Question 307 of 365: Why should we sand?

When my wife and I moved into our first house, we decided we would change a few things. We moved the refrigerator out of the hallway and into the kitchen. We covered over some hideous wood paneling with drywall. We even made consistent archways out of every entryway. Well, we didn’t. A really good contractor did all of those things. He and his band of builders rewired fuseboxes and resurfaced wood floors. He did everything, including install a new kitchen sink. Still, we weren’t satisfied.

The house wasn’t fully ours yet even if all of the most glaring errors had been taken care of. The cabinets were still a dozen shades too dark with awful hardware to match. We decided that this was how we were going to make it a home. We would tackle it ourselves. Or, more accurately, I would tackle it because my wife was newly pregnant and she was getting sick every day.

The project seemed easy. It seemed like in a couple weekends and we would be back to a fully working kitchen. So, one Saturday I took down all of the cabinet doors. I sprayed goop on them in the hopes that some of the veneer would come off. It didn’t. Next I tried sanding with my hands. I got nowhere. Every time I was starting to peal of a layer, I would find that the sand paper was out of grit. These cabinets had multiple coats of stain on them and there was only so much elbow grease and chemicals could do. So, I borrowed some hand sanders. I borrowed a Dremel (a very small handheld sander for fine sanding in corners and the grooves of cabinets). I set aside every evening in the shed for sanding away every bit of dark finish on those cabinets. It took a month.

At the end of that month, I was staring at some very uneven pieces of wood. From far enough away you couldn’t tell that anything bad had happened to them, but the closer you got you could see the little grooves that were made by frustration. You could see the dark lines when the Dremel’s sandpaper had heated up too high and made it into a wood burning kit. You could see everything that was wrong with those cabinets.

But they were ours.

There are no cabinets like those, and I would do it all again if I could. I would stand in the cold shed again with the music blaring out of an old boombox. I would yell at the sandpaper for breaking apart in my hands. I would try and match up the right cabinets with the right spots on the wall without really knowing which screw holes were right, having to unscrew and try again moments later. I would resand sand the drawers that we took out completely only a few months later when we decided that a dishwasher was more essential with kids. I would do it all again because the sanding made it special.

I pealed back the style and lack of creativity of someone else and I instituted my own statement about kitchens. They are to look at if you must, but to use and be happy in all of the time. I sanded those cabinets so that we could call them something other than what we were given.

And that is why I sand at other things too. I sand at the work that is given to me because I don’t know it well enough. After I have sanded down everything that is inessential, I will know each inch of the work and be able to talk about the journey of figuring it out. I sand at my life because those are the ways to the best stories. Only by taking off the first layer of veneer will I actually understand why I have made the choices I have. Only by sanding away at the experience can I really see myself in it.

Question 285 of 365: When does advocacy become an employment strategy?

Being in favor of things is not so very hard.

I’m for watching TV in the evenings. I’m for laughing with children. I’m for opening up boxes as soon as they come in the mail. I’m for remembering what I’ve done with those I’ve done it with. I’m for being quiet when screaming seems like the only alternative. I’m for screaming through the quiet. I’m for the scary moment in the morning when you realize just how much you have to do today. I’m for arm rests. I’m for spelling things out even when children aren’t present. I’m for innuendo. I’m for exaggeration and hyperbole and overstatement and repetition. I’m in favor of picking things up instead of stepping around them. I’m in favor of spending too much money on a movie and popcorn. I’m for clouds and rain. I’m for staring at strangers without their knowledge. I’m for separating candy from chocolate. I’m in favor of listening the same album over and over when it is just that good.

I can state all of these preferences quite easily and continue the list indefinitely, even as it spirals out of control into tangents and random mentions of my past. This is entertaining and time consuming but these are not passions, they are merely skipping stones across the surface. They are the brail of my life. They are the ways that people know I am me, but they are not the things that will last. They are not what will make someone take notice. They are not what will cause someone to stay tuned to what I have to say or want to hear more from my perspective.

