The Tribe and the Lords of Flatbush

I’m not officialy a social entrepreneur. I aspire to be, but I’m not, yet. As a micro-entrepreneur, it’d be a stretch to suggest otherwise. I do have people that work for me all over the world. And my contribution is to treat them with justice and fairness. To be honorable. Arguably, I’m not changing the world except in a microscopic way.

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Still, that microscopy has some value to me. I look at my people as my people. They’re like my family. And what does it matter if it’s a family of one, or two, or twelve? Does it have more or less value?

They’re not a family though, not really. What’s the adage? You can pick your friends, but you’re stuck with your family. Actually, they’re my tribe. People move in and out of the tribe. It’s that way in a internet-connected, globalized world of free assocation. And free association, while it may undermine traditional ties, etc., also offers more opportunity for freedom and justice. At least I think so. So I don’t mind, that people come and go. I don’t want slaves, or people bound to me by caste, and I don’t want to be bound to them, except by feelings of honor and dignity and loyalty.

I met with an old friend last night, and we talked about our old crew. A bunch of young men who could remember a lot of good times together, causing a ruckus, but who aren’t really seeing much of each other anymore. Some of us moved on and made families that took us away, some went to school or pursued careers, others dived into a world of continual amusement. We agreed that we missed it, the good times, our escapades - we were like the Lords of Flatbush - but we also don’t want to stop moving and try to manufacture something that implies we can’t grow any more. If growing means the groups falls apart, then it’s not our tribe. Not really. However sad or painful that may be.

I miss those friends, but I have a mission to carry out, and I’m willing to do it alone if need be. Thing is, I find the relationships with people I employ much more resilient, and often there’s more depth. In truth, you can’t really compare relationships, not if you’re being honest. But I suppose, taken from an aerial view, I still think that a relationship based on exchange of value for value, is the most just, equitable, rational relationship one can have.

One of the reasons I work for myself, and hire others, is that I waited indefinitely for someone like that to come along and hire me, and they never showed up. I was stood up by the culture of work, and I had to remake it, in the form of my own microcosm, so I could breathe free air, and let the emotion of love, the attitude of peace, and the conviction of honor stream forth from the place in me that longs to create and make something. A friend once said that we can either make our lives a sword to attack the evils of the world, and lose our identities in that process, or else begin with ourselves, and create the world as it ought to be, and moving outward from ourselves, include those who want to be freely involved.

I’ve practiced a little tyrrany in my life. I’m a religious person, and religious people become either tyrants, or libertines, or peacemakers. It’s hard being a peacemaker, when you are sure you’re right. It takes time to learn to move beyond tyrrany - it’s too easy for the young chiefs to cry out for sturm and drang, to go on the warpath, to straighten everyone out and keep all the “honor” for oneself. In fact, it was my business that taught me a lot about a tribe founded on justice and peace. People don’t understand - when they mourn the fact that I work on weekends - they don’t get it that I’m just being with my tribe, my people, that it’s good. It’s good work. It’s like being home.

It’s not a community, in the sense that it’s founded on proximity, culture, and so on - it’s something new - it’s something that operates on intangible principles - on virtues. It’s a community of virtue. It’s an atmosphere of taking people in and defending and protecting them, and honoring them for what they contribute to the tribe. A bit like being the silverback gorilla in the forest primeval. I don’t pretend to teach others any pristine truths. I’m just describing something - a kind of place I’ve found.

Of course I tremble at the thought of not being able to keep it together, of not being successful in business. Not mainly because I have to pay my bills. But because, I have to be the grandfather, the patriarch, whose mind generates the basis of income, so the tribe can be sustained. I have to provide the central idea, and do my work to ensure that the harvest comes in. Because I love the tribe. The tribe is one of the reasons I live and flourish emotionally. I belong to it, perhaps far more than it belongs to me. I don’t “own” the business in the traditional sense. And the people don’t just “work for” me. That’s all just paperwork. We are glued together by trading good for good, consistently. And anyone with any experience in that knows that it’s at its best when it’s a trade based on honor. Fools grasp at money without meaning. The business is one of the most meaningful bases of relationships I’ve ever had. I crave my business more than I crave rest. The pull of these relationships is even stronger than what is so often called friendship. Less than family, more than “friend”. I won’t pretend I don’t have personal goals, but I also find the business is a kind of end in itself, because it’s a nursery for meaning - the goal that all humans pursue, even if they run off of cliffs trying to deny it.

A definition of thinking:

Definitions are really only descriptions. They’re always less than the thing they describe. So here’s a definition written as a description: thinking involves considering other options to every assumption you’re working with. Thinking involves treating your premises as subjective, not objectifying them. Thinking involves, out of principle, never absolutizing your own perceptions, but ever challenging them. Once any of that stops, you’re not thinking, you’re reacting. And that becomes a tyrrany over the mind, a fascism of the soul, and a depersonalization of the world.

Things I’ve said that people believed

It’s a little known fact that the spotted zebra eats its young in the wild. Whereas the better known striped zebra do not eat their young. also the plural for zebra is zebri, which is the swahili word meaning “can we eat it?”

Google’s Ultimate Information Manager

I’m deliriously happy.

Happy to be wrong, that is. The other day I said Google didn’t know how to do “to do” lists properly. They don’t. But that’s beside the point - it seems google has figured out  that I don’t yet know how to do “to do” lists. In the same way, I used to think documents were slow-moving, local objects that you protect on a hard drive, and now I think they’re collaborative ‘events’ that you share on the internet - that expand, connect and relate, because of that. I was telling Google that to do lists are like emails to yourself. Google already has it figured out. I don’t know if they realize it, but their new PIM turns e-mails back into “to do” lists. If it’s not an action item, folks, honestly, in the world of work, what is it? Someone said that when you make books, write to do lists, not “notes”, otherwise you’re reading the wrong books. Why would it be different for e-mail?

Google recently added two glorious features to gmail - the best app in the world (we don’t capitalize it around here - it’s your OS in the future). By far, the best new feature is multiple inboxes (it’s in your settings) and a close second is the ultra-fast “move to” dropdown. The inboxes change the meaning of the application, turning it into a book of work, and the “move to” feature is like a rotary sander vs. a wood block - with the one you have a business - the other is just good enough for a quick job.

I spent a good chunk of time cleaning up my giant inbox, before I found these. I had about 270 messages, and I just was never going to find out what I’d forgotten to do on page 3. So I started backwards, processing, doing, eliminating… I made it to about 170 messages, when I got really tired of it and went fiddling w. my gmail settings.

Within a few minutes, I had several inboxes on one page. I didn’t even know how to do it right - I just named them, and it automatically used the names to categorize messages, so I instantly saw my schema - the picture, at a glance, of what I’m doing and care about right now. I was floored. But it works particularly well when you base each inbox on a label. So I started cleaning up my labels. I got it from about 40+ labels to about 10. The 10 that matter to me, now. Consolidate, consolidate - that’s the rule. Don’t have a label called “information”. Is it information for its own sake? If so, it’s the wrong information. What are you going to *do* with it? Assign it a purpose or an action.

In cleaning up labels, I discovered the instant “move to” function. Holy wow! That wasn’t there, before! Put these things together, and within a few minutes - yes, minutes! - I had separate inboxes for Clients, Contractors, Business Partners, Accounting, and yes… To Do. Ta Da!. It was so good that I added some GTD by creating To Do Right Away and To Do Eventually. Google, I need room for one more inbox. Hell, just give me 10. Paired with making decisions right away, as to whether something will get further attention, this is an effective time-management tool. It’s a life-management tool - after all, just categorizing something based on an action represents a decision.

