Question 168 of 365: When are we ready to fulfill our promises?

Making promises is one of the easiest things that I have ever done. They just roll off my tongue after a while. In fact, so long as I am talking to someone that is interesting enough, I will continue to make promises just to keep the conversation going. So long as I can believe in the moment that whatever I am selling is in some way connected to reality, I can justify my promises.

I have promised that Open Spokes would be a platform for answering questions and collaboration. I have promised that we will be able to record webcam video on the fly. I have promised an engaging display and ratings system for the question pages.

I have promised all of these things in the hopes that if I said them enough, theree would be some hope of them becoming true. It is as if I wanted to wish them into being. And as it turns out, I mostly have.

Somehow, thorough all of my high hopes, the system started to work. It started to perform the way that I always knew it could. And yet, I still held it back. I have a working product, one that I think has a huge amount of potential, and I am holding it back for fear that it will be judged too harshly. I have not written about it because I have been worried about people finding out that I am a fraud, that my promises weren’t everything that they were cracked up to be.

I delayed the launch and the testing phase because I wanted things to be perfect. I wanted to avoid the appearance that we are just toting with the idea of what is possible. I have been keeping things under tight wraps, holding on the simple piece of information that Open Spokes is open as of today.

While I am still maintaining that this is a soft open, you can go in and register for an account here. You can then go in and ask your questions and record your reflections. You can share your questions on any social media platform you wish and seek to get responses from others who sign up for an account.

While that may sound nice and technical, it is nothing short of terrifying for me to say those words. The idea I am encouraging people to start actively trying to play in the playground that I have created (co-created with my partner, actually) is so freeing and damning at the same time.

I think my biggest fear isn’t that people won’t like it, but that supporting and developing it will become all consuming. My fear is that it will become something that people actually rely upon.

It is so much easier to believe that you can shut down your project or company at any point and not have any further ramifications outside of yourself. After you have actual users, though, it isn’t yours any more. It is theirs.

That may be the one thing that we miss most in developing new spaces. We miss the fact that simply launching them and having others make them a part of their lives is hugely vulnerable. So, we may try to secretly sabotage our work so that we can go and slink away from it if necessary. With one foot always out the door, it is safer.

Safer, but not as spectacular. Standing beside your creation proudly and proclaiming that it is good is the only way to insure that it actually is good. I guess that is what I am doing. I’m stating for the record that some of the biggest promises I have made in the last 9 months are actually coming true.

Please, go and see for yourself.

Question 109 of 365: What is your field?

A man that I trust and respect once told me that we always go from specific to general in our heads, but we want to go from the general to the specific in our lives. He was speaking about the process of creating something new, but I think it applies to nearly everything I do. In my head, I tell stories, make specific connections and relate to the minutiae of a situation. In my working life, I seem to want to generalize about everything and then iron out the details later. I speak in absolutes and generalities but the only things that have ever really meant anything to me are the details. I do not remember a general good feeling about my achievements, rather my mind focuses on specific moments within those achievements that seem to represent those good feelings.

My wedding itself I can speak about in platitudes of good fortune, but I remember the way my little brother in law jumped from flower pedal to flower pedal down the isle with our rings bouncing around on the pillow the whole way. I can convey the fact that I love my children, but if I really want them to know what I mean, I have to retell the story of my daughter sitting with my wife and relating just how she believes that cells work according to their pictures in my wife’s textbook. I have to relate to someone else on the specific level, the one that brings about a passionate reaction. It is in the specifics of how many times I got up with my son on a nightly basis to put him back to bed that I am able to connect to other people. It is in the recounting of the time I  put away dishes in our first home while my sick (pregnant) wife kept me company on a palette of sofa cushions on the kitchen floor.

The specifics matter.