Being in favor of something every day and stating that preference, so clearly and completely that will cause others to take notice. It is why politicians have staying power. It is why companies can execute. It is why people get hired. Being for one thing and showing it to anyone that will listen is the role I am choosing to do. It is the implied job of my life, the one laying just below the surface. Those are how passions reveal themselves over time. It is the diligence to be for something ad nauseum, but never to actually become sick.

I am drinking the koolaid, and I have for some time. I am taking deep and long sips and enjoying it. I am advocating for what I need every day now because I know that it is the only way that it will happen. And if Dr. Seuss‘ immortal words are any indication, it is only a matter of time before I will start happening too.

Question 277 of 365: Are we on the clock?

I used to put my hours on a time card. I used to slot it into metal container made especially for that purpose. I didn’t punch in because that would have required too much investment on the machine that actually made the punches. I would just carefully scrawl the time and date of when I started and stopped working. I didn’t guesstimate or fudge the numbers. I just looked over at the clock around the corner and wrote down the time that it said. If I was clocking in, I would put on my fanny pack of money and head out the door to take orders. If I was clocking out, I would grab my cheeseburger with grilled mushrooms and well done cajun fries. It was my first job and I was glad for every hour that I had it.

Now, I write almost nothing down about the time I spend on a given day at work. I arrive when I need to for meetings and to get my accomplishments done. I leave when a late meeting is off site or when it is time to get my children. Some days, I don’t come to the office. I just work from home and listen to music while I type up emails and solve the problems that seem to be most pressing. Most of the time, the clock holds almost no importance to me. I don’t look at it longingly, hoping for it to go faster. I don’t count hours and think about how many more it will take to buy another CD or movie ticket. I don’t even think about it in terms of when my next class will come in and want to learn something that I haven’t fully fleshed out yet.

Recently, I have felt almost no need to justify my time to anyone. My goals are easy enough to set and achieve. Clear out my email. Blog once a day. Meet with the people that want to meet with me. Collaborate on projects that I set in motion. Everything is persisting. My work products are so instantly sharable that I feel valued from those that have no relationship to my accountability. I don’t have daily checkins with anyone and the projects that seem to get the most attention are ones that require tending rather than envisioning or planning.

In some ways, I long for the clock. I long for the simple piece of paper that had all of my ins and outs on it. I wish I could justify all of the time that I am taking to square up with what I want to be doing. I wish that my email checks were all there in black and white showing me just how much time I spend on archiving and filtering and sometimes even replying. And more than that, I wish I could actually dedicate a block of time to creating and doing. When you are on the clock, distractions are not okay. You can’t look into putting linux onto a boot cd just to see if you can boot it up on an old mac, at least not without writing it up on the time card.

I do not envy those working in food service, save this one sacred truism: they know what they are doing.

I sure wish I did, or at least I wish I could know what I have done. As it stands now, I have to reference things like the “the long tail” and community creation as successes. I have to show things like PDF files and Moodle courses as the meaning of my days spent in this chair.

Burgers and fries are easy to quantify; ideas are not. I am working on it, though.

Question 271 of 365: Who will we let change us?

My son has never liked being changed, not even when he was very small. He is absurdly strong and his hips seem to have the superhuman element to them that allows for him to swivel out of all but the tightest grips. He screams and he asks for whomever is not changing him at that moment. He doesn’t care if he hasn’t been wiped yet and he doesn’t mind struggling for ten minutes at a time. This is who he is.

Now that he has shown an incredible interest in potty training, I am finding myself extremely relieved. I cannot wait until I never have to hold him down as I struggle to keep the biodegradable insert in place for his earth friendly diaper of choice. I will not miss the dance that we have to play to get him to just lay down and start the work of changing him. I will not miss the chase or the defiance in his voice when we ask him the status of his diaper.

