Somebody told me that I tend to write a little like a monkey on tennis enhancers (crystal meth) and misuse "your" and "you're". Fair enough, I see how it is, let's be all professional about this, what have you done that's so great Mom.
Why Are You Awake -
Continuing on, what got you out of bed this morning. Serious question. I bounced up at 4:30am in terror going from laying flat on my back to a tense and perfected kung fu stance at the foot of my bed ready to roundhouse kick the world in the face. But that's just how I wake up. It's what got me out of bed that I'm thinking about on this snowy and cold morning in the Rocky Mountains.
Fear -
Dancing is for Dance Core, construction is for Metro Contractors, but the fear, the fear is all Ben MacLeay. I worked for two years as a baggage handler for the venerable Southwest Airlines during a really difficult time in my life. To the best of Southwest's knowledge I was never late to work, although towards the end I stopped punching in so that on the off chance I was ten minutes late nobody knew the better. My giant schisms in character aside, what got me out of bed and to the airport (a twenty minute drive but an hour of security screens that an entire Al-Qaeda cell could get through if they were willing to waste an hour of their time) was fear. Everything in my life was falling apart and the only thing I had was that job. We had lost our home, we had one car, the dance studio was flaundering on good days and I was opporating terrified.
So I got up at 4 or sometimes even 3:30am to get to work on time and kill myself for $10.18/hr. In snow and rain I was outside by 5am loading freight and bags into the underbelly of a glorified flying public transit bus on my hands and knees.
Then in July I got the opportunity to quit, my brother assured me that I could make $2k a month minimum in the construction business and so on July 31st 2009, I accepted a tiny buyout from Southwest and took my fear to a whole new level.
Fear and Self Motivation
Today when I took my deathly wushu stance at the end of the bed three seconds after the alarm went off a cold shiver coarsed through my entire body and I thanked God that I did not have to go outside for the next seventeen hours straight and take legalized abuse in front of a disinterested row of spectators peaking out tiny windows eating peanuts and judging me. Waking up at 4:30 sucks each and every day, but I had to do it before, now I get to do it.
What do you get to do? What pain do you get put yourself through to change everything? do you feel the fear and one inch punch the world in the brain?
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Act your Wage!
"I want to scream and poop, maybe at the same time!" I veered the car strongly as my head bounced off the steering wheel in a fit of laughter so ferocious it is actually illegal in many Muslim countries. This was the answer my wife gave to the question about a new blog post called act your wage. We played around a number of thoughts and then I said "Yah, but what do you do when your a freakin sweet entrepreneur and your wage is roughly nothing!" Below I've added a few impressions of said answer by popular bloggers:
Seth Godin -
A little note on screamers and poopers.
1) Not all screamers where created equally
2) Most poopers where created equally
3) Only your most gifted customers can scream and poop, create a product FOR them, create a purple poop.
Hugh MacLeod -
Just doing a little thinking on screaming, pooping etc. Pooping scales, people don't.
Johnny B Truant -
My oldest is five, but six years ago I'm reading a book called "Everybody Poops", and suddenly it hits me that me and Larry Fishburn are the same because we both poop pure F*$#@G INSPIRATION! (then I Johnny create this weird sensation of laughing at my own jokes while working with a silent medium, amazing).
Back to Ben, I will spend a little time in future post's digging into this idea acting your wage but first I have two critical and unrelated points to make.
1) You better have somebody in your life you can laugh that hard with when you actually are making zero dineros an hour (seriously, right now I am making roughly $0 at a brick and morter business with $10k in monthly bills, losers refer to this as a learning experience).
2) If you are not driving home at 8pm on a Tuesday night talking about your next blog post and up at 4:30am the next day writing it early because you have to rush off to work your backside off for nothing but hope, you need to watch Brogan's videos again.
3) Related to #2 I feel an inspirational post coming on that's going to be epic, but as Tony Robbins says "Inspiration is like a warm bath, sit in it too long and you just get cold and slimy and your wife tells you to get moving and what's wrong with you so you just slip down deeper in the bath until your ears are covered with water and it sounds like your inside a delicious fourth of July layered jello desert." Ok, Tony only said the first part but it's true, so go do something amazing and I'll write you all something inspiring afterward, like the M&M's I use to keep my two year old respectful.
P.S. I'll also be touching very soon on why on Thanksgiving Day I'm going to shoot my brother "American Gangster" style during the middle of the day in the streets of Harlem (also known as my parents upper middle class suburban house) to make a point and hopefully bring the whole family closer together but with me in charge.
Seth Godin -
A little note on screamers and poopers.
1) Not all screamers where created equally
2) Most poopers where created equally
3) Only your most gifted customers can scream and poop, create a product FOR them, create a purple poop.