And that is why it is getting harder and harder for me to tell people that I have a particular field of interest. It is why I have a harder time prescribing to the general ideals of a particular organization or job. It is why my passions don’t run toward keywords that you can punch into Google. And yet, all of our outward facing experiences, the kind that are required for introductions and business meetings are based upon this ability to generalize and synthesize. It is based upon whether or not we can pitch experiences as sound bytes rather than for the character-driven developments that they are. So, what should I do in situations that require the impossible: the general standing in for the specific?

What I hope to tell people in the future is that my field of expertise is and always will be in stories. It is in the drilling down to find a single image to capture the imagination. It is in finding a single argument that an entire program or course can be based upon. It is in crafting an experience for an individual so that they can know what it is like to speak with urgency and conviction, to create conversations that continue as long as they are valuable. It is doing one thing well and then telling that story until the next thing that needs to be done reveals itself.

And that is how I think that we can get beyond ego. It is how we can move into a place where everyone is capable of confident discourse and respectable work. It is the way that we will all become sticky and relevant. If we were all storytellers (and admitted to being so when asked), we would never have to justify our passions and our accomplishments. We would never have to prove our overreaching generalized purposes. We could be who we are with one another and create businesses and schools that edify the specific.

So, here is what I propose:

• Rather than beliefs on the walls of corporations, let’s put up stories or situations that demonstrate those beliefs. Let’s tell each other just how we accomplish what is that we seem to value. Let’s figure out what our one word codes really are based upon, going from specific to general.
• Rather than letting students choose a major, let’s have them write the stories of what they would like to achieve. Let’s have them revise this story over time and see how it shifts and transforms. This way we won’t have anyone who needs to change their major just to fit their current passions; they will be able to represent their entire selves within every edition of their story.
• Rather than doing 5 year plans that include virtuous goals, let’s outline the stories of how people will interact with us and our products throughout those 5 years. Let’s not set goals that are measurable, let’s write stories that are relatable. If we can take those stories from fiction to non-fiction, we have achieved our goals.

If we go from the specific to the general, we won’t have to worry about who is doing the small stuff and who is going to see to the details. We will all see to the details and nothing will get left behind. And the end of the day it is about this: I want my kids to tell me a story about their day. I want my boss to tell me a story about how he thinks I could improve. I want my wife to tell me a story about her dying mother. This matters. that is why I am going into the field of storytelling, not in the abstract English teacher sense, but in the concrete and human sense that we are all born storytellers. It is only the abstractions of life that take us away from this.

So, tell me a story.

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Question 69 of 365: Why is action such a surprise?

I have had a number of conversations recently that have resulted in someone saying that they were surprised that things were getting done. They were surprised at action. While I was somewhat baffled by the reaction, it made me think about what the root of this surprise might be.

Getting things done has traditionally been hard. It has required labor, huge amounts of time, or many people who were highly skilled in the areas that needed attention. Action has required a level of organization and planning that almost insurmountable considering everything else that needs to go on. It also has necessitated permission to actually “do” something. Meetings must be had, protocols must be followed, the chain of command had to remain intact.

In fact, we had so much protocol, there is even an entire mystique and formula for who you should cc or bcc on an e-mail. We have created a space that requires little action in any given day. We have set up systems to look like getting things done: Things like conference calls with the vast majority of participants muted, like conferences without the time to implement what you learn, like tracking systems for time/milage/payment that are removed from the ideas and the tasks that generated them.

Action has become foreign to many. Because we don’t produce any products, we don’t have things to show for our work at the end of the day. We have become inbox cleaners and document hounds. We wait, in a bad way, for people to finish their part of the problem for us to start on ours. Action is a surprise when we find it.

I am a firm believer in creating at least one thing every single day of my life, and I believe that this is my humble (or not so humble if I keep talking about it, I suppose) way to make action unsurprising in my life. The things that I create (Blog posts, trackable conversations, online courses, companies, learning objects, and collaborative spaces) may not look like much in the face of people who create real objects, but I believe that in my own way, I am trying to stave off the starvation of ideas. I am trying to figure out how to solve the problems, and then actually solve them. I am trying to answer my e-mail, not pass it around to someone else. I am trying to engage those who are unengaged in the process. I am trying to solicit others as directly as I can to act on their own behalf.