This process also makes me think about why he never let us change him. It makes me think about his insistence that he be in control of everything that is happening to him. While he has always wanted our help with things that he can’t do, he has always made it known that he is the one in charge, that he is the one orchestrating the whole thing. Seeing as how we have changed hundreds (perhaps thousands) of diapers in his two years of life, he has let us do it. It may have been a struggle, but he has never let himself go unchanged for very long.

Even though the metaphor may be a little gross, I wonder who we are really willing to let change us. With all of the excrement that we come up with in our formative stages of work and collaboration, who are the people that we actually will let wipe it away and give us a fresh start each day? Who are the ones that we struggle with, but inevitably allow to see us at our most vulnerable? And as we are training to be better at what we do, who are those people who will encourage us and give us incentives to keep on doing it the right way?

Those people are the ones that I want to be surrounded by: those mentors that don’t care if we fail? occasionally, those ones that stay with us even though we may struggle against them. They are the ones that see our successes as their successes. They are the ones that cannot wait for us to stop needing them so much and go our own way.

I want my son to outgrow me and our current struggle, just as I would like to outgrow all of those that keep on pushing me to be better at collaborating, communicating and creating the future. I’m sorry for pushing back so much and for all of the crap you have had to put up with. Soon, I will be better. I promise.

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 245 of 365: What is our social media policy?

An institution will be known by its use of social media. They will be seen through the lens of every contributor in their ranks. They will either be well represented or incredibly absent, nothing in between. The identities of every Facebook and Twitter user will build into an army of advocates for the institution, so long as the institution doesn’t squash that reality.

Social media policies govern what can and cannot be posted, connected, and learned from the networks that drive many of our work and personal decisions and plans. And mostly, they do it rather badly. These policies tend to confuse guidance with enforcement. Here are my biggest infringements with social networking policies that have been floating around for the past few years:

• They are overly long. There is no reason to have a 4 page social networking policy. Either people will follow the guidelines or they won’t. There is no reason to have a stipulation for blog posts that is different from Facebook updates.
• They try to regulate privacy settings for employees. By asking people to hide certain parts of information about themselves, you are asking them to not represent themselves completely online. You are asking for less real interactions than if they had the option to reveal more.
• They try to separate professional and personal life. While this may have been easy to do in the past, it is nearly impossible to sanction when “working hours” happen for many positions. I wake up at 3:00 am some days (because my daughter felt it was a good time to get up, mostly) and get started on answering emails and working on the things that require most attention. These kinds of policies would mean that I couldn’t tweet out about anything else but work during those times. It also means that connections that are made based upon work can never become more than those connections. Some of my best friends are a part of my twitter network as well. They aren’t one or the other. They are real people that live and work really hard. Let’s not regulate that out of them.
• They dictate (or try to) what company ownership of ideas is. Many communications and legal departments see anything that is done on company time as being a part of the company’s assets. Their understanding is that there is very little co-ownership of reflections, annotations, or conversations about the work that is going on. In essence, they claim everything. And at least according to my understanding of copyright law, unless they have signed something to that affect (which most places, unless there are strict non-disclosure agreements) this is not the case. The one thing that claiming everything does to employees is that they decide to save their best ideas for themselves. They don’t post things that could help the company, but rather they separate out what it is that is beneficial and they take it elsewhere. This drains value from the organization and takes away a big incentive for staff to want to contribute in a collaborative way to the projects that are in front of them.
• They impose disclaimers for all social media that do not have any basis in what social media is or can be. By putting a disclaimer on everything that says you can in no way speak for your organization is incredibly disempowering. The whole point of social media is that you are speaking for a unique perspective that others will want to listen to. By adding this disclaimer, you are essentially saying that you don’t want any of the value that others are creating to reflect back upon the employer that helped him/her to grow. These disclaimers are superfluous in a day when everyone has a profile and the profiles most certainly are not official. It is clear that when John McCain is tweeting, he is not speaking for the entirety of Arizona or for the whole senate. He is bringing his unique perspective to bear on the events of the day. This is what social media does; it gives a voice to everyone. Those voices are ones that we should celebrate and reward, not cut off at the knees in the hope of getting disavowing the disgruntled employee.

