First a link – I stole it from Noah Brier, but here it is anyway – on the phrase “that’s executional.”

One of my other agency favorites is, “Well, you’re not the target market.” But that’s a post for another day.

Anyway – seems to me that the thinking on the other end of this link makes part of the case about why the planning and creative processes should be ‘collapsed.’ More on that later, too.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time working on improving the experience of consumer research – for everyone, the researcher, the client, the agency, and perhaps most importantly, the consumer. There is a lot that is wrong with research, and it tends to obscure all that is right with it. But I have certainly developed a few things that fall under the category of ‘pet peeve’. To wit:

Insight mining assumes that insights are nouns. That if we just ask enough people, one of them will spew out an insight. But insight isn’t a noun, it’s a verb. You don’t mine insights, you have insight – you see something, feel something, hear something and think, “Aha! I know what that means!” Having insight requires the rigor of research, but also the sensitivity to listen, and the ability to foster the intimacy of conversation, the truth of storytelling.

Listening is useful – you have to listen to what people are saying, but also to how they say it. You have to listen to the omissions, too – the things they don’t say, the stories they don’t tell, the players missing from action.

Watching is good – see what people do, let them show you. Playing helps – actually physically touch something, use it, see what it does, take it for a spin. I once designed a website for an air charter company – the first step in our process was traveling with them, on a Lear 35 to Las Vegas for the weekend. We were picked up in limousines on the tarmac, taken to the Bellagio, given a suite. We were able to understand the experience, because we’d had it ourselves.

Listening, Watching, Playing – all fun, all good, all useful. We’ve got the verb, we’ve got the subject (your consumer) – what’s missing is the object (your brand, your product, your service). Jane thinks this about ______? Tom likes to use his _______ for relaxation. Sometimes, Hideo just wants to escape from the day with his __________.

Some ways to overcome these problems in research:

• Set the context. Know what decisions you want to inform when commissioning the research. Do the research in the right place – instead of asking people to recall behavior, why not get them to show you? Give people all the information they need to be helpful to you – tell people what you want to accomplish and ask for their help. They’ll try to be helpful and stretch beyond the critical if you enlist their assistance instead of asking for their critique.
• Invite everyone to the party. Yes, the brand manager and the creative director should be there. People who like you should be in the room – but so should people who used to, who don’t, who could. The conversations are more interesting when everyone has a point of view, but it’s not all the same.
• Don’t expect to find all the answers wrapped up neatly. You’ll need to go have a think about what you’ve heard, but it’s better to be actively listening than passively waiting for ‘the answer.’ First, it may never come in the format you’re expecting. You’ll need the prophets (the planners and researchers), and the poets (the creatives), but also your own intuition to help you make meaning from all the data.
• Go Forth. I’m not just saying that because I like the line from the current Levi’s campaign (though I do!), but also because sitting in a clinical setting of the focus group facility, or the stress-inducing confines of your office will not always teach what you need to know. Go out, see where your brand gets used, talk to people actually using it, experience how people really interact with your brand. Observation is about seeing and experiencing and understanding – it’s hard to do that behind the glass.
• Cultivate a point of view. Notice what you like and don’t like about other brands, other campaigns, other designs – both inside your category and out. Taste is about knowing what works for you and what you like. Your taste will only improve as you try new things. You won’t love it all – and you shouldn’t – but you will have a broader base of experience upon which to base your decisions. Learn from others, and be open to solutions that haven’t been used before in your organization or category.

Super revolutionary, no? A gentle reminder, dear reader, to do what you know you ought.

Much has been made since Lovemarks was published of the specialness of brands that are adored, desired, and truly loved by consumers. Only a few consistently come to mind, and you can see how they play out in the brand battles at brandtags.net. Sometimes it seems like there are so few true ‘brands’ that you can count them on both hands: Adidas, Apple, BMW, Coke, Ferrari, Google, Lego, Nike, Pixar, YouTube. They stand for something, they have meaning, they evoke imagery and feeling and spirit. They are, in other words, lovable.

But for many years now we’ve been convinced that anything with a trademark or a .com or a business card can be a brand. It isn’t true. Not everything – or everyone – is a brand. Sometimes they are just people, companies, products, services.

A friend and former colleague told me about a client who wanted to make a button on one of their remote controls a brand. A component piece of a component piece of a utility service – made into a brand. I’ve had clients who want the silhouette Apple iconography – now. I’ve had others muse that if they just had the Intel chimes, they’d stick in people’s heads longer. They’d completely forgotten about the work those companies had to do to earn the right – and the privilege – of being so recognizable. We had to have “1000 songs in your pocket” and “Rip. Mix. Burn.” in order to get to the iconic iPod earbud cords. We had to to see stickers on every PC tower and see the dancing technicolor ‘bunnysuits’ and get excited about the Pentium (remember that?) to give Intel credit for that sound.

And as we know, love fades. Brands that once deserved, even demanded our love, have grown distant, tiresome, old. Some brands have deserted us for younger consumers. Others stopped bringing us flowers, thinking we’d settle for something a little less. Many make us work harder to get their attention and their affection.

You see, the problem for years was that marketing managers, companies – yes, brands – have been feeding their own myths. They’ve believed it was their right to demand our love. They believed if they were loud enough, repetitive enough, big enough, we’d all adore them.

Over the last decade – the one just ended – many marketing managers concluded that the brave new world was upon us; that the monologue had been supplanted by a dialogue. That was the nice way of putting it – what many really thought was that they’d opened up the doors to all the riff-raff and found themselves deafened by the cacophony of consumer voices. Control of the brand was threatened by this transparency, by all this commenting and linking and reviewing and forwarding and tweeting.

But a new age is upon us – everyone’s going digital, everyone is, in the parlance of The ARF, “listening” – or in the framework of Henry Jenkins, fostering participatory culture. Yet even this winds up as a one way street. Many agencies are interpreting digital solely as online direct response marketing – and leaving creativity, demand creation, brand building in the dust. Many researchers and brand managers interpret listening as eavesdropping, getting consumers to do the work for you.

It reminds me of how Tom Sawyer pulled a con – I’ll let you paint my fence if you’ll give me your apple. Who’s getting the better deal?

As it turns out, no one.

Positioning and brand strategy have become empty vessels for a lot of companies. The desire to automate, mechanize, optimize and monetize are strong, and so true strategy that goes beyond headlines is hard to find.

Getting people to love you is the result, not the strategy.

What I’m interested in and passionate about is figuring out the strategy – what do you have to offer that makes you lovable? What do you say and how do you say it – and more importantly, how do you prove it?

When I talk to clients, we talk about your brand, and your consumer – but we talk about it in a slightly different way. We reckon with your present and your past, but we face the future.

• What do you have to offer – what is your product or service and what does it do, how is it different, what does it or could it mean to people?
• What kind of consumer are you looking for – who would make your best match, what would you offer them and what would they give you in return?
• What do you mean to people? What should you mean?

