Question 270 of 365: How do we define success?

I believe in serendipity. It is one of my strongest held beliefs, actually. It is the way in which I find much of the passion that I have for technology, education, and business. I make contacts on Twitter and at Coffee Shops that have very little chance to pay off with real relationships, but on occasion have yielded some of the most enduring friendships of my life. I take serendipity as a given. I proclaim that given enough time and enough creative output, I will meet the people that I am supposed to and traffic in enough new relationships to be fulfilled.

One recent encounter has shaken that hard-fought foundation.

A few weeks ago, I was meeting with a colleague and we decided to grab some coffee. After our meeting was over and I was finishing up some e-mail, a woman (who was clearly stood up by her business contact because of the awkward phone conversation I overheard which contained quite a few apologies on both sides from the sound of it) introduced herself to me. She asked what I did for a living and she wondered about the type of meeting I was having in the middle of the day. As I often do when in interesting conversation introduces itself, I gave her my card. I didn’t think anything of it. It seemed serendipitous, but probably not all that useful in the long-term.

And yet, that weekend I received a phone call from this woman. I returned her call on the following Monday and we had a short conversation about her new business and potential dovetailing of interest. She told me that she had a e-commerce website like Amazon.com and was looking for other people to help with it. I am always interested in seeing what else is out there (although I struggle to find any reason for someone to start up an e-commerce website that is “like Amazon.com” having a close relationship with that retailer already). So, we set up a day and time to meet to talk over what continued to seem like the logical extension of serendipity.

Then we met and she brought out her computer. We talked a bit about things that were going on as she connected to the free Wifi. I told her about doing some professional development with online school teachers and she reacted with an overly complementary response, which I thought nothing of because she seemed very interested in each one of our short conversations so far. Then she pulled up a rather obscure URL and turned the laptop toward me.I immediately recognized the site for what it was: a specifically designed presentation for a “business opportunity.”

Not wanting to get too judgmental (the meeting was serendipitous and all), I let her talk about her business as if we had always known that this was where we were headed. She went into details about her “e-commerce” site that she purchases all of her household items from. She showed me logos of every major player in online household and consumable products. We talked about my goals for the future and what I wanted to see happen in the next three years economically. I did my best to play along as much as I could.

Then we came to the org charts and one very small detail that was intentionally missing from the previous 20 slides.

At the bottom of the org chart, almost obscured by the arrows in the chart pointing to “me” was the Amway-Global brand. As she begins to reassure me about this company’s presence in the presentation she says this: “I’m sure you have heard of this company.” She pointed to it. She didn’t say the name. She just pointed and allowed me to process. She explained her progression of coming to terms with working for Amway. It was a real soul searchers story.

She said that she had wanted to run straight out the door when the person sitting in her seat now had introduced it to her. She said that her uninformed opinion was, well, uninformed at that time. She received some sage advice from her uncle to give it a chance. She is so glad that she did because she is doing quite well for herself now. I, on the other hand, just wanted to see how long she was going to go on about how it wasn’t a Pyramid scheme. I wanted to see how many different ways she was going to obfuscate the referral process. I wanted to know how she was ever going to get around to how she convinced other people to purchase all of their household items in bulk from a website that seemingly provided no benefit to anyone except for the person who owned the website (other than perhaps having a lot of off-brand discount products).

By the time she got to the point of asking for feedback after this revelation about what we were really talking about, she was pointing to a $117,000 annual salary. This was supposed to elicit a reaction of rabid interest from me, but I just felt dirty. I was being asked to consider “owning my own business” as nothing more than growing someone else’s model. I was being asked to believe that money was the measure of success that mattered most.

The problem with her pitch wasn’t that this seemed too good to be true. I am fairly confident that many people who get into Amway and work hard at it make a good amount of money. I am also pretty sure that given the right situation, this type of work would seem awfully attractive. The problem with her pitch was that I already consider myself a success. I don’t require that kind of salary to validate it. Furthermore, the purpose and passion I feel for everything I do has always provided me with enough money to feed my family and purchase all of my needs and many of my wants.

I believe in education and good ideas. I believe in creating a life for ones’ self. I do not believe in manufacturing it out of consumable goods. While you may be able to sell a lot of them, they will never last. That is the metaphor for why I felt so betrayed by serendipity. I create things based upon the reciprocal nature of shared ownership. She took that ownership of our communication and bent it toward her will. She tried to reengineer it until I became the perfect client, the next in a long line of “business owners” that she had converted. Well, that is not serendipity. That is manipulation. That is false advertising and bait and switch networking.

No thank you.

So while I still believe in serendipity, I will be on the look out for those who try to trade on it and are unwilling to give creativity back. I will still give out my card, but I will ask for their’s next time as well.

Question 191 of 365: What is the skeptic’s option?

Everyone who asks questions is a skeptic in one way or another, which is to say that everyone is a skeptic.

I once found my bicycle up in a tree in the woods. It had been placed there by some naughty older kids. They wanted to play a trick on me, although I am quite sure that they had no idea who I was. They just saw my bike in the woods behind my friend’s house and decided that it belonged in a tree. They carefully perched the handle bars on one branch and the back wheel on another. It hung about 8 feet up in the air, which was pretty far out of my 5 foot height at the time. So, I walked home.