Hugh MacLeod -
Just doing a little thinking on screaming, pooping etc. Pooping scales, people don't.
Johnny B Truant -
My oldest is five, but six years ago I'm reading a book called "Everybody Poops", and suddenly it hits me that me and Larry Fishburn are the same because we both poop pure F*$#@G INSPIRATION! (then I Johnny create this weird sensation of laughing at my own jokes while working with a silent medium, amazing).
Back to Ben, I will spend a little time in future post's digging into this idea acting your wage but first I have two critical and unrelated points to make.
1) You better have somebody in your life you can laugh that hard with when you actually are making zero dineros an hour (seriously, right now I am making roughly $0 at a brick and morter business with $10k in monthly bills, losers refer to this as a learning experience).
2) If you are not driving home at 8pm on a Tuesday night talking about your next blog post and up at 4:30am the next day writing it early because you have to rush off to work your backside off for nothing but hope, you need to watch Brogan's videos again.
3) Related to #2 I feel an inspirational post coming on that's going to be epic, but as Tony Robbins says "Inspiration is like a warm bath, sit in it too long and you just get cold and slimy and your wife tells you to get moving and what's wrong with you so you just slip down deeper in the bath until your ears are covered with water and it sounds like your inside a delicious fourth of July layered jello desert." Ok, Tony only said the first part but it's true, so go do something amazing and I'll write you all something inspiring afterward, like the M&M's I use to keep my two year old respectful.
P.S. I'll also be touching very soon on why on Thanksgiving Day I'm going to shoot my brother "American Gangster" style during the middle of the day in the streets of Harlem (also known as my parents upper middle class suburban house) to make a point and hopefully bring the whole family closer together but with me in charge.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
TRiBES
David Logan drops an absolutely awesome speech at TEDxUSC, you can see it by clicking on the title or traveling back in time and then to California which views itself as ahead of everyone else so depending on which time theory you adhere to (mine is Back to the Future II) this speech may actually be happening live as you watch it.
There are only 2% of the people in the world on either end of the spectrum of great and terrible. Logan states that people can only move up or down one level and that half of us or 2's and 4's (on a 1-5 scale 1=Hitler 5=Rhianna or Nelson Mandela). The dangers and hopes of society are then based on how well the 1's are at getting all of the 2's in the world to unite while Rhianna is trying to get all of the 4's together to fight said forces of evil.
The other thought is somebody like Ghandi (or Gandhi or Ganhdi or Gandih, I'm terrible with silently H's) took an entire country of 2's and brought them to 3's even though he was a 5.
So what do you do each day, try and make your 2 customers into 5's and get nowhere? Go out there and change the world, but understand the world you must before change it you can (say it in a Yoda voice, it will resonate better).
There are only 2% of the people in the world on either end of the spectrum of great and terrible. Logan states that people can only move up or down one level and that half of us or 2's and 4's (on a 1-5 scale 1=Hitler 5=Rhianna or Nelson Mandela). The dangers and hopes of society are then based on how well the 1's are at getting all of the 2's in the world to unite while Rhianna is trying to get all of the 4's together to fight said forces of evil.
The other thought is somebody like Ghandi (or Gandhi or Ganhdi or Gandih, I'm terrible with silently H's) took an entire country of 2's and brought them to 3's even though he was a 5.
So what do you do each day, try and make your 2 customers into 5's and get nowhere? Go out there and change the world, but understand the world you must before change it you can (say it in a Yoda voice, it will resonate better).
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Turn your blog into a flushing toilet
Ride your own wave. It's that simple. Create content, any content (blog, vlog, glog, ok i made up glog but do it anyway). Create more of that content. Do it every day. Don't try to write a book tomorrow just pound out another post.
Underestimate what you can do tomorrow and over estimate what you can do next year.
As a kid I was dirty poor. The rest of my family was fairly well groomed and sanitary but I've always been an all out individual. The richest of my friends had those four foot deep above the ground pools. I used to love to get a couple people in one of those and run in a circle until the entire pool was a giant flushing toilet sucking us down into the great abyss. I can still feel how hard those first few steps where. I can still feel that rush that you thought you were finally just running along and you stop to take a break and your swept away by your own current.
Go out there today and take a hard step. Sure your chest deep in water and your feet are slipping on the bottom. Sure your poor and just wearing a pair of underwear as a bathing suit. But at some point in the near future your going to be tired of running and if you have built your own wave (or flushing toilet but that's not quite as motivating) you will be able to simply ride along. As a kid the push was as much fun as the ride, as adults we've grown to hate the push. Love it. Do it.
Underestimate what you can do tomorrow and over estimate what you can do next year.
