t get me wrong, I have a business, and it’s the right idea, and it has been, for where I was, where I am, and for a while yet where I’m going. It’s the right idea because any business that works is currently the right idea. But you know what I mean. I mean that one idea that’s stellar, that you’ll give yourself to and promote when nobody believes in you, about which you are willing to be arrogant (some will say obstinate), even in the face of all the people that say “what if” and “yeah but” and “you’re living in a fantasy world”. I don’t know whether that’s the voice of your parents, spouse, siblings, religious group, or whatever. If all of these are supportive, you probably have it all figured out already and don’t need this article. My confidence and sense of adventure and obdurate insistence on determining for myself how to see the world painted an early target on by back. So I’ve had to pretty much work on the great liberating idea while under fire.

The idea is everything, you know. That’s what we know, those of us who are still trying to come up with it. The idea is everything. If we could just have that one idea – the one that no one has ever had, or ever followed through on or, if you settle, ever done quite right. We know what we want. We want the unprecedented. And when we have it, that idea, firmly fixed in our heads, and when we know that it’ll succeed no matter what anyone says, then we’ll act accordingly. That’s when we’ll act.

But I have a theory. It’s a theory I’m working on, anyway. My theory is that all kinds of ideas are the right idea, if you are committed enough. Put a different way, I’m not sure that the idea comes first, and that you will have that certainty, that absolute certitude, and then you will press on against all odds. Sure, it has happened that way now and then. But my theory is that perhaps, most of the time, instead of this, instead of just knowing, and so being committed, you commit first. You commit without knowing. Not just without knowing your idea will succeed – but without even knowing what the idea is. It sounds crazy, which is a word ordinary people use to mean counterintuitive – against common sense – unprecedented. But that, tonight, is what I think. At least I’m willing to explore it. I think that you commit to going forward, with and how you can, to being governed by an idea and, if you don’t have the exact one yet, to going forward anyway with what bare, meager ideas you have. You choose the one that isn’t guaranteed to make you rich, isn’t a sure thing that you can see whole and pristine against the sky. You go forward with wherever and whatever you have and, I think, you find the idea while you’re in motion, not while you’re waiting for it to dawn on you.

Now I can’t prove this. It is quintessentially the example of non-linear thinking, and I for one am not the biggest fan of what a lot of people call non-linear thinking. But what’s the alternative? The alternative is to stay put and bleed or, if you’re slightly less dramatic about it, stay put and do absolutely nothing at all. I’ve seen animals that stay completely still, because they’ve been injured in some way, and they’re bewildered – they don’t know what to do. They will starve like that, and I venture to suggest that if you’re the kind of person that responds to this kind of writing, so will you. It boils down to either paralysis and stasis or else going forward without the slightest guarantee, but more than than – without that pristine shining beacon, that mountain of enlightenment, that tinkerbell of sanity standing out in front of you like the vocational nirvana that it surely is. I think, again I’m not sure, that some of us may find what we’re looking for by feeling our way around it a bit. And besides, some of us can’t wait. When the lightbulb of all lightbulbs does go off, if we haven’t built the groundwork, by building businesses, by venturing forth bravely against the advice of others, we won’t be the kind of people that will recognize the lightbulb and distinguish it from something dangerous and threatening.

All ideas, when you’re not acting on ideas, seem dangerous, seem like a threat to our safe ground, because all of them presume the courage to change, the willingness to risk what we know for what we don’t. All ideas, at first, seem like walking out over water with nothing but faith. But when you are living in them, when you have walked among the storms already, then you know. You have the assurance of things hoped for, to quote a saint. And that’s what we mean by the certainty that the idea we alone can fully see, despite the fog of naysayers, is true, will succeed, and merits our undying effort and commitment. I think, first, before we’re entitled to that pillar of cloud going before us, showing us the way, that radiant lightbulb of genius, we must respond to the small fire in the bush, the small inklings that our lives are more than we’ve made them to be thus far, and must take those first furtive steps into what seems like the desert, and barrenness, living perhaps only on the manna of our own self-belief, and deference and humility before whatever god we think turns the dawn into darkness and strides the heights of creation.