My gmail is now a PIM (personal information manager). Combined with my sidebars showing my calendar items, google docs, and chat, it’s about 10 times the app it was just a little while ago. It’s gmail raised to an exponent. Needs twitter integration tho. Google, just go ahead and buy them! You know you want to. Yes, Twitter, it’ll hurt a bit, but it’ll hurt so good. Put my Twitter and my Facebook wall in there, Google, and you’ve got an even bigger winner.

I nearly said “woman”. Google, if you were a woman, I’d… Anyway, it’s fantastic. For those of you that think I’m gushing, needlessly, look, technology has given me arms and legs. I was a mere mortal before technology, and now I’m batman. I walk by and kick sand in the face of small tasks. Google has given me a toolbelt fit for a superhero. Thank you, Google. I’ll use it all. Including my Google Notebook - you can have my Notebook when you pry it from my… on second thought, you can’t have it, even then!

By the way, I’m a Firefox fanatic. And I’ve got Flock, now. Flock rocks. But fastest browser? Google Chrome. Just launched all three and I was typing this before the others opened. Googlepress? Hmm.

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Writing Winning Marketing

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You’ve seen them - the blog articles that are just fluff with a sales pitch. “You too can make millions. Buy my system, and get started today!” Or it’s like a book, but it doesn’t ever tell you what to do with this knowledge. I’m always telling my clients to blog, but how to write effectively for a business blog - well, that’s not always obvious.

Sometimes, the slice of life is the best way to get a point across. As an internet marketing consultant, I do a bit of consulting not only for my clients, but for writers of marketing copy. This slice is what I told a writer I employ:

1. A good intro is light but sharp, like a good appetizer: We all know an intro is fluff - in blog posts, most people use it just to be sure they’re on the right topic. That’s what it’s for, but if it’s too  long, drawn out, and elaborate, they’ll think it’s going to be all garnish and no meal, like so much empty marketing or spam, and they’ll quit reading. Make it “punchy fluff“. Don’t say “can be more difficult than anticipated” - say “can be rough”. Punchy fluff is like social niceties - we want the please and thank you but usually don’t need “I greet you with great gratitude, and humbly beg your pardon”. Punchy fluff - instead of “No one can disagree that recent sales comparables are the most important part.” - go with “Recent sales are all-important.” Writers talk about using the “active voice” and being concise - for the rest of us - just don’t put them to sleep at the beginning of the movie.

2. What comes after the intro has to be red meat. A lot of writers I’ve hired can’t deliver the meat - it’s all fluff.  Dig down a bit. Go for the details, but don’t show off your knowledge with scholarly details. Knowledge that can’t be acted on is bad marketing. You want blog posts designed to get the client in the door (or on the phone), but give them a way to initiate that conversation with information and their own questions. Pure fluff won’t do that. With business blogging, we’re not publishing for the sake of publishing articles - it’s not a magazine (except when it is) - but you also can’t sell anything unless you give something away - so it’s got to be real information, not just all another way to pitch. Most marketing people don’t get that.

3. The conclusion is an action item. Here’s where you sell it or blow it. The adage for English majors is restate what you’ve stated. That’s great for an informative essay. For marketing copy, the goal is to prompt action, a specific action and one fallback action (always give them a choice), but without it being cheesy like “So call or log on now for the best mortgage options…” You need just one summary sentence in this kind of writing, and then you need to get intimate with the audience a bit, and say something like:

“Get your broker involved in making the decision. I’m available, if you’d like to come in for a consult - call first to make sure I’m not out closing for someone just then. Or call me on the cell to make an appointment, so we can put the big questions to rest and get some numbers on paper for you.”

Adding Woot: Give away solid, valuable information and advice - don’t try to sell absolutely everything - the internet has changed our expectations - you have to give us something for free - fairly consistently. But with that contribution, include a prompt to action (”get your broker involved“), be intimate but not pushy (”I’m available“), provide a choice of on how to proceed “come in for a consult or call for an appointment“.  What you’re really selling, to someone reading your blog, is added value.

Look, most of us are products of adequate or perhaps even good English educations - but those didn’t (not when we were in school) make us effective marketers or bloggers. I was a magazine editor for a number of years before becoming a marketing consultant. I’ve been published a bit (pseudonymously), and I’ve written quite a bit of copy - more than the collective output of some small schools. Political writing, marketing, or fiction - in my experience you tell people they’re getting on a ride, you make the ride worth the admission (worth their time), and then you ask them to connect with you or think or act differently - perhaps even change the world but, at least, to take the next logical step. Write that way, and you can blog your business, your life, or whatever else you’re doing.

Now, yes, go write something. Update your blog, you lazy crumb! (just kidding). But not about writing something - that’s required. That’s right, go now.

Much ToDo about Filofax & Web2.0

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My Filofax is back! I confess, I’d let it sort of decline. Partly when I got really busy and started spending 18 instead of 16 hours online - and partly because I fell in love with my netbook and cloud computing. Still am - deeply - but they just don’t do it all for me yet.

So, all right, I go for simplicity, when it come to “to do” lists. I make lots and lots and lots of them. And I usually use .txt files made in notepad. In fact, so much am I dedicated to this that, when I use Linux, I usually install and run notepad.exe under Wine. Yes, that’s the extreme. It doesn’t stop there. I used to use mininote.exe - a tab-based notepad, so I could have more lists open at once. Before that, if you visited my house, you’d notice in all kinds of niches, and all over the dining room table, that I had piles and piles and piles of post-it notes, box covers, grocery sack fragments, and completely penned-over business cards… I could go on.

Back to .txt files. I probably have 20 or 30 in a “mess” folder of my hard drive that had just gotten so old that I tossed them into folders to be sorted through some day when I stop thinking of new things. There are probably an additional 40-100 or more that aren’t called “to do” or “immediately” and those could be anywhere in my drives. Yes, they’re backed up. Then there are all the ones I have online. Yes, there are more, and more and more. I have them in e-mail. I have them in google’s new Tasks feature. I have them in google notebook, and google docs.

[For you purists, I’m sorry, but I’ve given up capitalizing google. When it comes to the web, that would be like capitalizing the word “reality”.]

Anyway, yes there are more. There are to do lists in still other e-mail accounts, and other various online venues. There are to do lists under every screenname I have. Then there are all of the paper to-do lists that still exist from back when I wasn’t paperless. I’ve scanned all those, and they’re stored on hard drive space. The ones that aren’t in bound editions.

Yes, I’m amazing in my capacity to think of things to do. And, before anyone starts, I do quite a lot of them. More than anyone I know. And I’ve tried every online and electronic “to do” widget or environment that I can think of. But it comes down to this:

• It’s not with me while I’m driving.
• It’s not there the second I step out of the shower.
• It’s not instant, always on, with me in any setting, etc.

Netbooks are getting there. They’re the closest thing. But it’s still not fast enough, yet. It’s coming. The always-on device that’s as thin as e-paper (like a film negative) with billions of cells of resolution and becomes keyboard, screen, and mouse, all as one thin-as-2D surface with embedded storage and wirelessly connected to the cloud, where all its applications reside - it’s coming. No fan, no heat, waterproof, and a vein-like fiber battery that charges from human touch or any ordinary light source. Don’t believe me? See me in 20 years. I’ll be writing a blog post with it, on it, and about it - I’m old-fashioned like that. And mine will be the one that tucks into my Filofax, along w. the other ring-hole-punched paper in there. Now that’s a netbook!

So, thinking ahead, I’m also thinking back. What has been there for me, when even my lightening-fast, low power, ultra-portable, super-mobile netbook hasn’t been. My Filo. You see, technology is not about gadgetry, or what something can do - it’s about processes, and the meaning of things. It’s about the underlying ethos of work, human thought, and collaboration with creation that lets us extend ourselves not for the sake of extending ourselves, but so that we can see and image greater things. Gadgets are failed experiments at helping us get there. Tools - now, tools are the glorious machines that transform a Bruce Wayne into a Batman. They make us scale building, and fly between rooftops.