As a kid I was dirty poor. The rest of my family was fairly well groomed and sanitary but I've always been an all out individual. The richest of my friends had those four foot deep above the ground pools. I used to love to get a couple people in one of those and run in a circle until the entire pool was a giant flushing toilet sucking us down into the great abyss. I can still feel how hard those first few steps where. I can still feel that rush that you thought you were finally just running along and you stop to take a break and your swept away by your own current.
Go out there today and take a hard step. Sure your chest deep in water and your feet are slipping on the bottom. Sure your poor and just wearing a pair of underwear as a bathing suit. But at some point in the near future your going to be tired of running and if you have built your own wave (or flushing toilet but that's not quite as motivating) you will be able to simply ride along. As a kid the push was as much fun as the ride, as adults we've grown to hate the push. Love it. Do it.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
How to be a good drunk driver
Photo Courtesy of: BistrosavageI had a friend growing up who was an idiot. I had a lot of friends growing up who were idiots. My mom actually home schooled me until we moved out of that town because she said "This whole school district is full of idiots!" (with a smile as only an old librarian can). This particular idiot (not my mom, she's not an idiot, just a poor and unclear antecedent, the first friend idiot I talked about) told me once:
"Dude, the best way to drive home drunk is take your hands, put them on the steering wheel at like ten and two, hold your thumbs up and then line your thumbs up with the lines on each side of your lane. Then all you have to do is keep your thumbs on the lines and you'll make it home fine."
1) The "best" way to drive drunk?
2) Every cop I've ever given the double thumbs up to instantaneously pulled me over and tasered me faster than an 80 year old woman.
3) I tried this sober once and killed six puppies.
What's the point dummy, your asking? In fact, your probably not asking that at all because nobody reads this blog but there is a point here. Stupid information exists and should not be used. Looking directly into my friends frigtarded eyes I understood he was wrong the moment he said it. But imagine if this was coming from a snazzy presentation or inside of a book that was in the business section at B&N. Imagine you had just paid ten dollars for this ebook and figured you needed to at least give it a try.
Are you good at spotting idiots? Are you good at NOT taking advice?
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Chris Anderson is wrong
Free is not the new economy, free is the new marketing.
If P&G spent $500 million on advertising twenty five years ago now they must spend that much money (time?) creating great content that works instead of interrupting people.
To get a book off the ground thirty years ago an author needed a publisher and distributor to spend the money to advertise and get books on the right shelves. Now an author does not need to give away the mass majority of their book profits but instead they have to work for three years writing a blog for free before publishing an ebook, selling it to ten times fewer people but for twenty times the margin.
Are you spending as much time on creating great free content as you would expect an ad agency who you cut a check for hundreds of thousands of dollars to?
If you are a large or mid sized company, should you fire your ad agency and hire full time content generators?
Can an individual become a content generator for any company in the future just like ad agencies work for multiple companies?
If P&G spent $500 million on advertising twenty five years ago now they must spend that much money (time?) creating great content that works instead of interrupting people.
To get a book off the ground thirty years ago an author needed a publisher and distributor to spend the money to advertise and get books on the right shelves. Now an author does not need to give away the mass majority of their book profits but instead they have to work for three years writing a blog for free before publishing an ebook, selling it to ten times fewer people but for twenty times the margin.
Are you spending as much time on creating great free content as you would expect an ad agency who you cut a check for hundreds of thousands of dollars to?
If you are a large or mid sized company, should you fire your ad agency and hire full time content generators?
Can an individual become a content generator for any company in the future just like ad agencies work for multiple companies?
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
What have you done since 2005?
photo courtesy: jonssenFood for thought: Youtube did not exist in 2004. I consider myself to be pretty young but even that was just yesterday for me. Courage Fail or any of the other 400+ videos on fail blog have me laughing at humanity and wondering how God watched this stuff all by himself until now. Two stats about youtube have jumped out at me in the last month. First, Youtube hit one billion videos downloaded in the month of July for the first time. Second, they recently broke the one billion videos watched per day mark.
One Billion per day. with a B. 24 hrs.
January 1st 2005 they had roughly 0,000,000,000,000 videos per day.
In late 2005 I was starting to think about getting a dance studio off the ground. I was 22 and thought I was pretty cool and a go getter. Today we have 182 "users", not exactly a billion but doing ok.
Lets say you did not have a blog in 2005, you would have been in the same shape as Youtube. Lets say you did not have strong online social community in 2005, you would have beaten youtube which had none. Let's say January 1st 2005 you were not even a senator in the United States, well now you are President and Nobel prize winner.
What have you done since 2005?
More importantly, what do you plan on doing by 2013, because just maybe the next President has not been in the national spotlight yet, just maybe there are a billion somethings waiting for you to give them an outlet.
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