So. So, I commit to going on, into this sandstorm. Going on when a part of me wants to cry out “where is my food going to come from?” Not insanely. I’ll gather what I can each day, and conserve and preserve all that I find like the dearest friends. But the alternative, to continue to borrow a religious metaphor, is bondage back in Egypt. I don’t know how I’m going to live in the desert exactly, a year from now. But I have food for today, the courage and commitment to go forward, and I have what talent, what intellect, and what hands God gave me. Who really, of us, has more than this when, now more than ever, all illusions of security are being shown for the false prophets and dead idols that they are? I’m not going back to chains and servitude, to the lash and the mundane ordering of my life by the clock kept in corporate board rooms, building monuments to a foreign god who isn’t my own. Remember, this is just metaphor – I’m not preaching a sermon. But the beauty of religious history is that it lends itself so readily to a perennial understanding of the problems we face.

And aren’t we already a little arrogant or obstinate (or courageous) to think we’re the special people, the chosen people, the people who will break the mold, who will conceive of a life lived outside the cubicle walls, of an economic force that comes from our own fire, our own engine, and of an ethical and metaphysical determination, freedom, and self-actualization that comes from breaking with the world as most people describe it to us – from the stories of a people not our own – like Abraham coming out of Ur. And if we are that arrogant, why not a little more? Why take one self-righteous step forward and not be willing to take another? Why shout out freedom and tremble at pulling free of the chains? Let the silent stay in Egypt. Those of us who find in ourselves a voice that dares to say Pharoah doesn’t own us, to the wilderness! I don’t see the lightbulb with my physical eyes, ladies and gentleman. I’m not a liar. But I see it, there, just where I’m going. I see it with inner eyes, and know with a kind of stretching of the imagination and creativity and desire that it’s real and that, if I press on, I will have it in my head and and in my  hands and it will come out of my mouth. You can say it’s wish fulfillment but, actually, what’s wrong with wish fulfillment? I intend, I plan on fulfilling my wishes. That’s what I’m in this for.

I’m not a believer, as you skeptics are likely to label me. I’m more arrogant than that, remember? I have certitude. Obstinate surety, indifferent certainty – counterintuitive, unprecedented vision of something that doesn’t yet exist, and a theory that can’t be demonstrated to the minimal satisfaction of any empirical analysis. I have what some of you would call faith – though those of you that know me know that I don’t do anything on faith, and have no faith – but I’m not afraid to accept the analogy.  For those of you who, like me, tend to shy from anything the world calls faith, I’ll give you an insight. It’s not faith at all. I know something the skeptics and critics don’t, and it’s not contact with the spirit world or a high tech ouiji board – I leave that to the economic analysts of our time.  No, the thing that I know that none of the skeptics know, is myself. I know who I am. I have known for a while how I operate, and how I’m put together – how I work. Knowing how things work, that’s a kind of special interest for some of us, whether it’s for tinkering or just academic interest. I know how I work, and what I’m made of. I’ve taken it apart. And because of that, I’m not basing any of this on faith – I’m basing it on a kind of vocational insider trading, where the key component of the market is self-knowledge and self-determination.  I’m betting that some of you who read this have access to the same inside knowlege and, while I don’t intend to stick around in one place to find out, it’s my sincere hope you will make use of it and corner the market on amazing by continuing to take the first  steps toward awesome. I will see you, quite gladly, on the other side. I’ll see you in the promised land.

Designated Theme Video

This video can’t be embedded, but it has been chosen as the official theme video of the Rules of Work blog. A friend and colleague added the following verbiage:

It taps into everything you ever thought, felt and said about not “fitting in” when employed by a company. This video makes me think about…

• People who are smart but don’t do well in a traditional corporate environment.
• People who are creative but don’t do well in a traditional corporate environment.
• People who are ahead of their time, could deliver tremendous value, but aren’t allowed to.
• People with tattoos, funky hair, body piercing.
• People of different races, religions, sexualities, ages.

Note: the video link broke due to the mysteries of YouTube, but it’s restored now.

Fear, Loathing, Escaping the Cube

So when I first started building my business, I took a ‘day’ job. It was partly fear. It was. It’s hard to turn down a steady paycheck, healthcare, and the lascivious knowledge that somehow society supports your decision, where they seem to be bewildered by people who  break away from corporate life. It wasn’t a terrible decision, though. A job is a great way to capitalize your business. It’s a great way to shore up your resources, build your emergency fund, get your feet under you, and lend capital to your startup.

It was supposed to be for 10 months. A “contract” job, by which they mean you get benefits, you’re a full-time employee, but it’s essentially temporary – for a project. In this case, right up my alley – designing and training software and processes and being the face of the software rollout on the ground with the end-user population. As these things often go, though, it became two years. The business suffered. It suffered because I had to turn some clients away. I didn’t get to give it the kind of attention it needed. I throttled its growth, so I could keep doing what I was doing.

