“The man who judges by the group is a pea wit… I’ll be treated as I deserve, not as my father deserved.” – Gettysburg

In it is denied the theory that significance comes from lineage, from the works of another person, from belonging to a class, a culture, or an ideological group – in short, from having power over weaker persons, and from being above them in some way – from having access to a reality that they do not. That film argues for a shared reality – one we all get access to – for the opportunity of each person to do things he can take seriously.

And yet, the aristocratic view of vocation – that it belongs to those who are already exceptional because of some other un-earned status – birth or fate – rather than each person having the opportunity to find and pursue his own unique vocation, still ensnares the imaginations of Americans. How many movies have you seen in which we get:

• A man discovers his true birthright, his heritage, (he’s not really an orphan, but is secretly a child of nobility) and so he steps up to be great, because he’s actually already fated for this by birthright (as in this wretched film).
• The boy or girl who learns she is “special” – she has special powers – magic powers, psychic gifts, special perceptions – whatever – just like her grandma (the Jensen women have always had this in the family… or  ”you’re special, Harry, just like your parents…”, etc.)

It does wonders for explaining amazing contributions to the world – not by reference to the skill, talent, and hard work of an individual – not by industry, and the relentless pursuit of one’s vocation – but as the products of people that were, of course, destined to it, unlike you and I. We do get to dream about it, but you and I aren’t secretly a princess or a wizard. And if anyone does something wonderful, we can look for an explanation in heredity or the coincidence of time and cosmic forces, the modern equivalents of which are the impersonal forces of economics or historical progress. What we don’t do is say “Gee, that guy really rocks – he’s an f*ing rock star, and I am going to try to be like him” – because, of course, we can’t. He got dealt a special hand by the cosmos.

The falsehood is that great contributions come from great semen – from the bloodline – from DNA – or from unexplained forces. It’s a bit like suggesting illness is the result of demons or witchcraft. This is the attitude of cultures that carve out the hearts of those they conquer so, in eating them, they can possess their power, their fortitude, their brilliance – because of course, it’s not in the will, the determination, the attitude – it’s some innate thing they couldn’t help – it’s in the blood – they were special – they just had really high IQs – they have innate magic. Or as any dimestore half wit will tell you about those who make money in the stock market, “they must be really smart”. No, they mustn’t, actually – but such is the hereditary theory of prosperity, happiness, and joy in one’s work among the American people. It’s the mentality of those who, not long ago in the West, drilled holes in human heads to let the other people inside out. To the mediaeval occultist, the source of brilliant talent was ‘genius’ – which was a term meaning a spirit that lived in you, who actually did the brilliant work through you.

We still hear this theory in the rhetoric of those who lobby for a supposed ‘underclass’ – claiming they aren’t smart enough or innately talented enough (by heredity or magic) to take care of themselves. They can’t be expected to create their own value and offer it to society – they must be rescued from outsourcing, from downsizing, from obsolescence, and ‘given’ jobs – even if the jobs are in areas we no longer need. We must replace the machines with more humans, replace automation with more factory laborers, replace the street cleaning trucks with individual people wielding straw brooms. Heck, let’s go back to bicycle messengers or the Pony Express. Why? Because the underclass aren’t even smart enough, so the theory goes, to be re-educated, or insightful enough, aware enough, prepared enough, to even seek or consent to re-education. They’re too far along in life, and have somehow gotten stupider, not smarter. It’s too late for them, etc. Or, if retraining will work, then they can’t be expected to pay for it, because they can’t possibly work their way through school like a kid in state college, nor can they be saddled with the understanding that life involves constant change, constantly reassessing your skills, not resting on the laurels of something you’re good at past the point that it matters. That’s too much to ask. That’s only for the special people. One wonders, if they’re smart enough to receive training at all, why they’re not smart enough to seek it, work toward it, or make it a routine part of their lives.

There’s a false dichotomy at work. The genius-filled, hereditarily smart, magically-gifted special people who constantly reinvent ways to add value, who start companies,or  who look for new ways to contribut, and generate value, are actually constantly reinventing themselves – otherwise, they too lose their companies, and get taken down by the market. If the job seeker made obsolete can receive training at all – if there is any value in retraining or any sensibility in investing in it, are we not saying that the jobseeker not only can but must reinvent himself as well? Perhaps there really is no disparity between the perceived builders and innovators, on the one hand, and the ‘workforce’ on the other. We’re all in the same boat, and the same thing is required of us.

The theory of an underclass who must be taken care of, who is so big that it must not be allowed to fail, who cannot function by themselves without the parental care of those gifted by magic or heredity with the ability to reinvent and innovate, suggests not only that superstition and almost a kind of racism (certainly a theory of people and innate superpeople) govern our policy, but that this same underclass cannot be expected to learn from the continual historical need, obvious everywhere, to reinvent one’s role in society. Instead, they will need to be watched over for the rest of their lives, and their offspring will likely need the same thing. No one seems to be suggesting that the “workforce” wake up and realize there is nothing permanent, and reinventing your contribution is a lifelong requirement, and you’re not even a decent parent if you don’t equip your kids with that understanding. In fact, it is systematic indoctrination taking place in all the training grounds of employment that tells them, no, no, trust us – you get the right certification and you’ll be good to go for life. It’s a lie, and it certainly produces worker loyalty, but at the expense of their lives and livelihoods. Doctrine is wiping them out, not economic change.

Policy aside, it’s most heartbreaking that the culture is indoctrinating the vast majority of people with the notion that there is no “my work” – “my unique work in life” – “my way of contributing” for them – a vocation – one that is expressed not in one particular job title but in a plentitude of possible ways to work, contribute, and live. No, that’s for Harry Potter and Robin Hood, isn’t it? That’s for the girl who discovers she’s a princess, or for the Cinderella who merely attaches herself to royalty – to money, in other words. But unless you find that Duke in your family tree, or you can make your breakfast cereal levitate from an early age or talk to snakes, well you’ll just have to go take the first job where someone will employ you. Jeez, what a bum deal. How lousy is that? You mean the ordinary person, the regular Joe, is basically just a machine? Of course, those who offer us these ideas, in the form of policy or in what they feed us as consumer art, like some of these films, are the special people – the priviledged – explaining what went wrong with the rest of us. We weren’t uniquely gifted. We weren’t actually King Arthur, destined to pull the sword from the stone. But what if that’s horse shit? What if a) each of us is uniquely gifted with something we are capable of mastering with virtuosity, and can apply to a number of possible lines of work, and b) we’re responsible – ultimately, personally responsible – if we don’t? See, it’s hard to get people to sign onto that – it’s a dual edged sword – once you’ve convinced them it’s not their fault – their misery is your responsibility.

It’s true, other people can rob us of our vocations. The person abused from childhood, sold into sexual slavery, forced into machine-like servitude in a Chinese clothing factory, or constantly indoctrinated with toxic ideas is being systematically robbed. We get that, many of us builders do – a lot of us barely made it – a lot of us had zero help from our parents along these lines, and we had a lot of serious harm done – including by idiots in the academy and corporate life. But if the most awful cases, prevalent as they may be, aren’t exceptions, then our parents were right. If we really didn’t amount to anything, really couldn’t contribute anything unique, really had no virtuosity of talent latent within us, wanting to come out, then what’s wrong with being forced into a machine-like existence, after all? We can be robbed of something, precisely because we have something of which to be robbed. Bad parents are bad parents, and we can’t excuse them. But the ideologies of sending money down the castle chute to the helpless below are edifices designed by the abusers. Those are more institutionalized claims that ‘you can’t do anything’ – ‘you’re unable to take care of yourself’ – ‘you have nothing special to give those of us who live up here’ – depend on us – you are not independent – rely on us – you are not self-reliant – don’t create – let us create a role for you. Sure, it appeals to those of the lowest character, but it also corrupts those of the best potential.

“A man can change his stars” – A Knight’s Tale

Frankly, this is why so many of the rags to riches types of builders reject such social policies, and such theories of work, which are really theories of man. It’s easy to say that it’s because they’re selfish, and don’t want to ‘give back’ now that they have received their come uppance from the gods, or fate, or Hogwarts School of Wizards and exceptional entrepreneurs and savvy investors. But many of them know that they really could have failed, that they had to fight against nasty challenges, perhaps even primarily in the form of the theorizers of fated winners and destined failures, to rise. And the last thing they want to do is articulate the same abusive theory. They know that throwing money down the chute, instead of saying, “but you *are* capable of amazing things, and you really *are* able to reinvent yourself, to innovate – yes you *are* smart enough”, is not only wasteful, it’s harmful. It’s insulting. It’s abusive. It’s nasty, and not charitable at all. Rule of Work: Charity is always an affirmation of the other person, never a denial of their uniqueness. You can dump all your scraps down the chute and it still be a form of contempt. Real charity is offered not because there’s no hope, but because there is. This is why I like Kiva.org and microlending so much – because it’s focused on small, impoverished entrepreneurs – it continually reaffirms that people are not destined to oblivion – they can change their stars.

