horsepigcow

1. Say ‘no’ more often – and learn to say it with panache!
2. Get that startup of mine off the ground!
3. Workout more – this one is pretty standard on everyone’s list, but walking the dog doesn’t cut it, right?
4. Take a holiday – a real one. Unrelated to work. Just play. And dammit, stop making my holidays into a production!
5. Get that book done! The second one that is in limbo right now because I’ve been traveling too much.
6. Make a budget – or get an accountant to make one for me. And stick to it.
7. Help Tad pass grade 10.
8. Convince my landlord to remodel the kitchen, installing a dishwasher.
9. Put together at least one event – the conference that I’ve talked about or the women’s getaway that just started brewing in my brain. Or both.
10. Learn French!!!!
11. Change the world okay, that may be too ambitious for one year, but hell, I’ll keep heading in that direction.
12. Don’t go broke in the process. This relates to #1. And #2. And #5 & #6. This year felt like I had too many ‘broke’ moments. I need to learn to balance what I give away (bringing whuffie) and what I spend time on that puts money in the bank. I won’t do anyone any good living on the street.
13. Enjoy yourself! Embrace it all.

Like I said. Work in progress. Will check back.

[photo by Shutterstock]

I’ve figured out why my teenage son doesn’t like taking phonecalls unless it’s an emergency…multi-tasking! I spend more and more of my time multi-tasking these days – cooking a meal while answering email while reading some articles on a subject I’m looking into while texting with friends while monitoring twitter for what people are up to that may be of interest while…well, you get the picture. When the phone rings, I have to completely focus on the person on the other end because, well, my brain isn’t built for listening and doing other stuff.

When I’m online ‘chatting’ with someone and I have to save a pot of water from boiling over or finish folding the laundry, I can take my eyes away, do my task, then come back and focus on the statement/question and reply to it, then go back to what I was doing. With voice, if I miss what someone says, I miss it. I have to get them to repeat it.

I know. It sounds robotic and incredibly crass, but I do take time out to focus on conversations whenever I can. I just can’t do it as much anymore. And when I do, I prefer to have these conversations face to face to get the most out of synchronous moments.

The phone just seems like somewhere in between a-synchronous and synchronous. It allows for distractions, but requires full attention. Face to face requires focus and limits distractions. The person is right in front of you. There are expressions and body language to pick up on. And it’s incredibly, wonderfully intimate.

So now I get it. And of course, my son and I talk on the phone, but it’s usually for less than 1 minute and it’s because I haven’t replied to a text or I need to find out where he is pronto. Otherwise, we text and then talk in person. I like this arrangement.

1. Can I pick your wallet?
2. No, but I may let you pick my nose!
3. Sounds like that would hurt!
4. So, you’d buy me lunch in exchange for $200 worth of my time? You obviously don’t need my advice. That’s a killer business model you have there already!
5. OMG, you are a surgeon, too?!
6. Perhaps if that lunch is in…Paris! (or some other faraway, awesome destination)
7. Aaaaaaaaah! Zombie! (run away screaming)
8. Bummer. I’m all out of pickable brain today.
9. Yay! You picked my brain! What does it win?
10. Sorry, but I don’t exchange my time for sandwiches anymore.

Do you have any others?

The truth is that real clients pay. If you are blogging, writing articles, tweeting and doing all sorts of other things (like have a book on the market), there are oodles of ways for someone to get the basic information they need from the content you’ve already put out there for free (I have 3 years of archived content here on HPC — for free!). They are just being lazy…or taking advantage of your time. And getting paid for your time is how you support creating all the free content you produce (or at least, that’s how I make my living). And if someone truly thinks your time is valuable, they’ll offer you more than a meal to pay for it.

There are VERY FEW exceptions to this rule. Unless you are good friends and want to do a favour or think the project is cool and want to give your time for free, refer to the list above. Good luck!

