Mobile professionals are not the only ones who have discovered the usefulness of the smartphone. More and more public leaders are busting out Blackberrys and iPhones when they are out and about. At my recent talk at the National League of Cities conference, there were throngs of mayors and other elected officials staying connected at the back of every room.
After about a year of getting the wheels turning slowly with their new operating system for mobile telephones, it looks like Google’s Android system is about to hit it big, big time. More phones than you can shake a stick at are set to drop over the next few weeks and months. I’ve been using the new flagship, the Motorola Droid on Verizon, since the day it emerged. I really put it through its paces.
Overall, Google, Verizon, and Motorola have hit it out of the park with this phone. My only downchecks are the D-pad (I want a little trackball) and battery life (better than the G1, but still could be improved).
When I was about eleven, I learned how to make my favorite cheese sandwich: white bread, mayonnaise, American cheese. Yes, I grew up in the midwest. Shortly after I learned this special skill, I developed a fun game to pass the time: I would play “restaurant.”
More precisely, I would play short order cook. I would pretend I was a cook at a diner, with lots of orders coming in. Only thing was, everyone ordered the one thing I could make — an American cheese sandwich. So I would make sandwich after sandwich, as fast as I could, pretending I was a cook deep in the weeds during a big rush.
I got to thinking about this the other day as I reflected on my own career arc, current strategy, and future plans. I wondered, “Am I playing ‘restaurant?’”
Treading Water
A lot of my friends are solopreneurs — lone people plying their trade on a project-by-project basis. I have been working independently since 2003, and proudly so. But sometimes, I see other friends who are happily ensconced in organizations, managing, meeting, memo-ing. Then I look at my own workstyle, in which I write from about 6:30 am until 10:30 am, have a stretch of less productive time, and then come back hard from about 2:00 pm on. Sometimes I go deep into the night.
The things that rarely occupy this time are the things that routinely occupy my office-working friends’ lives. I have few meetings, the phone rarely rings (almost everything is email, txt, Twitter, and IM). There is zero office politics. The way things are right now, I can get a ton of stuff done. It leaves room for lots of possibilities.
But, sometimes, I worry. Should I be doing more? Am I just going through the motions of “working?” Am I treading water? Am I pretending?
I think these kinds of questions are ones that other solopreneurs also face. Twitter has given many of us a window into some water cooler cultures that we are not part of. I see lots of my friends “going into meetings,” or “having conversation with the boss,” and “talking to HR.” If I don’t do these things, am I just, in the end, making a bunch of cheese sandwiches and pretending I am the real deal?
Having Direction
I think the key lies in whether I have a direction or not. What’s my path? Having few in-the-flesh coworkers means I can get a lot of strategizing done. It also means I can succumb to one of two temptations. I can not write down any of my plans, in which case they are just dreams. Or, I can spend so much time on my planning, developing fancy slide decks for no one but myself, that I can fool myslef into thinking I am already GE. There’s a happy medium to be struck.
But I need to have plans, a direction. And they need to be written down. Otherwise it’s just cheese sandwiches.
Sometimes this planning can raise self doubts about how far I have come, or not come, but that’s OK. As solopreneurs, we are still writing the rules and for now — we are where we are.
Maybe you can tell I’ve been thinking about my own direction these days. There are some exciting things in store. But I always need to remind myself to keep it real. Don’t pretend I’m bigger than I am.
Nor should I pretend I’m smaller than I am: Maybe, I will look down and notice that those aren’t cheese sandiwches I’m making, but whole meals. A sub. A steak. Mashed potatoes.
The hand wringing, eyebrow-raising, and joke-making over Mark Sanford’s trip to Argentina is beginning to run its course. Having read the emails between him and the Other Woman, it’s hard to mark this one down as just venal corruption and hypocrisy. The whole episode clearly filled Sanford and his love with anguish — moral anguish. He knew he was doing wrong, yet His trip South was an effort to make sense of the wreck his life was becoming.
My friend Rich Harwood posted in his Twitter account (you should follow him: @RichHarwood) this comment: SC Gov. Sanford fiasco raises basic Q for all of us: How do you leave time for yourself so you don’t feel overwhelemd, at loose ends?
Indeed, that is the question. Sanford cracked — and his life broke open.
The episode reminded me of a piece I wrote a bit ago about a Missouri lawyer named David Masters, who cracked under the pressure of what seemed his perfect life. Re-reading the piece, I thought you might like to read it too, as it is a gripping story and also raises some important questions. Here’s how it starts:
David Masters (source unknown)
Strapped to a chair in a small, grey house on the edge of a Missouri town, 52-year-old David Masters begged for his life to end by lethal injection instead of by gunshot. His three captors, angered that he was three weeks tardy with rent and that he’d made unwanted advances on one of them, obliged by injecting him repeatedly with cocaine. The next day, his body was found near an Ozark river. Another toll taken by the culture of addiction.