Incidentally, I’m not dismissing outright charitable giving by referring to Kiva and microlending to the poor, but I select charitable projects (I use GlobalGiving.org) with which I can help enhance the possibility for individuals to extend their reach and the effectiveness of their lives for pursuing their own vocations (which is most projects on GG – every project I’ve seen, in fact) – and so I refer to it as investing charitably, not giving per se in the sense that people often mean something one is randomly throwing away. I am buying a kind of world I want to exist. I am literally making and creating the universe. As such, I consider it a godlike act, and the ultimate purpose of wealth, the capacity for which I was endowed with by my Creator. To be like him, I must create as he created and, like him, the world I desire to exist is one in which each of us can find the straightest path to our reason for being, our salvation, our god-given work that we each will find it supreme joy to do.

“What does that mean to be noble?” – Braveheart. 

The United States is a country founded on the belief that nobility is a plenitude – it’s available to everyone. It has never lived up to that doctrine, I’m sorry to say. Ayn Rand successfully pointed that out. But those of us who look out over its expanse and see not its limits but a vast potential are still trying to prove that any man can be a king.

On that note: Screw Robin Hood. To Hell with Harry Potter. Get up, especially if you are among the rich (or the “cable” poor). You were given an incredible mind, an amazing set of survival skills, and a plenitude of raw talent – and that’s just the one of us that’s below average - as well as some really nice environmental advantages. There is no me vs. you – we’re the same. Sure, it’s great to laud someone who does something wonderful. I look up to a host of people. But they’re not gods, not wizards, and they’re not princes. Each of them is one of us. We can’t take credit – like people who don’t know crap about science do when they talk about “us” having made great scientific advances. But we can take inspiration. Let’s be honest about this stuff. When one of us rises up and does something extraordinary, it’s not another testament to fate or affirmation of the importance of heredity, it is yet another affirmation that any of us can do something extraordinary. And some of that, honestly, is lost in all the cries about the top 1% controlling everything, and alienation from the means of production. The marxism of the NYC occupation is a mistake, though I sympathize deeply with some of their attitudes.

There is one fundamental philosophical error at work in the West that has you and I enslaved to these ridiculous ideas that are part of a magical worldview – and it’s just as prevalent among the atheists, voodoo though it may be. It is the confusion of person with operation – the conflation of who one is with what one does. Robin Hood and Harry Potter tell us that great achievements are a result of things one couldn’t help and can’t really take credit for – that they are matters of identity not industry – they are the result of who the person is, not what the person does. One cannot really create these things – we are powerless – we can only enjoy them. Anything that isn’t built into us from the beginning is impossible. Identity is destiny. And that’s a biological theory of superiority that we fought a world war to refute. It is cultural heresy, folks. Character is destiny. Identity is who you are – character is how you live – it’s what you do about the world, not who you are in it.

This is the biggest beef I have with video game and role-playing game culture. It’s always your “stats” that make you extraordinary, sometimes enhanced by money or equipment. It’s rarely, almost never, hard work and real thought. “Fun” in that crowd is being something you’re not – presumably only then can you do something you otherwise couldn’t – and this form of entertainment is sought out in the extreme by those who don’t feel extraordinary and so don’t think themselves capable of extraordinary things. Those of us already doing extraordinary things are easily bored by games, because they aren’t delivering the real deal. If you made something new today, or had a new idea, or built something that works and makes the world better, then who gives a shit about slaying orcs or what level you achieved in Call of Duty? The error that makes what we do that is either extraordinary or banal into who we are removes both responsibility and ability. It’s like one of those tar pits that trapped ancient creatures who struggled, died, and are preserved to this day. Somewhere, a guy who games 20 hours/week is embalming himself with bean dip and will be held up as a specimen a millenia from now – some poor, hapless creature who wandered into purposeless oblivion and finally accepted his ‘fate’.

Such people, and their social sponsors among the “priviledged”, look at someone who has not founded anything, or built anything, created anything, made anything, etc. and conclude that it’s because he is incapable, because he is inherently not a builder or creator or founder or maker. He is a permanent, biological underclass, because of lower IQ or bad genes, or because it’s not possible to exceed one’s upbringing, which is supposed to be absolute. And that is an entirely different view of man, an entirely different anthropological philosophy, than that which prevails among people who do innovate, who do contribute heavily, who do constantly reinvent and offer value. It is a philosphy of supermen and machine men – it is the ultimate elitism – not a meritocracy but a hereditary aristocracy. And frankly, it’s been distorted into a 60 year argument between fascists and socialists – between the right and the left – people who want the wealthy to receive more dividends regardless of the havoc they wreak on society as a whole, and people who want the ordinary to receive more distributions without any expectation of adapting, overcoming, reinventing new ways to add value. And both sides want to be the parasitic administrators of whichever deal they’re sponsoring – both sides want to rob the innovators to fund their ideology. Both hate man, have an attitude toward man that is mechanical and destructive. And both are missing the point. And it’s awfully tempting to take up with one or another of those seedy, bankrupt, superstitions isn’t it?

“No man has to bow, no man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was.” – Gettysburg

To paraphrase: there’s a difference between operation and person – between what you do and who you are. You may just be Joe – average Joe – and the possibilities for what you do may not seem endless. But they are extraordinary. Can’t afford college? I’ve got 3 degrees, and I think they’re in a notebook somewhere – they aren’t worth a dime to me right now. Can’t afford to start a business? I started my first one with $100 and a crappy old hatchback. It can be done, and there was nothing “genius” about it. Can’t get a job? Hell, I couldn’t keep a job. I got laid off more than Colin Farrell’s been laid. Think you’re too old to reinvent yourself? I thing I began adulthood at 25 (and took about 10 years to really get into it), and I didn’t figure out my vocation until 35, and was 45 before I dumped corporate life to really even start work on it. What, you needed to have it done by now? It’s not like we’re farmers in the 1800s that died of old age at 40. Besides, you and I have learned something by now that will be useful, that we wouldn’t have known at 18. I’m less worried about how old I am, and more concerned with how I spent this afternoon. You can get old without growing old – you know? We can’t afford to worry about that stuff. Get excellent insurance and save all you can, but put your thinking into what you’re doing now – especially if you can’t yet afford excellent insurance or to save anything.

I do realize that some people really want to be employees – great – but then accept that you are giving up a lot of control over your destiny, and don’t whine about it when the job ends. Everyone is a contractor now. There’s no such thing as permanent employment, except as a status on paper.  But it’s a fiction. Don’t ask people to sympathize because you wanted with so much of your heart to believe it, that you abstained from taking responsibility for change. Change is coming. Always. If employment, for you, is just a cop out – just a way of not having to think, of letting someone else take care of all the details, then you’re living in Harry Potter’s world, not this one. Eventually Hogwarts restructures, closes down, sells out, or just doesn’t need you anymore. Back to contracting or, as employment-minded people call it, “the job market”.

There are a series of questions we ask ourselves in life that take our whole lives to answer, and you can’t let them be confused with one another. Who am I? What is the world? What is my relationship to the world? What must I do? If you don’t know any of the answers to these questions yet, you’re not too old to get started – you’re too young to stop. And if you do know some of the answers, you’re already moving in a useful direction, and you just have to self-correct. Thinking the world would always give us a job is like driving in a straight line and thinking we’ll never hit a fork in the road. The world will never just hand us continuity, because continuity forever just isn’t possible. We’ll have to choose a different path, always – but every time we get to do it, it’s not a limitation imposed on us, but a normal exchange of continuity for more options. In other words – no job? OK, you have more options for what you do next than you did when you were punching a clock. Not to be flippant, it’s really true that we aren’t “destined” for anything – greatness or despair, failure or success. We don’t have to have our blood checked to read our future like tea leaves, and we needn’t shrug off greatness because no one dropped a magic sword into our laps. Frankly, a rampant desire to be Neo, the “chosen one”, puts all our minds in the Matrix. If you really want to free your mind, it’s not the spoon that doesn’t exist. It’s Neo. We’re all chosen ones. Sorry Keanu.

I’m not going to say that I’m in favor of not giving kids any money, or shelling out a measely allowance, but I think fewer kids than ever are learning to work for money at an early age – that too many kids are getting 100% of their needs met by asking parents for cash.

It’s only a little exaggeration to say I can’t get good work done on my home at any price. I can’t get people to show up, even to give quotes. I can’t get them to finish jobs they start. I can’t get them to work a whole day. I can’t get them to do work correctly, or without damaging other things. Frankly, I think most people are useless when it comes to work.

