Borders: The Line Between Corporate and Cool

I’m starting a corporate wall of shame to jot down the silliness experienced in various corporate venues that just keep on sucking out there without an adequate degree of ridicule in response. I’m doing it in honor of Borders – that’s right, the bookstore that used to have decent coffee.

When my coffee shop closes, if it’s late, and I still want to work, I’ve been going to Borders. It’s a good place to buy notebooks and drink some passable coffee (if you avoid the “cold brewed” concoction that often sits in a pitcher for days, which they water down in your glass because it’s concentrated). There are enough electrical outlets, and they’re open ’til 11.

There are often the usual annoyances – the bitchy, older small businessman broadcasting his toughness and independence (vestige of the John Wayne era) for all to hear: “I told her that if she was going to… and if he does that, I’ll tell him…”, the gaggle of reading group types making sure they set up right in the center, so we all can benefit from the sharing (and cackling), the single guy who discovered religion or politics just yesterday and is lecturing the tolerating girlfriend about it (pro or con) with the passion of a zealot and the conviction of a sage, or just mix and match – put the single guy on the phone, and give the older one the political megaphone, and make the gaggle a screaming child who says he’s in charge and the parent that let’s him make sure we all know it. Add in the weird musical selections over the PA – one evening some guy is singing a gospel “thank you, Jesus” and the next it’s a bluesy “I’m burning in Hell”. I kid you not, those were the two most recent times I went. But in some ways, it’s still tolerable with a good set of earplugs.

They’re serious about running you out at 11pm. That sucks, but I get it – it’s a labor cost thing. So why the wall of shame?

Seattle’s Best plays a big role. Borders used to have good coffee – coffee good enough to be missed. Even in Seattle, no one drinks Seattle’s Best. But it’s really the policies of the cafe that suck. Look in the forums for the guy that ordered no ice and they filled his glass half full, because that’s the same amount of liquid. Wow. It’s not every cafe, but it’s not none of them, either. Tonight I ordered an espresso, and it was $1.80. I asked if it had gone up, and they said they have to charge for a small drink. In the past, they could charge what they charge just for a shot (because that’s what I ordered). Not anymore – “it’s corporate”, the gal explains. That’s an interesting premise – file that away. So a double shot is $1.95, if that gives you an idea (is that a large drink?). But yep, it’s even decanted as a small drink – no espresso cup – they put it in a small drink cup, way down at the bottom. Imagine – an espresso that’ll take a lid. If it’s a small, hot drink, though, shouldn’t it work the same way as the guy w. the ice? Fill it up, or you owe me the rest. I didn’t make a point of this at the counter, but it only seems fair.

The real straw came when they killed the internet at a few minutes before 11:00. I had just written a lot of crucial material, and hitting save on my cloud document no longer worked. No warning – just bam, you’re screwed. When I asked a passing clerk about it, he said they shut down the internet automatically at 11:00. When I pointed out that it’s not 11:00 yet, he held his hands wide and said there’s nothing he can do about it. Wow again. If I had just been told that the most valuable objects possible in the world (ideas written down) – at least that valuable to someone – were hanging in limbo, and an evening’s work (how’s that for value?) was getting lost because someone decided to to set the wifi to trip off before closing time, I’d go back and flip the switch so the file could be saved. Yes, it’s that easy. But no, there’s nothing he can do.

So I go to the manager on duty, and tell her I really can’t regard the place as a cool venue anymore. I tell her about the ice, the espresso, and the internet, and how it has made me reticent to consider them an acceptable place to return even with the notebooks, the coffee, and the many outlets. It’s that serious to me – I’m losing an evening’s work. Wow a third time: what ensues is a list of reasons why I’m wrong, and how much trouble it is that I am raising these concerns. She says everyone has a fill line on their cups – that’s just how every coffee shop does it – I just don’t understand how iced coffee drinks work, because (she tells me) Borders didn’t have iced coffee before Seattle’s Best. They did, actually, and it was excellent. I tell her I just came from a coffee shop, one of many I patronize, and they’re happy to omit ice on a cold drink. “That’s an independent coffee shop,” she says. “This is corporate”. Again that premise. Still interesting.