I don’t mind playing with gadgets. But when it comes to work, this work, the work of my life, I want tools. So, for now, the netbook is going to be paired with the Filofax (they’re roughly the same size), and I’ll just bundle them with some kind of ingenious quick-release strap. A gigolo strap for my technologies, so they can whip out their power at any moment. But I’m going to stop trying to cram the Filo into the Netbook, until it really makes sense to do so.

This helps a lot. The Filo is a ToDo list organizer for me. That’s all it is. Screw the calendars and the currency converters. Lined paper. Simple lined paper. Or graph - my father taught me a fondness for graph. It’s about purpose. The conceptual problem with every other todo list system I’ve tried, is that it’s embedded in some other kind of functionality, whether it be the machine itself or some other application. Gmail shows the most promise as the ubiquitous core-application (Google gets this fact - the core is a collaboration platform - while Microsoft still thinks the core is an Operating System [brief pause for us to collectively roll our eyes]) but even Google still can’t conceive of the right kind of todo app and how to make it really effective by pairing it inside gmail. I wish they’d hire me to conceptualize and test that. I could tell them a thing or two about todo lists and integrating them with gmail (best application in the history of applications). I wish google would understand that todo lists are, properly, closest to e-mail than anything else. A todo is an e-mail to yourself. Google hasn’t figured out how to interface that, though they’re half way there with the way they’re archiving threaded chats. Google, call me. Let’s talk.

Anyway, the Filofax. It’s now my single to-do organizer. I confess, it’ll be a real challenge while I figure out what goes in Filo, and what in notepad (e.g. links). I wish technology would hurry up. I know, some of you are wanting to scream “Blackberry”. No. Just, no. I’m sure it’s great for the occasional scribble. When it comes to the kind of volume I can churn out - someone who can send 40 e-mails in a few short minutes - those little gadgets just can’t keep up.

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15-Year Love Affair with Netbooks

I used one of the very first netbooks from about 1994-1998. There have been micro-laptops that fit in your palm for perhaps 20-years, but I’m talking about one of the first subnotebooks that was internet friendly: the Compaq Contura Aero (thumbnail photo at right - from the Computer Museum in Germany). I had the top of the line (4/33c).

Internet was through a cardbus card. And boy, this thing was a dream come true.

I went to one of those colleges that gave you kiddie desks - you know, the kind you used to see in high school? And my Aero fit right on it. In fact, at 7.5 x 10.25 x 1.7″ (4.2lbs), it’s just smaller (not thinner) and only a pound heavier than the EEE PC 1000 at 7.5 x 10.5 x 1.1″ (2.9lbs), which is the biggest of the netbooks that deserves to be called a netbook.

Best note-taker I ever had. I did my B.A. on that computer. I wrote all my papers and essays on it, took it to every class, and could type faster than the instructor could talk. The thing had the best built-in trackball I’ve ever seen, so navigation was lightening-fast. Spin the ball, and you were all the way across the screen. I loved it. Simply loved it. So much so that I bought another one about 2-years ago, before the netbooks exploded on the market, intending to replace the hard drive and use it just like I did back then.

After all, I didn’t just take it to school, I took it to all my favorite coffee shops. That and satchels full of books. I’d pile them up, boot up, and write more words in one sitting than perhaps at any other time. If I needed to eat, I’d take it to diners, pull out an orange extension cord, and a light socket adapter, and connect right to the light over the table.

What I learned back then is that portability is everything. The conversations with friends, the poetry written in cafes, the notes on books, the papers and never-ending coffee… that little treat was before the days of wifi, but it was great for exactly the same reasons, and in exactly the same ways, as the new netbooks. And when I’d get home, I’d plugin and do research on the newly emerging world wide web.

I’ve had an EEE PC 900a (predecessor to the 901) for a while now, and I absolutely love it. It goes anywhere. I love that thing so much, I take it to bed (literally). And so, naturally, the wife took it over. It’s the tiniest of the netbooks, and the size is perfect. I love it for that, too. I’ve taken it on planes, next to larger books. I’ve walked down the street with it. I’ve balanced it on a foot and done blog entry. Love it.

And that’s why I almost bought the 901. I need my own now, and the 901 has a 6-cell battery, so you get more than 7hrs of battery life. But I thought and thought and thought all weekend, and finally decided on the 1000. For about $85 more, it’s just slightly larger (though thinner) than my Aero. And I know I’ll love it for all the same reasons.

I went with the EEE PC 1000 (not 1000 H, HA, or HE) - I like solid state - no hard drives. The 1000 has an 8gig master drive and 32 gig additional drive, webcam, bluetooth, and 6-cell battery. Of course, it has the standard 1gb ram and 1.6ghz atom processor. I’m upgrading the ram to 2gb.

I didn’t go with the Aspire, because it has a 3-cell battery, and the fan runs all the time, whereas the EEE PC fan runs when it needs to. I didn’t go with the Wind or the Lenovo, because you can’t get them without hard drives. I didn’t go with the Dell or the HP, because they’re Dell and HP, and I’m somewhat principled about it, besides the fact that I think their products are inferior, and they nickel and dime you to death on their web sites, and include non-functioning or semi-functioning slots, antennas, etc. I basically don’t like them. Asus’ EEE PC however, started the current revolution (e.g. Dell and HP have taken a queue from Asus’ naming convention with their ‘copies’ - or counterfeits, if you like).

But I’m not here to beat up the copy cats. In the end, I’m sharing a moment of pure joy, as I contemplate a much newer and more enhanced netbook of the size (10″) I’ve always loved, and which is perfect if you’re a big man like me, and don’t like your wrists touching while you type. Again, the 901 is great, I love it, and I’ll use the wife’s 900A whenever I can get my hands on it, but I know I’ll type faster on the 1000.

What’s this got to do with work? Well, it’s all about work, actually. Real work - not the philosophy of work. When I lean over and say to a colleague, “you really need to stop flying so much, and start Skyping more”, it’s somewhere between an intervention and a technology review, but it’s really just plain practical.

Yes, this isn’t really a review, and no it isn’t really much more than a “Yeah, sonny, I was there first, and loved it then and still love it now, and hey, I’m getting a new one!” The internet, and technology have done so much for me, though, that frankly I don’t care what it sounds like - I’m happy about it. So there. I think back on the productivity I had with my Aero, and I look at the productivity my netbook offers now, unobtrusively on a nightstand, or as the smallest thing in my briefcase, and I am just so glad that the days of bloat in between are finally over.

Shifting to truly portable (flexible) cloud computing is like being fat for years, and suddenly being thin again. It’s like going to bed tired and worn out and waking up virile and 25 (well, some of us are still just as virile, but now we can control the direction).

So lastly, for those of you who loved the little Aero, and many still do - there’s still a following, I’ve held and used the EEE PC 1000 (tried out the 1000H in a store, just to be sure), and I have to tell you, it feels like the same fit. Not just for nostalgia, but for the sheer practicality that, paired with cloud computing, the Contura Aero (and other subnotebooks) brought to us. I’ve sat with the 900A in coffee shops, used it on plane tray tables (with room just for the 1000 - no larger), and rested it on my steering wheel (not while moving), and when my 1000 gets here, it’s going where I go. We’re back, baby!

Oh, and I’m not feeling that superior. I still do have a suitcase computer or six.

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Books vs. Kindling

I’m thinking of getting a Kindle. Or something. Thing is, I’ll be donating or selling a lot of my 15-20,000 books to reduce my space. I’d really love it if I could retain them, but in e-format.

Now if someone would just trade me one for one, books for e-books, they’d have a library.