I’m not exaggerating there – there are countless useless jobs filled with people who do very little of value, in a country now constantly whining that someone else is supposed to “create jobs” for them. Jeez – that sounds just like a bunch of kids who never had to go out and get their own work to fill in the gaps around their allowance. But that also means that later, when people are working, they think just anyone can do it, and that there’s nothing to it.

It starts young. Remember when there were kids to mow your lawn? Where the Hell are they? Granted, there are still some to be found, but not nearly in the numbers they once were. Adults either – I can’t even get most lawn services to show up, even when I tell them yes I have money and will pay upon completion. In fact, *before* the market crash, there were guys knocking on my door all year long wanting to clean out garden beds, do hedges, or whatever. I haven’t seen one since the bottom fell out. I’ve heard a lot of clamour about there being no jobs. That’s true, there are no jobs, but there’s a lot of work, and a lot of people sitting on their asses who would rather play ninendo than do any.

A Spring or two ago, I had a boy come by asking for money so he could go on a school trip. He had his mom with him – apparently he couldn’t ask for handouts by himself. I told him I’ve got gardens he can rake, and I’ll pay him cash right now. All he did was lean on his mom, bury his face in her stomach, and hide his eyes. Sure he’s a kid, but I really don’t care – and I don’t care about his trip. That’s pathetic. He doesn’t mind if *I* work hard for money and give it to him freely, but he doesn’t want to lift a finger to do any work. That’s a kid spoiled on his freaking allowance.

Again, I got a shitty allowance growing up, that didn’t even cover the cost of a soda and a candy bar once a week. And I think that’s asinine for a family that can afford a house, or pretend to afford one. And I didn’t get squat if I didn’t mow. But I was also encouraged to go get other work, if I could find it. I had to find it, of course. My point is that, when I was growing up, if you were a pre-adolescent kid or an early teen, the adults on your block looked at you as a potential contract laborer. Now, there are neighborhoods full of such kids who have never raked a leaf.

Even when the work sucked, it had value. There’s no amount of pay for leaf raking that can be considered reasonable and still compensate you at a fair rate – it’s work designed for those truck-sized vacuums, or else you’re making a buck or two an hour. And people that wait until their lawn is six inches tall and thick as a carpet, and expect you to mow it for $25 are exploiting you at any age. Still, by doing that work, I learned more how to set a price effectively, properly value labor, and manage the details of a job (figure your gas, downtime to clean the mower and when it breaks, as it will even more quickly if you’re clogging it by mowing foot tall grass at a crawl, the importance of decent equipment – pulling a starter rope for 45minutes will change your attitude).

This isn’t meant to be one of those moralistic life lesson pieces that wax nostalgic about when kids learned responsibility through hard work. The same guy that tells you that crap wants to exploit you at a buck an hour because you’re a kid. What I’m lamenting here is that this shift from learning the basics of a small enterprise and contract work at an early age to depending on someone to hand you an allowance maybe on the basis of a pre-fit chore (doling out a job), is hamstringing kids who might otherwise learn how contracting works at an early age, and be resilient enough to work meaningfully in any economy.

What a lot of the US is doing right now is clinging to government’s parental leg and burying its face in any belly that pats it on the head and promised to protect it from going after its own work based on its own ideas. In other words, the crash has wrought *greater* not lesser dependence, in some cases, and a real divide is forming between people who are ready to lynch officials that don’t promise handouts on the left or jobs on the right, and people who are fed up with dependency and are creating their own culture of work independently of this top-down parental system.

It’s shitty that kids aren’t getting a chance to choose this by getting core experiences early on. And frankly, it has results. You can get all the good grades you want, staking everything on the old myth that a good career is inherently stable. Or you can prepare kids for the new era where you’re handicapped if you don’t have an independent way to add value, the ability to generate at least your own secondary income. People who stake it all on a single income source, and hobble their kids by training them to do likewise, aren’t doing good parenting – they’re setting up widespread failures in the next economy. What the next economy needs is baby contractors, who got the vibe of what’s coming at an early age. And meanwhile, I can’t get anyone to clean out my damned gardens, because those kids have already started growing up.

image via Babyhold.com

1. People who knew they didn’t need what they were buying: shopper after shopper said “I have nowhere to put any more stuff” or “my house is already so full and cluttered” or “I don’t really need this” and yet they bought stuff anyway. If not for them, the sale might have been a disaster. In that way, the sale was what I intended it to be, profiting by transferring a lifestyle I don’t want to people who insist on living it.
2. People who bought for other people: I was surprised at how many people said they had no more room for anything else, but were buying for a sister, granchild, or even ex-wife. It’s as if these folks had filled every nook and cranny of their own lives with so much stuff that, in order to keep shopping, they had to transfer the lifestyle to still more people. Again, I was glad to make the exchange for liquid capital.
3. People looking to profit from other people’s desire for stuff: One of the newer phenomena is people scanning bar codes – on books and CDs especially (Is there still profit in books and CDs? If so, then not for long. Where’s that used CD store in your town – is it still there? And didn’t a Borders near you just close?). But they also tried to scan other items, clearly intending them for resale. I could have been offended that they were trying to use me as a cheap vendor, but I was more than happy for them to put the effort into unloading an inventory that I was only too happy to see depart.

What I glean from these three consistencies is a commonality – people are still deeply committed to stuff, long past the point that it has any real value, purpose, or utility. They’re so committed that, even after they’ve crowded their lives with all the stuff they can get, they’ll try to have other people vicariously own their stuff by giving, trading, or selling it to them.

Stuff is the centerpiece in a whole cadre of lives – it is the reason some people exist. It is life itself, for them. Existence is counted not in years lived, or what one has achieved, in meaning experienced, or even where one has mattered – it is measured in the accumulation of artifacts of other people’s lives and society’s need to manufacture. It’s not just a consumer lifestyle, it’s the all-consuming, product-driven life.

Here we spend a lot of time talking about work as the primary font of meaning in a life, and how stripping down for work, streamlining a life toward it, is visualized and exercised. If everyone adopted our mindset, no one would show up at the garage sale we use to strip down. But one can’t help, still, feeling some sense that in order to go on, you have to be willing to let other people fall along the way.

Crossing the desert, you have to let the Mr. and Mrs. Howell of Gilligans Island (if you remember that), laden with commodified articles of living, the meaningless (in the desert of goals) furniture of experience, drop in the sun, weighed down with things, as you go on toward a goal. For them, the stuff was the goal, and they got the stuff, held the stuff, and we don’t want to judge them for that.

Except, it doesn’t even satisfy them, even when they have all they can hold – they have to go on grasping, in the death throws of over-satiation, for more and more, desiring that the stuff they hold will fill the world, and become the ground on which they rest, the air they breathe, the liquid in their veins, and replace all human striving with objects in a world-sized garage.

There’s some online conversation about an IKEA store that’s supposed to one day hit the area in which I live, and people are treating it like yet another furniture store – and that’s so missing the point. The whole premise behind IKEA is not still more stuff to fill up and clutter, possess, and consume a life – but simplification, taking only what you need, living lightly, even somewhat disposably (stuff you keep forever can easily be thought of as prison bars with a life sentence), and so freeing up a life to pursue meaning elsewhere.

One can’t help but wonder if the soul, finding an unsatisfyingly endless pursuit in shopping, is terrified of the most core questions of existence – what does my life mean? what might it mean? how might I get there? – and, phrased for purposes of this post, “What might I do with my life if no one needed any more stuff?” Instead, these questions are obfuscated with endless acquistion, as if possessing things lets us transfer their significance to ourselves.

So here’s a question to think about: if you were only ever allowed to own 100 things, for each member of your household, for the rest of your life, (including underpants, forks, hats, and toothbrushes), how would your life be different, and what would you do with the rest of it?