When the day gig started winding down, the temptation to look for another job was strong, I can tell you. For the same reasons. After all, you can never have enough capital, never really have enough in the emergency fund (it keeps getting hit by life’s emergencies), and when your primary peer base is employees who support what you’re doing – being an employee – you start sort of feeling the pressure to cave.

At some point, though, you have to cut the cord. Corporate life is like a mother that feeds you, true enough, but also ensures you never stray outside the front yard. As the project started ending, people would get sort of gentle and weepy-eyed on my behalf – you know, the kind of sympathy you get at funerals. “Are you going to be all right?” Imagine that too quiet, too soft voice like someone has died.  I have a low tolerance for that. What makes anyone think I’m all right being an employee? Is that what it means to be all right?

People respond differently when you tell them you’re leaving corporate life to do your own thing. Some like to insert the if’s everywhere they can. “IF you’re able to make it float. IF you’re able to last in this economy (they don’t realize that every economy is an opportunity).” etc. Others like to sort of glaze over and patronize, as though you’ve told them you’re quitting college to be an artist, or running away to join the circus. They figure it’s a phase, an expression of despair, loss, and grief at “losing” your job. Have they never been in a contract before? The whole point is for you to finish it, and for it to end. But the point is that they think you’re doing something self-destructive, like moving in with your mom and drinking a fifth of vodka every day, while you refinish wooden boats. Come to think of it, if it’s good vodka, that could be a business.

The thing is, at some point you either have to keep strangling your own business, or business plan, keep relegating it to the theoretical, actually lending creedence to its fairytale status, or you do in fact have to sack up, cut yourself loose from the dock, and float your boat out to sea. The sea is choppy, the sea is wild, that’s what they warn you about. It’s true. So true. But if you listen, what they’re really saying is, “the sea is scary”. They’re asking you to be afraid. They’re asking you to share in their own fear, to be afraid with them. After all, if we’re all afraid together, huddling in our cubicles – our cells, dreading the axe, the chances are some us will get a pardon. Gosh, I just can’t bear any longer to look at the world of work that way. Work is the fruit of a man’s loins, so to speak. Work is the product of his heart, his head, and his hands. It’s a glorious, sacred thing. The notion that fear enters into it, or somehow helps us, protects us, keeps us sane, stable, and safe is for the fainthearted who plan to spend all their lives living on another man’s dime.

Don’t get me wrong: if someone wants to be an employee, that’s fine. Some people prefer that you give them their work. I’ve no qualm with it, ultimately. I much prefer to be a contractor or self-employed or both. Contractors *are* self-employed, if they do it right. But the notion that the employee has to choose being an employee out of fearfulness cheapens being an employee. If you’re that, and you want it, do it without fear. When you’re laid off, when your project is finished and you have to move on, when your company goes out of business, you know that’s part of the deal. Don’t be afraid, be ready for it. Be on top of it. I’ve seen successful employees do this. I’m not knocking it. I’m knocking terror in the sacred place of our talents and the product of our souls. People say they don’t feel afraid, until you see the boat start to rock, and then it all comes gushing out.

But in the same way, fear has no place in the heart of a contractor or a self-employed person. It’s an enemy, a slow poison. Sometimes, not so slow. It’s like being chained to some invisible, impotent thug who only wishes to be a weight that holds you to the mundane, stifles your imagination, and does its best to convince you to be like other men – to join and imitate the huddle. And that fear will stifle your business, where taking a temporary gig to fund it and build it, in and of itself, won’t do so.

To those who are shaking their head in sadness for my departure – you can rest assured I’ll be fine. Quite fine. I’ll land on my feet, because I know where they are. And if I ever get hungry, I’ll see you again, using a job to pack my bank account for a business makeover, or a rebuild, or a new birth. But the very idea that I’d fail presumes only one thing – that I lack the heart to keep running at it, determined to prosper. I have a much harder time buying that fairytale. I don’t even see *how* one can fail if you only determine never to stop, never to give in, never to let up, until you have what you are after. And what’s the worst case scenario? That someone like me does this all his life, running at it, making a new start, pushing at it, building, building again if it gets knocked down, until his last breath. Frankly, that’s a heroic way to live. I’m pretty comfortable with that. I don’t plan on that to be the story, but I wouldn’t mind it and, honestly you don’t have the emotional stamina to put yourself to work if you don’t have the heart to work that hard.