If we don’t talk about who you really are as defined by what you do, what you make, how you present yourself – in other words, your products, services, employees, distribution methods, design, pricing and service – we’re only ever talking about window dressing. If we don’t align who you are with how you want people to feel about you – we’re likely to make products and messages that don’t break through and don’t stick. And if we don’t keep our eyes open to the possibilities – to the people who do, could, and should love you – then we risk your business.

To get love, you have to give it – all the relationship advice in the world can be boiled down to that truth. The way companies give love is simple: respect the people you want to sell things to, and make things they would want to buy.

My job is to help you figure out how to get there.

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Several weeks ago Clay Shirky ranted about women.  The premise was a simple one – as a faculty member at NYU, Shirky gets a lot of requests for recommendations, but the men are more forceful about self-promotion, and he is worried, he says, that:

not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks.

For the record, I think he’s right.  I have personally been guilty of not behaving like an arrogant self-aggrandizing jerk, and I have witnessed my fellow female colleagues fail on the same count.

But let’s unpack this sentence.  First off, the statistical caveat, “not enough”.  Some women do this and do it well.  Second, “have what it takes” – one supposes this assumes a set of personality or character traits, but also a set of skills, and perhaps most importantly, the will to do this and do it well.  Some women, and perhaps many of the women Shirky encounters, do not have the self-esteem or confidence or what-have-you to put themselves forward, to be zealous advocates for themselves.  But even if women have the self-esteem and confidence, they may lack the skill-set that makes an effective advocate.  Now let’s also assume that some women have the confidence, and have even been taught the skills, but for some reason hold themselves back from advocating for themselves.

The argument has been made that women are socialized to advocate for themselves last – that it is easier for us to promote or defend our friends, loved-ones and colleagues before we will promote or defend ourselves.  It has also been written that in business women promote each other in the belief that they will carry each other forward and up – and also provide a bit of cover when women at the top want or need or must take on the roles and responsibilities they face outside the workplace.  For example, this article in the New York Times a few years ago described this behavior in the Hollywood studio system.

From there, the women fanned out to different studios, often employing one another. “There’s a little bit of an old girls club at this point,” Ms. Pascal said. By the late 1990′s, female executives, particularly Ms. Fisher, who cut her work week to as little as three days when she had young children, had smoothed some of the edges off the industry’s go-go, late-night culture. “We needed each other for cover, so we could cut out for that concert our kid was in and not seem like slackers,” said Ms. Jacobson, who has a 6-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter. (Such habits spread: even Steven Spielberg has joked publicly about the joy of taking “a Lucy Fisher day” with his children.)

That seems encouraging, on its face, and I personally have benefited from having great female role models in my industry – women who were definitely themselves and definitely women, who were able to make decisions and build businesses and influence the influential, and who were even able to marry and have children in the process.  Perhaps most importantly, they didn’t shut the door behind them – they actively mentored, rewarded and promoted younger women like me.  They have, over time, evolved in their roles, from my boss and mentor, to my friend and colleague.  Without them, I’m not sure I’d have the guts to do what I’m doing now – or the vision.

Shirky doesn’t address this part – most people don’t.  What they talk about instead are questions of supply, demand, and intrinsic gender-based qualities (that are assumed to exist).  For example, in the same Times article as above, they discuss other options, ranging from pipeline, to socialization, to drive and support, to personality traits.

Ms. Daley said the pipeline is indeed part of the explanation – only about a third of the women who come to the U.S.C. program are interested in directing – but not all of it. “There are talented girls who want to do this, but so far they haven’t done what the boys do – band together and sacrifice everything to make a small film,” she said. It’s those films that eventually find their way into the hands of studio executives looking for the next hot young thing.

Young women are less likely to get support, both financial and emotional, from their parents, Ms. Daley added. “In my experience, parents of girls aren’t as eager to give them their life savings to make a movie,” she said.

But some executives, male and female, suggested that directing might require personal characteristics that few women possess. “The fact is that to be a director you have to be unbelievably ruthless,” said a woman who has been both a studio chief and a producer, but didn’t want her name used for fear of alienating temperamental directors. “They have a cold streak that most women I know don’t have and don’t want to have. They are both artist and commander, and they have a maniacal vision that precludes them from caring about anything but the film.”

It’s almost impossible to unpack everything that’s going on in these paragraphs, but let’s just do this as simply as possible:

• There aren’t enough women putting themselves into the system for development in fields, especially creative ones, that have been traditionally dominated by men.  The film, design, advertising, and music businesses are key areas where this has been a notable struggle; I’m sure there are many others.  The struggle is defined less by employment stats (number of women in field) and more by power structures (number of women breaking the title/pay/success metric barriers).
• So why not?  One reason: they don’t have the family support that ‘self-made men’ have.  Their parents don’t encourage them to take these risks, nor do they bankroll their endeavors. I’ve known a lot of women whose mothers still encouraged them to get a degree in teaching so they could work on their writing while having something sensible to fall back on; my own parents counseled me to double-major in something esoteric and something practical (though in fairness, my father always wanted me to take 6 months off to write a book and said he would do anything to help me do that).
• Reason #2: they don’t have the support of their peers.  Whether male or female, they do not have the support structure of colleagues and friends.  When I was thinking of leaving my last company, my friends were gingerly supportive, worried that making a move in a volatile economy would be a bad idea.  But another swath of my friends, interestingly my male friends, have always told me that they would work for me any day, that they would let me sleep on their couches while I looked for a new job, that I could be a literal rock star if that’s what I chose to do.  These friends have helped me talk myself into my going solo project; a lot of women don’t have these support structures. I’m incredibly lucky, and I’ve cultivated this kind of reckless belief in my abilities by recklessly believing in the abilities of my friends.  Who are, it must be said, awesome.
• Reason #3 is the one that people seem to respond to in Shirky’s post: that women don’t have what it takes.  Apparently what it takes is a maniacal personality, compulsiveness, obsessiveness, 24-hour work days, etc.  I think this one is bunk.  That’s not about gender, that’s about personality, and I wonder whether that is truly the personality make-up of all successful directors.  Any artist or creator is obsessed with their creation during its incubation period – have you met mothers?

Okay so let’s go back to Shirky’s sentence and the phrase I think actually matters here. That phrase is “behave like.”  He’s not advocating that women become ruthless bastards, he’s just suggesting we borrow some of the behaviors.  We certainly can find ourselves defined by our deeds, but the point is that we have to be our own best advocates, or as my dad said, “look out for number 1.”

Right, so what’s the answer?  The thing I find most fascinating is that when you look at Shirky’s post, taking what he posted and all the comments below, the word ‘mentor’ is used exactly once, by Shirky himself.  In my view, that is the answer – good mentors, people who completely, unreasonably believe in someone’s talent and wherewithal.  I have been accused of possessing this trait.  It came from a friend who DM’d me this a few months ago:

random realization: u are very good at exciting people toward their potential. i wouldn’t mind it if you told me what to do someday.
(That DM came from a guy.)