So far, my three favorite little pieces on factory schooling are as follows:

1. From a letter by Fr. George Rutler to Peter Robinson, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan:

I’d encourage your youngest one to abandon kindergarten altogether. Almost everything I learned was learned outside the classroom, and school itself interrupted my education. Moreoever, school locks you in with your peers. That is a mistake. One’s social circle should never include one’s equals. From my earliest years I found children uninteresting and always preferred the company of adults. This was an advantage, because I got to know lots of folks who are dead now whom I never would have known if I had waited until I was an adult. – So I have a collective memory – and oral tradition – that goes back to the eighteenth century, having spoken with people who knew people who knew people who knew people who lived then. – The only real university is the universe and a city its microcosm. That is why an expression like ‘New York University’ is foolish. New York City is the university….Instead of school, children should spend some hours each day in hotel lobbies talking to the guests. They should spend time in restaurant kitchens and shops and garages of all kinds, learning from people who actually make the world work….One day spent roaming through a real classical church building would be the equivalent of one academic term in any of our schools, and a little time spent inconspicuously in a police station would be more informative than all the hours wasted on bogus social sciences. Formal lessons would only be required for accuracy in spelling and proficiency in public speaking, for which the public speakers in our culture are not models, and in exchange for performing some menial services a child could learn the violin, harp, and piano from musicians in one of the better cocktail lounges, or from performers in the public subways….So I urge you to keep your child out of kindergarten, because kindergarten will only lead to first grade and then the grim sequence of grade after grade begins and takes its inexorable toll on the mind born fertile but gradually numbed by the pedants who impose on the captive child the flotsam of their own infecundity. [source: The National Review]

2. From Richard De Charms:

An Origin has a strong feeling of personal causation, a feeling that the locus for causation of effects in his environment lies within himself. . . . A Pawn has a feeling that causal forces beyond his control, or personal forces residing within others, or in the physical environment, determine his behavior. This constitutes a strong feeling of powerlessness or ineffectiveness.

3. From Seth Godin:

A hundred and fifty years ago, adults were incensed about child labor. Low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hard-working adults. Sure, there was some moral outrage at seven-year olds losing fingers and being abused at work, but the economic rationale was paramount. Factory owners insisted that losing child workers would be catastrophic to their industries and fought hard to keep the kids at work–they said they couldn’t afford to hire adults. It wasn’t until 1918 that nationwide compulsory education was in place. Part of the rationale to sell this major transformation to industrialists was that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers. Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn’t a coincidence–it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they’re told. Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.Of course, it worked. Several generations of productive, fully employed workers followed. But now? . . .

If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do. Do you see the disconnect here? Every year, we churn out millions of of worker who are trained to do 1925 labor. The bargain (take kids out of work so we can teach them to become better factory workers) has set us on a race to the bottom. Some argue we ought to become the cheaper, easier country for sourcing cheap, compliant workers who do what they’re told. We will lose that race whether we win it or not. The bottom is not a good place to be, even if you’re capable of getting there. As we get ready for the 93rd year of universal public education, here’s the question every parent and taxpayer needs to wrestle with: Are we going to applaud, push or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable and mediocre factory-workers? As long as we embrace (or even accept) standardized testing, fear of science, little attempt at teaching leadership and most of all, the bureaucratic imperative to turn education into a factory itself, we’re in big trouble. The post-industrial revolution is here. Do you care enough to teach your kids to take advantage of it? [Full Post]

I see lots of brilliant kids “washing out” of public preschool or finding their first years of public school (by the later years, they’re already a little dead inside) intolerable, because they are being penalized or ridiculed for being initiators and rewarded for being pawns. They are taught to color between the lines, not to reconceive the initial problem and challenge its very definition. They are being molded into interchangeable managers and execs who will keep straining to float the existing system, long past the point people are screaming for the lifeboats. I also see parents turning away from factory schooling as the standard of education, just as they do from traditional employment as the standard of work (and it’s no coincidence, since the one is predicated on the other), and their kids are often turning into 5-year old and 8-year old initiators, innovators, creative geniuses. When the cloned kids try to bully or insult them, they teach their kids to leave those guys behind. When adults try to marginalize or turn them into a sideshow curiosity, they’re taught to find their community elsewhere. I can’t help but think that these little boys and girls will have opportunities I haven’t had for the simple reason that they aren’t being put through the lathe of corporate-political-religious power in the West. But watching them, I find it easier to ask myself, “How would I approach things if I unschooled myself? What would I do differently.” It’s great to have as inspirations people who only come up to my knees.

Whether it’s Montessori, a Summerhill approach, Open Schooling, or what, there have been rebuttals to the educubicle for some time. Sure, people always say, “but we live in a great school district where the classes are smaller” or “we’re sending our kids to a good private school” – but what exactly, really makes a school good or great? What the above writers are talking about has nothing to do with class size or whether they’ve got more programs, better labs, or less of the ghetto. They’re saying, along with several generations of alternate thinkers, that the entire model is wrong. A good traditional school, in other words, is a lot like a nicer cubicle, or better coffee during those corporate meetings that suck so much. Are you bad parents if you send your kids to cookie cutter schooling? I don’t know, are you? I’m not personally in the business of excusing people, and normalcy isn’t an argument, as far as I’m concerned. I can tell you this – I can see a difference. A big difference, in who these kids will be, and what they are about currently, and how they already approach the world. If that pisses you off, you’re probably reading the wrong blog. Surely your school district has one you’ll enjoy. But the cultural revolution that began with this economic crash is far from over. We will not, no matter who you are or what you’ve heard or what you think, be going back to just business as usual. Ever. Ever again. Things will be different.

This is the first moment in our history when a vast number of people are doing anything they can to not go back to work, where work is defined as traditional employment. The economy is not done moving – that was a quake, but it was part of a series. And the keys to success dreamed of by the previous generations are no longer the standard – the family investment (assuming a stable market was a mistake – quake 1), the house (not so smart, after all – quake 2), the career (will never be secure again – quake 3),  the education (possibly not relevant – quake 4), the luxury car or truck (like spending hundreds a month on gas? – quake 5). And if we think it isn’t going to change how a lot of parents raise their kids, and what childhood education is about, for more people than before, we’re smoking crack. The market is going to shake some more, and it just got more competitive. And there are two kinds of leaders – the interchangeable cookie cutter corporate/politico types who can’t save us and can’t even save themselves, and the initiator, origin, types who we need to create the ideas that will deliver civilization from the abyss.

I like to point out that one of the fastest growing types of food chains is the supermarket that caters organic, healthy, and delicious unprocessed food to ordinary “bucket of chicken” eaters in the Midwest (e.g. Sunflower Market), at prices that make it interesting to them for the first time. They’re not Whole Foods (which is expensive and more of a yuppy phenomenon), and they’re not the local health food joint (which is even more expensive, and you can’t treat it like a supermarket). These guys straddle that and focus on getting the price point for wholesomeness back into blue collar hands. We haven’t had healthy, affordable food for average people since the 1940s. Wonder Bread is crap, and everything that came with it, including 90% of what’s on the aisles at Walmart, but it’s what average Joe settled for in the form of “food”. $1.99/lb hormone beef and hamburger helper, anyone? That’s all changing. There’s a groundswell. A Trader Joes or something very like is coming to a community near you. Where I live, even the traditional supermarket, which will always cater to the poorest, is panicking and stocking up on organic everything. Their day is done. Feel the quake? They do. And there’s no less of a cultural movement toward work. This is the stuff Free Agent Source is always talking about. But it will result in a change of cultural attitudes toward how we condition children for work (and, if we’re honest, we’ll acknowledge that’s what traditional schooling really is – it’s child pre-labor, as we’ve currently conceived it – it’s not about teaching kids to really think at all). To borrow from Harlan Ellison, ‘If you make someone think they’re thinking, they’ll be a useful employee, but if you make them really think, they’re mainly suited to completely change everything and make it better, and what the people who sponsor education really want is useful employees.” So, putting aside the question of good or bad parenting, the most pertinent question is: “Are you aware of what has changed, of what is coming, and are acting accordingly in your family?” If not, then listen to Godin up there – he’s not just blowing smoke. And you’ll be one of countless who are listening to a lot of guys like him. Stick around – we’ll try to say something useful now and then, too.

Students find reasons to do almost anything – the list is endless – which tells me that either school is really freaking boring or that they’re following a career path they’re really just not that interested in. The cost of that, of course, is far in excess of just the student loans – it’s years of wasted time, lost opportunity, and only simulated happiness. Good luck. It’s important to do the work, and some of it is tedious, but if it’s all like that, you really should be paying attention to classic avoidance behaviors.

Writers commonly say “a writer is someone who writes”. I my experience, a writer is someone who doesn’t. Those who are writing are writing. “Writers” spend enormous amounts of time agonizing over minutae, something the people who are writing refuse to do. Writers spend a lot of time reading about writing, talking about writing with other “writers”, and getting peole to critique the 1000 words they wrote a month ago. Classic avoidance behaviors. Everyone has a half-finished novel – doesn’t make us writers.

Small businesses are always planning to do marketing. Most never actually do any marketing, at least not in a concerted or frequent way. They might throw a little money at a boxed solution, spend a few hours, stay at something for a couple of months, but the rest of the time they’re doing “work” – “business”. It’s not that doing the job, and invoicing, and bookkeeping, and all that aren’t necessary. But things that are necessary also make the most effective classic avoidance behaviors. We tell ourselves that because it’s necessary we’re not really avoiding other, equally, perhaps more necessary things.