Because action should not be a surprise. It should be a regular part of our day, something that we celebrate and see in everything that we do. We should see the change we create. We should see the products, even if they take some time. We should see the spaces that we inhabit as malleable, because getting things done isn’t hard anymore.

It stopped being hard when we could create virtual goods and services. It stopped being hard when we could create things on our own and solicit help from people outside of our organization. It stopped being hard when organization became as easy as a hashtag.

So, start a school. Start a business. Start a project that requires something important of you. Be deliberate in engaging others in conversation. Intentionally break protocols in your organization so that you can get things done. Not haphazardly. Not unreasonably. Purposefully and with a huge amount of hope: Act. Do things. Now.

Question 68 of 365: What does it mean to be a breadwinner?

While I do not particularly like the designation or the baggage that goes along with it, being a breadwinner is something that is very important to me. I am not interested in being the sole breadwinner or someone who does only that, but there is most definitely a part of me that has to bring an income into my family and provide the things that we need and want. While this need is definite, it needs to be redefined.

In fact, I think that bread needs to be redefined. If it is the staple that sustains us over all others (carbohydrates in general, I would argue), then the bread that I win must do more than fill my family’s bellies. I would like to make the case that I have to win our bread doing something that my children and wife can understand, respect, and rely on.

I want my bread to be something I am proud of, something with my own signature texture. I want my bread to be complex and sophisticated, but also work well with what my kids love (peanut butter and jelly in the physical bread’s case). I want my bread to be plentiful, but for everyone to always know that it took work to create. I want my bread to rise, always.

I guess if I am to win this kind of bread, I had better start making some choices as to what I will and wont do for it.

What I would be willing do:

• Work with people I wouldn’t associate with otherwise.
• Do tech support
• Push buttons (as long as I can design the buttons)
• Work on other people’s projects

What I won’t do:

• Stop blogging, tweeting, or working on my own projects
• Regurgitate what other people have said or done
• Work in isolation
• Travel multiple times a month.

The reason why I choose to focus on these matters now is that as I continue to figure out where my career path is headed, I need to know what it is that I am striving for. I need to figure out just what I’m willing to sacrifice and what I’m not. I need to be able to see the learning curve on all of it, too.

Should I put out this want ad, and see if someone will take me up on it? Should I go into every situation and state my assumptions? Are these biases enough to get me through?

I can honestly say that I am a breadwinner, and that all of the baggage that the word gives me is okay, so long as I can pack up the really important stuff and take it with me wherever I go.

Question 64 of 365: How can we be for ourselves and for an entity at the same time?

I have realized that an idea can’t grow if I don’t let it stand on its own. I have figured out that I cannot be the idea. If people are going to get behind it, it can’t be me they are getting behind.

And yet, I have been branding and rebranding myself for years. I have been writing for me. I have not been party to any party line. I have not been pushing something other than my own thoughts out into the world. In fact, I have been careful to not align myself too closely with something that isn’t me because I don’t want to be let down by what it becomes. And yet, there is a time to be for yourself and a time to be for an entity, an ideal. There is a time for placing yourself into a label and owning it.

Yet, the label must be something that I can change to mean what I want it to. It must be big enough to poke holes in and not collapse. It must be something that others will want to try on and become a part of. It must have a presence that interacts with real people and not as one idea to another. It must be ongoing and unique.

So, that is what I am trying to create now. I am trying to inhabit the Open Spokes presence and let the ideas flow through me to it. I am working toward creating actions that I set in motion but continue on without me.

And, it is freeing.

I can follow whomever I want on Twitter. I can write things that I would never write as an answer to a question. I can be as open to new opportunities as possible. I can obsess over things that I never have before. I am more than me. I am it… sometimes.