This is the role of the mentor.  And in my opinion is a role that is sorely missing from professional programs, creative fields and the workplace.  So, Mr. Shirky, here is what I would propose for your program, for any field, and I’ll say this – on the off chance you see it: I would be very interested in building a network founded on these ideas:

1. Move beyond advisor and recommender to cultivator.  You are growing new talent, not just reviewing it and passing it along.  See your job as training people, drilling the basics into their heads, while also forcing your students to use all those basics to put together something bigger.  It’s like teaching someone to read using a combination of whole word and phonetics: sound it out, okay now you hear the word that you are seeing, what does it mean?  okay now you know the words, how do you put them together into a sentence?  okay now you know how to put together a sentence, how do you make a paragraph? and so on.
2. Take gender out of it – give men mentors who are female, and vice versa.  In fact, I think this is incredibly important – we need to train bosses to see the opposite gender employee in a constructive light, as much as we need prospective employees to model successful behavior.  Show women and men what it’s like to have a professional relationship with an advocate of the opposite sex, and we can begin to deal with people based on categories other than the simplistic gender divide.
3. Teach: Break it down into digestible, action-oriented pieces.  When I was starting out, the people I did informational interviews with (an excellent tactic! I have been hired through that approach, and I hired someone last fall who took that approach with me), often told me that they ‘backed into’ their field.  This revealed two things: they wanted to believe it was a mystical event; and they hadn’t been thoughtful or reflective about the path they’d taken to get into their field and achieve any success in it.  They were fumbling towards their own futures, with no perspective on their pasts.  I know most of the steps I took to get to where I am now, and will happily tell you how that worked and give you insights and actionable suggestions that are behaviors not philosophies – in other words, ‘news you can use.’  Mentors need to take down the veil of mystery – it’s a lot simpler than that.
4. Practice: Drills, drills, and more drills.  Any sport requires the breaking down of a move, a play, a technique into its component parts and then reassembling them into the game, the routine, the stroke.  On Saturdays I take a writing class – we do free writing drills based on simple concepts: write this in the 1st person, now the 3rd person, now the omniscient, etc.  Then I go to the gym and lap swim – I don’t just freestyle, I do lengths of kicks, lengths of strokes, practice my kick turn, count strokes past the flags.  Our junior employees and our students need to do the same thing: on this project, only do the desk research and write a summary.  On the next project, do that but now tell me what you think that information means.  On the next project, do all that but now tell me what you think our client should do about it.  It’s the teaching hospital principle of “watch one, do one, teach one.”  Theory is great, but we have to teach people to apply it.

And that is where the last bit of advice that is always put forward really falls short for me: it’s about hard work.  Yes, it is, but what kind of work?  There is hard work and there is smart work.  Smart work is drills and plays.  Smart work is trial and error.  Smart work is raising your hand and going first.  Smart work is believing there will always be a next time.  Smart work is failing harder.

And that has to be taught.  So, Mr. Shirky – how are you, as an educator, a mentor, a leader in your field, going to teach your students how to achieve their own success?  And how can I help?

there is a lot in this world that is about what appears to be luck.  right place, right time – that sort of thing.  most of the time, though, it isn’t really about that at all.  it’s not a lightning strike, or a complete coincidence.  you meet people because you are somewhere where people can be met.  you get a job because you tell people you are interested in one.  you are presented with an opportunity because you are open to one.

what happens in the middle, the down time when things don’t seem to be happening, can be unknowable and therefore, often, scary.  we think things have stopped, dried up, disappeared. we think we’ve failed.

in those moments, all that is left to do is to ask yourself, what needs doing?

my father died almost two years ago.  you go along in your life thinking things are fine, or things suck, or things are boring, or things are fun, and then you are suddenly confronted with all kinds of terrible knowledge.  you know that someone you love might die, you know that there is very little you can actually do for them, and you know that you are not in charge.  you can run all over the place and busy yourself with all kinds of work and you will not be able to will the circumstances to change.  skill, insight, speed, technology, will be required to save the person you want to save – and those skills and insights will not come from you, that technology will not be something you can operate.

it is, let’s say, a challenge.

friends of mine who have recently had babies report a similar sense of things – that the rules are not for them to define, that what they want and what the baby wants may well be in conflict and that the baby has to win, that once that little being is developing inside their bodies, they have to give over some of the control, or go crazy fighting it.  i remember a dear friend, always so buttoned up and stressed out, look up at me, placid, calm, downright happy and tell me, grinning, “I’m not in charge!”  that realization was a huge relief to her – it freed her to think of something else: of trying a new recipe, or going home early, or putting her feet up and relaxing, or having people over to dinner, or sleeping in.  these were things we’d all wished she did more before the baby came, but now she knew: there was nothing left to do but relax, let events wash over her, trust that billions of babies had been born before hers came along and that billions more will come after – that this is the way of things, so she can relax.

sometimes, though, when we are faced with the biggest and toughest and most universal and significant of moments, we turn inward, thinking we have to handle it all ourselves.  it’s the wrong time to do that.  people are social animals, we need each other to survive.  asking for help is important – it’s a necessary life skill, something that separates the truly successful from lots of other people who roll themselves up a Sisyphean hill  and wonder why they never feel they got anywhere.

so in the meantime, what is it that needs doing?  you’ve talked to everyone you can think of, you’ve put some ideas out there, you’ve asked for help.  when you’ve done everything you can do, to paraphrase my torts professor, then you go sailing.

i’m sitting here in my bed, taking quiet time to read things and watch things and listen to things online.  i like to do this – i used to do it every day as a matter of course.  it’s waned over time as i’ve spent my energies elsewhere, and as the gap between the way i live and work today and the technology i have available to me temporarily widened.  when i had a job in a web shop and everything happened online and smart phones hadn’t happened quite yet, and WAP was still getting sorted out, I spent 6+ hours a day online in front of a desktop computer, and I knew what I knew about the internet because I spent a lot of time on it, just screwing around, and because there wasn’t quite that much of it yet.

but then my lifestyle changed – wireless networks and smartphones and all the rest of it started to develop, but like William Gibson said, they weren’t widely distributed.  if i was away from a computer, then i didn’t know whether anyone replied to my email, posted a comment to my website, etc. i convinced myself this was somehow liberating, but the truth was, i didn’t have a choice.

i busied myself with the things i could be doing on a plane to tokyo (eating, sleeping, watching a movie, writing out a few slides, cleaning out my inbox).  i purposely shut off caring about what was happening while i was leading brainstorming sessions or taking notes or interviewing people – i could not physically do those things and also be texting with friends and colleagues, replying to client emails, proofing a powerpoint deck, surfing, sharing, IMing, etc. so i buckled down and got good at interviewing people, managing testy clients.  i developed a whole set of skills that are what i now consider to be ‘backroom’ skills.  invisible skills, useful, profitable, specialized, but not the kinds of skills i want to spend most of my day using.