People ask, “So how do you avoid classic avoidance behaviors?” Maybe avoidance isn’t a constructive attitude. After all, that’s what we’re already doing, right? I have no boxed cure, and I don’t think avoidance itself should be treated as the illness – I think it is, in fact, a symptom. We avoid because of something. The easiest answer is “because I dont’ want to do it.” Yeah, but that’s not deep enough. Why don’t you want to do it? I think if we dig under the avoidance, we start finding fear. Maybe it’s fear of learning, fear of effort, fear of thinking, fear of other people, but fear of something.

So how do you overcome fear? Well, that’s something, fortunately, we’ve got a lot of good information about. There’s lots of good resources. Maybe if someone expresses interested, I’ll throw in my two cents. I have more than one idea about this. But for now, I’ll say I think a negative is often treated not directly but by replacing it with a positive. In other words, instead of concentrating on the fear, maybe we start reassessing more fundamental questions. What is it we want. Why do we want it. Do we really want it? What are we willing to do to get it? Etc.

I also am a big subscriber to the idea that fear is overcome by imagining your worst fear coming true, then imagining life after that, and what you’ll do next. These things have typically worked for me. Some things are complex and have lots of nested problems to unpack. I’m not a guru, so I can’t help with that. The point of this piece is that we can learn to recognize our classic avoidance behaviors, and consider what it is we’re afraid of. At that point, if you can lay fingers on the specific fears, you’ve got work to do, maybe changes to make.

That said, just wanting to make money on the web isn’t enough. The 1990s were partly about the .com bubble. The idea was to create a web site, get investors, and then ask “how do we make money?” Since the questions were in the wrong order, most people lost money, not made any. As a lot of us look for a way to create a secondary or a new primary income stream on the web, the danger is that we create our own personal .com bubble. It’s so easy to fall into the Field of Dreams mentality – “build it and they will come”. The sound way to proceed is to ask “build what and why and what for?”

The first thing is to figure out what kind of business you want to be in – what general type of products or services you want to offer. The second is to figure out how you’re going to do it differently than the competition, or what specialized or value-added services you’ll offer that they won’t.” If you can answer those two questions, the rest come easy.

First, most of them talk of funding their ministries with card counting, and so furthering ‘god’s work’ (a classic pragmatic utilitarianism that ill fits with any ethos related to the actual words of Jesus). A lot of them are minister of some sort – albeit, that may mean they rent a room, put out folding chairs, and get 15 people to show up while they play guitar and talk. Thing is, card counting looks more like a way for most of them to not have to work in a normal job, which is also what being a minister seems to be about in those cases . It seems more about self-indulgence guided by an inner personality deity that shows them its “will” by finding ways to make them more comfortable or alleviate responsibility (ethical, personal, etc.). Likewise, some of them are into internet companies that do nothing but mark up existing products or sell nebulously helpful overpriced vitamin supplements. We’ve all met the person selling the miracle herb – it’s always about his need to have a comfortable income. In that way, for these people in general, the rest of us come off like their support structure to ensure, once again, their personal comfort.

They talk of taking money out of casinos, and how casinos are parasites and hurt people – taking their last dime or their life’s savings. They never bring up the fact, of course, that they don’t return that money to the original owners, so they profit directly as a result of casino’s profits. In that sense, they actually need casinos to keep bilking people, so they can keep skimming off the top. These are not Robin Hood types. Using their own logic, they’re parasites on the backs of parasites, making money from suffering every bit as much as the casinos. It’s just that the casinos are up front about it. These kids sound more like megachurch prosperevangelist Joel Osteen (‘God wants you to be comfortable, have a nice car and a nice house and nice things. It takes a lot of money to have that.”) The stuff about doing “god’s work” and saving the world from evildoers is flimsy if not ridiculous. Like cheating at cards, they’re cheating at logic and ethics as well.

They focus on a lot of  straw man arguments. They point out that card counting is not illegal. Granted. They point out that it’s just doing math. Granted. Where they go astray is in making out that anyone who doesn’t agree with them doesn’t understand card counting or the law. No, there are plenty of reasons to disagree. One of their rank in the film eventually leaves, pointing out that, while it may not be wrong, it also makes nothing, contributes nothing, means nothing. He is saying that vocation – that work -is meant to be more than that. You can see him reaching for what we talk about here – that one’s work is supposed to be a font of meaning.

Holy Rollers represents a really good thought experiment in how distant people can become from the true nature of what they’re doing (cheating/deceiving) while justifying it with army of god type constructs (god wants us to take money from bad people who take money from other people doing bad things – god wants us to have money – god wants us to have money, because we use the money for what god wants). To listen to these guys, god has his own personal shopping force and covert fraud squad. Personally, I’ve no problem with counting cards, and competing with casinos, as much as possible, on their own turf at their own fixed game. I have a problem with the pretense that it’s somehow a service to god or is being sponsored by the almighty. Raid the raiders, if you like. Just understand you’re taking blood money, and living by it, and it does garbage up your soul. It’s also interesting for elucidating how convenient a religious network is for running the equivalent of an organized crime ring or other illicit trade. Fundamentalist networks are like cell groups – they can start from anything, exist anywhere, and end up sponsoring anything they need or want to keep going. And “god” can justify anything – robbing banks, pillaging, or whatever, as long as it’s with your religious network in there doing it with you.

I thought the film had one weakness: after doing a splendid job creating an extended sense of absurdity, irony, and the agony of watching willful self-deception, it left us without a single participant who acknowledged that ‘yeah, we’re really just justifying fooling these guys’. Technically, I know, I know, it isn’t even cheating. I get it. But it’s tricking the casinos. No one expressed real ethical realization that we’re lying to ourselves, this isn’t even remotely how Jesus Christ handled things, and it’s dishonest. Again, not disagreeing with it per se – just saying that if you have to wear a disguise, it’s dishonest. But perhaps the filmmaker had no access to such a person, because these guys really believe their rhetoric that much, and not a single such person exists – or at least the ones that do never wake up. But then I’d have liked to see the film say that – that they could find no one who had done it for a while and decided it was not ethically compatible with an honest ‘christianity’.

So, the part about work: These guys are ecstatic at times to bring in 4-5000 dollars for 3 weeks work. Sure, the investors gets 35% return, sometimes – sometimes they lose big – but the players make about what they’d make just getting a job. They talk about winning 55% of the time and losing 45% of the time. It’s far from the ‘blessed’ triumph of the ‘armies of god’ you would expect. OK, seriously… $4000 for 3 weeks work? That’s it? I don’t care if you did only work 30hrs that week or 20. A consultant would say that if you take half my day, you’ve taken it all, just from the standpoint of planning and logistics and other lost opportunities – so you have to bill enough per hour to compensate. That’s one day I won’t get a tent set up before dark in the forest – it’s not like the other half of the day is really fully yours. 4000/3weeks is $68,000/year. THAT is the overwhelming salary these guys are making living the dream? No wonder they get kids to do it. And you have to fund your health care out of that. Again, good thing they’re young. Taxes are never mentioned. Cash sits under sofa cushions. This is living the dream? A 68K salary? And they’re not computing all their practice time, planning, meetings, briefings, debriefings, etc. All those hours, they conveniently ignore. No self-respecting self-employed person or contractor would overlook that. These guys could pick any number of professions and do better. Cable installer is about that good, once you hit 3 tiers. Plumber? Beats it. These guys talk about not working a normal 9-5 job, then they talk about how much like a regular job this is. In fact, they’re paid hourly plus bonus, just like a telemarketer. In typical fundamentalist fashion, they’re living someone else’s dream – it’s always someone else who benefits most off the tool-like deployment of their lives.

In short, these guys are working for less, on average, than many of us can live on, and they’re the equivalent of religious drug mules. They can’t derive real significance from their work because, to do that, you have to contribute something, not just take it. As an illustration of what it looks like to give up a sense of vocation, of one’s work as a primary bringer of meaning, and to replace it with ideology, philosophy, pretense, and hucksterism, the film gets works. You could say that it makes no judgments at all about what it’s portraying, though again, I’d like to have seen a little more challenging of it. It’s also an illustration of the pathetic and a film about despair and self-delusion. The one guy, again, who talked about work as an engine of transcendent meaning, finally left to go looking for it. The rest are now just looking for the next group to train, or selling lousy vitamins out of their kitchens. Most of the talk in the film is centered on how much money can be made. But that’s just it – if that’s the central theme of your chosen profession, you’ve already indicated you’re willing to trade – meaning for a raise – substance for affluence. Whether it’s a trade that ultimately delivers transcendent value is not just for these guy to judge for themselves – we too can determine that, by asking what they have contributed to the world to make it better. The film does a good job of leaving us with a bleak ‘meh’ – a gray feeling that, while these guys go on reproducing themselves, the contribution is sorely lacking.