I do. You do, some of you. Or want to. How on earth do people think these things get done? I’ve heard the myth – every business that survives and enriches its owners is the creation of pre-existing wealth or is an accident of history in a far off place where someone else – always someone else – stumbles accidentally upon an idea or a process that makes them ’successful’. It takes a lot of faith to believe fairy stories like *that* one. Any decent survey of startups that have lasted a few years will show you that it’s *not* true. That happens, yes, but a lot of businesses, quietly making it, are just the product of someone so cantankerous, so obscenely arrogant, that he wouldn’t give up, wouldn’t stop, and didn’t care what you thought about him (unrealistic dreamer and blowhard), even if he seemed pleasantly congenial during “team lunches”.

To those who think I’m unrealistic, what is real? Isn’t it what someone is actually doing? What I’m doing is real – it’s not imaginary. And what I will do will be real when I really do it. I’m not asking you to believe anything, let alone believe in what you can’t see. I’m not asking for anything at all. That’s the point. Be sympathetic, if you want. Be dubious, if you like. Just don’t be in my way when I’m working, because that and only that will give me concern. Just don’t call me late for dinner, in other words.

Now, in a blog about work, I’m not the point, per se. Not really. Nor is my personal history, and that’s not why I’m recounting it. Nor am I the paragon, holding himself up to suggest you live the righteous life that I myself am living. I’m writing a somewhat personal story because I think many of us are in the same boat, sharing the same goals and are surrounded by many of the same attitudes and… sympathies. And if nothing else, this is about more than encouragement. The blog is called Rules of Work. It’s about the principles of what we’re doing, and how we achieve it. We’ve written about fear in the past. “The mind killer”, as they say on Dune. So I won’t articulate that rule again. People who don’t get it just say “yeah, whatever, blah blah blah” (yes, I got such an e-mail). People who do, just need to know that many of us are unafraid. That courage is there to be found, to reach for. And that the fears of others aren’t the rule that must govern our lives. We are free of others’ anxieties, if we want to be.

You don’t have to burn every bridge. Like I say, I’ll get a job again, if I get hungry enough, and I’ll use it to fund a rebuild of my business. But you also don’t have to stay in the big “safe” boat (the news anywhere lately should tell you it was never safe and certainly isn’t going to be any time soon – smart people at least put a second iron into the fire). You can cut the rope, including the rope to all that emotional baggage that comes from other people, and just serves as an anchor to weigh you down. Nothing profound, perhaps. Just an alternative story – a different mythos than the one that’s coming over the top of the cubicle walls, or is in the mournful goodbyes if you’re leaving your gig. Be a rock star. Leave the stage just as well as you walked on.

Contractors vs. Corporations

The trend is corporations increasingly substituting contractors for full time employees. Besides not having to pay benefits, there is no unemployment security, fewer rights (e.g. medical Leave of Absence), and diminished job security. Use them and drop them – that’s the new mantra. It’s not just the economy, either, as though it’s coming back. There’s a fundamental shift, perhaps spurred by the economic crash, that’s changing the way corporations look at filling roles within the organization.

Mr. Elienberg wasn’t a Comcast employee, but a so-called independent contractor working for a separate company. This month, he sued both companies, for allegedly depriving him and other contractors of overtime pay and benefits by not considering them employees.The case highlights a perennial issue for employers that is gaining new prominence during the recession. Lawyers say employers are trying to avoid hiring full-time employees by tapping contractors, as workers seeking better pay and benefits turn to the courts. – [Wall Street Journal, Oct 19, 2009]

Undoubtedly, this will result not only in the kind of lawsuit being levied against Comcast, but also we’re likely to see pressure from individual contractors to achieve the kinds of rights once associated with unionization – basic rights. To do this, contractors may soon be seeking alternative forms of representation – alternatives to the traditional staffing agency. After all, staffing agencies are essentially the tools of the very corporations driving these changes. They take around half of your income, ensure that you don’t rock the corporate boat, and respond ultimately to the demand not of the individual (you’re not their client, the corporation is) but rather act as yet another corporation in partnership with the very forces reducing worker status and entitlements.

It’s not that being a contractor is undesirable. But being a contractor with no negotiating power isn’t going to fill the gaps for the newly unemployed, and glutting the contractor forces is liable to drive down opportunities and bargaining power for existing contractors. What is needed is perhaps not to defend traditional employment – arguably the corporations are right – traditional pre-depression employment may not just be in decline or recession, it may ultimately be dead – we just don’t see it yet. What may be necessary instead is to elevate and dignify the role of contractors traditionally at the mercy of staffing agencies by replacing staffing agencies with something new – a kind of empowerment engine for free agents. Stay tuned, if you like. This is something some of us are actually working on.

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