Crowd-Sourcing Your Job Freedom

January 13, 2013 By David Griesing 4 Comments

Oftentimes, it’s the talented, motivated and grounded people who struggle the most getting to the work they should be doing. It’s like the burden of their gifts weighs them down, placing an unhealthy gravity on the decision to strike out and make a change for the better.

But beyond the over-complicated knots we tie ourselves in are the practical barriers that confound us. One of them is not having the financial freedom to do the kind of work that we need to be doing right now.

In this regard, there’s good news for everyone who has an entrepreneur inside of them, struggling to get out. Your pitifully small bank account is no longer a roadblock to your success as long as you have a good idea and an equally good story to tell. For the first time ever, millions of strangers are funding small business ideas that never had the chance to get off the ground before. All you have to do is sell them on your dream.

With crowd-funding, it’s the small amounts, quite literally “the seed funding,” that can not only get you off the proverbial dime, but also a cheering section of people who truly believe in you. Where once you needed a rich uncle or well-healed friend, the “kindness of strangers” now provides a way for you to get in the game. (I last wrote about crowd-funding in July.)

You always wanted to ____ (fill in the blank). You’ve never understood why somebody hadn’t figured out how to ___, so you’ve figured it out. Tell the crowd about your idea. Tell them how much cash you need to realize it. Tell them how they’ll get to share in your success. Convince them that you deserve their vote of confidence and they just might give it to you.

Historically, because tiny businesses rarely attracted outside financing, they just as rarely got off the ground. Today, a whole new class of entrepreneurs has a chance to strut their stuff. Spreading like some positive contagion, crowds are nurturing brave little start-ups everywhere there is access to a funding network. Years from now, when some of our leading companies can trace their origins to networks like Kickstarter, I think we’ll recognize that the true democratization of innovation began in our time.

What this gives you is an opportunity that simply wasn’t available five years ago. But you still have to believe in what you’re setting out to do, and get that cheering section to buy-in too. Indeed, it’s your ability to inspire (on the one hand) and the desire of total strangers to be inspired (on the other) that makes this bargain work.

In the world of crowd-funding, the desire to be part of an appealing stranger’s quest to succeed is nearly universal. She talks about how she’ll change the world. You learn about how he’ll make our lives better, easier, smarter. They share their stories with us, and we in turn see some of ourselves (and our hopes) in them. We like & admire them & look forward to sharing in their success. The ticket for the adventure is modest given the upsides, so we buy it.

For investors, it helps too that you’re not the only one who’s buying. It may be dozens or hundreds or even thousands of others who are similarly inspired. With crowd-funding, you find out early and often how many others are getting on-board with you. The infectious rush of fellow believers is essential to the dynamic.

But what’s really unique (and special) here is that the entrepreneur’s energy & inspiration and the investors’ psychic & financial support are joining together for the sake of economic productivity. We’re building a business here after all.

Maybe it’s your business.

A Hero in a Poor Season for Heroes

January 6, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

We’re just about done thinking about 2012, but not quite.

As always, there were many small heroes this year, but Groundbreakers? Galvinizers? Healers? Those who stood before us with clear eyes and quiet confidence: there were almost none of them. Perhaps these men and women will come out of their private worlds when we’re closer to bottom, when our need will be great enough to recognize & welcome them & finally decide to stand behind them. This year, leaders like this were leaving us, not striding onto the stage.

Neil Armstrong left the stage he was never really comfortable on for the last time this past August. My post about him was one of the year’s most read, perhaps because it’s not just moths that are drawn to the brightest lights.

Surely, some of it was that his life recalled a different America when we were able to pull together to accomplish something amazing, whereas today we can’t even agree to come together and make sense. But it’s also about a man who took us with him on a great adventure, didn’t get in the way when we got there, and then gave everybody else the credit when it exceeded our dreams.

One way to take the measure of Neil Armstrong—in all his Mid-Western matter-of-factness—is to eavesdrop on an interview he gave in 2001 as part of the Johnson Space Center’s Oral History project. (His interlocutors are historians Stephen Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley.) His thinking is also a good way to clear our heads for another muddled year ahead.

On who gets to be the first man on the moon:

AMBROSE: It is part of the popular perception, I guess, and it appears in some of the literature that the other astronauts have put out, that there was a lot of jockeying for position.