I confess, looking at Kindle2, that it’s very Star Trek Next Generation, and that’s part of the appeal. A lot of us grew up frustrated at the slow pace at which technology was being rolled out - perhaps because tech companies gobbled up other tech companies rather than focused on R&D, and so much creativity targeted a quick sale. Be that as it may, the Tricorder (remember that?) represented the future. The multi-functional portable computer that gave us information on what we needed when we needed it. Well, that was the original Star Trek. Then STNG had those great portable book-pads - those proto-Kindles that let Picard read the Epic of Gilgamesh anywhere on the ship. Paper books are great. I love books. But I love access to books more. More than books, I love being able to read what I want, where I want, when I want.

I’m already getting ready to buy my 2nd netbook (today). And yes, it sure trumps a Kindle, any day. But I can see a purpose for getting away from the e-mail, the open web, and all that, and simply reading.

Already, I find I’m more interested in getting a paperback and ‘consuming’ it, than owning a hardback and loving the spine and the cover and the fact that it’s sturdier and represents the old tradition of lifetime book acquisition, appropriate to fixed estates, low mobility, and the bequeathing of a literary inheritance. I used to have time for both consuming and owning. Now, there’s no time, and I place a premium on space, effective storage, convenience, portability, etc. And frankly, the preservervation that used to make me love hardbacks, now in fact makes me interested in ebooks. I don’t want to read them on my office desktop with three monitors. I want them in my hand at the coffee shop. I want an electronic book. A Kindle.  A Star Trek book. And once it’s in digital format, you can be in the year 2120 and get a perfect copy of something from the 3500 BC.

Frankly, just the cost of moving books, the overhead of boxing them correctly, storing them in the right temperature, etc. means that I have to make a choice between being highly mobile in life or being surrounded by my library. I’ve made the choice. So now, it’s just a question of how to conduct the transition.

What will be really neat is making all new annotations in my ebooks. I wonder if the Kindles support that yet. I want to be able to take an e-pen and write in the margins and have it saved.

Anyway, got an ebook you want to trade for the real thing?

Amazon Kindle 1, Gently Used, Original Package + Extras US $290.00 (7 Bids) Auction Ends: Saturday Jul-04-2009 10:53:15 PDT Bid on this Item   | Watch this Item

AMAZON KINDLE 1 EXCELLENT CONDITION USED 4 TO 5 TIMES US $232.50 (3 Bids) Auction Ends: Saturday Jul-04-2009 13:56:43 PDT Bid on this Item   | Watch this Item

Flat World Worth It

Thomas Friedman’s book, “The World is Flat” has been filling my mind for some time now; I bought the 33-CD latest edition. It’s been completely worth it.

I really don’t like the writing style. It’s always either too precious, too patronizing, or just too slow and laborious, if not pained and redundant. The fake ethnic accents the narrator chooses on the CDs aren’t the author’s fault, perhaps, but they get old - especially when they’re badly done, or the speaker forgets and lapses back into American standard. Finally, the Americanism that permeates work often seems incongruous with the globalism as it’s being discussed, accepted, and even touted. This leaves the impression, on the one hand, that our primary focus should be our own nation and, on the other, that only the author’s version of internationalism and openness is truly intelligent. In short, it’s infuriating where not a bit insulting.

All that said, it’s worth it. I’d buy it again, and I’ll probably listen to it repeatedly.

The changes to the world that the author outlines are just too significant, and the points he makes about the changes just too important to care nearly so much who is saying them, or why, or how he manages to get them accross. If this were a blurry PDF, a warped, static-burdened record, or a barely audible reading in a dark room by Phyllis Diller (or Richard Simmons, if you’re not that old), it would still be worth it.

I’ve never been much for current affairs books, or analysis of the news. But Friedman’s book goes way beyond that. I won’t even begin to try to explain it here - you can google it for yourself, and I doubt I can say more about the theme, thesis, or its significance than you’ll find in Wikipedia. What I can say is that, if you’re interested in the future, in entrepreneurship, in education, in your children, or in politics, you owe it to yourself to get through some chapters. I’m in chapter 9, which I think is about half way through this massive tome and, while I’ve occasionally been tempted to stop, thinking, “I’ve got it I’ve got it. Enough already.”, I’ve not been disappointed by sticking it out.

Have you ever had a friend that annoyed the hell out of your, by being windy, slow to make a point, slightly condescending, and not a little repetitive? All my friends are saying, “hell yes”, right now. But have you had a friend like that who also made points that changed your life, painted the world in ways you hadn’t seen it before, and ultimately challenged you to live differently, more thoughtfully, with more attention? Those sames friends of mine would just as quickly say, “hail yes!” Well that’s what I get from Thomas Friendman. I forgive his faults, not just because I share them, but because he pays off, and keeps paying, and it’s worth it.

And Thomas likes to ask “where were you when you first realized the world was flat?” Well, in fairness, I should say I realized it while listening to his book in the car. But actually, I was in South Korea, when it developed the 40x CD-ROM. And I began to see how, with its video game development (e.g. Tribes), it’s superior miniaturization that made the US cell phone industry seem quaint, and it being the most wired country on earth, with 57% percent of its people on broadband, while people in my own country were almost universally stuck on dialup - I began to see how the future would shape up abit differently than most of the people I knew suspected.

Well, Friedman’s observations are far more significant, and he’s shown me how much I wasn’t paying attention to, and how much analysis was right there in front of me, and I missed it. I’m willing to sit at his feet, for that - and also because, if he’s right, and I believe he is, mostly, I’ll need very much to know what he knows.

The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman US $0.01 (0 Bid) Auction Ends: Saturday Jul-04-2009 9:08:02 PDT Bid on this Item   | Watch this Item

The World Is Flat 3.0 by Thomas L. Friedman (2007) US $5.00 (1 Bid) Auction Ends: Saturday Jul-04-2009 18:07:14 PDT Bid on this Item   | Watch this Item

The World Is Flat 3.0 by Thomas L. Friedman (2007) US $5.50 (4 Bids) Auction Ends: Saturday Jul-04-2009 19:57:39 PDT Bid on this Item   | Watch this Item

The World Is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman (2005) 1ST. ED. US $5.00 (0 Bid) Auction Ends: Saturday Jul-04-2009 20:17:21 PDT Bid on this Item   | Buy this Item   | Watch this Item

NEW BOOK The World Is Flat Friedman, Thomas L. US $13.38 Auction Ends: Saturday Jul-04-2009 23:29:13 PDT Bid on this Item   | Buy this Item   | Watch this Item

Instant Collaborative Workspace

So you want a low cost, collaborative workspace with big capabilities, and not much to learn? Here’s a recipe:

• Web-based: you want to access it from anywhere and not have it be dependent on your own hardware. Besides, you’re not lugging around a 20-pound laptop are you? You’ve been good, and upgraded to a netbook that really does travel. Anyway, the whole basis of collaboration is not documents lost on some ’shared drive’ but documents and workspace in the cloud - hanging out there where you can assign them to any and all.
• No learning curve: Even if you’re tech-savvy, you want to spend your time collaborating, not teaching people to use your funky interface. It has to be very simple in organization, with a transparent, intuitive interface.
• Free-form with fast, flexible queries: Do you want to spend your time fitting your information into someone else’s schema, or do you want it to take your data quickly, make it categorizable, searchable, and just work?
• Effectively scalable: I’m thinking at least 20 users. You may not need that much. Now. But once you start sharing documents and, more importantly, sharing workspace, you find all kinds of uses over time. It also needs to support separate folder structures or other separate areas (for SMEs/Teams/Projects/Topics).
• Secure: You must be able to add an ’s’ to the http:// (https://) and have it run in SSL secure mode. You are accessing your G-mail that way, right? https://gmail.com
• Low cost: free wouldn’t hurt, but at least it needs to be free for low-volume users.

Some Broad Options:

• Hosted shared space (e.g. google sites)
• Hosted shared documents (e.g. google docs)
• Hosted wiki-based environment (like BrainKeeper)
• Hosted forum (like Wet Paint)
• Hosted blog atmosphere or CMS (like Joomla or Drupal)

We’ve ruled out Access (office database)-based approaches and installable software, for exactly the reasons we led with - it’s just not modern cooking.