Holy Rollers: imdb,

1. They keep changing the deal or want work to begin before nailing down specifics. The basis of doing any work should be a contract. If you’re not getting one, you’re not a professional. There has to be some written agreement as to who does what, what it depends on, and who has what share of responsibility. This is why it’s a bad idea to let the client pay before the contract is signed, even if you require payment in advance of the work. And the statement of work should consist of specifics – exactly what will be done, in some cases what won’t be done, when it will be done, and who delivers what deliverables in order to adhere to that time line. Once payment has taken place, if there’s no written, detailed scope of work, the temptation to change the deal is heightened – “I want you to include just a few more things” – or “here’s an outline I spent the night working on of what I really want you to do” – or the client wants vague statements of future performance. No dice – you get the statement of work signed in advance, with specifics, just like signing that clipboard when you get your oil changed, that authorizes them to work on the car and indicates the scope. And you get it not only before the job gets touched in any way, but before payment takes place. If a prospect keeps dodging the contract, no matter how many times you revise or offer to revise it, or keeps providing versions of their own that are vague, non-specific, or unacceptable, or cannot be completed with the agreed resources (an agreed price and deliverables by both parties), you have to fire that prospect. If a client (someone who has signed the contract) keeps trying to change the deal, you simply say ‘no’ if it’s unreasonable, but if they keep at it, you might also have to fire that client after the job is done (i.e. refuse to do any more work for them), because they’ve proven unreliable. You’re not doing this at the drop of a hat, but definitely have to be willing to, if you’re not going to end up in a world of hurt, unable to deliver on your promises or working endlessly without additional pay.

2. They call you all the time. One of the things I love about ING Direct (home of the Orange bank account) is that they keep their fees low and rates high by identifying the people who demand the most attention and inviting them to go elsewhere. They do this, because if a handful of people strain the support system to the limit, they can’t provide decent support to everyone else. Taking endless inbound calls is particularly untenable if you’re a consultant. There’s no such thing as free consulting. If a consultant gives you free time (e.g. an initial free consultation), it’s to try to get your business, or otherwise part of a marketing effort or a practice exercise for newbies – in short, he’s seeking a benefit. But at some point, whatever you call it: advice, coaching, guidance, teaching, training, or “just one more question”, it’s an hour of billable time at least. If one client or prospect is chewing up a lot of time they don’t expect to pay for, before or after the sale, eventually you’ll have to cut them loose. Even if it’s deemed “support” for a service or product, there’s only so much support that goes unpaid without a support contract. Remember, you’re not running a corporate fast food store, where you do whatever it takes to make the customer not complain to the corporate office. Two items on the list of benefits you should absolutely demand and expect as part of working for yourself, is the right to refuse service to anyone, and the right to assign a value to your time and insist that it be paid for if used. We always give an initial consultation free. After that, if you want coaching on how to use Twitter effectively, or what the next steps ought to be in an internet marketing plan, you pay a consulting fee – that’s how we eat. Clients and prospects get to eat – so should the people the turn to for help. And, by the way, phone time is premium time, so if they insist on not handling basic things by e-mail, and want you available on their schedule, even if you’re not a consultant, you want to either get paid for it explicitly, or else calculate a rate high enough for everything else that it covers that premium demand or request. It is not true that you must be available whenever anyone wants in order to make a living selling anything – have you tried calling Stephen King lately to ask him what he meant in his last book? Again, that kind of thinking comes from basing business principles on the operations of fast food joints, Walmart, and various 24-hour drive through operations. Chuck’s Chicken is not necessarily how you run the kind of business you may be in. Get paid, connect phone calls to income, and self-employment becomes feasible in all other respects. Don’t, and you might as well pack it in, no matter how good you are. The guy that says, “call me any time about anything” is broke, same as a guy showing up for a job interview and saying “I’ll do anything, and work at any time.” Desperation is the death of self-employment, and it doesn’t even get you a good job.

3. They are abusive. I don’t put up with getting yelled at or verbally mistreated by clients or prospects. Once they put the relationship on that footing, it’s not only not worth it, no matter what they’re paying or how “important” they are, even if they were a referral – it means that you can’t constructively advise them or add value, because you’re caught up now in trying to preserve the concept of yourself as a professional. People like that are probably abusive to housekeepers, crappy to animals, and are the ones that always call the manager at a restaurant. This is another reason the contract is important. At least, if you have that, and they become abusive, you can finish the job indicated, unless it’s all consulting time. If it is, then you have to decide whether to grit your way through and just refuse to renew them, or turn them away immediately and refund the balance. Running your own show is challenge enough without also getting abused for it. Whether immediately, or as soon as the current contract period is complete, you have to fire them.

4. They want endless freebies. I’ve been known to throw a bonus item in for clients, often routinely, if they deliver on their end (e.g. if it’s not weeks after a deadline, and I’m still waiting on their deliverables, before I can complete the job). Adding value can either be the things you do that others don’t, or sometimes it’s the small extra things you do that you didn’t have to. Either way, it’s a great practice. Don’t put everything in the contract, because you want to leave room for things you’d like to do, if all goes well, but the client doesn’t expect. But some clients want lots of free everything – conditioned, as many of us are, by the illusion of handouts provided, again, at fast food places or their equivalent. But even those handouts are bait and switch. Those companies might sometimes come up with dumb ideas, but the original concept is always to benefit in some way from providing a freebie. If you’re not benefiting, you’re not even up to fast food standards, and you’re selling your profession and your industry short. I ran a landscaping company once. One of my lawns wanted the nearby park mowed for free, because I had him and another client in the same neighborhood. Turns out he’d collected money from all the residents to get it done, but wanted to pocket the money for himself. I just let him know that getting neighbors is one of the only reasons I got into a neighborhood – it would hardly be worth it if I only had one lawn there – but mowing the park for free would cost me a whole day for two lawns – I’d much rather fire them both, and come out ahead. Sometimes freebies don’t create good will, but create demand for more free work, and they hamper your ability to do good work for existing clients. I wouldn’t fire a prospect or client just for asking for a freebie, but I might if it was unreasonable and they kept insisting it was necessary not to sour the deal. Keep control of your freebies. Give them out, mostly, without being asked, to people who will be grateful, and only once you actually have the job (not as part of the original spec), and your perceived value will be much higher. Adding a freebie into the statement of work at the beginning diminishes it as a value added item, and makes it a contracted part of the agreement, soon to be forgotten as anything more than part of the price vs. value negotiations. Try treating freebies as ‘tips’ for being great customers, and you won’t go too far wrong but keep them small, infrequent, and unexpected or you’ve just changed the deal, and now you’ve got to work for free all the time.

I’ve heard it said by some business people starting out, “I want all the clients. I’ll take anyone.” Really? Then why are you in business at all? You’ll get paid more consistently from a job, with fewer demands, more available time, and you have a built-in process for handling abusive behavior. People that talk like this usually haven’t been part of a contract negotiation or renegotiation between larger companies. It’s all about give and take, never an absolutism where one party is subservient and the other controlling. If the price is wrong, the corporation tells the contract ‘no’, or the contractor tells the corporation, ‘sorry, we can’t do it for that’. You can renegotiate, but eventually you have to be willing to reach an impasse. If the demands are high, including a lot of face time, on the ground time, or hand holding after the sale, the price needs to go up accordingly. Always, and for one simple reason – companies that don’t do that go out of business, because their profits don’t sufficiently exceed their higher costs. Imagine a team of software developers and a project manager contracting with a major wholesale corporation. Do we think these guys charge the same regardless of the demands, the work conditions, the time requirements, etc? There’s a saying – “you can do it fast, cheap, or correctly – pick two.” Guaranteed, though, no such organization works without a contract – on either side. The one who expects that is the non-professional. You get someone saying, “I’ll pay you, but I won’t agree to anything in writing”, and you’ve got to wish that prospect well, if they hold to it, and send them on their way. The work agreement is not an option. And abuse, well, one of the benefits of being on the software team is that you aren’t an employee of the other corporation – you can walk away if they treat you badly and, at some point, your company can refuse to continue until a worklike environment is maintained. Don’t let clients treat you like garbage, if you’re solo, either. Once you do, you’re commoditizing yourself – turning yourself into a work object, not a professional – and then, why even do it, as opposed to going back to regular employment? In the end, firing a prospect or client, even if it’s 5% or more (whether you do it explicitly or just use various discouragements to turn them away), if you work in an industry where people sometimes don’t know how these things (business standards) really work, is better than ending up hating your job even when you work for yourself.

Facebook is the new AOL.

1. Facebook is ostensibly free (although 1-5% of users might buy something at some point – perhaps a game token of which facebook gets a cut, or maybe something from an ad on facebook, and facebook of course gets ad revenue.