The internet she blames on the ISP – they “have no control over Verizon outages”. I tell her what the clerk says about the automatic cutoff, so she says she’ll go back and flip the wifi back on long enough for me to save my file (so it’s not Verizon, after all). But great – I might just change my mind about the place – that’s what I’m looking for – simple fix, and I’m out of their hair. But no, she can’t leave it at that. She launches into telling me that I should have come to her sooner. So I’m wrong again. Wrong about ice, wrong about the internet, wrong about not getting to her sooner (it’s 11:01pm – I discovered the dead internet at 10:58 as I was saving the file to go home – I tell her this, she still says I should have come immediately). She explains they cut off the internet because some people like to try to stay until 11:15. Imagine, customers who like the place so much, they try to stay there. In fact, she tells me, they’re closed now, and they’re trying to leave. So, I can save my file, but I should acknowledge that the system really makes sense as it is. In the end, I tell her the list of reasons why I’m inconveniencing her, don’t understand how things work, and am complaining in the wrong way, is growing really long.

I am indeed an inconvenience, she says – she’s trying to go home, and that I’m making her evening difficult. I can rectify that, of course, as I see what I really have to pay for my file is capitulation – I have to accept cubicle wisdom – things are what they are because they’re corporate and corporate is immune from correction – I tell her not to bother with flipping the wifi – I’m on my way to another wifi connection to save that file. She still can’t let it go – she needs to believe – she needs *me* to believe. She gets in a few parting shots that I won’t bore you further with (more things I’m doing wrong and should do better, more that I don’t grasp – it’s corporate, after all, more of how my complaining procedure is incorrect). At the door, I ask who were supervisor is, and she wonders why I’d want to trouble him with these things (I’m so much trouble), and finish up a Friday evening with a complaint. My evening isn’t finished, I assure her (for one thing, I’ve got work to go try and save – good thing I had that small drink… er… espresso).

So, wall of shame. And not because I want to get limp revenge on Borders. And I certainly don’t want to get individual people there in trouble, which is why I’m not naming them, and not actually going to that manager – corporate stores like this don’t learn or create learning for others – they punish people when you complain, instead of making them better. Those complaints are too much of an inconvenience, after all. It’s really just futile unless you’re trying to hurt someone for whom this is all there is in the world of work (like kicking a cripple), or unless it’s really worth the price of admission to go that far to analyze and understand how people in that kind of work milieu think.

That’s the biggest shame – that these folks are trained to regard consumer unhappiness as burdensome, a thing to be refuted and argued against rather than repaired with thinking outside the nametag – the need to defend and prop up corporate-ish-ness and make sure the customer knows he’s wrong – that “corporate” simply can’t be wrong in the same way – it’s above the person – it’s a self-justifying mechanism – a thing is so, and is rightly so, because “it’s corporate” – “there’s nothing we can do”.

I might indeed be wrong, I might be. The guy w. the half full cup might be wrong. But how would they know? Are we wrong just because they want to do things a certain way and our asking for it to be different is an inconvenience? What’s troubling is that they’re right about the independent vs. corporate thing, which they all seem to have down, including the guy that says “there’s nothing I can do” (translation: I have no empowerment in my job – I exist in a world of absolutes that cannot be changed). The gal that explains the price gouge: “it’s corporate” (pricing isn’t about rationally sensible to you, it’s about what works for us). And their manager, finally: “that’s an independent store, we’re corporate” (She’s right, of course – the independent person, right down to the lowly part time counter clerk, at any independent coffee shop I’ve patronized in the last 15 years would have imagined what it’s like to be in a customer’s shoes and would have said “That sucks to lose an important file, here let me flip the wifi if all you need is to hit the save button. Then we’ll get you on your way.”).  It would have been shameful for an employee at any independent coffee shop to think, live with, let alone say the words “there’s nothing I can do”. They just don’t want to work in a place like that – it’s why they’re not at Blockbuster.