Enough has been written about blogs and forums, though perhaps not as collaborative spaces - there’s a lot to be explored there, in terms of their potential functionality. The wiki is the perennial collaborative space that will always be around, I think - and lots of work has been done on the wiki phenomenon. Google Docs, well, it’s pretty straightforward, since back when Writely was one of the best contenders for online word processing. If you’re still cooking documents on a hard drive - why? So they can get fragged, glitched, or require backups?

That leaves shared space. And again, here, there’s PHPProjekt and others that either enforce a more rigid structure or require customization to get around that. We want something that works out of the box.

So far, I’ve found two in the sterling, awesome, workable category: Google Sites and Evernote. Both of these meet all our criteria, and have fast, fast searching and content editing. Very fast searching.

Evernote is almost entirely free-form, with a notebook and tag structure if you like. In this ballpark, Google Notebook, has been, frankly, outstanding, except now Google has stopped development on it, essentially yielding the ground to Evernote. I really, really just won’t let go of my Google Notebook, tho. They may not be offering new ones for much longer, but they’re keeping the existing ones around and, as long as they do, I’m in. It has made my life so much easier. I wouldn’t be right without it. That said, Evernote is a damned good product, and has some neat features not found in Google Notebook. I will be using it as well.

Google Sites offers more structure, but still allows a lot of freedom, and is, frankly, more robust as a collaborative space. It’s folder-based, though I wouldn’t be surprised if google made it tag-driven instead. Really, it depends on what you need. I intend to collaborate with both.

With some creativity and either Google Sites or Evernote, you can create a really impressive professional environment to show clients, as well.

Big and Flat

The World is Flat is one of those lovely life-changing pieces of literature that, if you can get past the author’s infuriating writing style, is worth the significant time investment.

If you’re an entrepreneur, at the least, consider it brain-food, that unique energy that courses through the dendrites of our neural networks, and comes out in the creativity that keeps our endeavours alive.

That said, it’s also perhaps one of the best works of modern prophesy outside of science fiction. If you want to know how the world looks, looking ahead, it’s important to take stock of what we’ve been ignoring all along. It’s not magic - scanning the future - it’s just looking at the present with a more sophisticated lens.

When I was in grad school, I used nanotechnology to illustrate a point, and someone popped off, to the amusement of all, that I must be watching too much Star Trek. Never mind that Eric Drexler, first MIT Phd in nanotech was writing prophetic works that simply required the author knowing what was happening in a few publicly-funded laboratories on better college campuses. The one person in the room who didn’t laugh was a US ambassador who knew very well what we were working on at the time, and whose own articles appeared adjacent to ones on nanotech in journals that were in the library a short walk across campus.

In short, a prophetic view of the future belongs to those who are sufficiently aware of the present. It’s not magic, but it is sort of like travelling back 100 years and introducing the personal computer. It might be just a matter of going into a lab and walking it out to the nearest street corner and saying, ‘look what I’ve got’. “Are you from the future?” you might get asked. “No, I’m from just over there.” The future is just outside the range of what we automatically notice.

The unnoticed lab that Friedman, author of The World is Flat, has access to is simply more extensive travel, more diverse contacts, and a little publicly available information. Enough that, if you’re moving at a heartland of the US kind of pace, it’s like a dose of the future that brings you closer to the world’s actual speed.

More than anything, what Friedman captures is that, if you’re not thinking internationally, you don’t know what’s going on at all. If your mind is stuck in America, if you’re humming along to songs about how great we are, if you’re buying the rhetoric that our way of life is superior, that our colleges are the best, that everyone wants to be us, you’re sleepwalking through the present, and the future is simply imcomprehensible.

This isn’t a political post, it’s simply a recognition that, as we’ve said in earlier posts, and still keep saying, and find essential to successful entrepreneurship, the world is big. In other words, Friedman’s The World is Flat, is an excellent support for our own theorum, that there world is always outside the circle of our definition of it. Outside Friedman’s, outside mine, outside yours too. And when we accept that, sloughing off the bonds of artificial constraints and conventions, then we can begin to be truly creative in hypothesizing new endeavours.

The Energy of Korean Pop

Ha! This is a more personal post, but I just recovered three Korean pop songs I used to like about 10 years ago when I lived there. Not a big fan of pop, but you adapt to what’s available.

돌아와-클론 (Clon, “Come Back”): I like the energy when the woman in this one starts to sing, and the underlying spirit of it, the warm communal singing, is very Korean. The video is bizarre, but not silly. This one is my favorite of the lot. [also: live version]

유승준-열정 (Yu Soong Jun, “Passion”): I’m not a fan of hip hop culture, and I think these boys in “osh kosh” look ridiculous, but there’s a point where the song rises in a ballad format and then breaks that I like.

Park Ji Yoon - Sky Blue Dream: The video itself is horribly lame. If you can turn away from it, do. But the ballad is still good and, in my defense, I would hear it on the radio and in the nori-bong (karaoke shop). I like it, because the chorus lends a feeling of being in motion, wind, unbounded, and free.

What I sense about all of these that must have interested me in a sea of otherwise annoying pop songs, is the energy, adventure, and sense of liberty. I guess I’d forgotten how like a lion I was back then.

In an early post, I mentioned other favorites. Superstar Lee Jung Hyun is perhaps one of the most original and creative of pop stars in Korea  - e.g.  Wa (”Come”), Nuh (”You”), and Bakkwa (”Change”). Also 1tym performing 1tym or Ghae Ji Na Ching Ching (the showmanship and sense of humor is what’s so appealing) and Jinusean performing Mal Hae Joe live (mainly because Um Jung Hwa joins them for this and just makes men swoon with her obvious but still very effective antics). Even Baby VOX is just too fun with Get Up (outtakes built in) despite all the poutiness. It’s hard to separate them vocally, but the bad one (you’ll see who I mean) is the most interesting for attitude.

What takes it all is when you put all these people together in one live concert to celebrate a common purpose, as in [Hana Dweh Uh] (”Now and New”) which commemorates the peace talks between North and South Korea. This [studio montage] version is nice, too. What you get from it is a sense of the feeling of national responsibility of the participants. Here too is Hand in Hand (from the 88 Olympics)

Thoughts on Project Management

Projects can swiftly get out of control, and can easily lose momentum. By that time, however, they’ve already started to take a toll on the confidence of stakeholders, participants, and clients. Because of this, the ability to implement effective projects requires excellence, support, and commitment at each stage of the build.

The things project leaders must do well:

Be able to attract and effectively hire and retain supremely competent dream-team members who are capable of working more like responsive, fast-moving, flexible, project team members than like traditional employees. The focus is on contribution, achievement, and success - not office supplies and drama.

Be able to leverage and utilize the best talents of each team member, regardless of position, title, or task, without regard to the “politics” associated with traditional employment. Project teams must work like contractor engineers in a huddle, not like cogs in top-down structures with their traditional bottlenecks, and a primary interest in escaping blame and responsibility.

Effectively predict costs, especially on large ventures. It always costs more than you think. The unknown and unpredictable is always present. If you’re not willing to quote for that up front, and make some people unhappy with the number, you’re not really planning a project, you’re planning a disaster.

Effectively predict realistic time frames, especially on aggressive ventures. Same thing with money - those are the two things a project will always use more of in ways you don’t expect, at least if you don’t have a consistent pattern of success in ventures of the same type and scale. This is especially true if you plan to cut corners on realistic safeguards for success, and if you don’t plan and adhere to the scope effectively - you’ll spend more time or money, and likely both.

