Learning is Change

Question 108 of 365: Why do we want to be entrepreneurs?

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Rubber band (Elastic).
Image via Wikipedia

The easy answer is that we would like to turn something out of nothing. While many of us are not in the entrepreneurial field, that is the one thing that we all quest after. It is the need to turn a problem into a solution using nothing but you mind and your ability to be more stubborn than anyone else on the issue. In the end, we would all like to make money simply by having a good idea and following it to its logical conclusion. We would like to be better than anyone else that one thing, even if we can admit that it will never quite happen like that.

I have spent much of my life running away from the fact that ideas are worth something more than just to a notebook or a blog. The entire open source aesthetic that I subscribe to is nothing more than my unwillingness to assign a value outside of a particular community of users. My penchant toward non-profit and public service is hypocritical because of the way my mind works. I am constantly seeking something that no one else knows or has figured out yet. It is (even if it is short-sighted) my greatest achievement to have people look to me for expertise that is not shared with others. The very fact that my name can be affixed to things and I can call them mine is what makes me an entrepreneur.

This is not to say that cockiness makes me an enterprising fellow. Quite the opposite. It is because I feel as though I have yet to prove my worth to those people around me that I must reach deeply into myself and produce some value from where they was none before. It is a lack of confidence in speaking, writing, and thinking that makes me want to completely change my approach and overcompensate to achieve my goals. And I believe that it is a lack of confidence that is behind all great ideas. True accomplishment is in competing with your self-doubt, and emerging triumphantly.

And I know because I used to sell super rubber bands in grade school. Flicking a rubber band was an art in those days. Whether you were twisting behind your thumb to fashion a finger gun or simply drawing it back over your nail, there was only so much aim and power that could be imparted on a single band. That is why I decided that my tripple looped super rubber bands were far superior. I would fashion them through a sophisticated knot system so that they looked like mickey mouse by the end of the transformation. They produced far better accuracy and could be shot from over triple the distance away.

I sold them for 15 cents a piece and in the few short days before the operation was shut down, business was booming. I had created something that other kids wanted, even if it was only because I capitalized on a fad (and the fact that boys liked flicking rubber bands at pretty much everything). Unfortunately, I got greedy. I brought my entire stash of rubber bands into gym class and began an ill-fated rapid fire demonstration. The gym teacher confiscated them, and I received my one and only trip to the principal’s office during grade school. After it was all done she said, “I think you can get some other rubber bands. These ones don’t really need any more of your attention.”

And that was that. I had established a perfect product-market fit, but there were external pressures on the marketplace (in the form of unfair regulatory practices) that lead to me having to close up shop. And yet, those moments never really left. I knew that having something other people truly wanted was exactly where I wanted to be for the rest of my life. While that didn’t always translate into entrepreneurship, it did make me want to become the most specialized at any given discipline until I became an integral part of the process, until I had something that other people did not.

And while this may all sound quite ambitious, I am not at all convinced that this need to be useful unique or that is tied specifically to selling “things.” Even open source programmers are trading upon favors and recognition. Even non-profits are funded based upon who they know and what they can achieve. Organizations and people that have not found a significant niche, will soon be obsolete. And that is why we are all entrepreneurs.

We are trying to parlay our skills into something that someone else will pay for. We are making ourselves and our ideas a commodities. It is just that some people (those in business, mostly) are much more outright about their intentions. Many, if not most, hide the fact that they are a commodity.  They would like to think of themselves as having a higher purpose or simply that their work does not define them. While I feel as though you can aspire to those things, I do not think that either is terribly true.

Wanting something for yourself is what being an individual is all about. It is impossible to have the self-esteem needed to get up in the morning if you didn’t want people to value you and your contributions. As for being defined by things other than work, there isn’t much evidence to support that idea. While the thing you do for a paycheck may not define who you are, the work that you do (even if you call it play) on the things that you love is what you would like to be known for. You would like to be able to do those things and have people write you a check or at least feed you and your family for them. And yet you remain shy about working toward it. Why?

What could be so significantly terrifying that would cause us to be afraid to attribute value to what we do and ask people to support that value on a regular basis? What will it take so that we can all come together and create a true knowledge exchange so that our best ideas and products and truths do not pass by without being worth something?