Mostly, the world of social media is so new that many places do not understand how to embrace a different paradigm of communication. The communications department can not control the message simply by putting out an reactionary policy. By assuming the worst of people, they are creating an environment of distrust and miscommunication. They are taking all of the bad things of social media out of context and convincing those with power that social media is bad for business. It isn’t. It is one of the things that will save your working life. It is engaging and invigorating because it brings all of our personality into a one space. We can be real people in social networks, and that is what we should want for our employees.

One of the best social networking policies I ever saw was this, from the blog Gruntled Employees. It is an entire policy put into a single tweet:

Our Twitter policy: Be professional, kind, discreet, authentic. Represent us well. Remember that you can’t control it once you hit “update.”

It is simple and authentic. It is exactly what we need for our organizations. Let’s do that and nothing else.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Creating an Enterprise Employee Social Media Policy (itexpertvoice.com)
• The Social Media Policy – not just for the big players (mindjumpers.com)
• Does Your Agency Have A Social Media Policy? (worob.com)

Question 236 of 365: Who wins when others fail?

I don’t want to hear about other people not doing their jobs right.

It isn’t interesting, novel, or beneficial. It may make for cleverly underhanded conversation or ambitious posturing, but it doesn’t really do much good. I can complain about others not pulling their weight or not working the way I would, but I just end up feeling petty and unoriginal.

I don’t believe in basing my worth in an organization based upon the worth that I see in others. Everyone is judged on his or her own merits, and I am not responsible for the final word on quality. Even if you are evaluating work done by someone else, talking about it as an absolute failure is negating any contribution you may have made to the work. If you see yourself as so separate from the community of work that we are all engaged in, I don’t see how you have any ground to stand and judge what others have done. If, on the other hand, you are subject to the same environment, then you are responsible for making sure that mediocre work is not valued in the community. It is your responsible to set standards for yourself and others, but not to impose a sense of superiority about whether or not others have made the cut.

The fact is: you didn’t do the work. You could have, but you didn’t. And anyone can stand and tell you that they could have done a better job, but their lack of experience is disengenuine. You look at others work as a representation of the person who created it, and criticism of that work as criticizing the person. While I believe in being a critical friend sometimes, I cannot stomach the glossing over of hours of work in the hopes of summing up contributions into a soundbite.

You are either building capacity or you are burning bridges. There is hardly anything in-between. If things don’t look like the way you want, build relationships with those people who aren’t “doing it right.” If there needs to be a change in personnel, so be it. Don’t talk about it as if it were nothing. Don’t talk about work as not being worthy of your own prerequisites.  There is no line in the sand, across which is your sweet approval.

For our ears only is a hollow sentiment. Stating that something is not good enough to everyone but the person who could make it better is dishonest at best, and downright evil at worst. Nothing good comes from tearing down our future before we can even get there.

No one wins when the people around us fail. We are not better than those we work with, and we do not know better either. We just know different, and if our different is indeed better, then others will see that too. If our different is truly a success, there will be no denying it. Pointing out failures without providing a viable alternative is not winning. There is nothing learned from it because we haven’t done any of the work and we don’t know what lessons can be gathered from the failure itself.

I don’t need to hear it. It is one of the things that is holding us back from creating real change.

Question 235 of 365: What is the real nightmare of testing?

I don’t put much stock in dreams, at least not the kind that you can have when you sleep. Most of the time, I like to think that my subconscious just has a little more room to roam. I have an off switch and nighttime is when I flip it. My dreams do not require deep analysis because most of the time I don’t remember them, and when I do, there is nothing even remotely interesting in them. Sure, I have an odd dream that will amplify something going on in my daily life or reveal a desire that I have internalized. Most of the time, though, I don’t have to worry about those kinds of things. My dreaming life mostly leaves my waking life well enough alone.