The internet thing is stupid, sure – it’s like turning off the lights while someone is still reading 5-minutes before closing, or locking the bathroom so they can’t let out they’re espresso 5-minutes before they get on the road. It’s just dumb. 11:00 should not mean 10:55. Close 5-minutes earlier, if you want. If I know that’s coming, I’ll shut down then. Did I mention that there were several announcements over the P.A. system to the effect that the store closes at 11:00? Nothing said, “but at 10:55, we turn out the lights!” Spooky, but kind of fun if you just announce it. But come on, it’s more like a restaurant than the post office.

The coffee thing, well you can always work around stuff like that in a corporate store – they’re never quite clever enough to prevent all frugality (which seems to be the real moral crime in one of those places). You just learn to do things like order a double espresso, add twice as much half and half and some honey, and then ask them to fill your “small drink” cup with ice (ice is free, isn’t it?), after which you lid it and shake. I feel like Jack Nicholson trying to order a sandwich in Five Easy Pieces. “What do you mean I can’t get toast, you have sandwiches, you have bread don’t you?”

But the whole, ‘we’ll flip the switch rather than lost you, but you complained in the wrong way, and we’re not really wrong, you’re wrong – about everything, and we hate getting feedback like this – we only want positive feedback – because we’re a corporate store’ – all the way out the door – that’s really the “corporate” mentality writ large – and that’s almost worth a nights work to write off. There’s only one right kind of feedback in a corporate store, because there’s only one reason for things: “we’re corporate” – and that’s why I don’t complain to the GM – because there’s only one response in a setting like that – the patronizing “sorry you had a bad experience, that shouldn’t have happened” and then someone gets punished – not for a rational reason – they don’t get trained – they get punished – for one cause – “it’s corporate”. But it doesn’t change.

Sure I always knew that Borders was corporate. And yeah, I’m picky and all, and yeah – for those of you who avoid conflict like gonorrhea – I could have just let it go or adapted. But I *want* to interact with the world of other people’s work, too – even big box work. I *want* to engage it, even if it’s an unwinnable cause, because it fuels my own understanding of work. I suppose the first step to breaking free is understanding there’s a problem. Sure, you’ve gotta get beyond that, but it’s never really good to lose touch with the problem. As a colleague of mine says, “We’ll watch them, we’ll learn from them, and we won’t run our businesses the way they do.” I always smile and nod and say, “And that’s why we’ll outdo them with fewer resources. That’s why we’ll succeed where they fail.” So I admit, I’m not exactly the quiet type who just sinks his chin and goes off looking at his feet. Especially not after abiding by the rules, and still being unable to save a night’s work. That’s raping me, in my book. But it does provide an opportunity (I’ve got to get something out of it) to think about what those two pregnant words (“it’s corporate”) mean to people. What is it they think they are saying? I don’t know if you caught it, but they also think that my Friday ends when their store’s Friday ends. At 10:55. What does that say about the lens a corporate store uses to understand its clientelle?

Anvil – Clothing for Good

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

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

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

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

Religious Bias and Tolerance at Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Film Commentary: The Corporation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rush Hour Driving Tells Us About Work Attitudes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Running Out of Time

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

Excerpt from: The Insect

Chapter title: Running Out of Time

Copyright 2005, Daniel DiGriz, All Rights.

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

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

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

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

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

“Leaving.”

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

“Night.”

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

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

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

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

“Hello? David?”

“Yes?”

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

“Work? Is there something special going on?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Shelly . . . What time is it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You OK?”

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

“You do this often?”

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

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

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

“Don’t what?”

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

He sat down.

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

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

“Better now?” She was still smiling.

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

“Feels like the end of the world.”

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s your name?”

“David. David Doss. Yours?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re combing?”

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

“I didn’t exactly run into you.”

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

“You’re kidding.”

“Yes, I am. But you started it.”

“True. Thanks for the water.”

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

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

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

“You’re picking me up?“

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“STOP!”

“What? What’s wrong?”

“That’s mine! I’m getting towed!”

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

“STOP! Please.”

“Maybe I should have a talk with him.”

“I don’t see why, it’s my car . . .”