ARMSTRONG: Yes.. . The goals, I thought, were important to not just the United States, but to society in general. I would have been happy doing anything they told me to do. It’s probably true that I was less inclined to be concerned about just what job I had than some were. I think they’re all different people, they all had different kinds of views on that subject. It wasn’t as obvious to me as some of the stories I’ve read have portrayed it. (49)

Foundation instincts: steady, confident & clear:

AMBROSE: But you made a decision [after serious technical problems] and you got back to Earth. I spend a lot of my life talking to men who have made big decisions, and in this case your life and others’ were at stake…

ARMSTRONG: Well, I can’t make too much of it. I think generally you try to keep going as long as you safely can and try to save the flight, the objectives, and try to put everything back together. At some point you just have to make the decision that, “I can’t take the risk of pursuing my goal further, because I have to go back to the foundation instincts”, which is save your craft, save the folks, get back home, and be disappointed that you had to leave some of your goals behind. (55)

The results also come from:

ARMSTRONG: I think it predominantly is experience over training. Training certainly helps, but having been in flying machines for many years and faced a lot of difficulty, [pilots] become accustomed to being required to solve problems as they arise …, and particularly test pilots who get a higher percentage of things going wrong than normal pilots. And I’m not saying that we did it perfectly in every case; I’m sure we didn’t. But the experience that we’d had in flying a variety of different kind of machines in difficult circumstances certainly enhances your ability to look at a situation, … analyze it and determine what your probable best course is and how much latitude you have to deviate from that best course. It’s not an easy subject to describe adequately, but it seems to have worked. (57)

The important things: the task at hand, the shoulders you’re standing on, and pride in your work:

BRINKLEY: …Apollo 11…was perhaps the most watched event in the history of….the world. [Y]ou didn’t treat it differently mentally at all, [only] as you would…one of your previous missions?

ARMSTRONG: I was certainly aware that this was a culmination of the work of 300,000 or 400,000 people over a decade and that the nation’s hopes and outward appearance largely rested on how the results came out. With those pressures, it seemed the most important thing to do was focus on our job as best we were able to and try to allow nothing to distract us from doing the very best job we could. And, you know, I have no complaints about the way my colleagues were able to step up to that.

AMBROSE: Let me interject here that you share a quality with General Eisenhower. When reporters would come to him during the war and want to get a story, he would always say, “Go talk to [General Omar N.] Bradley. Go talk to [General George S.] Patton [Jr.]. Go talk to a sergeant. That’s where the real story is. This is a team effort,” and he would never allow it to concentrate on him…And you just spoke about the hundreds of thousands of people that have been working for so long to make this happen, and I invite you to make a reflection on the team nature of the Apollo 11 mission.

ARMSTRONG: Each of the components of our hardware were designed to certain reliability specifications, and far the majority, to my recollection, had a reliability requirement of 0.99996, which means that you have four failures in 100,000 operations. I’ve been told that if every component met its reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would have about [1,000] separate identifiable failures. In fact, we had more like 150 failures per flight, [substantially] better than statistical methods would tell you that you might have.

I can only attribute that to the fact that every guy in the project, every guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that’s setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, “If anything goes wrong here, it’s not going to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it.” And when you have hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job a little better than they have to, you get an improvement in performance. And that’s the only reason we could have pulled this whole thing off. (78-79)

We give heroes our best because they take us with them to a whole new world.

Godspeed, Neil Armstrong.

The 10 Things I’m Most Proud Of In 2012

December 31, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’ve written several times this year about why we need to take time to be proud of our accomplishments. That is, proud of what we’re producing for ourselves–of who we are becoming through our work. And proud too of the services were providing and the products we’re making for others, what used to be called “the fruits of our labor.” (It’s Time To Be Proud of Your Work)

I’ve spent some of this week between Christmas and New Years (a jumble of slightly deflated days between the festivities) trying to decide what I’m most proud of in my work this year. As it turns out, my accomplishments were not money-in-the-bank or shout-from-the-rooftops successes. Instead, they were smaller victories on the path to larger ones.

Thinking about your accomplishments, in this way and at this time, is like stringing together the best pinecones—recovered from where they’ve fallen, and hung up briefly once more—like a salute, or pennant in the wind after a good race. It’s part of what makes the journey worthwhile, this pause: short but necessary, before getting on with it.

So here they are, the 10 things about my work that I’m most proud of this year, in no particular order.

1. Achieving more economy in thought & word. Not that the richness of life, or its best lessons, can be captured in an elevator speech or tweet. But what we have to say can almost always be said more economically. I can see it in these posts. Maybe you can too. I’m proud that I’m getting there.

2. Realizing that editing is a worthy endeavor, in & of itself. Communicating isn’t just about what’s heard or read. Excising the newest favorite phrase or train of thought because they don’t carry your ball effectively is not only essential but also gratifying. Like polishing dull wood.