David Masters had been a lawyer. Hearing that, we imagine him in a small, cheap storefront office near city hall, a bottle hidden in the desk and no receptionist. Maybe an ambulance chaser. A lost soul hanging on to whatever profession he’d once had.
Here is what David Masters once had. Seven children. A wife. The best home in his Missouri town, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A reputation for hard work and scrupulous integrity. Proteges, who have since succeeded. The favor and support of the governor, who had appointed him county prosecutor in 1990 and which office he held until 1998.
David Masters had been a shining success. People marveled at how hard he worked, putting in full-time hours on a part-time job while still keeping his private practice. It appears his life unraveled shortly after he was unseated from his prosecutor’s slot in 1998. Under what seems to have been a crushing amount of personal and professional overhead, he ran out of money and options. Then, he plain ran out, moving without telling anyone, including 65 clients, where he was going. His law license was suspended. In the court documents, he at one point listed himself as “homeless.” That might well have been better than where he was, living in that small grey house with a killing drug dealer for a housemate.
I had a fascinating conversation with a young person and it gave me a new insight into how different people use social media.
Like a lot of young people, her Facebook stream has its fair share of adults mixed in. There’s her parents, and some of her parents’ friends, and other relatives.All jumbled up.
She was complaining (in a good-natured way) about the adults. “They’re always posting such serious stuff,” she said. “They sound like essay questions. Who cares what you think about some issue?”
I asked her what kinds of updates and links her and her friends were into. What were some of the recent updates?
Billy!! [Mays]
I’m at the mall. TXT me
[The name of a friend] <3
(The last emoticon is a heart, in case you couldn’t see it.)
What some might turn up their nose at as “trivia” – but in fact the social currency of a certain peer group.
"Wear your Twitter badge with pride" by Flickr user jmilles
Meanwhile, here’s the kind of stuff in my stream:
Listening to a report on Honduras.
My fourth grader just had an amazing end-of-year beach party.
Monday back at work after two weeks off.
Yeah, I guess that’s pretty dry.
Turns out there’s a deeper divide than some might expect. I used to have the feeling that people under, say, 25 found a lot of what the older set talk about to be sort of benignly boring. Little did I sense that, for some, it’s a misuse of the social medium. How dare we use it in such boring sand dull ways?
That got me thinking. I’m a bit of a social media evangelist, and as I talk to my peers about how they might use it, I often get skepticism. “Isn’t all this Facebook and Twitter just a bunch of fluff?” they’ll ask me. “Who cares whether I’m at the mall, or whether I’m happy or not?”
Meanwhile, younger folks are saying the same thing about these so-called “serious” issues.
I rescanned our respective Facebook streams, and saw that if you really looked, the divide is pretty stark. There’s one stream that’s all issues and links to thoughtful thinkers. There’s another that’s all light-seeming social interaction. Two very different worlds, coexisting in the same space.
I am frankly not sure what to make of its implications. I can think of a few things:
The fear that “it’s all trivia” from people resistant to using social media is baseless. Different groups of people are saying things with differing seriousness.
The “trivia” is an important way that some people interact, and to dismiss it as meaningless is irresponsible.
There’s room in a good social media platform for many different uses. That has implications for people building new communities: they need to be welcoming to different kinds of uses.
Everyone has a need to share trivia. Even people in the “serious” stream share meaningless comments about things they are planning on buying or where they live.
What “camp” are you in? More important, what other camps can you think of?
Just in time, too! Most years I spend New Year’s Day writing out my goals for the coming year. This year, for some reason, I did not do that and I have been hankering to get to it. However, I have felt for some time now that my efforts in this regard have been too clever and cerebral — I would create these interlocking systems that, come April, were unworkable.
But my friend pointed me to Cindy Ronzoni’s “vision board” idea. This is really just a posterboard with a bunch of photos or drawings on it, a lot like the collages my daughter often makes. The images are meant to evoke things you want to do in the coming year.
This is obviously not rocket science, but it’s a useful way of looking at the task. Even more useful, though, is a set of questions to ask myself in order to generate the vision board.
Here they are:
Where would you like to vacation this year?
What inspires you?
What would you like to learn this year?
If you want to change jobs this year, where would you like to work?
What are some of your passions?
What have you always wanted to do?
Who inspires you?
What “words” reflect who you are?
Do you want to exercise more or change your diet?
What goals do you have for work?
What financial goals do you have?
Do you want to volunteer and if so where?
What colors depict you or designs?
What kind of relationships would you like?
Is there an item you’d like to buy yourself?
Are there any fears that you would like to overcome?