She grinned at him devilishly.

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

“I’ll enjoy taking care of it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Additional Rules of the Church of Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supreme Court Rapes the Free World. Again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Power of Negative Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ROW Spotlight: Kiva – You Can Microlend

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

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

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

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

What’s Wrong With Discounts?

I’m not a believer in discounts, unless they are part of a marketing campaign. Half-hazard discounts, just because someone asks for one, force you to work harder for less pay to justify your normal price. And you’re not giving them a reason for the discount, so what does that say about what you were going to charge them? That it wasn’t a fair value? I wouldn’t want to send that message. If you’re willing to cut prices, just make the discount 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 individual 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, without over-generalizing.

Most people that tell me they’re only able to get business by slashing prices aren’t doing real 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. In other words, they’re efforts result in a less desirable situation, not more. 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. If I don’t do that, I’m doing it wrong. 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 necessarily 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 – trade referrals for referrals. Don’t trade free 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? Because the prices are perceived as 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, and we don’t specialize in 10lb bags of cheese puffs for fifty cents less – 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 method – I don’t like the bargain of “expected discounts”, 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 have every day low prices – they’re certainly very reasonable. 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. In other words, I cut costs. 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. I want to add enough value that price is not the primary discussion.

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 darned well entitled to afford 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 in Southern California, by the way, you might want to contact Free Agent Source ( I do some work for them). 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 (and save) 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 anything 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?

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. Society is always in tension with the individual – I already figure society is not out 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 a lot of people call home “ownership” isn’t just a fairytale we tell ourselves while sleeping 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 crumbcake. Especially if we live there by having our heads so far up our corporate boss’s butt that the job feels extra-secure. We’ve learned a lot about both homes and jobs lately.

That aside, effectively preventing a lot of self-employed from having home loans 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 guys 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 tinker’s 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 and more in control of their live.

There are foolish people who will make foolish deals. There are predators who will prey on weaker understandings. That will go on, too. But it’s not going to be the whole story. 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. It’s the equivalent of something we’ve quoted before – when you read, don’t make notes, make action lists.

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. Or if you’re interested in home maintenance or remodeling or handywork over all, you could go down that path. 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, whatever it is, as something that might have value for other people).

I’m a self-employed internet marketing consultant. I write a blog about work. I didn’t really know, at first, 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, and then I split it again, and started another blog on my corporate site. Now this site is 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, freelancing, free agents, 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. One doesn’t have to start several blogs – one will do, but I mention it to show how, over time, one tends to carve out a niche.

EXAMPLE: 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, or at least write for 10minutes.

• 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 a few examples. You might have different ones. But you get the point. But “I sound awful, 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. People don’t want to read an essay, so don’t write one.
• 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 (“we offer… we offer… we offer…”) – people are getting enough offers – you’ve got to add value. What were you *really* thinking about today, related to what you were doing? Now why would I care? Or how is that related to your work?
• they have little expertise in your area or interest showing through 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. Heck, I don’t even spell check a lot of the time. Yeah, I know, that’s unprofessional. That’s why I usually do spell check. But 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 don’t carea about what you’re writing (you’re writing the wrong stuff) – 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. It’s 10minutes – it isn’t that you don’t have time.
• 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 even you wouldn’t believe you. If you’re able to answer an e-mail, or respond to a phone call, you can shell out a readable paragraph. Besides blog content (which just means 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. Before you get worried that that means you have to be Woodward and Berstein, just make it interesting to others. Usually, the reason it isn’t is because you are not actually interested in anything (or won’t tell us what it is that you’re interested in). In other words, the blog sounds like dry lumber, because you’ve chosen a topic you don’t really care about. Perhaps you’re not thinking outside the box – you’re falling back on that 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 annoyed, because they don’t want to hear the real answer one of my blogs is giving to a key 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.” Zilch. That’s zilch. 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, deep sea fishing, vintage motorcycles, 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 Jerry Seinfeld wanted to go out on a high note. Your blogging won’t be 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 hopefully you’re working in or around it), 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 – or constant additions to your website content. Whatever you call it, it’s not enough to do some back-end search engine optimization, anymore, if you want to maintain an audience. It hasn’t been enough for years, now. Front-end search engine optimization is about frequently updated original, relevant content. 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.