And that is strange and scary. I have never been able to be my employer because I have disagreed with my employer about many things. I have never been able to be classroom because my classroom wasn’t all that I wanted it to be. I have never been able to be a learning theory or a particular tool (even though I talk about connectivism and Google Apps on a regular basis) because they aren’t really mine. All of these things are what I use to make sense of the world, but they are not me.

I can only be what I give birth to. I can be an idea only if I can run alongside and hold on to it, like a bike without training wheels for the first time. Open Spokes is a child of mine. And, at some point I will let go and watch it roll down the street unaided. I will see where it goes and be proud of it for pumping its feet as fast as it can and finding balance against gravity.

Because we are all challenged by gravity. It is what makes us think that we have to speak on behalf of things we do not believe in. It is what makes us think that we cannot reinvent who we are and what we do. It is what will slow us down if we let it.

But, we can launch a lot of bikes down the street. We can birth many ideas. We can be more than we are. We can be for the things that will make a difference and not forget just what it means to have a personal identity. And that is nothing short of brilliant (The act I am describing, not the writing).

Question 62 of 365: Why does waiting matter?

In so much of what I write and think about, I am interested in what is instant and what I can will into being. I am so interested in creating what I can’t yet see. I want to be a part of the conversations that create change and I want to be with people who are passionate and have purpose behind their actions.

And yet, there is the waiting.

I wait because other people make me wait. I wait because I want to know what they have to say. I wait because that is the only way that listening can occur. I wait because being told no should always be an option on the table.

So, today I waited for a response. I waited to hear a judgement being handed down. And while I waited, I wracked my brain for what I could do better. I wrestled with every conceivable question that could have come up, every roadblock that someone else thinks I have. I sat nervously trying to iterate without a concrete direction. I wanted to speak, but knew that it wasn’t yet my turn.

And in the end, I wanted so badly just to be able to reach inside of someone else’s head and change their mind. I wanted to write the e-mail that told me I was doing a good job and that all of my hard work had paid off. And yet, that isn’t what makes waiting important.

I am not going to Techstars for a Day, but I will be continuing to iterate on my ideas and see if I can make it into the big show. This news wasn’t what was important either.

The waiting was the best part. It was the not knowing that provided the most freedom to have hope and hopelessness. It let me see two diametrically opposed futures: one in which everything goes exactly according to plan and I have an easy time convincing others that my ideas are valid and the other in which I have to fight for every conversation and every user. The reality is somewhere in the middle, but it is important to be in limbo sometimes and weigh both sides as equally possible.

Only waiting can let me get comfortable with ambiguity. Through waiting, I am able to doubt everything and come out on the other side. I can challenge my assumptions and figure out just why those assumptions were stupid. Flat out rejection is too harsh because you end up throwing out everything. Pure success is equally damaging. It can make almost anything seem like a good idea.

Waiting is what makes us vulnerable enough to let others make us better. And that is what I did today. I got better.

Question 61 of 365: How do we make renewal more accessible?

Sometimes, making a single change to a long held practice will completely renew your interest and commitment to that practice. One of those times was this week.

I am renewed in my fascination and commitment to blog comments.

For years, I have thought that along with PDF’s (as Will Richardson puts it), they were where ideas went to die. They only lived as tiny little attachments on the end of a post, an asterisk on an idea. While they may spark a lot of debate or be the most interesting part of a blog, I could never help but feeling as though they were a waste because of how little they were incorporated into everything else I was doing. Sure, you have been able to subscribe in e-mail to comments on blogs, but it never felt like a cohesive conversation. Sure, people have had threaded comments for a couple years, but it always worked more like just an extension of the regular commenting structure than a real debate of ideas. The threads never really went anywhere besides what the original blog post had envisioned.

So, why this renewal?

The switch to Disqus comments has fueled my new outlook on comments. The simple ability to respond to a comment directly in e-mail and then see all of the threads as a conversation in gmail has made me think that there really could be a commenting renaissance in our future. Because each comment now has its own short link, I can send it out on Twitter or Buzz and continue the conversation.