Apply realistic safeguards for success, such as truly adequate testing and pilot implementations, comprehensive training, and coaching toward maximum efficiency and individual effectiveness. Even more significantly, effectively plan the scope in an accurate way that maps processes to take into account everything the project touches. And even then, don’t be arrogant, give the processes back to the man on the ground, and let him tell you what you still don’t know and didn’t think of. Nothing will ruin planning like an utter lack of humility. If you think you own it, but you don’t touch it on a daily basis, think again. The man whose wrench is on the boiler owns the boiler, when it comes to the process - you need that perspective, not just a flowchart that can be easily filed in a cabinet.

Construct, streamline, and utilize a swift and effective decision-making and sign-off apparatus. If everyone wants to get a say, add their personal flavor, tweak some part as a way of applying their brand or adding their voice or their initials in the concrete, you don’t have decision making at all - you have a committee - a congress. When was the last time one of Congress’ large scale projects went particularly well, not to mention coming in under budget and on time? The alternative to an effective decision-making apparatus is that the drywaller is closing up the wall before the electrician is done, and you’ll have to tear down and redo. And that means the painter is costing you more, while he sits on his can.

Effectively define and communicate the scope of the project to all stakeholders and clients, with emphasis on understanding and acceptance of the new culture. It is always a culture change, or the project wouldn’t be worth implementing. Building it from the outside is how prisons are constructed; living communities are built from the inside. If the planners spend to much time at the drawing board, and too little onsite living in the apartment, you’re going to have mattress-burning riots in the yard when the fence starts to go up.

The emotional commitment to the project’s actual implementation must be present in every participant, but especially in those who lead. Nothing draws down the direction and momentum of an implementation faster than not being sure whether you really want to pull the trigger, or whether you really are all in for what it all means. This is not only a “middle management” issue - the commitment must be in place at the top, and sideways as well.

A project implementation requires a definite set of conditions to work. These do not ensure it will go smoothly, they ensure it will go at all. If you pull out one of these pins, the structure will wobble, the audience will reel, and the participants will begin jumping off. Not only that, your contractors will ask for more money. To quote the film Ronin, “If it’s going to be amateur night, then the price has got to go up.”

Before launching a project, organizations should take real stock of themselves, their history and, pride and egotism and overconfidence aside, ask themselves whether they have the soft infrastructure in place, along with the real infrastructure, to conduct large-scale projects, let alone projects of moderate scope. If not, a lot of time and money could be saved by building the foundation first, and then trying to erect the skyscraper.

My address has an @

The road and the office are one.  Wifi vs. postal. Mobility and credibility. I though about several titles for this piece, and I don’t have one that captures it exactly, because the old way is easy to describe - it’s static. But the new way is so much more dynamic - it won’t hold still long enough to be nailed down.

So, snazzy title or not, here goes. Once you weren’t considered a business without a postal address. And if you had a PO Box, it was like a strike against you. You were “fly by night”. But the brick and mortar began crumbling long ago. Now, postal addresses are just something tech businesses do to make customers feel better. And physical storefronts? In a global market, it doesn’t matter. I’ve met very few of my clients face to face and, because of that, we’re able to concentrate on getting things done. The postal address has no reality - a street address can be had almost anywhere in the country for $10/mo.

The same holds true with publishing that darned fax number. I publish mine, because it costs me nothing to do it, but I haven’t plugged a fax machine into the wall in a decade. I think I’ve received one fax in that ten years. As far as image, it’s more of an annoyance than anything. Can you even buy a device now that will fax but doesn’t scan and e-mail?

Toll free numbers, likewise, once conferred “professional” status. Now, they say that your primary clientelle doesn’t carry a cell phone. They’re a vestige of the days when long distance was $2.50/minute. Yes, you can brand it, but it’s like putting vanity plates on all my shipping trucks. Come to think of it, that might be a better idea than advertising with 866-call-daniel

So back to the topic of physical addresses. I’ll get one if I need one for product-based sales (even then, your fulfillment people are the ones who really need the address), but I’m willing to have a customer put off now and then by the fact I don’t publish it for service-based work. I don’t apologize for the fact that I work from wherever - I’m proud of it. Coffee shops, planes, trains, automobiles  - the best deal on office space comes with a latte and some Sade. Why anchor down and plug in when WiFi is on every corner patio?

The perception gap will persist a while. But I’m not bowing to it. Mobility, flexibility, and technology should be the call signs of someone you want working on cutting edge projects for you. Where can you find me in person? You can’t, and you shouldn’t need to. Have you ever had to hunt down your handyman, chase someone for a payment, wait on someone to show up at a job site or to a meeting? Has your drywaller had to sit on the tailgate waiting for the plumber or the electrician to get there? All that synchronous communication is the bottleneck that keeps businesses from scaling and you from getting better service. And people are figuring this out. Free me from the landline, the postal address, and the fax machine, and you free me to be better than ever at what I do for you. Don’t trust me unless we move slower and cost more? The times they are a changing. The rest of the world darned sure works from outside the zip code! I can live with 10% of my prospects not trusting me and not pulling the trigger, because I don’t move at the rate of the postal service (which, frankly, I think does a damned good job at what they do) - what I can’t live with is 90% of my clients who just want results going to the guy who won’t wait, won’t slow down, and won’t sit still in one place.

It’s one thing if I’m a local Insurance Agent - you want to know where to find me. It’s another if I’m helping you in the fast-moving, ever-changing stream of the internet. In that case, all you really need to know is how to google me - if I’m in business, I’m there in force. And so is everyone else. Where I park the Mazda, really doesn’t matter, does it? Besides, there’s that secret-agent aura of being all over the place and carrying high-end equipment in a duffel bag. Who could pass that up?

In the future, the stability and solidity of a business will be judged not by whether you can drive down that lonely industrial road and find someone reading a romance novel and manning the front desk, while the owner jiggles the handle on the water cooler. In the already present future, in the now, stability and solidity will be judged by a continual pattern of delivering high quality at excellent prices, as consistently as the client requires. To do that, I work while I’m driving, instead of driving to work. I don’t take coffee breaks - I work at the coffee shop. I take my work to lunch, instead of taking my lunch to work. I have the largest office, with the best view, in the nicest parts of town, of anyone I know. And when I get tired, I put my work down and go to sleep.

An address may even underscore, for a consultant, the old ineffective corporate work ethic of evaluating professionals by presence and activity, rather than by effectiveness and results. I sell the latter, and the former I guard, protect, and preserve, and lend sparingly when the contract really requires it. Not everyone gets the new way, so there’s some negotiation for the biggest work but, if they’d get rid of the desk that’s nailed to the floor, and contract with people like me, they’d get twice the bang at half the buck in half the time for half the headache.

The people who need “watching” or “tracking” or “locating” to be effective, are the people who don’t realize there’s a tsunami coming. China, India, and the world are waking up. It’s a tidal wave of overwhelmingly bright people that are willing to be outstanding without being parented and without anyone even knowing or caring where they’re sitting right now. It’s a flood. If you’re in my shoes, you’ll have to be mobile just to survive, but it sure will be exciting.

Hmm. Maybe I should give out the address of my local coffee shop. If they’d offer that service, I’d pay more for the latte.

It’s a Shoebox After All

The previous post talked about online business receipt storage (No More Shoeboxes). When tossing out shoeboxes, I think I spoke too soon. I’ve since surveyed what seem to be the contenders:

Shoeboxed: Very nice. Excellent for receipts and business cards. Allows you to e-mail or scan them. A bit slower than I’d like on navigation and search, but allows multiple simultaneous uploads, and has superior export features, including excel, intuit, and my own favorite - a PDF with both receipt log and receipt images in a single file.  That last feature is why I’m going with Shoeboxed for now.