Last night was an exception to the rule.

I had a nightmare about testing. The weirdest part was that it wasn’t the kind of nightmare that I feel testing presents in a very real sense. It wasn’t about sharpening number 2 pencils or in standardizing the world into easily photocopied and graded booklets. It was about an entirely new approach to testing, which I think presents an even grimmer look into the future if the current trend continues.

The real nightmare of testing isn’t in prescribing a certain brand of English and Math for every student. It is in trying to prescribe everything else too.

In my dream, I was the one being tested and I had little to no idea of what the goals were in mind. I was looking all over the place for a path to the end of the test. Instead, all I could find were a series of tasks that were being monitored and assigned, which had little bearing on whether or not I knew anything.

For example, I was tested on how fast I could text. I was given a cell phone that was connected to an oversized monitor and I was asked to text a message quickly. I wasn’t given a person to text to or a purpose for doing the text. I was just being asked to text. All of my errors were being shown up on the screen for everyone to see and I didn’t know if I was really doing right by the test or myself.

This is what we do with our testing now.

We remove all semblance of purpose and audience from the act of writing or reading or doing any kind of problem solving. And in this case, it was being applied to a task that is obviously forthcoming in the curriculum. Many students all over the country are now being given their tests on computers, and what is to stop us from taking their temperature on their method of input? What is to stop us from asking them to do a simple typing or texting test?

In my dream, we were asked to perform video game like sequences in order to reach predetermined goals. We didn’t know whether we were doing it right (as in real video game dynamics where you have constant feedback), but we had to perform anyway. The isolation within the gaming environment was intense, just as all testing experiences I have had to date have been isolationist exercises.

This is where we are headed. We will make each task of our modern upbringing into inauthentic shells of their current selves. And we won’t stop there. Even as we are testing students in new ways that have the appearance of real life, we will push the boundaries of inauthentic tasks in the business world as well. I can see the effects of such actions even now:

We ask for one another to “blog” in internal systems (mostly in corporate settings) without the ability to comment, syndicate, or permalink. We create entire systems of accountability that offer nothing but check boxes and filling out forms with hollow goals and meetings that would be generously be described as formalities. We send e-mails just to send e-mails, cc’ing everyone that could even casually be interested. We ensnare one another in the busywork that are our little ways of testing one another to make sure that we are still buying into the same illusion of authentic relationships.

So, in that way, the culture of testing does match up with our real life counterparts. The only problem is that I want better for all of us. I want better for our kids in their stuffy testing rooms and I want better for our adults in their cramped cubicles. It isn’t enough just to change the ways in which we test. It isn’t enough to add gaming or texting as another way for each of us to feel better about how much summative information we get from those whose entire existence up until this point is formative.  It isn’t enough to change the ways in which we do business to have the illusion of transparency and collaboration. We can’t just introduce social media or networks into our businesses and say that we have done right by consumers and employees.

None of us want to life inauthentic lives, and yet that is the direction we are headed.

When testing becomes a part of the every day data of learning, we will be doing right by our children

When community is a part of every transaction in business, we will be doing right by our corporate interests.

Nothing less is worth our time.

Question 226 of 365: What speaks to us?

I have a web alert set up for “social media” in my local area. Anything, whether it is a job or blog post or simply a quiet mention on the local news sends me an e-mail calling my attention to it. Usually, it turns up things that I am already aware of like a school’s new twitter account or a new business working their way through their newest iteration of “viral marketing.” I don’t often feel as though the things that I am interested in are really interested in me. Much of the time, the social media that is happening around me is much more concerned with broadcasting information rather than engaging in a conversation. Yesterday, though, was different. I felt as though someone was reaching through the screen and tugging at my shirt, employing me to come and act on what was going on. This is what it said (formatting is mine):

You are a natural communicator and a master of the written and spoken word.