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BONUS LINK! I ran across this amazing article on the New York Times Blog today: When to Work for Nothing. Great quote:
It doesn’t matter if you’re a dog walker, a Web designer or a tax preparer. When you agree to work free, you reinforce people’s misguided ideas that the self-employed are independently wealthy hobbyists. Don’t degrade your profession by letting a cheap client take advantage of you.

note: My time is especially precious as I am a single mom who is the sole support for my family. But it shouldn’t have taken my realizing I was shirking my Mommy duties to give free time to so many people (and I’m asked the ‘brain picking’ question dozens of times per week) to come to this conclusion.

[image from: Shutterstock]

I was fortunate enough to be part of a webinar with Beth Kanter today. Beth gave a fantastic presentation and I really enjoyed our conversation (I’ll post the link once it’s available).

But what I enjoyed the most was when, in response to a question about figuring out how much Whuffie one has, Beth showed a great diagram:

that will be in her book coming out next year, The Networked NonProfit.

What I love most about the way Beth thinks of measuring is that the impact, not the influence is the final goal. The big prize. All too many times, people stop at the influence part: how popular is that person? how many followers do we have? who is talking about me and my company? how much love do people feel for me?

This is one of the biggest reasons I don’t like to measure Whuffie. I get the question time and time again when I talk about the book. The question I *should* be getting is ‘what can I do with my Whuffie?’. We should be less concerned about how many followers one has and more about what that person does with that many followers. Not only is Whuffie left better in the non-fungible, ephemeral realm, but it is inconsequential. The measure needs to be in the impact. If we concentrate on our influence, we forget the end goal. We get caught up in our ego.

And ego isn’t where we want to get caught up. Fame for fame’s sake. Followers for followers sake. This all turns into, “Look at me! I’m influential! It makes me special!” It’s easy to get caught up in, but don’t. Which reminds me, an influencer who tends to not dwell on his famousness, Chris Brogan, talked about this the other day. Enjoy:

Remember the impact. What will be your legacy? That you were just famous for being famous (i.e. Paris Hilton and/or Vaporware)? Or that you made a difference, built something revolutionary, or led a real change in the world?

[originally posted August 8, 2006]

“Everything was going to plan, then we added people to the mix” – anon

I’m reading an amazing new book by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstram, The Starfish and the Spider, which discusses what I believe is the future of business: leaderless, decentralized organizations. We’ve seen, first hand, how significant the difference is between Starfish and Spider organizations, when we compare conferences (and unconferences) to the movement of BarCamp.

There is noone in control when it comes to BarCamp. It is just an idea in the wild. It changes and morphs with every location it takes place…follows the desires and whims of the organizers and participants. Like the Apaches that are mentioned in the book, even these groups are temporary, decentralized and spontaneous. There is no set schedule or hard and fast rules. People walk in and there is a blank slate. The event emerges from there.

In the past year + a couple of months, BarCamp has spread to almost all continents and taken place (well) over 70x in over 50 locations 1,000x in over 500 locations. The only camps organized by the original founders have been the local Bay area ones plus the first Amsterdam camp.

But, even though BarCamp has been something instantly recognized around the world by thousands, it is still a very difficult concept to handle by many. As Ori discusses in the book: decentralized organizations have been around and prospered for thousands of years, yet, when the idea is presented to a group of business professionals, it is nearly impossible to grasp the idea of a leaderless organization.

So why chaos? What will embracing chaos do for you?

1. Simple. It will prepare you for anything.

   Imagine trying to prepare for every single outcome possible. It would drive you batty. Waste your time. And you would probably miss the one thing that eventually goes wrong. One of my good friends does contingency planning. She is really, really good at what she does. She takes her clients through various disaster scenarios to prepare them. But she would probably tell you that the most airtight contingency plan couldn’t possibly cover every angle. On their homepage, it says: “You can’t predict…you can prepare.”