Evernote: While not laden with receipt-specific features, very flexible. Use tags for date, amount, category or item. Allows you to e-mail receipts. Very fast. Needs an export feature. Those last two features are the clincher. Speed and organization are so good that, even w/o receipt-specific fields, the tags work fine. If there was an export feature like Shoeboxed, I’d be inclined. In the meantime, I’m thinking this is my catch all scan organizer. It’s too cool and too useful not to use.

Neat Receipts: I’m interested, but I’m waiting for them to go web-based and allow me to use my own scanner. They acknowledge that web-based storage is the future, but it’s not ready yet. In fairness, they’re widely considered to have the best scan quality w. their scanners in the biz, they’re very affordable to get into ($110 at amazon) and, if you were going to house it on your own hardware, this would be the way to go.

Pixily: So promising, but what’s up? Excellent uploader, and it’s housed on Amazon S3 servers. Unfortunately, nearly every internal link (e.g. Organize) took me back to the home page, and my two uploaded documents seem to have been lost during processing. It was looking like Evernote, until then.

Docrage: Household receipts and a few expenses only. Interface is old fashioned. Didn’t upload a gif. It’s in beta, but it needs a serious dose of rethinking. Business is where the money is - drive that, and personal receipts will follow. Interface needs to be fast, not necessarily flashy. Multiple uploads, flawless search and organization, and a serious export feature. That’s where it needs to go.

Google: It wouldn’t be one of my blog posts unless it considered google. It wants google. I use small “G”, because, frankly, it’s too big of an underlying reality to be just a brand. I love Google Docs and Google Notebook. And I’d strongly consider the latter for this project, if it let me paste in or easily upload images. But it doesn’t. Time will turn that around. In the meantime, I’m betting Picasa or Picasa2 will do the job just fine. Think image uploader (web or software based) with extensive tag capability. Google has never pinned me down out of mere brand loyalty. They’ve bought and improved most of the things I’ve liked (think Writely). I’ll give them time on this one. If I had to, though, I know out of their two dozen tools in my arsenal, one would work.

So, the winner? Shoeboxed. With honorable mentions to Evernote and Neat Receipts.

NEAT RECEIPTS SCANALIZER NIB US $43.00 (6 Bids) Auction Ends: Saturday Jul-04-2009 11:35:30 PDT Bid on this Item   | Watch this Item

Neat Receipts Pass-Through Scanner US $32.00 (8 Bids) Auction Ends: Saturday Jul-04-2009 13:54:03 PDT Bid on this Item   | Watch this Item

Neat Receipts v4.0 Document Management System Scaner US $139.99 Auction Ends: Saturday Jul-04-2009 18:35:00 PDT Bid on this Item   | Buy this Item   | Watch this Item

THE NEAT COMPANY RECEIPTS NEATRECEIPTS 4.0 SCANNER NIB US $144.99 Auction Ends: Sunday Jul-05-2009 6:26:40 PDT Bid on this Item   | Buy this Item   | Watch this Item

No More Boxes of Receipts

The IRS, according to Revenue Procedure 97-22, permits businesses (and individuals) to store receipts and other records in digital format (and destroy the paper versions), provided certain standards are met, namely w. regard to clarity, indexing system, etc.

This makes me very happy, since I’m busy going nuts with a shredder. Thermal paper fades, paper receipts are subject to fire, mold, whatever. And organizing, storing, and moving them is no fun. Small footprint is better.

I’ve been scanning for some time, and been mostly paperless, but now I’m going 100% paperless and the search is on for a higher volume solution for receipt scanning, tracking, filing for my business.

Neatreceipts and Webwallet (mac only) are common solutions. I’d like something that works with my own scanner, or any scanner, but archives my site receipts on the web. Frankly, if Quickbooks online would do it (great product, by the way - and the Firefox version rocks), or Google offered a solution, I’d be in.

I’ve looked at [scanner technologies] and there’s not much new but some software. I’ve looked at NeatReceipts - the problem I have with it, is that it depends on local, onsite storage. Sure, I can back that up with something like JungleDrive, Carbonite, or Mozy. But I want a light, downloadable mini-app or firefox plugin that that either backs up my receipts to native web storage, to a server I specify, or to Google’s apps (Docs or Notebook) or Quickbooks Online.

I’m holding out for something next generation.

Dave Ramsey’s Seven Steps

David Ramsey changed my life. Before David, I never had much money saved, and could never keep it in savings. I had revolving debt. I paid late fees. I paid silly amounts of interest. I worried about losing my job. I was at the mercy of my own bad financial management. It was like a crazed controller handled my accounts, and I was him.

After a friend introduced me to the seven steps, my finances turned around. I paid off my revolving debt (my credit card provider lowered my interest rate down to a fraction as the debt disappeared, and they recently canceled my card for non-use). I have had money for emergencies, and have not had to use credit for much at all.

These are the seven steps: They must be done in order!

1.  SAVE AN EMERGENCY FUND OF $1000. (I’m not comfortable with less than $2500 with a family, but I didn’t have $1000 at the time, either, so I started with that). Pay the minimum on all debts and save everything else, spending nothing you don’t have to, until you have $1000 in a savings account. The money is off limits except for a real emergency. You must, again, do these steps in order, and this is first. If this fund is not there, the next emergency will place you further in debt, not further away. If you tap your emergency fund for a real emergency, back up and start at #1 again.

2.  USE THE DEBT SNOWBALL TO WIPE OUT ALL PERSONAL DEBT EXCEPT A MORTGAGE. Start with the smallest debt and pay on it hard until it’s gone, but pay only the minimum amount on the rest of your debts. When the smallest debt is paid off, move to the next smallest debt, but increase the payment to include what you were paying on the smallest debt, and so on.  However long this takes - months or years - stay on it - and resist the temptation to pay the largest debt or the debt with highest interest first. Pay hard on the smallest debt, so you can use the snowball. Stock investors use the snowball method to grow their stock portfolio - you’re using it to shrink your debt. Besides, paying down debt is emotional, too. Seeing debt after debt drop off is like winning a battle. Starting with the largest debt or else fighting on all fronts at once (focusing on interest rate), is a recipe for despair. Do not attempt step 2 until you have completed step1. Don’t go to step 3 until you complete step 2.

3.  BUILD A GENUINE EMERGENCY FUND. Deposit enough money to live 3-6 months without a job (in case you become ill, unemployed, or your business falls into the sea.

4.  FULLY FUND ALL PRETAX RETIREMENT AND BECOME FULLY INSURED (Life, Long-Term Care, etc.)

5.  IF YOU HAVE CHILDREN, BUILD A COLLEGE FUND

6.  PAY YOUR HOUSE OFF EARLY. Even an additional $100/month added to your payment can shave 10 years off of your mortgage.

7.  BUILD WEALTH. You can revisit Ramsey’s methods when/if you reach this point. You may never finish the seven steps. You may have to start over several times, but you will learn how to manage your money, and what it means, and you will grow in confidence and focus and be better off than ever before.

There have been a few books and authors that have changed my life. David Ramsey, Timothy Ferris, Thomas Friedman. I started with Ramsey, and my family has been happier and healthier ever since.

More Than Enough by David Ramsey (1998) US $4.95 Auction Ends: Wednesday Jul-15-2009 19:25:29 PDT Buy this Item   | Watch this Item

More Than Enough by David Ramsey (2002) US $8.03 Auction Ends: Sunday Aug-02-2009 0:57:56 PDT Buy this Item   | Watch this Item

Work in The New World

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The Beginning: The post-WWII generation embraced and inculcated into their children a lifelong quest for acquisition – acquisition of specific things. Some cultures even refer to them as the keys to success: university degree, respectable job, respectable house, reliable car, supportive spouse. Increasingly, though, these either matter less, don’t matter, or are being reconsidered and redefined.

It’s Over: There’s a film depicting Bobby Fischer, child chess prodigy, holding out his hand and offering his chess opponent a draw. The opponent says, “The game’s not over yet.” Bobby replies, “It’s over. You don’t realize that it’s over. Twelve moves, or you can take the draw.” The world has changed like that.