Perhaps if we all owned up to our entrepreneurial leanings, that would be a start. And if not that, perhaps just admit that we all sold something in elementary school. Whether it was a toy that we traded, invention or lemonade, we created an underground economy for pennies and dimes. It is not a phase we all went through. It is something that guides our decisions every day. We are all entrepreneurs. It is just that some of us don’t make any money at it.

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Question 107 of 365: Are we occupying or transforming our idle time?

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My brothers played hockey. Smelly, cold, and rough and tumble. They had early ice times and late night games. They played from mighty mites on up through peewees and then in high school too. Hockey made sense to them in a way that it never did for me.

I used to stay home during their practices, that is once I had done enough time in the ice rink arcade. For years I faked playing video games in there, living vicariously through people who seemingly had quarters coming out of their ears. But when I was old enough to stay home, I did. I knew that there was only so much locker room stench I really needed in my life, and once I had reached my limit, I said no more.

So, I stayed home and had marathon sessions of Saved by the Bell. I should have been doing homework, so I would try to turn off the TV from time to time, but I never was able to resist one more episode. Because of this I can go head to head with anyone who believes they know more about Zac Morris than I do, unfortunately it isn’t something that comes up all that often. I wanted to escape from my responsibilities into a world that was made for the protagonist, where the affects of doing whatever you wanted were never felt for very long (see the episode where Zac scores extremely high on SATs without doing any work in school). I just couldn’t turn away, at least not when the alternative was math worksheets or projects that had been dreamed up decades before.

It was when I was left alone like this that I understood just how idle my life was. Without the presence of interesting goals or progress toward something of value, I was just looking for something to distract me until my parents came home. That was when I first noticed how much time I really had to do “nothing,” but it certainly wasn’t the last. Before I could reflect upon it, I had lived some of the most insignificant moments of my life in front of the television and computer. Before I knew that Collaboration would engage my mind, I saw that entertainment could distract it. Before I understood that creation would bolster my confidence, I saw that consumption would provide escape.

And yet, I did figure out what would truly bring about my happiness and let me transform my idle time by controlling the ratio of input to output. I realized this as a function of being bored. I starting to write on a daily basis. It was becoming engaged in poetry and the conversations that it held that allowed me to finally turn off Saved by the Bell and find something more worthy of my time than Zac Attack (the fictional band that Zac Morris created in a dream episode). Unfortunately, I don’t think it can be writing that does it for everyone. I also think that we are distracting ourselves more easily than we ever have before.

Netflix on Demand, DVRs and similar services are creating a culture of entertainment that feels more like creation. Because we can play, pause and fast forward all of our content (even print, audio and images), it seems as though we are doing something. There is no longer the sense that other people are going to create a marathon of episodes for us. We are creating that marathon for ourselves. We are now active participants in our own idleness. Before it was being pumped at us, but now we are choosing to turn on the fire hose and leaving it on because it feels like we are moving from the pressure.

We can no longer accept that boredom and idleness are the same, mostly because we are no longer bored when we are idle. We don’t give ourselves the chance to be bored. We must always be engaged by the content at our fingertips. We must always be searching YouTube for the next viral video or be reading up on the next Apple rumor. In that way, we are occupying our idle time in self-made distraction. We are crafting the environment that occupied my time for years while my brothers were off playing hockey. And yet we are feeling transformed in this environment, and that is what I am most worried about.

It is the fact that our idleness has become so interactive that is disguising our preoccupation with it. We are no longer able to simply be bored and to let that run its course. Because inevitably, boredom leads to invention, at least it did for me. I wrote in the quietest of times and spaces. I wrote when there was nothing to occupy me. But there aren’t those times now, and that is a turn for the worse. While I am not going to make an argument that certain devices, like the iPad, are turning our culture in one of consumers rather than social creators, rather I would like to state that it is the way in which we are consuming our content that allows us to confuse idleness with participation.

In one last analogy, I believe that our instinct to create playlists of music has been compared to the mix tape or cd of just a few years ago. Unfortunately, I do not buy it. Now, our playlists are made up by Pandora or iTunes Genius technology rather than by people. We share them far and wide through project playlist and other such sites. There are no hand crafted covers or agonizing over tracks. While I do not wish to bemoan the past, I think that believing that the playlist and the carefully crafted mix are the same is one more way in which we are confusing a mere occupation of our idle time with a transformation of it.