I was skeptical about whether or not I would be able to convince my mother that this wasn’t my fault, that I hadn’t been careless about leaving the bike in the woods in the first place. I asked myself questions about who could have done such a thing, all the while cursing both the people who had done it and myself for being so trusting of an obviously hostile world.

If Twitter and smart phones and Fail would have exited back then, you can bet that the entire escapade would have been chronicled first by the older kids as a viral video contender and then by me so that I might chronicle the improbability of my bicycle in the tree. I would have tweeted something like “So, my bike decided that the beaten path (or any path) wasn’t good enough for it.” I would have put the twitpic in there too, just for good measure. There would not be much skepticism just then about what had happened or disbelief by my mother. We could have looked up the whole thing and probably gotten a geotagged play by play, complete with facebook profiles on each of the perpetrators because their faces would be tagged.

I tell this story not so that you can pity my former self, but rather so that I can outline just how little skepticism there is for the things that we can see, and how this is bleeding into ideas well.

Right now, it is very easy to like something on the Internet. It is easy to share it and to link to it. It is easy to do pretty much anything except for be skeptical. Sure, there are contrary opinions and lots of snarky comments on Twitter, but don’t really found those and true skepticism. Skepticism is looking something directly in the eye and stating for everyone to hear that you don’t believe it.

I want the ability to not believe again.

Now, all of my choices are to either support or not support (and most of the nonsupporting options are burried in comments). I want the ability to not believe as well. I want to be able to stare wide eyed at the things that hold untruth and disbelieve them. Imwant q universal skeptic button.

This button will be the equivalent of the Facebook “like” button, but instead of converting to page promotion or demotion, it will have the effect of allowing me to highlight the most offensive portion of whatever I am looking at and call it to account. Any time that someone hovers over that text in the future, it will have my record of disbelief and whatever comment I cared to make on why it was untrue. The button will be in ebooks and blog posts, on videos and podcasts too.

The skeptic button will finally make the process of making a case against an idea easier because it will cobble together each and every comment offered and aggregate it for a common purpose.

In the end, I dint want to like/dislike things or even merely comment on them. I want to believe them or disbelieve them. The things that I believe in should be shared in all of the spaces that I inhabit and the things that I do not believe in deserve to connect me with all other nonbelievers. I feel as though we would have a common bond, a network of skeptics.

Right now we are scattered. Someday soon, though, we will rise up and state our intentions for making belief a part of our metadata. We will make asking questions a part of every online interaction.

We will look up at the bicycles in the trees around us and we will start to walk home together to tell someone else the story from memory.

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Question 60 of 365: Who should be our partners?

Not all collaboration is equal.

There are the types of collaboration that require that I do a first draft and then everyone hangs ideas off of it like a christmas tree. Generally, these are things that I have a lot of experience in, but many others have opinions about. Google Docs is the perfect platform for getting things like this done because it is basically begging for someone to start an idea before sharing it out.

There are the types of collaboration that require divvying up the work in a big way so that each person. I think about every time that I have started a wiki or managed a project. There are just some things that we gravitate toward because we actually have time to tackle them. Each page is owned by someone else and while there may be commenting back and forth, the pages really feel like one person’s work.

There are collaborations that call for extremely distributed contributions. We are talking here about the ones that use hashtags, forms or drop boxes. These kinds of collaborations do not feel especially well organized because their point is to gather data rather than propose an idea. The real result is that someone must use the data wisely and produce a first draft type of collaboration.

All three of these types of collaboration are fine, but they aren’t partnerships.

To me, partnerships are all about shared resources and shared responsibility. They are all about taking a risk in the hopes of finding a reward. They are about joining forces so closely that it doesn’t matter who is doing the action, both entities feel “on the hook” for making sure it is a good one.

These kinds are partnerships are few and far between. And yet, they are the ones that I am looking for. I am actively engaged in finding groups of people (whether those are companies, organizations, or just self-organizing conglomerations) that are interested in giving up a piece of what they have in order to find something greater.

I am looking for groups willing to invest time and resources in building an idea, and not necessarily their idea. Rather, I want groups who are willing to share an idea.

And yet, how do you get a group that is already established to buy into something that isn’t “theirs” in the strictest sense of the word?

It is my belief that in order to partner with someone, your value must be so glaringly apparent as to make it inconceivable for the partner to want to do anything else. Too often we settle for less than ideal partners because we either do not believe that we have this kind of value or we believe that it does not exist outside of us, and therefore, is impossible to find.

The people we partner with should be able to help us achieve one of our goals better, stronger, or faster. If not, we should take a pass. And if they do not see us in the same light, they should move along as well.

Partnerships should be made based upon creating something new. If it is just consolidation or dovetailing of interests, a partnership is unnecessary. People will collaborate just fine without formalizing a relationship. But, creating something new, requires new people to step forward. It requires a leadership that cannot be slapped together. Creating something new, at least something lasting, is impossible without sharing a thought process and following through on that process.

A partnership also must be perfected over time. The relationships are very much like any good marriage: they require a lot of communication and work. I believe in the power of working hard to communicate between two entities and in fulfilling the requests that one another have. “Trouble Tickets” should be able to go both ways. The process of fixing something broken is both systemic and swift, iterative and intuitive.

In short, I want to partner with those who want to partner with me. Any takers?