these skills did not draw me closer to the ideas and insights and skills that i wanted to develop.  they did teach me to miss those moments, however, the social, interactive, dynamic parts of my day that i fed on when i could be reliably close to a computer.

i started to crave more connection, more always-on time, because the best ideas come from making lateral connections, from making any connections, and when you’re shut off and behind a mirror in an office park, you are not making the kinds of connections that will propel you. at any rate, not at the speed and density that you could be making connections if you had the right tech.

okay, okay. my iPhone rocks. six hours on a plane no longer mean that I am disconnected for six hours – i’m getting instant messages and emails, i’m watching videos on youtube, i’m booking flights, hotel rooms, meetings, hair appointments, paying bills, buying tickets, sending pictures. because i do those things on the go, i can afford to sit here on a sunday afternoon, not get out of bed except to make lunch, and read articles and watch TED talks and sample music and write.

there is nothing to feel guilty about. i’ve been awake for 6 hours and in that time i’ve talked to friends, been entertained, caught up on some interesting news, written a bit, uploaded a video, and so on.

this ‘in between time’ – the period between opening yourself up and doing your leg work and then realizing the rewards of that work – is precious and terrifying.  what needs doing?  i should wash the dishes and pick up, take out the trash, and get money for my housekeeper.  i should put away my clothes and take a shower and go to my friend’s house to watch the super bowl. i’ll do them, i’ve got 2 more hours before i need to be anywhere.

and here my iPhone chimes to tell me about a new message, carrying news that a project has come through. they want my hourly rate, and for me to sign an NDA. voila. what seemed like down time, a lag, a frozen moment, was in fact just the time it takes for the processor to do its thing.  and despite my guilty self-admonitions to the contrary, what needed doing today was simply anything else.

I am lazy.  I do nothing, a lot of the time.  I once gave a 6 minute and 40 second talk on “Doing things: Why I don’t”.  I enumerated the reasons people don’t do things, and the things I don’t do.  I took the time to do that, and I’m taking the time to do that again here.

The old saw about success being 90% perspiration is true.  But some people are hard workers and never have a good idea; other people are full of ideas and have a hard time, as is the current term in fashion, ‘shipping.’  I fall somewhere in the middle – a flurry of focused activity and then a period of hibernation in which I feel, if not defeated, then certainly not successful.

But that’s okay.

As it turns out, there are lots of kinds of action, lots of ways to create.  My favorite example, amusingly – as I am an atheist who doesn’t even feel strongly about disbelief, is from the Bible (I prefer the translation of the Hebrew Bible, via Mechon Mamre).

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters.
3 And God said: ‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.

For the remainder of the chapter, God says a lot. He does not sculpt, or drill, or paint, or build.  God sees, God says, God names, God appreciates.  I’ve always been fascinated by this notion – that creation is an act of observing, inventing, editing, appreciation – and that its heart, it is a demonstration of the power of language.

We should be careful about what we say – the knock-on effects can be mind-blowing.

For example, in December, I walked along a beach in Miami and said to myself, “I can do all the things I want to do.”  That meant I had to think about what those things were, and start to give them some kind of form and life.  I made a list of things I wanted to do, and this made me think of the people I would want or need help from in order to do each thing.  That necessarily led to reaching out to those people, to simply saying, “I haven’t seen you in awhile, but I have an idea of a way we might work together, and I’d like to talk to you about it.”  That seemed to pique some people’s interests; most of them said, yes, let’s talk, soon, now, tomorrow.

Well, then, I couldn’t stop there, could I? I had to talk to these people, I had to sort out even a hazy point of view and I had to be open – I had to face them head on and admit what I don’t know yet and say it’s an experiment but I’ve done parts of it before and I know it works and the rest will be all the magic of transforming our hovering spirits into the makers of darkness and light, heaven and earth.  I felt energized, good.

But it was the end of the year, and that can be a real pause in the momentum of the universe.  People feel the need to just be quiet for a moment, to regroup, to recover, to renew. I packed too much into my end of year and wound up taking the first half of January to do all my renewing.  But yesterday I did not feel renewed.  Yesterday I felt tired, cold, like I wanted just to stay in bed all day.

I found out I’d screwed up paperwork and billing enough to have my COBRA drop me.  It’s not a big deal, I can get health insurance through my current employer – I’d just hoped not to.  I preferred the old way, but because I willfully turned away… yesterday my Free Will Astrology horoscope came across the transom:

One of the classic ways we deceive and hide from ourselves is by refusing to recognize the obvious, and shrouding what is right before us in rationalization and false complexity. We often delay and deny necessary transformation by claiming that there is a mysterious answer hidden from us, when actually we know the answers but pretend that we don’t. (Quoting Jonathan Zap)

I have done that in ways large and small for a very long time. And it always bites me in the ass.  So when I discovered that piece of information, “You have been dropped”, I went into a bit of a self-punishing spiral.

I sat there, on my couch, wondering why I was so irresponsible, so tired, so unmotivated, so lazy.  Why was I not doing something?  I took this as a sign, that I am trapped in this job now – can’t get out, need their insurance to survive.

But that’s not true. And it was, finally, this morning, looking out on the Manhattan skyline from my office window, that I realized that all that time spent “not doing” was actually an incubation period.  Things are hatching.  In fact, I just won a freelance project that will put me halfway on the path to my 6 month reserve fund, will require no travel, and no true expense for me.  It is thinking, creative, strategic work, and I’m excited for it to start.  I was asked to bid on an enormous project that if it came through would probably be enough for me to simply quit my job now, though that seems hasty.  And a potential colleague I spoke to in December emailed me about a strategy project he wants my help with; he wants to talk today.

You place objects in motion, and they tend to stay in motion, even when you are at rest.

It’s okay to rest, rest is necessary.  Sometimes, pausing is all you can do – better not to spend energy fretting and throwing yourself headfirst in every direction… You’re liable to pulverize.  Laziness is another matter.

I’ve said it before – Laziness is about fear.  It’s about being afraid of what might happen, or what might not happen, when you take action.  What if you are rejected? What if it isn’t good enough? What if someone else is already doing this? What if they’re doing it cheaper or faster? What if it’s not a good idea? That voice is not an angel, it’s a devil – a hobgoblin trying to stop you from wishing and hoping and doing and trying. It’s very hard not to feel defeated.  Add in a proclivity to attention deficit disorder and anxiety and mild depression and you’re in real trouble, believe you me.

So what does it take to get out of the laziness – which is really The Fear? God lays it out for you in Genesis.

• See the opportunity.
• Do something.
• Edit what you’ve done.
• Refine and name it.
• Appreciate your work.
• Repeat.