If I can be so bold as to suggest:

We need more boredom. We need more mix tapes. We need more writing.

We need less false interaction. We need less occupied minds. We need less playlists.

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Question 106 of 365: How can we find unique comfort?

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rectangular bumper pool table
Image via Wikipedia

I sometimes have a hard time relating to those who have never played bumper pool.

While most people don’t come right out and say it, there is a look in their eye that questions the very notion of another type of pool game. In this look they are giving themselves away. They are declaring, bright as a Colorado morning in the mountains, that a cue ball is required for them to take their shots. And that is okay. I respect those who have never experienced the joy of putting in all five balls into their opponents pocket, one after the other. I get that not everyone has shot through the forest of bumpers in the middle or banked perfectly to block a shot. I believe that there is something to be said for only having played a single type of pool. However, I have a hard time relating to those folks.

Bumper pool is the kind of game that is only played at camps, over at odd friends’ houses (exclusively in half-finished or unfinished basements), or in the back corners of bars without the funds to buy a proper pool table. It is a tool of last resort or of idiosyncrasy. On the other hand, regular pool tables can be found anywhere. They are the subject of entire businesses (both the pool hall and the pool table store). They are a reason to go out or to stay in. Traditional pool is a game of finesse. You can look cool playing it, whereas it is impossible to look truly cool at a bumper pool table. Even as much as I would like to claim that my streak of 14 consecutive wins at summer camp made me cool, I know that it made me untouchable in a different way.

But it is those things that make it so hard to relate to those without a strong bumper pool background. When they have never seen a ball spin around in the pocket, they may never be able to fully express their point of view to me. For it is that combination of the unique and ridiculous, the familiar and foreign, that propels me to be able to say anything and know that it is okay. It is the ability to be one degree off of normal and feel comfortable in being there that has let me feel satisfied with my geekdom. I know that there is nothing someone can criticize about the way I create or play or work because I have played bumper pool. I know that looking silly and standing out is most of the fun. I know that seeking out the one table that everyone else avoids is going to be more fulfilling. And the people that follow me there, will experience the same kind of enjoyment from the knowledge that we didn’t want to share the same kind of experience as everyone else. We wanted to play a different kind of game. And that is where our unique comfort comes from.

It is in finding a set of rules that make more sense and a series of obstacles that resonate. It is about working to narrow down the number of possible angles until there is only one answer and then pushing forward with that. The comfort is in not settling for playing the way that others do or even in accepting the competitive space that others have accepted. When I speak to those who have never held this unique comfort within themselves or who have not tried on a similarly awkward activity, it is as if the speech ricochets off of them. As if my words were hitting a cue ball and then finding their mark on the proper target, trying to guide it into the right spot. But for those who know this comfort, my words are hitting the target straight on. We have connected and transfered our energy toward the same goal of finding a solution. And given the option, I would much rather speak directly with someone who knows this comfort than shoot in the general direction of someone who does not.

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Create your own real-time SMS to Twitter service!

For the past month I have been trying to figure out an elegant way of having an entire audience all tweet to the same account using text messaging on their phones. While I can think of a good number of reasons to want to do this, my main concern was in creating a twitter backchannel for presentations that anyone could participate in, regardless of their experience with twitter or backchanneling. I believe in the power of the audience and I want them to be able to ask questions and make comments on what is going on. I also thought it would be quite powerful to show people just how easy it is to harness the technology that most of us carry around in our pockets.

So without further ado, here is how you can give anyone a single number to send an SMS to and have it post to twitter on the account of your choosing.

Step 1: Sign up for a new twitter account using the gmail address+ feature.

While you may think having a bunch of people posting to your twitter account would provide you with a bunch of content, it is a really bad idea to let just anyone in the audience to put words in your mouth.

So, go to twitter and sign up for a new account, but instead of having to have a different e-mail address, all you need to do is to use YourGmailUserName+YourKeyword@gmail.com. This will still send all follower e-mails and direct messages to your Gmail account, but it will allow you to filter it out if you don’t want to receive any of it.