2. Facebook has seamless integration with the web, because it’s on the web, and doesn’t try to serve as your web browser.

But the character of Facebook is quite similar to AOL:

Contrary to popular argument, people feel safe on Facebook. Sure, sure they bitch about security and privacy all the time, which is another reason it’s like AOL. But they come to facebook, and stay on facebook, and make facebook their central hub of online activity, primarily because it’s a shield from the wild West of the open web – it’s a safety net. Where else can you actually call someone a stalker for looking at material you posted specifically to be looked at? On the open web, people would think you’re an idiot. In fact, on the web, the whole goal is to get people to look at your stuff – people pay big money toward internet marketing to make that happen, and they collect back revenue through premium/freemium services like members only content, just like Facebook does with its value added services. Facebook is to the web what highschool is to the rest of the world – an insular place that sponsors cliques, and the social dynamics that go with them. On the web, you want hits and interaction. On facebook, you want interaction only with people you know or like – in fact, one of the most popular applications on facebook is the one to see who’s been looking at your profile, except it doesn’t exist – it’s a trojan that replicates to spread itself to your facebook friends. There are a minority who have figured out that Facebook is excellent for marketing, just like the open web, and a smaller minority who have figured out how to use it successfully for that, but the majority of Facebook users are today what AOL users were in 1993.

Facebook, like AOL, reaffirms the myth of ownership – it gives the impression that you have your own space. From a practical standpoint, that’s never true. The only time it’s really 100% yours, is if you lock down your profile from all eyes and connect to no one. But a space that’s not connected to anyone, from a networking standpoint, has a practical value of zero. Even then, your content doesn’t belong to you – what you enter into facebook belongs to facebook – read the agreement you agreed to when you signed up. That’s why once you do start connecting to people, ownership virtually evaporates. What you keep unconnected and wholly private is worthless, and what you share can be used in a variety of ways you’d prefer it wasn’t, and shared to anyone else, whether or not you’d wish it. And there’s really not much you can do about it, because you entered into facebook, making it essentially property of the network. People complain about this endlessly, but it’s the most asinine complaint possible, because it’s a complaint about the nature of networking itself, which they voluntarily engaged in, not a complaint that is applicable specifically to facebook. One of the reasons Myspace had a burst of popularity for a while is that the very notion of “my space” on the web conjured up mistaken images of ownership and safety, ala AOL. But by being primarily, at that time, a crappy web page, like any web page on the open net, with only rudimentary networking features, it went the way AOL did, just in much shorter order. Now it’s popular mainly among the napster-culture music-obsessed, bands, mp3 traders, and those of a tender age whose aspirations to meaning are tied to the latest music group.

Facebook, like AOL, more suits the perpetual network novice – the person who shifts to a magical worldview when it comes to technology – especially networking technology. The difference here is that AOL was never something techs wanted to use, unless they were interested in the alternative sex chat rooms, whereas even the tech types use Facebook some – though they are less likely to camp there all the time. It was an open secret at AOL, by the way, that sex chat accounted for the largest share of its user base and revenue. In fact, it was called affectionately gay-OL by those in the know, because of the vast network of M4M rooms that accounted for the lion’s share of nightly activity, even if yes you could read Time Magazine in AOL, or check stock numbers. This was especially true after 1994, when AOL opened the floodgates of its userbase to the open web. Facebook, currently, doesn’t have that going for it – but it does provide the sort of built in messaging, the buddy list, profile, etc. Network people often say AOL and Facebook are a perfect fit for those who can’t keep track of e-mail addresses, or who just find e-mail address formats and other address formats (like the difference between something@something.com and www.something.com) too confusing and start adding spaces and slashes where they don’t belong, or trying to e-mail web sites and visit other people’s e-mail addresses in a browser. With AOL, and even easier with Facebook, you solve both problems, because you can just search for someone, rather than remembering anything or using a contact list, and you get both their contact method (Facebook messaging) and their web presence (profile page and microblog posts), leading to discussion like “Are you on Facebook? I’m on Facebook. Just look for me on Facebook.” The difference is, of course, with AOL you still often needed to know a screen name, of which a person might have several – with Facebook, you know their real name, which again gives rise to a lot of the bitching about security/privacy controls, and charges of “stalker” hurling around at people who look at your web site and blog (that’s all your profiles and posts are – their web pages and microblog posts on a web site).

So the challenge for networking novices who now use Facebook is to accept networking itself, and what it is, and to understand what they’re doing. A computer is the only appliance people buy first, understand later. Most of us knew how to use a refrigerator when we bought our first one – same with a TV, radio, and usually with a car, more or less. Computers, though, for a lot of people, were buy and learn devices, and so you get a lot of inaccurate perceptions that lead to attitudes based on myth and magic, not the facts of computer science.

What Facebook is:

Facebook is, always was, and remains primarily, a blog. In that sense, it’s no different than twitter or wordpress in principle – it’s just that with wordpress you run your own server space, usually, and with twitter and facebook you don’t. There’s a reason it’s called micro-blogging. The people who love facebook and ridicule twitter are just unaware that they’re using the same type of engine – 140 characters for posts on twitter, 420 characters on facebook (you can use the notes feature to do a full length blog post, instead of microblogging, but even that’s limited). Sure you have a profile, but a profile is the equivalent of a static page on a web site – an About Me or Contact Me page and, frankly, pretty f-ing boring if you’re not posting anything, or at least interacting with other people’s posts. That’s the great thing about Facebook – even if you’re not creative or interesting, you can like or comment on other people’s posts, because Facebook is a blog with networking features. It is, in essence, a form of collaborative blogging. A comment can be worth just as much, if not more, as an original post – if you doubt it, spend some time on Failbook or Lamebook looking at the great gaffs in response to otherwise banal posts about the weather or someone’s kids.

Facebook is, and always will be, a network. Again, there are people who expect and even demand that it be only one kind of network, with only one or two layers (maybe that’s all they can keep up with), of interactions and relationships, but social networks resist this kind of boxing, pidgeonholing, and restriction, because frankly a lot of us can multi-task and can handle a wider array of freedoms and options without becoming paralyzed or confused. It’s smart aleck, but it’s also true. People try to say “I have my friends, and I have my associates, or some such thing, and then get up in arms when someone acts like they don’t neatly fit one of the categories. But compute the number of possible combinations of sharing settings (which are networking settings), and that’s the number of possible types of relationships the system actually supports, assuming no one is creative enough to have their own interpretation of any of those, which also isn’t so. It’s hundreds of possibilities. One of the reasons Facebook created the Lists feature (which actually increases the number of possible relationship types exponentially and potentially infinitely), is to a) satisfy the demand for *more* not fewer possible options for how to interact and relate, but also to help people make (and take responsibility for) their own choices about how to keep them straight in their heads. You might have a list called “teachers” with one set of settings, and another called “office people” with another, and on. While most people might make fairly banal use of the feature, the actual potential quite is inspiring.

There are, of course, people who are not comfortable with blogging, per se, and don’t realize that’s what they and others are doing on facebook. There are those who aren’t comfortable with networks, have never studied networks or don’t understand how they work, etc. Some of each of these want to turn Facebook into what they want it to be. While they will ultimately have the option to use it how they want, for themselves, they will never succeed in a) making it that for everyone else – because it would bankrupt facebook and drive a lot of its user base away – and no, there are no facebook killers coming to replace it – and b) getting everyone to go along with a limited usage of the system’s capabilities. You may want only people you like to look at your stuff – tough – if you put it where it can be seen, we’ll look if we want to – you may want – so hide it, where the value is dimishined, or accept that it’s public, and take what comes with that. You might want only people you like to interact with people you like – tough – we all get the same freedom in our relationships that you have. In the end, Facebook is the new AOL, but it’s also far better than AOL, because there are more, not fewer, options for using it as a network and a publishing (blogging) venue. It isn’t safe, if safe is defined as restricting ideas or people you don’t like. It isn’t owned, if ownership means you can control how people respond to what you write, or if they respond. By participation in Facebook, you accept that it’s a blogging network (which is why all those features are there), and you give up control.

All networks require relaxing or relinquishing control, and yet personal responsibility or diligence for determining (at every moment) what info you let out. This is why corporations are so often self-destructive with their security policies. They try, on the one hand to restrict things that need to be done, hampering their productivity (like preventing their contractors from accessing key project data), for fear that they’ll be corrupted by touching the open web or people they can’t directly control, and yet they do things with the information that no one needs to have, to store, or to give access to, that constantly expose their constituents to harm (like drop it into an unsecure place for their own convenience). In other words, they want safety and ownership, even when it hurts them, and yet they want to get the data out and use it, and collaborate on it, and share it, and do so often without sufficient thought for how networking exposes data, which also hurts them. Networks, inherently require *some* understanding, some real thought as to what you’re using.