The first and most important step in starting a business blog that doesn’t suck is [drumroll...] starting a blog. If your site isn’t equipped with one, it can be added. If you want to start it off-site and work it for a while until you’re comfortable, you can do that too. My company, Market Moose, is happy to help set you up, and provide consulting and training. But if you feel comfortable setting it up on your own, what are you waiting for?

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. That’s bad for the client, because they always get nickel and dimed with mediocrity. 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, either, they can end up getting the wrong thing, whether it’s me or someone else. 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.

It’s not commodity selling. You’re not buying corn, where one bushel is like a next. The client doesn’t always see it before we talk, but 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. You can’t win selling commodities – you can’t win producing commodities. Ask a farmer what it’s like. 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, and add value rather than cut price.

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. And even if the criteria of what you deliver is defined by law – like doctors, lawyers, appraisers, and real estate agents – you can 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 extra technical or informative deliverables or documentation that enhances 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 for a dollar less. It’s back to price shopping, driving value ever lower, until some smart individual decides to add value instead of cut price, and charge a living wage, while beating you on something that makes the difference.

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. Don’t tell me the price is $600 but you’ll do it for $500. Tell me what I get for $600 that I wouldn’t for $500, and how the difference benefits me.

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 differentiators had darned well better be on your home page, buddy. No mistake. And 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.

My wife is a hair stylist. She charges more for hair extensions, but the technique she uses lasts much longer with less damage and more flexibility, so the client is getting much higher value for slightly higher cost. She charges a bit more for hair color, but she uses a premium color line without the overpowering ammonia in the air, with less fade and more gray coverage. Again, added value. She charges more for hair straightening, but it lasts far longer.

What 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 part of what marketing consultants do, among many other things. Get one. Get me, if you like, for a few hours, and I’ll help. But if you’re lost, for goodness” sake, get someone.

Price lists for products? You pretty much have to, sure, unless (again) you’ve created unique, high-end products where the price isn’t the up front discussion but the added value is. Services aren’t products, though. Yes, 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.

Update: If you’re stuck in price compete mode, your choices are either upgrade (with some pain) your services, and potentially your clientelle, or get out and switch lines of work (or lines of product). When I ran my first computer business, back in the nineties, I built computers by hand, with individual high-quality components. When Best Buy came around, you get a computer with the same specs (with one integrated motherboard – i.e. lower quality) as the one with individual components, but for much less money. They sold on price, and it was a hard, hard sell for people who’d never seen a computer to look at anything but the spec sheet. I knew what they were getting, but they didn’t. Computers were the only major appliance you’d buy first and understand later. So I sold my inventory and switched industries. Sometimes you have to make a decision, but price selling isn’t a viable one.

The 2-minute Resignation Letter

Here it is, time to write another resignation letter for a family member. This is sort of my role in our family. The reasons for leaving are employer incompetence, but naturally I reach for the most tiny, most dull, most trivial format there is. 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 (and a laptop), 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 BS out there, about how it’s going to be ‘over’ in a few months. I don’t think so. We’re never really 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 a part of the United States where 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!

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. Darned straight. Those rules got me out of credit card debt. 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 all 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. They’re roller derby debt erasers. I wouldn’t bet against them. The five are keeping it real. Gutsy gals, 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, 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 to 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.” These guys (and at least five girls) are the drop outs from the economy of economic serfdom – the burn your credit card  anti-debt protesters of the new economy (today the draft card 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.

A Song of Strength

The activity of our souls is all-consuming, and the work of our hands comes from that source, like fire from a furnace. It’s like picking up the Wall Street Journal – it’s got some of everything, because everything matters.

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 won’t be made useless; I won’t be made idle with despair.” I’ve decided to also designate Hands by Jewel as the official Rules of Work blog theme song. For some people, 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.

“Not to worry, because worry is wasteful and useless in times like these.” I think this song is perfect. 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.

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.

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