Here is what that looks like:

Step 2: Go into your Google Voice Account and turn on SMS forwarding to e-mail, which is a checkbox in Settings in the SMS and Voicemail tab (if you don’t have a Google Voice account, let me know, I have a few invites). It looks like this:

Step 3: Go into your Gmail and set up a filter account with the following parameters:

Subject: “SMS from” (without quotes)

Has the words: (whatever you want your keyword to be. I was using the twitter account name as a hashtag, so mine is SMStoTW)

Doesn’t have: (you can filter out any text message with a swear word or any words that you think shouldn’t be sent to the twitter account… this is a feature that I am really excited about)

It looks like this:

Then, click next step and have the filter put the message automatically in the archive as well as forward it to a YourKEyword@twittermail.com address, like so:

Step 4: Tie Twittermail to your Twitter account by going to http://twittercounter.com and clicking the “Who are you on Twitter?” link in the top right corner and then allowing it to access your new twitter account (make sure you are logged in as your new account and not your public account here). It looks like this:

Step 5: Change the twittermail address to be your keyword by clicking in the twittermail settings, typing in your keyword, and saving the settings. Like so:

If you did everything correctly, anytime that someone sends an SMS message to your Google Voice account with the keyword (or hashtag) somewhere in the message, it will post it instantly to your account. Like this:

Other implications of this workflow are that you would be able to update all of your twitter accounts via text message simply by including your own keywords in your SMS. Your keyword could be as small as a single character with the pound sign so you wouldn’t be wasting any of your 140. I am very excited about the potential of crossposting to multiple twitter accounts using multiple hashtags. I also like the idea that we could use it to engage the community with questions and comments, even away from a presentation setting. But, I’m sure other folks will figure out better ways to use this process that I haven’t even thought of yet. Comment on the post if you come up with anything or if you have specific questions about getting this to work.

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Question 105 of 365: Are we still allowed to be embarrassed?

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Blue metal soldiers
Image by slambo_42 via Flickr

You never know if you can fit underneath a metal folding chair until you try.

I used to sing really loud just about any time I got the chance. Ask my childhood neighbors about my lawn mowing falsetto or headphone isolation. I really didn’t have a concept that this wasn’t what other people were doing. I just knew that it made me happy to “project” and feel the conviction of the words as much as I could.

Ultimately though, singing loudly in unison is where it is at. That is why choirs are wonderful. You can surround yourself with a bunch of folks who like to sing for all they are worth. It is also why knowing the rhythm, the words, and the repetitions matters. There is nothing worse than singing loudly while standing next to a whole bunch of other people who like to sing loudly and being entirely out of sync with them.

I think I was 7 when I first noticed this phenomenon. During a particularly passionate religious gathering (another time when it is okay to be around loud singers), a particular song was being sung by a large congregation. This song happened to have a series of “Hey” refrains within it that were to be sung after the right phrases. I was incredibly good at screaming out at those parts and thus adding my own little flavor to the experience. Unfortunately, I didn’t truly understand the nature of the song, because just as it became soft once more, I shouted out the loudest “Hey” I could.

I knew that I had screwed up immediately because everyone (or seemingly so to my 7 year old brain) turned and looked directly at me. It was then that I decided to try and fit underneath my chair. I hid there just long enough for my father to see and come rushing down from his place in the mini-choir up front to try and coax me out. This was not a proud day for my wish to sing out loudly at any chance I got. I was embarrassed to be that off the mark.

And yet, I was allowed to be embarrassed. I was even expected to make that kind of a mistake a 7 year old. I was comforted in my mistake by the fact that other people had done the same thing, even recently. I am afraid now that we are not allowed to be this embarrassed of the decisions we have made. I worry that no one is diving underneath their chairs because of their missteps.

I keep on seeing justifications for wrong doing rather than simple contrite embarrassment. For example, when Google unveiled Buzz within gmail and didn’t fully consider all of the implications of their wide open privacy policies and sharing setup, they encountered huge backlash. All eyes were on them to fix it, which they mostly did. However, instead of simply admitting that they had not fully considered just how important people’s contact privacy is to them, they passed it off as inevitable part of being a “beta” product or of working with customers to find an ideal solution. These kinds of embarrassments are covered over for PR reasons, and yet, I believe that if Google were to have felt the sting more clearly and attempted to crawl underneath their decision to really reconsider their approach it would have garnered a lot of respect. If they would have simply taken the service down for a few hours, talked with some users in an open and honest way (perhaps much in the way that my father took me aside and consoled me for making an awkward decision) and then relaunched with their seal of approval, they would have a viable group of early adopters. As of right now, it seems as though that group is dwindling more by the day for such a service.