I am now looking at my comments as ways of forming relationships and beginning/continuing conversations that were impossible to do previously. And, all from one simple switch to a different commenting system.

So, this has gotten me thinking about whether or not the entire process of renewal can be made more accessible to others. It makes me want to figure out which feature of a process could be changed in our every day lives that would cause us to buy-in anew and want to create something.

Which aspect of collaboration can I change to incite renewal for others?

Which part of meetings can I shift in order to renew interest in talking with one another?

What can I change in the writing process to allow people to see it as a renewing force in their life?

And there is the crux. In order to make renewal available to everyone, there is a level of investment required. All of these things do require someone to DO something. So, by focusing on things that people are already doing, we may be able to shift them one or two degrees in order to bring about real change.

In essence, what I need to figure out is not so much what are the changes I can make for others, but to really figure out what people are doing and go from there. Unless I have a good understanding of exactly how people are using a given tool, protocol, or idea; I will have no chance of making a lasting change that brings about renewal. I need to hear more stories about how people are meeting and collaborating, about how they are asking questions and about how they are leveraging the people that they know in order to find answers.

Until I listen, I can’t renew or reinvent anything.

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Question 28 of 365: Are we responsible for the Web 2.0 graveyard?

As I look around the web, I see the shells of formerly great web services. I see the Flowgrams that could have been. I see the Google Notebooks that wallow in disuse. I see the missing Jumpcuts that provided me with so much hope and pleasure. I have spoken about these web applications vanishing from the face of Web 2.0, but I kind of always blamed the companies themselves for going out of business. I mean, it is their fault that they gave away their products and then had no way of making money, right?

I am coming to the conclusion more and more that we share a lot of the blame for Free being the standard pricing for all of the things that we want on the web. I think that the culture of “free music” and “ad-supported” services have lead us to believe that any new service that comes along should offer a huge chunk of their functionality for free, especially to schools and non-profits. This is what we have been demanding by presenting on topics like “Free Web 2.0 sites to engage your students” and “How to leverage free social networks for marketing and engagement.”

Other people have written much better about what the price of “Free” really is, but I think that it is time we stop looking to others for what we have created. We have created an unsustainable model of ownership. By craving the products that make our life easier but asking them to be free is making sure that we will never be able to hold on to them for very long. We will be forced to make the choice, either pony up and start providing funding for the resources that we need or let the web become a wasteland of good intentioned companies.

(To be sure, there are many web services that I would never pay for and that should not have been funded as a company, but there are things that I would pay for and I just wish someone would ask me to.)

Advertising can’t be the wave of the future, even as much as those who are in charge of Augmented Reality are pushing for it. There really has to be a point at which that we take the helm and start owning access again. I would feel better about cloud computing, cloud storage, and cloud applications if I could pay a monthly fee or buy the product up front.

We are our own worst enemy in the race to find the next “big thing”. When we spread the word virally about a new service, we shouldn’t be putting in the “but it costs” as a detrimental part of our pitch to others. We really should be extolling the virtues of a good business model. We should be saying: “Come check this out. It is exactly what I need, and guess what? It costs money! I actually can pay for access to it so I know it won’t be going anywhere soon. Come and pay money with me so that we can collaborate together and not lose this service.”

Essentially, if everything is free, then everything is equally expendable. It really doesn’t have “value” if we won’t pay for it in some way or another.

Question 14 of 365: What is the future of outsourcing?

I do not claim to be an expert in outsourcing, nor do I claim to know all of the terrible (and good) things that have come from an acceptance of outsourcing as a reality. What I am claiming by my attempt to answer this question is that I think I may know where it is going. It may be quite arrogant to claim that you know where something is going without really understanding where it has been, but I feel as though it may be important to take this stab in the dark.