You know how to convey complex topics in ways that both novices and experts will understand.

The power of your words influences people and shapes their opinions.

You can write case studies, white papers, press releases and other marketing collateral in your sleep.

Importantly, though, you are not old-school.

You embrace social media and its viral power.

You had a blog before most people knew what they were; you were on Facebook and Twitter before they were cool.

You spend your waking hours blogging and tweeting.

You understand and use a variety of social media platforms and outlets, and a lot of people follow you to hear your insights.

While I might never boast about myself in such terms, upon reading those words I couldn’t look away. I was drawn to the potency of being so direct. It was as if someone was taking the journey that I am on in these 365 days and splaying out on a table. While these words could be used to describe others, their urgency is arresting. All at once I wanted to be the one that these words were describing, to feel validated and unencumbered by these talents that seemingly so few people see as talents.

Each one of these statements struck a different chord within me and I wanted to explore exactly why that was.

When I think back to when writing was hard, I had to set aside a specific time and space to find an elusive muse. Now, I pull out a cell phone, iPad or laptop and the words just come. I don’t lack for stories to tell, pedagogy to analyze, or technology to dissect. I pull construct ideas, turning them over in my mind until I can figure them out. I find images and links and all kinds of media that speak to my experience, and nothing is out of bounds. Most importantly, I question. I question what is possible and I question what is good. I lend value to the words and seek out the truth in identity. I think about all that has come before and I know that I am not alone in a quest for expression or commentary. I know that the network of creation around me is supporting my efforts, one word at a time.

When I speak, it isn’t to obfuscate the world that I am co-creating. I seek to educate and to let simmer the ideas I find engaging until there is only flavor and further inquiry left. I do not dumb down, either. But I understand how to frame conversations and I do so until the only thing within that outline has a rich context, no matter who the viewer is. I do not stick to a single form of expression or arena of influence because I do not see value in arbitrary barriers to learning. The tools for presentation are all at my fingertips and I mix and match at will. I find audio resonant with audience, video triggers value, and words awaken the mind. Nothing less is worth our time.

When people link to me or retweet my work, they lend credence to a version of history that shifts with everything I consume and learn. I focus attention on what matters to me, and it never ceases to amaze how many others feel the same. I know this because I am a part of a conversation and a community. We are engaged in the act of rebellion, always. It is rebellious to influence others. It is rebellious to write and persuade. It is rebellious to have an opinion and to support it with everything you author. It is my responsibility to rebel in such a way. I’m not sure I know anything else at this point.

And I research. It is never the world according to Ben Wilkoff, but rather hyperlinked vignettes that aim to reinvent the world. There is polish in a PDF, in a slide deck, in action research. Collaboration is drafting, and publishing is posting. The process is an act of courage for finding an authority all my own. And in moments I feel that authority. In moments, I feel like final drafts are for people who have stopped exposing and promoting what is ongoing. So, I iterate. I never stand on a case study or white paper for very long. They are stale from the first time they get’s saved to a hard drive. Links are substantial. They allow you to rewrite history and focus attention on the next day’s rather than yesterday’s news. Knowing what is still relevant is my work every day.

And sometimes I use a typewriter. Sometimes, I know the tools of connection so well that it makes sense to bring a solitary notion back into the equation. I do not engage in echo chambers. I write because that is what is new. New media isn’t merely about comments, aggregation and syndication. It is about having a new perspective and articulating it through those means. The new school is about assimilating who we are and were into who we will become, and anticipating what we will need when we get there. It is a blend of tactile and transformational. It is creation wherever people are. It is more about those people and their connection to others. We are the links. We are the words.