Embarrassments should be felt and remembered. It is enough that I remember this event as clear as day as it continues to inform my decisions on trying to do the same things as those others around me. While some people would say that I am advocating for learning from failure, but I see it is as something greater. Failure is a part of every day life. It is common, it a part of the action and reaction of doing your job or being a part of a community. Embarrassment is the feeling of being totally alone and isolated from anyone who is making you to feel embarrassed. While it is an awful experience while it is happening, it is the stuff that character is built directly upon. It is the stuff of origin stories and roads to success. Embarrassment is worth feeling because it allows us to share a common bond of disjointed being. It allows us to have the out of body experience necessary for reflection and change. But this only happens if we let ourselves be embarrassed.

You cannot justify your way out of singing when everyone else is silent. It is best to show your understanding of just how much you were out of sync. So, get down on your hands and knees and start crawling.

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Question 104 of 365: How far will we dig?

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Regiones fisiográficas de Ohio.
Image via Wikipedia

My grandmother owned a mountain. Well, maybe not the entire mountain, but in the middle of Ohio, it is about the closest thing to a mountain as there is. And near the top of it, my grandfather built a huge farmhouse. He built it in two stages, and we called the pieces the old house and the new house. Even I did, and I had never known the house without both halves.

The house sat on the side of this mountain so that on one side it was one story and on the other side it was two. It provided for a beautiful deck overseeing acres and acres of forest. And below the deck was a walkout basement and courtyard. If you wanted to, you could climb up underneath the deck and see where the earth met the house. And I wanted to, all of the time.

I would dig up the arrowheads that laid buried in the soil where the house was set into the mountain. It was the coolest, dirtiest place a boy could find in the summers that we used to go up and visit my grandmother. I knew that with each handful of dirt that I sent down the hill, I was unearthing something that no other person had ever seen before. What I didn’t realize is that I was also weakening the foundation and eating away at the supports as well.

You could make the case that I did no damage and that all of my arrowhead hunting was simply not enough to make the house slide off of the mountain and into the ravine below. But, I would say that given the chance and enough summers, I would have dug that house right out of its home.

It is the same kind of digging that I seem to be doing now, with the same level of curiosity. I seem to be digging underneath stable houses in the hopes of finding my own treasure. I am digging underneath traditional education to see just how far the supports can hold. I am finding lots of trinkets and experiences in online learning. I seem to be making up stories of just how things could be in the same ways that I made up the stories for the rocks and roots I found underneath that old house. I am digging underneath technology just to see if it is worth anything. I am digging underneath business to find the most creative ways of solving my problems. I receive shade and a wonderful work environment from all of the things that technology and business have afforded me, but at the same time, I am actively trying to undermine the very thing that is giving me shelter.

And the people that live in the houses I dig under have no idea that this is happening. They seem to go along with their lives oblivious to the fact that it isn’t just me digging anymore. There are hundreds of thousands of people who would like to see the foundation be undermined. And not all for the same reason.

Some people are digging away at traditional schools because they aren’t working for their kids. Some people are interested in scooping out large pockets of earth in business because of the rejections they have faced in trying to break into a biased corporate culture. Still others are hacking away at the earth in front of them, trying to bring down the technology houses that seem to only provide a sterilized version of ownership and creation of content.

From MakerBots to Lean Startups to Charter Schools, we are all digging away at the house up above. And it may well crush us if and when it falls. And yet, we continue to dig, despite the danger. We continue to dig because we know that the stories of digging and the chance for finding a truly amazing artifact are more than worth it. We believe that what we learn in the shadows of a big house, getting our hands dirty and figuring out what is really holding the structure up is a much better education and experience than sitting up on the porch and admiring the view.

And if we survive the dig, we may go away from that mountain and start to build a house of our own. We may construct a sturdier and better house, with reinforcements on the foundation and a more hidden earthy exterior. But others will find a way to dig at our edges too. They will be just as curious as we were to see what really is really holding the structure up. They may want to know just what we covered up in our rush to build. And we will deserve it every bit as much as the folks that we are digging at now.