3. Learning how to tell more of the story through pictures. Pictures engage different parts of your perception, both in the taking and in the viewing. It’s Instagram & Pinterest, infographics & new forms of visual learning. It’s pictures of both altruism and tragedy and our responsibilities as viewers when we look at them. In this supremely visual age, I’m excited that I’ve gotten better at using this powerful toolbox.

4. Recapturing the adventure of great working partnerships. One of the best things about work is who you’re doing it with. When you define your work as broadly as I do, and your collaborations are as far-flung, there can be an amazing spectrum of rewards. It’s been years since I’ve been as open as I am now to cross-pollenizing work that is limited only by the reach of the networks I’m a part of.

5. Plugging in. There is a great passage in Ian McEwan’s Atonement where the woman of the house is lying in the dark connecting to its sounds: the creaking & hissing of a vast building’s central nervous system. For me, it wasn’t dark or just about the sounds, but when I participated in the #140 character conferences last summer I felt connected to a similar throb & pulse. To speak to hundreds while they are tweeting to tens of thousands is an exponential sensory experience with a half-life that keeps on tingling. That the conferences took place at the 92^nd Street Y, where so many thought leaders have climbed the mountaintop, was just the icing.

6. Toning the voice. Almost as important as what you say is how you say it. Words. Pictures. Sounds. A warning. A rebuke. A laugh. It’s the way you assemble them that adds up to your voice. I’m relieved that I can finally stand “listening” to mine.

7. Grounding message in service. It’s more of a rolling wave than a beginning this year, but helping smart & talented people find their life’s work has become an increasingly confident exercise, and therefore more satisfying than ever. Too few of us know how to think productively about what to do with our lives. It’s been great to figure it out together, and have fun while we’re doing so.

8. Seeing yourself in print. I’ve published in other careers, but most of my discussion about worklifereward has been via social media—until this year. An October op-ed in the City’s paper is the first of many forays into the traditional press.

9. Becoming more resilient. I wrote about the book Antifragile recently because one key to success today is learning how to respond robustly to the unexpected challenges the world keeps throwing at us. This is a life lesson I’ve taken to heart this year (and boy does it get easier when you do)!

10. Lightening up. Around a year ago when I started blogging, an old friend told me I was a lot more interesting & fun in person. I had worried about this in my first post, where I said values are serious stuff, but that I’d try to host a discussion “with some bubbles added, to give it a lighter finish when needed.” I’m proud that in much of what I’ve accomplished this year, I’ve tried to include those bubbles.

Cheers!

A Holiday Present Worth Asking For

December 22, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The path to fulfilling, purposeful work is hard to walk alone.

Too often, even the smartest, seemingly most accomplished people don’t know how “to get out of their own way” to figure out what they should really be doing with their lives. The push towards clarity usually needs to come from the outside. Who that someone is, of course, is everything.

Most of my work has been inauthentic. I studied things, took jobs because of what others told me I should be doing with myself. I can’t believe that at this age I’m still living somebody else’s version of my life! The lens that looks beyond the here & now is unfocused. I squint, but still can’t see what I’m aiming for. I can’t see past my day-to-day to a more satisfying future. Well of course you can’t. Because you’ll never be able to see clearly through the fog of, say, a parent’s vision for you, through eyes that have always played an outsized role in what you think and feel about the world around you.

So the helpful holiday present I’m recommending may seem, at first, to come from exactly the wrong direction. While a skillful stranger with none of the presumptions you grew up with can provide the catalyst for rethinking your life’s work, you’re probably going “home for the holidays” in a couple of days. As incredible as it may sound, you might also find someone there who can help you out with this.

I’m relying solely on anecdotal evidence mind you, but in my family and in nearly every family I know anything about, it seems that similarities in personality and perspective skip a generation. Now admittedly, some of it may be due to the concerted efforts of daughters not to become their mothers, sons their fathers, and so on, but I think it goes much deeper than this. That great aunt, great uncle or grandfather may have a lot more in common with you than any of the others around the holiday table, and this family member has a present with your name on it.

All you have to do is retrieve it.

What richer or more familiar repositories of stories, life lessons and family traditions are there than the older relatives you’ll be spending time with in coming days? I’d start with the one you always connected with most naturally, because you’ll cover more territory when your conversation with them starts to roll. And roll it will.

As in other situations, you can help your luck along here by thinking beforehand about what you’d like to find out from them, and then doing a little research so you know more about his life or her career when they were your age. You might be surprised at how someone with similar wiring confronted hurdles like the ones you’re facing. You also might be surprised by how much you’ll learn about yourself when you start tapping into all that accumulated wisdom.

What’s less surprising is how few of us ever get around to asking.