   I’m not 100% sure of how she prepares you, but I’m pretty certain part of it is to help their clients embrace chaos and act quickly.

2. It will prevent you from making assumptions. (Assume = ass out of u and me)And open mind is a mind that is prepared for learning and discovering.
3. It will reduce your stress levels.I watch so many people using up so much energy on worrying about what could go wrong. I wonder what would happen in a REAL crisis?
4. It will open new doors.When you try to control the situation too much, you limit possibilities. FOO Camp rocks, but look what happened when BarCamp mirrored the format and opened it up? A whole new beautiful event emerged.

   We watch people start to trust their communities all of the time (actually, we prescribe it) to amazing results. I’ve always believed that if you trust people, they will more than likely impress you rather than let you down.

5. It will allow you to fail gracefully.And, dammit, you SHOULD fail. Fail early and fail often. If you don’t take risks and you don’t fail, you will never learn much. Scott Berkun talked about this in his myths of innovation talk at FOO this year. Businessweek had a cover story on it this summer. Harvard has a whole department of study on it. The Colonel tried to sell his recipe something like 14,000 times before KFC was born. The Post-It pad was a result of a massively failed new glue.

   Scientists know that every failure is one step closer to finding the answer. I always ask myself when I’m worrying, “What is the worst thing that could happen?” Answer: this doesn’t work out. So?

6. It will allow you to be utterly agile.If failure isn’t an option and you invest so much time into making something air tight, it will be that much harder to realize that you need to change and/or let go of a project or situation. Imagine how liberating the feeling of agility can be when you hit a wall.

There are even more advantages to embracing the chaos that we can see in our work with our clients. We watch them become excited again about what they are doing. When you feel the fear and “do it anyway” (who was that? Tom Peters?), it can give you a feeling akin to riding a rollercoaster or skydiving. Coming out alive on the other side is even more elating.

I challenge every one of you to go out, do something uncharacteristically chaos-embracing, then blog about how it made you feel and what happened as a result of it. It can be as simple as going to a concert by yourself and striking up a conversation with the people next to you, or as involved as throwing your own BarCamp.

According to Victoria Stern in an article titled, “Why We Worry” in November/December’s Scientific American Mind, not only does stress and worry do nothing to help us control our situation, but it can also make us LESS prepared for the worst case scenario.

Although it is our natural tendency to fret – or feel negative thoughts about a future event – too much of it can actually hinder cognitive processing, lead to cardiovascular issues and even (at its extreme) cause permanent damage to one’s body. The article also points to an article that says a small amount of worry is actually good for one’s performance, but that many people take it to an extreme that ceases to be beneficial and starts being detrimental.

And so it is with embracing the chaos and feeling the fear but doing it anyway and all of the advice we get when setting out on an adventure. It’s human to feel frightened…to have worry pangs…but it is entrepreneurial to forge ahead with senses heightened, enjoying the ride. In fact, those days when I feel that familiar pang of ‘this could all fall apart tomorrow’ are the days that I feel most alive as an entrepreneur. It is what drives me to look further ahead, be more agile and definitely be smarter about the decisions I’m making today. But it is never daunting or immobilizing…or at least it isn’t any more.

It wasn’t always that way and I used to worry far more than I do now. I fretted to my own detriment. Not only was I mired in my own stress, but I was incapacitated to act in ways that would make a positive difference to my trajectory. It was as if I had the choice to steer out of harm’s way or let go of the steering wheel and bury my face in my arms…and I would do the latter. The crash is inevitable when you spend more time worrying than doing something about your fate.

It’s also allowed me to the see the long term more clearly. This was something I couldn’t do when fretting. I saw today clearly and tomorrow was full of clouds. By seeing tomorrow clearly, I can prepare myself today (and sometimes make sacrifices necessary to make a brighter tomorrow).

And not fretting about tomorrow doesn’t mean you ignore it completely, either. A healthy eye on the future combined with an open mind today is the right balance to strike. Keep your eye on the prize and enjoy the ride.