I called someone who works for me cynical yesterday.  But then, listening to myself, and the way I talk about clients and colleagues (who are really internal clients), I acknowledged that I sound pretty cynical, too.  Where I would draw the line between myself and the guy who reports to me is that he has not earned the right to be cynical about our clients – he does not have the experience to know this disappointment… but I do.

Oh, woe is me.  Yesterday I posted something somewhere via ideasareawesome – there are a few bullets that stand out to me as the most important to what I want to say here (and yes, I realize that I’m not getting to the point very quickly):

• Great clients lead to more great clients (and more great work).
• Bad clients lead to more bad clients (and more bad work).
• Bad clients take up more of your time than they should.
• Meanwhile, we take great clients for granted.
• The trick is to reverse this.

These things are true, I know they are true, I protested in favor of their truth for several years.  But now I am in a job – I chose to be in it – where these things are still true, but where I have lost the… will? ability? clout? opportunity? to effect the full-throated advocacy for the great client.  And I realized why that is:  I am behind a firewall.

Wikipedia’s definition of a firewall is illuminating: A firewall is a part of a computer system or network that is designed to block unauthorized access while permitting authorized communications.

I’ve been behind firewalls before, when I was fairly new to the businesses I’ve been in. But the firewall was lifted, or at least significantly loosened, very soon after I joined because I earned the right to flexibility in outbound communications, and the trust that I would handle appropriately inbound communications.

In my last job, as a partner in the company, there was no true firewall at all – and when it looked like one was a-comin’ I left.

This company is made up of a maze of firewalls. Information is transmitted unidirectionally, often through multiple layers, and is frequently encrypted.  Information is also time-limited – what is true today may not be true tomorrow.  And information is controlled – you don’t always know what you don’t know.

This is very difficult to accept for me – and may be one of the chief reasons I decided that enough was enough and that it was time for me to move on.  I have always believed that true power within any organization is best earned through the distribution of knowledge, not through the hoarding of data.  Which probably makes me a teacher and not a leader in the traditional sense. I dunno.

…

So I was out last night on a ‘drinks thing’ with a fairly interesting guy that I’m not interested in, if you get my drift.  And I was describing my disaffection with the job I have now. I described my boredom, my lack of a defined role, my long stretches of hours in which there is simply nothing for me to do. He called that the ‘perfect job’ because you can spend all those hours figuring out what you would really rather be doing and incubate a whole business out of it.

I don’t disagree. But there is going to come a moment when I will have to make a choice – that moment may come sooner than planned. And then the ‘perfect job’ – in which I can do what I’m doing now and procrastinate my appearance at the office to blog about my disaffection will have to be sacrificed for actually, you know, doing stuff.

Oh – I was going to tell you why I haven’t blogged regularly as promised.  I suspect that I punish myself for not doing what I think I ought to do by withholding writing from my life. That literally just occurred to me (mark the date and time! an epiphany!).  I didn’t make much progress towards my goal last week, and I didn’t follow up with the people I said I would, and I went out and got myself one really spectacular hangover. I think, somewhere, deep down, I felt I didn’t deserve this plan, or this practice of writing about the process of planning. I felt like I was wasting time. I often feel like I’m wasting time – that I am doing things instead of other things I’d rather be doing, that I’m constantly tuning the piano but never playing.

What is the secret to overcoming all this angst and ennui we pile on ourselves because we spend a lot of time working for someone else’s so-so idea, when we have a decent one ourselves? I’m not sure but I suspect it involves a little of the following – yes, I always try to leave it on an ‘up’ note:

• My Buddhist therapist calls it ‘self-love’ – taking care of yourself first, not punishing yourself, not descending down a path of sweeping negative judgments because that way lies depression.  Get 8 hours of sleep (HT Arianna Huffington), eat food you cooked, stretch your body and move it around, go outside. In response to my bad hangover, after a good chat with my therapist, I went down to ABC Carpet & Home and bought myself a meditation pillow.  I’ll be honest – I haven’t used it yet; but it is a reminder to me to slow down and breathe.
• Give yourself some credit. I am here putting off the perceived hassle of walking three blocks to the subway, waiting for the train, sitting or standing on the train for 20 minutes, and then walking three more blocks. I know that I have no tasks to perform today, no ‘thing’ I need to be doing. My job is to, frankly, wait, advise, respond, execute. I feel guilty for not doing anything.  But one of my dear friends just admonished me, “oh puleeze! call it a makeup day for all those saturdays you had to do whateverthefuck. no guilt. it’s not like you’ve never done anything.” She’s right. I do plenty. I’m ready for sprints and marathons whenever someone is ready to pull the trigger on the starter pistol. I can take however many days of not doing much are required before I have to do everything. And I can use that time productively.
• Set specific appointments with specific goals attached to them.  I’m reading Natalie Goldberg’s book Thunder and Lightning, and she recommends setting aside time to write with specificity.  I will go to this place at this time and do this kind of writing for 30 minutes, or 20 pages, or whatever. Put it in your date book or your iPhone/Blackberry/Droid. Set a reminder. Show the time as busy. You have to go – it’s an appointment. I am helped by having someone else to be accountable to – I meet with someone to talk it over, or I set time to call them to talk it over. She talks about making the promise to herself, “But Nat, you said you’d write today…” Do what works.
• One of the best and completely sua sponte things I ever did was during my trip to Miami – I set time in a different way, and assigned that time a task I didn’t usually think of as a task.  Time was calculated as, “walking from my hotel to the end of the jetty and back.”  The task was, “think about what Charlotte and I could do together. Crack the problem.” I still think that the idea I had was pretty brilliant, and the walk along that beach, with my feet in warm Atlantic water, spectacular storm clouds mounting overhead, was one of the most productive ‘ideation’ sessions I’ve ever experienced.  All I really did was assign myself a problem and a deadline.

And you see, I think that’s what I’m seeking, a “perfect job” that isn’t about simulating and perfecting a process, but about solving problems in the best way you can think of, about releasing yourself from formalized and often quite useless places and structures and firewalls, and using your whole brain and heart to solve the problem.  When I made the list of the things I’ve done, the hats I’ve worn, I realized that I am a generalist, and not in the sense, as my companion last night so artfully put it, of the ‘strategist’ – but of the Thinker Who Does.

So I’ve got all day – what shall I do first?

I would start by telling you about all the apathy and fear of the last week, but I think this says it so much better.

And if you do not now read Bobulate, you must.  I think I found it through Noah Brier, and it has quickly become something I actively look forward to reading.  Which is rare.

More later.

When you’ve got a full time job, as I do – in fact  full time job that runs about 12 hours a day – it’s hard to focus on the more important task.  Worse, once you’ve decided you want to go solo, you might find you have a hard time investing in the work that’s providing your salary at the moment.  It’s a little scary, really, to realize that my head is already halfway down the way, enjoying the freedom and excitement of the new world I’m opening up, while my body is sitting in front of a computer, writing reports on the same old things – in the same old ways.