The House: Location matters far less in a global economy, so owning a house isn’t carrying with it the esteem it once did. It isn’t the sign of wealth and accomplishment that it was after WWII – it may actually be a sign of being behind the curve, if you’re tied to it, and it represents the sum of accomplishment. The mortgage crisis underlined this: a house is a balance sheet item. If that $500K would earn more in another investment, when you subtract the cost of renting, then it’s bad business.

The Car: Cars are losing their romance. Places in the world that depend on cars as the primary transportation infrastructure may eventually seem like they still drive covered wagons. What about going to work? Perhaps fewer of us will be doing that. “It’ll never change. There will always be cars on the road.” You can just hear the reassurances of the status quo. We also heard, “There will always be fax machines. Cell phones will never replace landlines. I’ll never use e-mail.” Before that, our recent ancestors heard, “Air transportation has no commercial future.” and “These horseless carriages will never replace a good mule.” Etc. The recent crunch has slowed car sales, and fuel use, indicating that we can indeed do with less. We won’t, collectively at least, forget this.

University Education: Education is now just socialization and information. The age of transforming individuals into great thinkers went the way of traditional universities, following the mediaeval model (one I happen to like). What’s left is accessible online, and often for free. Even the Ivy League can be had just as easily in Dubai as the US. Great thinkers are not those who excel at going down the well-beaten path of tradition, but will be found among those who turn tradition on its head.

Retirement: Retirement made sense when labor was back-breaking, physical, non-automated, dangerous, dirty work that took a heavy toll on the body, and eventually broke it. Now the worst thing for your body is sitting in an office eating candy and lunching on fast food. In the emerging economy, we’re not breaking our backs from labor, we’re straining them from getting fat. Retirement hasn’t made practical sense in some time. It doesn’t make vocational sense, either. With this much ubiquitous opportunity, why would anyone spend 60 years doing something they don’t particularly like, in order to spend their twilight years (the age which begins at the exact statistical point that a large number of us begin to die) doing what they want. In an age of continual access to information, opportunity, and every imaginable experience, why defer the life you want? Besides, work, not some far off cessation of work, is supposed to be the primary vehicle of meaning in our lives. Instead of postponing our lives while we work, we have immense opportunities to do the work we want, or at least use reasonably delightful work that can subsidize lengthy stretches of even more meaningful activity. It’s not really that hard to spend a month in Korea. The culture of new technologies and economies encourages pulling life back off of the shelf and putting it into play now. We were once told we were being responsible by deferring life - now, perhaps, we’re just being dull.

Marriage: The initial stigma associated with getting a date online is gone, except among those who just can’t absorb the implications and benefits of technology fast enough. Eharmony made it mainstream. Marriages that were once arranged at grange dances among partners no more than 50-miles from their birthplaces, are now frequent among those 5000 miles apart.  The jury is still out on the results, but one thing is certain, the search is easier, and the implication is that marriage can’t easily retain its status as a major meritorious accomplishment.

In Sum: Knowledge is no longer unavailable to the “slow students”; epistemological speed is often measured in how fast and effectively you can Google something. Being clever is generating more value than having a degree - which may represent your creativity, or may just as easily represent your ability to get a guaranteed loan and follow general instructions that are repeated over and over. It’s now possible to conduct a serious business out of a backpack while living in a hostel. Getting around is easier than ever - the car you own, depending on where you live, may be the last car you ever need to own. Ubiquitous WiFi and cellular has made social networking the basis not only of romance, but of business. In other words, the old system – degree, job, house, car, wife – is being met with the extended hand of a cultural Bobby Fisher, and the tremors of change are being felt and mistaken for a momentary financial setback or two. Where it isn’t dead, it’s being redefined. Where it isn’t useful, it’s going the way of the dinosaur.

Life Modification: One of the key results of ubiquitous internet and global placement of fiber, is the personalization of individual existence and subsistence. Life modification is now the rule. The idea that we all follow a herd-like model is replaced by a culture steeped in continual self-expression (e.g. blogging) and pervasive communication (e.g. Skype). The new entrepreneurs who thrive in this environment will break the rules - they will be, inherently, heretics to the old way. Most will keep it for themselves, perhaps, but the social entrepreneurs will even make the world better, and perhaps help to save it. Work is too interesting now to be just a way to get useless stuff. Besides, stuff has to be stored - more bloat, less mobility, less flexibility, less adaptability, less stuff. Smart life-modders will go lean and live strong.

The Heels of Culture: The .com bubble demonstrated that a technology update waits for a cultural update. Technology itself doesn’t increase productivity, expand options, or empower individuals. Technology requires a commensurate culture shift, and you can’t learn that from a degree-granting institution, because the world is changing far faster than they can catch up. For the “freaks and geeks” from two decades ago, this is a very good thing. “Success” is not only no longer measured the old way, it’s not dispensed the old way, and its economic and social meaning is radically altered.

Anything can be a Business

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Rule of Entrerpreneurship: Anything can be a business.

True, this is a bit of stretch if you’re a stickler, but it’s true in principle. We’ve all heard of the guy who could sell bags of poo for $1 each, by discussing the benefits for plant growth.

The rule is more of a general principle of outlook – “more like guidelines” as Jack says of the Pirate Code. It’s about how you approach problems and what eyes you see with.

As a writer, my maxim has been “anything can be a story”. It’s about seeing the story qualities of things around you on a consistent basis. Lately, what I’ve been seeing – in the shower, when driving, when I first wake up, throughout a good day, are business ideas. They’re under every rock. The world is teeming with them.

And it’s scary, like a world filled with friendly but wild monsters. If writing was ever scary – the prospect of facing up to the work of writing a story, then founding businesses is sheer terror. But there’s a thrill in the terror.

Personally, I’m reaching a critical mass, of where I’m willing to step out on the ledge of risk of disaster, and attempt feats of brilliant energy. I’m more scared than I’ve ever been of storywriting, and that’s pretty scary.

But in fact, this is the path to get to there. The ledge of entrepreneurship is the tightrope of acrobatics, and the goal is the open free fall of having enough time, with my intellect still intact, and my spirit unbroken, my white hot fundamental energy unspent, to write.

Other people want to tour Europe with their gain. Some want to buy sprawling houses. I just want to be left alone in a decent place with enough leisure time to write. And it’s worth the risk. It’s worth the risk of being wrong, of failure (and getting up again, despite everyone thinking there’s proof you can’t do it. It’s worth the risk of having to start over. It’s certainly worth the risk of losing what I have.

The thing is, then, to see businesses everywhere, where they don’t exist. To see nascent businesses, and to be prepared to risk, to experience fear and trembling, to give some of them shape and form. In that sense, it’s not unlike writing a story. Anything can be a story. Anything can be a business.

Last Minute Gift = Delivered Instantly

Last second gift? Next-day air won’t do it? Give by e-mail: An online gift doesn’t even require shipping.

Give a gift card, gift certificate, or gift in someone’s honor from globalgiving or givemeaning or kiva or oxfam.

What do you get for the person who has everything?: You’ll find lots of articles on the web claiming to answer that question and, usually, it’s more of everything: a shower radio, a guaranteed to dry quickly soap dish, a chocolate putter. How about something that’s everything-proof?

How about someone you don’t really know well or aren’t close to? I say it every year - it may be the co-worker you don’t know enough about to get something truly personal, or the friend who lives at Walmart and buys whatever whimsey suggests anyway, or it may be that you’ve got a dollar limit placed on the gift for some absurd office game. This lets you share something of meaning rather than one more meaningless bauble.

Your closest friend: What about someone you have a deep, personal investment in, who shares your outlook on the world, and a generic gift card just won’t do it? This is a way of sharing meaning that goes beyond the stocking stuffer.