Because all houses on the side of a mountain have a cool underbelly. They are all playgrounds for curious people. And it is only those with the will to attack something as big as a house with nothing but their own fingernails that will succeed. It may take many summers to get anywhere close, but eventually we will start to expose everything. And that is a good thing.

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Question 103 of 365: Who is watching out for whom?

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A digital picture of a candy apple, taken by L...
Image via Wikipedia

I had never dressed up for Halloween until I became a teacher. It just wasn’t something we did in my family. But, when I became a middle school teacher, it was definitely an expectation. So, I was Peter Pan and Poneyboy a couple of times and it was never a really big deal. Not until I had Isabelle and Tobias did I really understand the true nature of Halloween. And while dressing up my children in their first costumes was a big deal for me, I think that it only amounts to a rite of passage in the end. The real power of Halloween is in the trick or treating event. The very idea that soliciting strangers is expected is foreign to me. I always felt embarrassed to go up someone’s walkway unannounced, must less do it in a disguise. But my daughter gracefully asked for her fair share of candy, even making specific requests a number of times. To her, this was what you were supposed to do on such an evening.

This year she was a Dragonasaurus (half dragon, half dinosaur) and my son was a chicken. Tobias had just learned to walk fairly well when we put him in this outfit that was just too small. We ended up cutting out the feet so that he could fit in it. As he walked down our too-narrow sidewalks, he tried to carry his candy bag. After one particularly successful stop on our route, another adult in our party was hurriedly trying to get to the next house with his daughter. This man ran directly over Tobias and knocked him to the ground, face first. His nearly-new teeth met the sidewalk, only protected by his lips, which immediately started to swell and bleed. As we tried to comfort him (and carry him the rest of the way), I couldn’t help but contemplate what exactly this other adult was thinking in moving so fast or so recklessly.

Tobias could have been seriously injured due to someone else’s lack of awareness. Luckily, his lips didn’t split and the snow on the ground provided a wonderful ice pack for him. Oh, and opening a few chocolate pieces of Halloween candy seem to ease the situation somewhat. Although, Tobias wasn’t watching out for the adults either, he probably just assumed that they would more likely look out for him so that he doesn’t have to. I know that I have forgiven this adult for hurting my child, but I am still not entirely convinced that he will really be much more aware in the future.

And that is pretty much the way I feel about big and little companies, large and small projects and expanding and contracting schools. I know that many of them have run over smaller entities in order to get somewhere new, but I don’t think that many are really learning from that experience. Many large companies continually give fat lips to those without as much balance or grace, rather than simply guiding them along and making sure that they are the ones that can take credit for the small companies success. The startup is little and untrained, and doesn’t really know where it is going. If an established firm really wants to get at the sweet rewards that the startup is collecting (is that stretching the metaphor a bit far?), it is much better to guide the startup along the path, investing in its future earnings. That way, when you count out the bounty, the large companies can take their cut (perhaps the largest and most complex profits that the startup would really be able to digest fully).

As for projects and schools, I believe that there really is an aspect of collaboration that is being lost in running over the small pilot program in favor of the high-profile endeavor. Just like the mass produced costume that many kids wear, the large project seems like a sexy alternative to a boutique solution that really fits a given situation. Whether in a national charter school or a top down IT-based initiative, the price of a packed solution seems to be justified simply by the fact that it comes shrinkwrapped. The hand-sewn answer, while perhaps not as pretty, is one that we hold onto for years. It is the one that stays with us and builds a mythology all its own. We tell stories about its creation, rather than create reports on why we have moved on to something else. We hand it down to others, who remake it to fit their own needs rather than watch it deteriorate and be thrown away at the first sign of diminishing returns.

I would like us to watch out for the creative costume or the littlest solicitor. Because it is through them that we will learn the most about how to do our jobs better. It is through them that we will find a balance that we so desperately seek. And it is through them that we can become joyful about the process of going and asking for others to support what it is that we need: whether that is candy or a living.

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Question 102 of 365: Is silence still an option?