I spent the better part of the afternoon developing a spreadsheet that would calculate pricing on the projects we do.  The company I work for doesn’t quite grok the world I’ve been living in for a long time, so I have to do this math for them, and think of nearly every contingency.  I’ve finished the spreadsheet and sent it to my favorite client service person for feedback, but already I know how incomplete it is – and how fuzzy it is.  I locked loads of cells, but know that many of them are still malleable, still up for interpretation.  And I know that this spreadsheet wouldn’t even begin to address the intricacies of an international project.

BUT.  We have one.  And it actually makes a great deal more sense than anything else like it I’ve seen.  I’m exhausted from clicking on cells and writing =IF(B9=”Blahdyblah”,1000… but now we know what blahdyblah is worth.

How to stay focused?  Or rather, how to be focused in two places at once?  I’m going to have to solve for it if I want to have the future I’m excited about – the future of doing all of it.  I’m beginning to develop some strategies.

• Distinct workspaces.  I have a home office – from here on, it’s only for my personal endeavors.  It’s not where I bring work home – I have a perfectly good couch and dining room table for that.  If I think of them as two offices, I can kind of think of them as two jobs.  When the first workday is over, I can come in here, as I am right now, look out my window at the houselights on the street, hear the sounding of the cruise ships or barges or whatever are coming in by Red Hook, and do what I’m doing right now.
• Clear, manageable objectives. I got this one from my therapist.  I’m sure she got it from Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or something, but I think it works.  Each Sunday night, I sit down and make a to-do list that covers the roles I play, the priorities I have.  I keep the to-do list to 2-3 concrete things I can do, and I give myself a deadline for doing them.  Not so much a deadline, really, as a dateline – the day I shall do this thing.  I have these tiny lists covering several territories: SVP WorkCorp., Entrepreneur, Apartment Renter, Friend, Body, Daughter, Sister, Potential Girlfriend.  These micro-lists help me focus on what is important, and not just urgent.
• Keep Track! There’s a lot more going on now that I’ve started exploring the possibilities.  I have a much more robust date book; I have personal emails that are no longer just forwards of funny pictures of kittens, or jokes I’ve heard a thousand times.  I have real emails coming to my personal inbox that require action. I have people I was supposed to call last week (ack!) that I need to apologize to and reschedule.  So for now, I’m trying to keep two daily to-do lists.  One is for me at work – the usual place, the usual notebook, the usual Outlook calendar.  And the other is on my iPhone. Oh, iPhone.  I add activities as dates in iCal with reminder bells.  If I take a phone call about my entrepreneurial project, I jot it down next to the computer in the home office, right where I can see it.  If I get a call during the day about my entrepreneurial project, but am at the office office, I let it go to voice mail so I have a record.  None of these are perfect solutions – the trouble is you have to keep these worlds separate, but you can’t lose track of either one.

Actually, I want to digress for a moment on this one – I once worked for a woman who lived part time in LA and part time in San Francisco – she had her job in LA and her husband in SF… She worried she would lose track of herself, so she did a funny thing:  she leased a car in LA that was the same make and model of the car she had in SF, only in a different color.  It helped her feel comfortable in her new part-time city, but also helped her remember where the hell she was.

I’m trying something similar – two notebooks – one is a red spiral lined notebook that stays by my computer at the Office; and the other is a leather red unlined notebook that stays on my person.  Always in my purse, in my pocket, nearby – and it’s where I keep the micro-list, right next to my iPhone.

This is hard, folks.  It’s even harder when you’re trying to detox from the holidays and drink less caffeine, and when it’s so cold out you don’t get to the gym.  But I’m going to take 20 minutes right now to respond to some emails, make some lunch or drinks dates, and then I’ll make dinner, do some Office reading, and go to bed at a reasonable hour.  It’s going to be a sprint that feels like a marathon tomorrow.

I’m working from home today – I have that luxury.  I’m reading through all the materials to write my report, and I’m handling the admin details that an admin should be hired to do.  I’m looking at the emails and reading the subtext of what my colleagues are saying to me, about me – no, not about me, about the work they think I do.  I’ve always invented my role, at every company I’ve worked in. I’ve always been described as entrepreneurial because of that; at my last job my boss would joke that I was running my own business at my desk – in many ways that was true.  I managed $1-1.5million per year in business for that company.  I made less than 10% of that for most of the time I worked there.  It wasn’t ideal, but at least they understood what I did.  This company, for all it’s ‘go-get-’em’ spirit, and refreshing candor, and California-style positive-ness, doesn’t quite get what my role is – so for each person I work with, it has taken on a slightly different permutation.  I have to think a little bit about whether I want to establish myself more clearly in the role, or whether I’d rather go with the flow.

At the end of November I would have simply sighed and said, “I’ll go with the flow. Why bother fighting?” But it’s 2010 now, and the whole point of this is to give up less.  Besides, if I’m going to do right by the people I bring into this organization to run it after I leave, then I should make sure there’s a framework for them to enter.  It’s only right.

I’m thankful that a lot of people are out today, and that they know my plate is full with this report (even if I am taking this 10 minutes to upload a post about it all).  It gives me an extra moment to decompress and really focus on what the role ought to be – as far as I can know it.  The truth is that the CEO can at any time make her declaration about the role and there it is.  I am constantly reminded of the line about Ginger Rogers, dancing backwards and in high heels – I think that’s not just the role of women, it’s the role of being very senior within an organization, but ultimately powerless.  Still, she points in the direction she wants to go and I have to figure out how to get there; while I don’t want to do that for much longer, I should still find ways to make it interesting, and more importantly, successful.

I realize I’m being vague about my current role.  The world of public & private has certainly blurred, but it’s no good to anyone if the entire world knows my plan just yet.  I’m sure you understand.

It’s perhaps the riskiest part of deciding to go out on your own – you need the cushion of the job you have now until you can afford to take the leap.  They say six months expenses is what you need to be safe; some say six months income.  So how does someone go about getting six months expenses socked away?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot, and here’s what I’m going to try – see if something like it works for you:

• Draw up your budget – include all the things you know you have to have:  rent, utilities, mobile phone, internet access, prescription co-pays, student loan payments, etc.  What can you live without?  Cancel it.  For example, I’m canceling Verizon and getting Skype – I can have a phone without the phone company.  A year ago I canceled cable, but kept the cable modem – now I get my TV over the air (I’m pretty thankful for that digital changeover – network TV never looked so good!) or via Hulu.com, AppleTV, or Netflix. That’s about $150 less each month that I’m spending – Skype service for the year cost me about $30.
• Ask yourself – what will change when you go out on your own?  You’ll have to get your own health insurance, pay your own taxes.  How will that impact your monthly expenses?  I’m starting to do some research – in New York, we have the Freelancer’s Union, and the Healthy New York website (even if you don’t qualify for HealthyNY, they’ll link you to individual insurance rate comparisons).  Each state is different though, so do a search for ‘individual health insurance rates’ plus your state and see what you find.  If you have someone who prepares your taxes for you, consider getting them to advise you on how to manage your own withholding; otherwise, check out the IRS’s website.  I was audited once for a year I freelanced and filed incorrectly – it was actually incredibly painless and my IRS agent was a very kind, professional man.  Don’t be afraid of them – they’re just doing their job.
• Now be realistic – you’re not going to become a monk for the next several months, you’ll want to order in on a night when you’re too tired to cook, you’ll want to enjoy a movie every once in awhile.  And besides, you’ll need a little money set aside for schmoozing – taking your contacts to lunch or a drink or dinner.  I’m setting aside some cash each week for something fun – that something fun could also be with one of my contacts… who says you can’t mix business with pleasure?
• Make sure there’s one thing in there that is an investment in the future you’ve started to design for yourself and is an outlet that is just for you – maybe it’s your gym membership if getting in shape is part of the image of the New You; maybe it’s a class that will teach you a skill you think you’ll need.  I just registered for a writing class – I used to be a copywriter and gave it up for being a strategist… but my true love is creativity.  Even if I don’t write the great American novel, I’ll learn some useful skills for the work I really do want to do.  And I’m keeping my gym membership – if I get there 3 times a week that’s 3 more hours of “Me Time” than I’ve got in years… and it might just take off some of the stress-induced, sitting on your arse fat I’ve packed on.  Plus – and I don’t know about you – but I’m more alert, faster thinking, and buttoned-up when I’m getting some regular cardio.
• Everything else gets put into savings.  Now add that up – if you put aside that much money each month, how much will you have in 6 months, 9 months, a year?  I’ve set an aggressive timetable for myself – June 30, 2010 – so I will have to take on some side projects to get where I want to go.  I’m helped in an odd way:  I went from a twice-monthly pay cycle to an ‘every-two-weeks’ cycle.  Some months I’ll effectively have an extra paycheck.  That paycheck will simply get socked away.
• I should make a note here about credit card debt.  I’ve had too much for too long; but last year during my brief period as a contractor I used that money to pay off my credit cards – and my mother’s.  It meant I wouldn’t have to pay her bills anymore, and it took about $300 a month out of my outgoings.  Really took a load off for me.  I suspect you’re better off (and I’d guess Suze Orman would agree!) paying off the credit cards aggressively and then saving.  Even if when you hit your date you don’t have much money in the bank but do have loads of contacts lined up and no liabilities – you’re in pretty terrific shape to take the plunge.

But it’s not just about having the money to spend – it’s about having the space you need, both in your head, and in your house.  Your home is going to be the headquarters of your new enterprise – at least while you wind down your current job and set yourself up to make the change.  There’s a kind of budget for your intellectual energies that you’ll need, too.

As a kid I used to leave things all over the floor and I told my mother that if I kept a layer of clothes and toys everywhere that the monsters under the floor wouldn’t be able to get me.  Sometimes I let things get out of control with clutter – I think I’m putting down that protective layer again, keeping the monsters at bay.  But this time, the monster is me, my goals, my uncertainty, what I hope will happen and what I fear won’t.  In the end, the protective layer just gets in the way of the real thing.  Going solo is about taking the full risk, seeing the possibilities and pit falls and meeting them all head-on.  You can’t do that when you’re surrounded by a layer of clutter – at least, I can’t.  When there’s stuff to be put away or fussed over, then you can always do that instead of the work you need to do to get on with your life.

• Streamline – take a look around you.  What do you really need?  What motivates you, energizes you, makes you feel good and hopeful?  Keep that stuff.  Everything that makes you feel burdened, messy, tired, less than – toss it out or give it away.  I’m about to edit my closet – stuff I haven’t worn in more than 6 months? Out.  Stuff I feel frumpy in or doesn’t fit me well? Out.  Good clothes can be tailored later – no need for fat jeans and skinny jeans.  What I don’t need can go to Housing Works. The bag of ancient but functional cell phones can go to a participant in Cell Phones for Life.
• Spruce things up.  Keep your house in physical order.  Get the buttons on that coat reinforced or sewn back on. Have your shoes resoled. Give the place a good cleaning. My indulgence is a housekeeper – it’s fairly inexpensive to have one in NYC, and I only need her every two weeks.  The money I spend is worth it to me – I get the time back to spend on building my business or improving my quality of life, and she gets to make a living.  I consider this a more than fair trade.

Alright – that’s enough from me today.  Time to get some work done – in every sense of the word.

It’s January 1, 2010.  I have a hangover.

It’s not just a champagne and oysters hangover, though that isn’t helping.  It’s a 2009 hangover.  I’ve been awake for less than two hours and have spent these two hours bitching about all the things that caused me to leave my last job and join the new company, about all the things that are frustrating me about the new company, and about how I’m not doing what I really want to do because I’m doing something else.

The hardest thing about making this change in my life is that I’m going to have to change so much of my life!

I’m going to have to let go of all the things these other companies have done that I didn’t like, made me feel stupid or held back or incompetent.  I’m going to have to let go of all the personalities that didn’t mesh well with mine.  I’m going to have to let go of the Way Things Were Done.  Especially when these things are all related to activities and work that I don’t even want to do anymore.  And that, come July 1, I won’t be doing anymore.  By that day, all these complaints will be so far away, so distant in the rear view mirror, that I won’t be able to see them anymore – and I hope, I won’t be able to conjure them up so easily.

I think of a lot of us choose paths of less resistance – this work is hard, or I have to prove myself, or it’s competitive, and so I choose something adjacent to that work that is easier or less pressure.  But there is always pressure.  When you choose to do work that isn’t what you really want to be doing, or what you really should be doing, you create a whole new class of problems.  I am constantly trying to understand why the people I work with don’t see the world the way I do.  And it’s simple really – they want to be in this business, and I don’t.  They identify with this business and I don’t.  This business is good enough for them, and it’s not for me.

It’s not the business’s fault, nor is it my colleagues.  It’s mine.

The thing I have to change, is me.

Last night I got upset about how New Year’s Eve was developing.  My friends wanted to go to their local, when I felt the party was just getting started at the hotel party we’d come to.  I was tired, I hadn’t had enough to eat during the day, I was hungover from the night before – I was in the wrong headspace to be out.  I wanted to stay, get my second wind, see what happened in a beautiful hotel lounge, with all sorts of people I didn’t usually meet – but instead of simply saying, you go on ahead, I’ll stay here, I let myself be discouraged and let down, and the whole thing disintegrated from there.  I gave up.

When you’re constantly doing something instead of what you’d rather be doing, what you’re really doing is giving up.  I spent most of the last decade giving up.  But not all of it.

So the thing we have to do if we’re going to go out on our own – to really do what we’re passionate about and that is ours – is simple , and therefore very hard.