Karl Pillemer, who teaches courses on human development at Cornell, wanted to do something about that, while also preserving some of what was being lost. He is the guiding force behind the Legacy Project, whose website and YouTube channel provide access to life lessons collected from hundreds of older adults on topics ranging from marriage and parenting to their careers.

In his own life and work, Professor Pillemer has also come to appreciate the personal benefits that are realized on both sides of the Q & A, and certainly on the answering side. In a recent interview, he offered this simple advice:

Ask them for their life stories, but try to tap their life’s wisdom. If you ask a person for advice, it empowers them. It honors a person’s life experience.

Who helped you along the way? What mistakes did you make? How did you make ends meet? Did you ever want to settle for less? Why didn’t you?

With the holiday season upon us, and New Year’s resolutions ahead, being home for the holidays may provide you with an unexpected opportunity to think productively about the future direction of your life and work. But the present won’t be given to you unless you ask someone for it.

Just Plain Funny #2

December 16, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

I like a newspaper I can hold in my hands because sometimes the stories across the folds can talk to one another in ways that never seems to happen on a screen. That kind of exchange took place in my newspaper today.

For as long as I’ve been reading it, the Wall Street Journal has a funny, odd or just plain ridiculous story at the bottom of Page One. At some point, the Page One editor must have decided that stories like this are good antidotes to the calamities, logjams and shenanigans chronicled above. These daily stories always froth over to the last page of the “news” where they brush up against the beginnings of the “commentary” section on the other side of fold. It’s here that strangely compatible bedfellows sometimes meet.

Page One’s dollop of the day today was about a long-standing West Point tradition celebrating the graduating cadet, who by academic and other standards, finishes dead last in his class each year. Because of some “informal” information sharing, everyone but The Goat knows who he is on the big day, and when his name is called out from the graduating roster, the cadets erupt into the loudest cheer of the day.

There are two kinds of Goats, according to a disappointingly dry piece in a publication called Failure Magazine. There are cadets who labor through the muck to the bitter end, and those who take the experience just seriously enough to fall inebriatedly over the finish line. Of course, several of the Good Time Goats were actually pretty smart and went on to make history (Generals Custer and Pickett, for example). Several middling cadets did pretty well too. (Eisenhower reportedly said: “If anybody saw signs of greatness in me while at West Point they kept it to themselves.”) But it’s the ones who always struggled to do their best, while barely making it to the end, who are the real heroes of the story.

Unclear whether to be embarrassed or proud of their accomplishment, most of these Goats eventually seem to settle into being good sports about it. For example: “In my class, no one else can say that they’re the Goat and no one else can say that they’re part of this special lineage that dates back so far,” said good sport Roberto Becarra, Jr. in 2007. Somewhat earlier, the bespeckled Goat (below) seems to have had a similar reaction.

When asked about these persevering Goats by the Journal reporter, James S. Robbins said:

The tradition of the Goat is important because it kind of encapsulates that American spirit of—yeah, you’re going to have the top and they’re going to get recognized and they’re going to get stars by their names and all that other stuff. But, you know what? The guys further down, they have their chance too, and they can succeed too and it’s important to recognize them.

While his insight might have been more penetrating had he been a psychologist or meteorologist instead of an historian, Robbins’ remarks did manage to counterpoint similar observations about the value of “keeping your head up” and “putting one foot in front of the other” on the facing page of the paper, where a Journal writer reviews a new book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called Antifragile.

Taleb’s singular perspective is that theories follow practice instead of the reverse. It’s not “the Soviet/Harvard notion that birds fly because we lecture them how to.” We learn by doing it first, and make up the theories that contain all of our how-to-do-it wisdom later on. It is, as the reviewer notes, “a startling [chicken v. egg] insight,” because what Taleb’s debunking allows is a flat-out celebration of the creativity involved in doggedly keeping at it. The many virtues of trial and error.

Taleb makes up the word “antifragile” to mean not only hardy, but also something that has been improved through repeated failures, becoming more resilient in the process. From this perspective, the persevering Goats are not just plodders: more than a few of them embody the adaptation that is at the beating heart of natural selection. As Taleb’s reviewer notes:

If trial and error is creative, then we should treat failed entrepreneurs with the reverence that we reserve for fallen soldiers.

This is why experience is the best teacher. It’s why “A” students who master the theory often work for the “B” and “C” students who rightly suspect that the magic lies elsewhere. It’s why rigidity and too much seriousness is always a bad idea. And it’s why the loudest cheer really should go to somebody who has not only failed most prominently, but also has the spirit to get up and keep trying.

modern-times — CHARLIE CHAPLIN IN “MODERN TIMES”

Not that it’s always so easy.