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This is a picture of bookshelves in a tiny lib...
Image via Wikipedia

Study hall was where I honed my skills as a bully. And since I was weaker and less socially adept than almost everyone, my bullying was relegated to a single individual, Bryan. Now, I didn’t beat him up or call him names. I just pestered him. In that middle school library, not long after we had taken our seats at the same small round table, I would start talking with him. Truth be told, Bryan was one of my only friends in the Study Hall, so I didn’t have much choice but to talk to him, except that we weren’t supposed to talk. So, I would whisper at him, I suppose. I would ask him questions and tell him things about what was going on in my life, and I expected him to respond. But, he never responded to my satisfaction. He never put forth a full-throated response. So, after a while, I started telling him to use his “real voice” as if the one he was using was fake and dishonest. I kept trying to get him to speak more and more clearly.

Bryan was nothing if not shy, and I thought that perhaps I could get him to snap out of it by simply bothering him enough. I figured if I got in trouble enough for talking and moved around from his table enough for cracking us both up that he would just have to take notice and say something “real.” This didn’t work out so well. He remained silent up until he skipped town a month before High School graduation to go be with someone who did understand his quiet and unassuming attitude toward everything. Not that we were that close by then. He had gotten enough in that study hall to know that being bullied into saying something real isn’t an option.

The bullying hasn’t stopped, though. I still pester people to say things with their “real voices.” I gently nudge people to blog. I pull people into conversations that they weren’t previously a part of in an e-mail thread. I outright call for participation on twitter. When people have been away for a significant length of time from posting or engaging in the community that I believe they are a part of, I call them on it. I ask them where their next podcast is. I continue to call for more writing and creating, even as they are just going about their normal existence.

It has become an even stronger belief that silence isn’t an option online. If you aren’t continually crafting a message, then there is something very wrong with you. And while I live that every day, it is becoming more and more clear that silence should be a choice afforded to all people. It should be okay to simply drop off the radar, if only for a little while. It should be accepted that some people are more shy than others, and it doesn’t mean that they will have less friends on Facebook, it means that they may not be on Facebook at all. It means that their digital footprint might be so light as to be washed away from a single high tide.

We preach that posting and creating is almost a civic duty in today’s society, but what about those people who really are content to speak only when they have to and only speak to those who matter to them? Shouldn’t they have the right to not engage in the public creation of content? Is forcing them to start up a blog or participate in a wiki really such a good idea?

While I do not think that my bullying is why Bryan left Ohio for Florida, I do think that our collective bullying was. I think that everyone is feeling pressure to speak authentically and without reservation about their lives and post status updates every few minutes. With this pressure comes the fact that many people cannot live up to that ideal of transparency. And when they figure out that this pressure doesn’t exist everywhere, they will run to those places that do exert it over everyone. I believe that a social networking backlash is coming incredibly soon, if it hasn’t started already.

This backlash will be all of the kids/people who can’t stomach the empty friendships and connections. It will be the quiet folks who don’t need the constant noise and chatter of a news feed. They will form their own spaces in the real world and they will shut themselves out of everything that has to do with a technology-based relationship. Some may refuse to own a cell phone or be reachable by anything other than meeting in person. They will be silent to all but their own “kind.”

And while I will respect their choices to live away from the pressure of the “What are you doing?” and “Where are you?” questions, I think that society will be missing out on their contributions. Not in the sense that we will miss out on their status updates, but rather that we will miss out on their presence and their gentle pressure back, reassuring us that we don’t have to be posting all of the time. Just as I believe that we need to make our online spaces more hospitable to those who would rather not speak up, they should continue to provide us with the value of choosing our words carefully. Silence should be an option, both in study hall and on the internet.

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Question 101 of 365: What is the next vanity?

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MUNICH, GERMANY - SEPTEMBER 20: A Bavarian dr...
Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I used to fall asleep in crazy positions.

My parents tell this story about me falling asleep with my chest over my knees at the foot of the bed in Disney World. While that is basic fetal position, it is usually done on your side or your back. I was just folded in two, taking up the smallest footprint on the bed possible.

The one that I remember, though, is falling asleep in our van’s middle bench-type seat. I somehow became unbuckled and dangled myself off with my knuckles touching the ground and the rest of my body somehow staying on the bench. The reason I remember, is that I woke up like that. I woke up to my mother telling another woman about me. She kept on talking about the crazy ways that I would fall asleep and then she went on to talk about other things that were more flattering and personality driven. I wish I could remember more of those.