1. Look forward, not back.  Think about what you want to do, not what you usually do.  Talk about what will make you happy, don’t rehash what has made you miserable.
2. Be a little selfish.  Do what will make you happy.  No judging what makes others happy, but no acceptance of crazymaking – doing what others like to do that you don’t.
3. Be active, not passive.  My sophomore year in high school, my English teacher, Mr. Morton said, “Act or be acted upon.”
4. He also said, “You only have to do two things in life: make choices and die.”  Make choices.
5. Stay focused.  When you hear yourself saying, “and another thing!” you’ve let yourself go down the rabbit hole.  Eyes on the prize, everyone.

And have a Happy New Year!

I was talking to a friend the other day.  I told her about my new job, the one where I am, nominally at least, in charge of developing a whole new practice within an established and growing company.  She was curious.

“How many people work there?”

“240, 250, maybe.”

“Oh, wow. That is so many.”

I laughed.

“Really, it’s just I have been independent so long, that is all I know.  All independents, people who don’t even put on shoes to go to work.  We just live in California, and wear very expensive things and very cheap things, and we are very selfish, and very happy.”

I stopped laughing.

I live in New York.  I like shoes.  I have a collection of them.  But there were words missing from my life: independent, selfish, happy.  My world revolves around a dozen stars, making for a crazy-making orbit of loop-de-loops and figure-8s.  I have a technical boss, an actual boss, and a dozen constantly changing mini-bosses depending on the project I work on.  And then I have clients.  I am not the boss of me.  Even my housekeeper has to chase me down to book appointments.  If it’s something that will be for my benefit or enjoyment, it is always crammed in to an already overloaded schedule, and only adds to the crazy.

My role is defined by all these bosses.  I have limited influence, few privileges, and loads of responsibility.  And in that company of 240, 250 maybe, I am one of three who do this work.  I am also the only one of those three who have ever done this work before.  In essence, I am disproving Donne everyday – this man is an island, but it isn’t bloody Ibiza.

So okay, that’s not their fault.  That’s mine.  I chose to stay on this path – this path of constantly moving away from the roles and responsibilities and tasks that I really enjoy so I can keep moving upward.  But “up” is a poor target – up where? Up with whom?

When my friend said she was happy – and her Facebook photos of herself, her husband, her two kids, on beaches, on boats, on vacation say she is – I took sudden stock of my life.  It was very visual – a solid image in my mind.  Me, at a desk, frustrated and slowly packing on stress-related inches.

I can change this, I thought.  I can be something else.

So I did something on the spur of the moment – I went to Miami, to see Art Basel.  I walked along the beach, my feet in warm sea water in December, and I thought – what do I really want to do?

There were so many things I wanted to do:

• Write a blog about brands that could be a testing ground for chapters in a book.
• Start a strategic consultancy with a focus on creativity and content.
• Develop a model for strategic planning in the entertainment business.
• Invent social network-based games that encourage people to share certain kinds of information with the cloud that can be mined and sold.
• Write a TV script.

These were a few. There are others, and there are permutations of these.  If I focus on one, I will miss the others and ultimately lose interest in the one. My brain likes lots of things to do, lots of problems to solve. And in the end, these problems are all of a piece – I’m interested in how people make decisions and prioritize, and in using that insight to make things.

So this is the list of things I’d like to do – but I’ve already skipped ahead.  Let’s get some clarity about what all this is about.

The Goal: Quit my job and be working as an independent by June 30, 2010.

In this blog, I am going to chronicle each day the steps I take to get to that goal.  Six full months is both an eternity and a fleeting moment.  This is my personal journal, chronicling the steps I’ll take to get from here (working at a desk in a job that is only marginally less soul sucking than my last one) to there (kicking back in my home office, shoes off, doing what I love).

Let’s begin.

The first step was deceptively simple:  It suddenly occurred to me that it was possible.  Once I realized it could be done, I thought – ‘possible’ very quickly turns into ‘too easy’.  When it gets to be too easy, I get distracted, begin to think it’s not worthwhile.

So the second step was deceptively complex:  In order to make it happen, I needed to set a timeline short enough to inspire a healthy dose of panic, but long enough to realistically set aside what one of my friends calls, “Fuck you money” and to hire my replacement at my current job.  Oh, and I decided not to focus on one of the things in my list – I decided instead to focus on all of them.

The next step was to make a list of all the things I’d ever done in my strange little career:

• Designed website navigation systems and wireframes
• Developed and produced a web-based video game for a TV show
• Wrote copy for websites, circulars, brochures, and ads
• Researched and developed the game play for a skydiving video game
• Written creative briefs
• Ideated and developed strategic guidelines for new products, content, ad campaigns, and events for clients spanning software companies, television shows and networks, sporting events, logistics companies, spirits, and consumer packaged goods
• Sat in the writers rooms for two soap operas and helped them develop new modes of storytelling
• Advised a national sporting association on how to position the sport to new fans, as well as how to lay out its Hall of Fame
• Designed and implemented systems for worldwide adaptation and simultaneous launch of advertising campaigns
• Taught people how to think and how to write
• Published a small, non-profit magazine
• Hosted a small, non-profit radio program

There’s more to that list, but it was a good start – it reminded me that I actually have done very interesting things.  Things that go beyond project management and constantly rehashing process and deadlines.  Things, in other words, that do not make up even 20% of my day anymore.  I looked at these things and resolved to do them again.

The final step was another list – and this list was just as revealing.  I wrote down the names of everyone I know who is, in some way, an entrepreneur.

• The owner of the small digital creative boutique
• The owner of the small creative content boutique
• The founder of the photo-sharing and storing start-up
• The founder of the digital advertising agency
• The founder of concert and video production company
• The founder of the video and film production company
• The owner of a small strategic consulting company
• The founder of a data-mining consultancy
• The founder of a marketing and ratings analytics consultancy

And so on. Suddenly I realized that a great many of my friends – the people I’d known the longest and the best – were all doing what I wanted to do: working for themselves, doing what interests them, and making a damn good living at it.  I had the resources – the mentors and advisors – I needed all along.

So I took the fifth step:  I called or emailed all of them to set up appointments – times when we could talk about what they were doing, how they go to this point, what advice they would offer, what things I hadn’t thought about that I should.  Those snippets of advice will be on this blog.  There’s no sense in keeping them secret.

To recap – the path to my emancipation has begun.  I started with 5 simple steps.

1. Realize it’s possible
2. Set aggressive goals
3. Make a list of what you would rather be doing
4. Make a list of people you can turn to for advice, encouragement, and connections
5. Don’t be bashful – call them up or send them an email and ask for their advice.  Better yet, reignite your friendship with them

I strongly suspect that what I’ll need most are sympathetic friends.  And to get friendship you have to give it! Besides, it’s no chore to genuinely reach out to and spend time with the people you like and respect the most – it’s a pleasure. That’s the whole point isn’t it?  To be doing what moves me, with people I enjoy and respect, to make work fun.  And now I have my trajectory – the direction and distance and general idea of the arc this story will follow.  5 easy steps, lads and lassies.  Set yourself free.