It’s real easy to hurt yourself with your car if you just go treating it the way people treat facebook, like it’s supposed to be inherently safe. But you also can’t drive it like there’s no one else on the road – you have to take into account other people’s needs, desires (we sometimes turn left just because we feel like going there), and preferences. Driving is a kind of networking, which is why it’s so volatile – people bring to it some of the same attitudes of control (look at tailgaters) and some of the same mythologies of safety and of ownership (I had the right away, and he was still turning, so I hit him. Nope – actually, you only have the right away when he yields, even if your light is green). Facebook is much more like a highway where you’re sharing your driving with everyone else. You can tint your windows, sure, and tune people out by turning on the stereo. But you still don’t own the road, and you do have to yield, and you don’t get to get upset because someone is checking out your bumpersticker, or sporting one of their own. If you don’t like it, keep your car in the garage.

The experiment in traditional employment, where one spouse leaves home to earn money, and the other spouse decides between a similar choice and being with children, is folding into the realization that all households must earn money independently of traditional employment. Whether that’s ebay selling, or part time services work, or a full-blown company operation out of the home – the most basic predicate of economic security now is not going to remain what your employer gives you (insurance, 401K, job, promotion, bonus) nor what you acquire (house, cars, kids, spouse) but rather what you do, independently of those things, to trade and produce wealth.

The core role in the family will no longer be the breadwinner that goes out to a job but the steady wealth-generators in the household, which might include contractors who work on site at companies, or a householder who does interior decorating or catering, or that etsy or ebay store. The core household responsibility, the core contributor(s) will soon be predicated on what we once turned to jobs for: steadyness, stability, consistency. The difference is, it’s self-managed not employer-managed.

So along with the utility bills, start budgeting a monthly startup allowance for the household business expenses or household income generation (this used to be the gloves and work boots on the family farm – now it’s becoming Outright or Quickbooks, Batchbook, Zendesk, Adwords, your LLC or S-Corp formalities, etc). Don’t believe it? Already we consider internet fees a basic utility, and cell phones trump land lines if you’re figuring out what to keep. That’s a change from just a handful of years ago. The good news is that you’ll at least take the tax deduction for the expenses, so yes you’ll need those business formalities and bookkeeping solutions (or to pay a lawyer and accountant more to handle all that, and then they’ll pay those software/cloud-app bills).

Of course, there are some interesting solutions – Free Agent Source, which I work for, is the notable one for 2011, I think. Avoids you having to pay for and manage all that, and also having to hire the attorney and accountant. Kind of nice.

But the point is that we’re experiencing a cultural redefinition of the household which returns it to something much closer to what it was in the Middle Ages and in Ancient houses – think Medici – a household is a growing interest or concern, fundamentally a business operation with contributing member/investors who get their living from it and even grow it for coming generations. Like a business, if it’s not growing, it’s dying. And if it’s not marketing, it’s not growing. A household then, in this conception, is a dynamic – moving thing, not the static “safety zone” of the 1950s in the US.

The new household is the old pre-corporate, pre-depression, pre-WWII, pre-cold war, entity – much closer to the ‘farm’ environment you saw on Little House on the Prairie, but without the ideal that affluence would mean one gender or another not doing certain kinds of work (or any work). In a household, everyone always works. It’s what Ursula LeGuin (“Another Story”) calls “thick planning” – the kind of holistic thinking about meeting all the needs of a community of people (i.e. a family) that requires a constellation of skills. If you remember Poor Richard’s Almanack (Ben Franklin’s encyclopedic housholders periodical), it was all about the kind of “farming” that really meant household enterprise. Later, of course, the Farmer’s Almanac was based on that.

In other words, the new household as business enterprise will require that some member or members of the household be able to do some bookkeeping, some sales, some business formalities, some of all kinds of things are needed, and they need to be somehow cooperative to produce the enterprise. The separation of each member into entirely separate work silos is largely over. And the constellation (or absence) of those various skills and abilities or the willingness to master them, will largely determine the viability of the household. Period.

In the future, it may well be that prospective husbands and wives will consider, in quite practical terms, what the other person has to contribute, and will self-select a mate – “naturally select” if you like the evolutionary term – partly on the basis of what they’d be bringing to a household. Can they do something? Do they have the potential to do more? Are they made of stout stuff – will they kick in or lie around on the sofa, whine about the bean dip gut they got from lying around on the sofa, and wait for money to fall from the sky? Do they have a mentality of dependence – on society, an employer, or wholly on the other spouse – or are they thinking about how to build a house like a Hapsburg or a Hohenzollern (the great houses of old)?

Instead of ‘does the man have the four keys: house, car, education, career’ and is the woman fertile (the exchange between genders of safety and security for sex and reproduction), now you get a different definitive methodology of safety and security. It’s not in the four keys – you’ve seen the housing market – a house can be a liability more than an asset – you’ve seen the job market – you’ve seen the worthless degrees – and cars are expensive liabilities – the bigger, the dumber. The new safety, security, reliability, stability, whatever – is in the ability and willingness of all parties to the household to kick in and create a going enterprise or concern – to create the household itself, and not act like part-timers or temps, let alone outsource all its interests to an employer.

I remember when I first got married, and I took flack from the outside, from people who poo pooed me treating a family like a business, especially when I actually told them what I was doing. Just “strange” and “unromantic” and “mean” they said. Yes, I’m a mean guy. But now, I see lots of people starting to do it – they’re catching on. And we’re successful, mainly and primarily, for one simple reason – we both do that. We kick in. We serve the household. My wife is a steady breadwinner with her own business, and she’s been a rock without which I couldn’t have launched mine. And the neat thing is that these businesses overlap. My internet marketing company provides services for her beauty business. She’s local – deeply rooted in the community, I’m global – existing on the internet and not committed to anywhere, so we’re diversified and mutually contributing. I’m seeing this kind of thing sprout up everywhere. Poo poo it all you like – even if you don’t get it, your kids will, eventually. Households are a specific design that produces survival, growth, and prosperity. Households (not merely “relationships”, not merely the romantically-saccharine conception of a marriage) are one of nature’s machine models for the continued existence of a particular species – human beings.

In the old days (I’ve said this before), even if you went to work in an office, a basic survival necessity was having a trade – something to “fall back on” – to insulate you from utter dependence on the exigencies and capriciousness of “the economy” (or “the market”) – those fantasy words we use to hide the fact that our lives are deeply affected by collections of individual morally-accountable persons making choices that can control us and hurt us.  The new security (from being repetitive, and so duplicated and so necessarily outsourced or made obsolete by advancing technology) will come from:

1. having multiple irons in the fire (multiple, diversified income streams) – this means a key survival trait is having multiple talents, multiple capabilities, or at least having the ability to multi-task
2. controlling at least one of those income streams in-house (it’s not dependent on traditional employment – though you might be a contractor or business that works with traditional employers) – or at least having a working apparatus that you keep well-oiled, and start the engine on every quarter (when it’s layoff time), just so you can be sure it’ll run when you need it – like “Red Barchetta” in the garage – but I’m an advocate of actually driving that income-producing plan around once in a while, making money from it even if you don’t need to
3. participating in your family like a household, and your household like the original conception of a household – a business enterprise unto itself – a place where wealth and work are processed for survival and growth – besides, nothing bonds you quite like working together toward a common goal – a household is a movement – if it’s just hearts and flowers (as nice as those are), what is it going to do when you lose your job or your business gets mowed down? Will the relationship or the family hold, if it’s not a household?

I routinely predict the future, these days, and I’m always surprised that no one jams a finger in my face and asks if I think I have a crystal ball. But I’ve always said that knowing the future isn’t magic, it’s just perception and awareness. It’s just listening to and observing things that are happening now, combined with the logic to hypothesize where they might lead and rule out the impossibilities and narrow the alternatives. But I’ll mention one other thing. It helps to cheat.

So often, describing the future is just a matter of looking at what’s happening right now, before most other people have noticed it. When you describe it, at first, they may find it strange and unheard of. But when they catch on, catch up, get there themselves, you’ll seem prescient in your observations. I’m not saying I *don’t* have some Svengali-like capabilities, and I’m not saying I do – but they’re just not needed to look at this train barreling down the tracks in the distance, smoke over the treetops, no turn-off to the left or right, and no station where you’re standing, to guess that soon the air will be displaced as it roars past you. Some of the future is what had to happen based on what was happening already.

The question is, how is your household changing, and turning itself back into the householders’ coop of old? What are you doing to ensure your survival, growth, and prosperity as a family? Are you in motion, or sitting quietly still hoping everything stays the same?