The future of outsourcing is personal. It is within your own daily workflow. It is within the stuff that you always wish you didn’t have to put up with, and now you don’t. And, I am not simply talking about the Roomba. I am, instead, referring to the idea that all of the monotonous aspects of your daily existence will be put up for bid. And, if anyone is willing to do them, they will be outsourced. I think the only real way to prove this point is to look at examples.

Prefinery and UTest allows you to outsource your beta testing. No longer will you have to figure out exactly who your users should be. You can rely on the crowd and a company to do it for you.

Smart Thinking allows you to outsource your stack of papers to grade. You can have someone else give your feedback for you. Isn’t “peer” review and writer’s workshop just another form of this kind of outsourcing?

SendGrid gives you the ability to outsource your personal responses to e-mail. We can now scale what used to be a human reaction to having completed steps or done something with an organization, business, or school.

Seed will let you outsource photography, writing, or other creative (but time consuming) work. The question is, how low will the network of creatives go?

Do my Stuff will let you basically put any task you have to do up for auction. Even cleaning bathrooms is up for grabs.

LivePerson will give you life advice and possibly outsource how you should act in your love life.

So, why does this all matter? Why is it that these services are worth even looking at, even as I make fun of the idea of how our future will look when faced with these realities?

Outsourcing (and some people call this version, enlightened outsourcing) in general lets us focus our attention. If it doesn’t do those things, then the future doesn’t look good. If we are outsourcing what is essential to our happiness, then we need to take a step back. But, on the other hand, if we are outsourcing the non-essential then we are streamlining our own existence.

I believe in that part. I’m just not sure if some of this is the answer. While it may be the future of outsourcing, I’m not sure it is a future that all of us can buy into. There may be a huge backlash coming where people take great joy in cleaning their bathrooms and doing their taxes and working with students and users directly. So, what will that be called? Self-sourcing? Unsourcing? Besourcing?

Whatever it is called, I would like to find a balance if I can. I would like to do what I can to be human and involved in the daily events of my life, all the while, not getting bogged down by the things that I have no interest in attempting. That doesn’t have to be a part of a movement. That part can just be for me.

Question 8 of 365: What’s in a name?

Starting something new is much easier than coming up with a good name for that new thing. Whether that is a business, an educational model, or just a theory. Is KIPP a popular charter model because it has such a memorable name (or, more likely, is it popular because of the change it creates within students)? Is Twitter popular because it evokes the quickness of the service? Is Google a verb now because of the hard G sound that is repeated? All of these are plausible.

Everyone that has some advice for a new venture seems to have advice for naming it. Especially when it comes to children. People seem to want you to try on their favorites and see what you think. I think it is probably the same instinct that causes people to want to name your business or school. They would like to see what you think of their ability to own some part of the idea without actually having been a part of its creation.

So, are we dooming any venture to an early death by making an egregious error against some of the most highly valued properties of naming?

• Something that is hard to say.
• Something that is too long.
• Something that doesn’t really evoke an emotion or an image of what you are trying to accomplish.
• Something that can’t easily be turned into a verb (googling, blogging, tweeting)

Or, could we simply call it what we want and create something great, that people will want to use and help to grow. In the end, does the name really matter? Is Flickr the leader of photo sharing sites in spite of the odd spelling? Is Drop.io a success because of the strange url that is uses?

I guess to finally answer the question, I must put it onto myself. What is in a name for me?

I want whatever I do to be something that I can be passionate about. I want it to call up only the right things in my head when I think about it. I want it to be always on the tip of my tongue. I want it to immediately stick out in a crowd of millions, and I want it to stay with you long after you hear it for the first time. I want it to be something that people don’t have to overlook just to see the merits of what I am trying to do. In essence, the name is something I want to call out in triumph and not yell out in agony.

It’s a good thing I named my kids well, I suppose. The names Isabelle and Tobias bring me so much joy, and I don’t get questioned daily about them. I think there is something to be said for that.