When I watch the traffic of a single tweet as it bounces around among friends, I see action within each bounce. One annotates and one embellishes. One retweets and one reminisces. There is no single path that a meme can take, but each shows the value in tracing influence and challenging convention. Social media’s goal is to subvert convention and hierarchy. It is to go use the spaces that already exist to proliferate and saturate those that are already savvy and those who have yet to get on board. Social media makes those who do not engage feel as though they are missing something. That is virality. When the old networks of email and phone calls get mixed up in the madness of sharing what is new and bold. When grandmothers are suggesting video to their grandchildren, we know that we have changed the order of things. And that is what we must do. We must continue to use leverage legacy systems and inject them with the networked values of the blogosphere. The power of social media is in being social with media, not the media itself. It is in creating the context for the things that we have always done. It isn’t optional, and no one will do it for us.

Everyone has a journey and here is mine:

• I joined my first social network in 2003… along with 3 million other people.
• I first blogged in the winter of 2004… at least 4 million other people beat me to it.
• I sent my first tweet in 2007… by then 8 million others had sent theirs.

Being first doesn’t matter. Having a presence does.

I don’t sleep until I have posted my questions and ideas of the day. I don’t read or watch without thinking about sharing, commenting or annotating. This is the way my mind works. Anything that I can’t rate, clip, or link to has little value to me as a learning tool. Technological silos aren’t of interest to me because they have taken themselves out of the absolute value equation. They have already lost in the game of competition and reflection. My identity is wrapped up in what I can write and think about. If I lose the pulse of what is going on, I feel as though my own pulse is lost. While Virginia Woolf believed in a room of one’s own, I can only advocate for a blog. It is the one space that sanity and understanding of self can happen in public. That can be a person or a company, the blog is the public face that we wish we could have had with us all of our lives, crafting it and changing it to suit everything we have tried on or tried to make work. We are public institutions, and it is time we all start taking control of it.

I think that it all comes down to understanding.

I use social media because it is essential. I pick the voice and the vehicle, and I push it out to those who are most ready to hear what I have to say. The idea that others find value in what I do is powerful. The audience is what makes it authentic as is the greater purpose for creating change within what I see around me. And that is why these words spoke to me so much. I feel as though they were authentically crafted and offer up a reality that resonates with my own experience. The fact that it happened to be a part of a job posting is all the more engaging. It means that the change I seek is making its way into exactly the right places. It means, we are on the right track.

Question 217 of 365: Who spilled?

I have always been pretty clumsy. I didn’t know how clumsy until I met my wife. She has a way to showcase nearly every one of my falls and mishaps. She does this by not falling and bumping into walls and tripping herself up. By contrast, I look like an uncoordinated version of the hunchback of Notre Dame.

On one particular evening, I was quietly drinking diet Dr. Pepper while my wife was helping her friend put together shawls for a wedding. As I went to put down my drink, I found a way to bat it up in the air and spray all of the soda on the room around me. The soda hit it’s mark on the shawls quite nicely. Everyone was thrilled.

I found that in that moment I was utterly responsible for spilling out what I had to ruin what other people were working on. We were able to salvage those shawls, but there was nothing we could do to fully get rid of that sweet syrupy smell of soda.

It makes me wonder about other spills that we make. We are clumsy in our attempts to hold on to our own ideas. We let the least tactful thoughts fly out of our hands and land on what others are working on. We practically spray our ideas on reform or lean development out with little regard for when and where they may be mow useful. We have a scattershot approach to change because we let our clumsy natures take over our better judgement.

I don’t know the answer to making change and traction a bigger part of our lives, but spilling isn’t it. Each new idea should be sipped at and swallowed, savored and supplied as real solutions for real problems (being thirsty for doing things better).

I guess I am just trying to pledge myself to being less clumsy, to taking my time with each hold of he cup. I may not ever be as graceful as my wife, but with a little luck, I won’t have to apologize and clean up the mess every few days when I have my next spasm of drink shaking ideas. I’m okay just to hold on and sip for now.