Any groups you want to join?
Any events to attend this year?
I love these, because they are so concrete and not airy-fairy.
The other night, a close friend was ill. The next day, recovered, we discussed an interesting thought that kept going through their mind. Every few moments, with some change in symptoms or worsening of feeling, they felt compelled to describe it to themselves in the lingo of a status update: “X is lying in bed,” “X is hoping to get better.” They were too ill to run to the computer, but still, the thought was there.
Most readers of this blog will know that a status update is a brief (one sentence or so) description of what you are up to, how you are doing, or what’s going on. In Facebook, the status update is one of the main ways that people interact, posting sometimes trivial, other times significant dispatches from their daily lives.
One way to look at this anecdote is with a certain amount of alarm: See? The “status update” culture has infiltrated the world’s psyche!
But another way to look at it is to see it for proof that there is something powerful that Facebook, Twitter, and other microblog outlets have tapped into. I think many people have an innate desire to say what they are up to, almost as a way of just verifying that they are present.
As a user of Twitter and Facebook status updates, I can tell you that they have come to matter to me in a way that I find surprising. Seeing a list of what all my friends, family, and acquaintances are up to helps me to feel connected to them. This is not just silly “Joe Blow is at the mall shopping for an iPhone” trivia either, though that is a crucial element of social currency. Important information can be conveyed, too. It was through a status update that I learned of an old friend’s work in freeing slaves in Calcutta, for example.
In fact, it is the haphazardness of it all that is compelling.
I am reminded of my old friend Charlie’s college admittance essay. Charlie was a brilliant, creative, enigmatic person. He wrote an admissions essay for colleges that was a meditation on social interactions at a neighborhood gas station (where he worked). At the time, I recall, it was too brilliant for anyone to really grasp.
But now I sort of get it.
Charlie’s essay, as it reached its punchline, touched on research into whale songs. It seems that after decades of research into the content of whale songs, scientists had been able to determine that, essentially, whales are mostly giving status updates and alerting one another to our (humans’) presence, watching them:
WHALE HERE MAN HERE
I do not know if this is really true about whales, but I do know that often my status updates are whalesong: I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.
Reading the item made me remember that I used to be in an entourage myself. What a strange life it was.
Unless you have been in one, you cannot really imagine what it is like day to day, wondering what you will do next, knowing that it is entirely at the whim of your entourage’s anchor.
In my case, the anchor of my entourage was not a star but rather a charismatic business person. We were all working on a startup company in the electric transportation field. It was in Los Angeles.
It’s a story I don’t often tell because it takes too much time for all its strangeness to soak in. So here are a few of the less salacious details. I could go on at depth but some of it just should not be talked about in polite company! Also, some of the memories are a bit hazy.
For about nine months, there were no offices. We would all congregate at the founder’s Malibu beachfront condo (which, it turned out, he was renting with investor money). We’d sit in the living room watching the surf, each of us in a separate living room chair, working a phone.
I got a call every morning at seven to “plan the day.” My boss and the second-in-command were kindred spirits when it came to this — hyper morning people. They had decided it was rude to call people they did not know well before seven, so they would wait, chomping at the bit, until that hour. Then we would all suddenly get caffeine-fueled calls.
Our daily plans typically included simple business errand: go here to pick up the new logo t-shorts. Go there to drop off a form. These were complicated because we all had to go together, because we were part of an entourage. We were always waiting for someone. It seemed that, if the size of the traveling party decreased below a certain threshold, our anchor got depressed. There always needed to be a bunch of people around to hold cell phones, fetch water bottles, drive cars, etc.
No one had a real job description, but we had our “areas of expertise.” These typically had little to do with actual skills any of us had. I was typically deployed when there was some perceived need for someone who understood politics.
The founder loved women. There was always a new young woman floating around in the condo. Many meetings were held with him in bed, us hangers-on standing in a semicircle at the foot of the bed, taking notes.
For a while, there was a houseboy. I have no idea where he came from. But one day we all showed up and there he was. He got us drinks and cookies. It was not clear what his duties were in comparison to others in the entourage (everyone did everything). Eventually he faded away.
One day we all piled into a couple of cars and went to a meeting at a Hollywood mansion. We were meeting with a big TV person (I recall it was Aaron Spelling but I may be wrong) and his people, looking for investment money. As I recall, we showed up late on purpose. To make some kind of point. TV Exec wore fancy pajamas to the meeting. I do not know if that was to make a point.
For a while, there were plans on the books for the company to buy a mini-bus, which would be outfitted as a rolling office. We would all just spend all our time in the bus, rolling around LA.
Eventually, I left the company to do my own thing. I’ll always remember that time. I am not sure how useful any of it was — but it sure was interesting.
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