I realize now that I didn’t start moving and fully wake up because I wanted her to keep on talking about me. I wanted to know what she and this other woman thought about me without asking them. In short, I was vain. I had this sense that other people would talk about me when I wasn’t in the room (or awake, apparently), and I wanted to know what they were saying. It was one of the first ways that I knew that the world continued on out of earshot and eye sight.

Not a lot has changed, I’m afraid. I am still vain, and I still want to know what others are saying about me. I don’t pretend to be asleep now, though. Rather, I empower my eavesdropping ability using a variety of technologies. I run Google Alerts for my name, getting daily update whenever someone mentions something on the web about me. Hootsuite performs a perpetual search for mentions of my username. My blog gets an alert whenever someone links to me, as does my Google Analytics account. My Facebook and Flickr accounts are alerted any time I am tagged in a photograph. I even get updated on Slideshare whenever someone likes one of my presentations or decides to embed it into their website. There is a certain science to my vanity now.

The problem is, where does vanity go from here. How can I possibly eavesdrop on more people or figure out just how good or bad the things are that people say? To me, the future of vanity actually lies in the moment with my mom in the van. She wasn’t tagging me in a photo or linking to me as a person, she was simply talking about me in casual conversation. She was telling stories that didn’t require any technology to augment their reality. Yet, if I hadn’t woken up, I would never have known that those words were being said.

So, I believe that the future of our quest for vanity and self-branding will be in the power of voice and conversation. In the not so distant future, I believe that all speech will be able to be parsed and tagged. Moreover, I believe that all conversations will have the capacity to be auto-tagged and analyzed. I’m not saying that all of our conversations will be recorded, but I think that everyone with a device in the pockets will be able to use it to see the networked representation of what they are talking about.

For example, I like to talk about movies frequently. I believe that if I bring out my phone and plop it on the table in front of me, it will be able to pull up all of the information about the movie that I am speaking of without me having to type it in. It will follow the conversation on screen and continue to present me with further topics to explore, further ways to travel down the rabbit hole. In doing so, it will be tagging my conversation and it will allow me to play it back if I would like to or publish it (and the conversation path) along with it.

With a technology such as this, vanity will be a very real part of our lives every day. We will be able to know exactly when people are speaking about us and be alerted as to the context of that speech.

I also believe that this will happen in video first. I believe that we will start to tag each other in speech with the videos that we are creating. Now that YouTube has decent transcription service going on all of their videos, we aren’t too far from making that text live, searchable, and hyperlinked. As soon as the conversations in video response become tagged with our names and our ideas, video will be the next thing to start making us more self-aware.

The next vanity will be the same as the first. Our words will make us more and more vain because we will always know our references. We will become a part of the taxonomy of communication. We will have an analytical value based upon the number of conversations that are about us. And that will be scary and validating, seductive and pointless, ugly and freeing; all at the same time.

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Question 100 of 365: Why do we crave a streak?

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The famous Honus Wagner T206 card, circa 1910.
Image via Wikipedia

I used to have these hall of fame baseball figurines of guys like Honus Wagner that I would play with in my bed. I would have them hit home runs and go around my made up bases that I created with the objects on my sheets. I was so intrigued by these old players that I would look up their statistics in old baseball almanacs. I knew that there was some significance to those figures, to the numbers of base hits and RBIs. The one figure that I could never quite fathom though, was consecutive games played. This streak was held by Cal Ripken, Jr., a contemporary player that I never had a figuring for. His continual dedication to coming in and working every single day was amazing to me. He was my hero from the time ages of 7-10  because of this streak, and until now I’m not sure that I knew why.

I crave this kind of streak within my life. I am always interested in creating something that is as long lasting 2,632 games, spanning 17 years. Mr. Ripken’s achievement is something that will most assuredly never be copied. These kinds of streaks are not sought after. The level of consistency it takes to show up whether you think you will be amazing or not, is something that is most impressive.

100 days of writing is the longest streak I have ever attained. While I have written more over the course of many days, this is the most consistent I have ever been. And, I want it to continue. I want to be the Cal Ripken, Jr of the question answering world.

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