Steve over at Polar Limited is doing a networked social media book giveaway.

Steve has convinced these seven authors Mitch Joel, Tamar Weinberg, Chris Brogan + Julien Smith, Gary Vaynerchuk, Avinash Kaushik, John Jantsch, Beth Kanter and me to offer up free copies of their books.

You can win a this set of books, signed and personalized by the authors that will teach you how to be human through your computer, generate tons of social capital, and be a social media virtuoso – plus have some great books to curl up with during the holidays.

Here’s how you win:

1. Leave a comment below telling me your social media plans for 2010, and why you think these 7 books will help you achieve what you want to accomplish.  Best comment in within the next week wins the set.
2. Visit one of the following blogs who have the same set of books to give away.  If you really want to increase your chances of winning, you’ll probably want to visit each of them and leave a comment there as well.  Here’s where to go:

   www.kaushik.net/avinash:  this is the amazing blog of Web 2.0 Analytics author Avinash Kaushik. He’s simply the smartest guy in the world when it comes to analytics and what it means for your business.

   www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog: this is the blog of John Jantsch, THE expert on small business marketing.  He’s also writes probably the most practical, hands-on marketing blog on the planet.  It’s a must-read.

   http://beth.typepad.com/: Beth is one of my heroes and actually appears in the very first chapter of The Whuffie Factor because someone that does such good work should open up any book.

Bonus: like Beth, I really love Shel Israel‘s book, Twitterville. I’m happy to pitch in and help her get it added to the list, too!

Presentation I gave at AZEC09. It was a barrel of fun. I called a poor, unsuspecting entrepreneur on stage and put him on the hotseat.

[Please don't read this if you haven't seen the season finale of Mad Men - serious spoiler alert]

For three seasons of Mad Men I watched in frustration as Don Draper seemed to get away with anything and everything. A handsome, well-dressed, privileged, tall white guy that could take everyone in his circle for granted, lie to them, cheat on them and treat them like garbage, yet continue get everything he wanted. It was a frustrating parable for me, a woman who spends a big part of her daily routine trying to make the world a place where people like Don can’t get away with murder. But there he was and people loved him. Hell, even I had to love him.

Of course, he was “good” to the people who didn’t say anything. He bestowed his wife, Betty, with all the finery she wanted at home, provided a good life, said the right things to let her know she was lovely. Yet, he cheated on her at every turn, lied to her constantly and treated her like a child when it came to her real, human concerns. She was solipsized by his personality as merely an extension of him. With his former secretary and now copyrighter, Peggy, he kept her secret and gave her a good promotion and an office. She should be grateful, right? Only she paid for his graciousness along the way by keeping his secrets, working her weekends away (while he played), jumping when he said jump and taking his constant belittling.

It wasn’t only the women who were kept at arms length with Don, it was also the men. He didn’t really have any friends. No sense of loyalty. He spent most of his time peacocking around, proving that nobody could own him. And nobody could. They feared him and were too scared to talk back. Too scared to stand up to him. In fact, Don’s ‘relationships’ were akin to having thousands of Twitter followers but little engagement with them. Looks impressive from a distance, but rather ineffective in the long run.

Until the last part of this season…or at least the last two episodes…where you saw his controlled world break down around him spectacularly because he forgot that the glue that holds together worlds when times are tough is relationships. And relationships aren’t something that Draper understands. When the people around him finally get the gumption to say ‘enough is enough’, Draper has to face the fact that he’s broken everything he tried to build by forgetting the most important part of life: connections to other people.

I’m sure Draper isn’t going to change overnight and become a warm, caring individual. I doubt that he’d be as interesting. But I look forward to the next season where he realizes that he does have to invest the time into ‘throwing sheep‘ a bit more and building those soup friends. Ruling through fear only creates resentment and de-motivates. And I look forward to the world that is tuned into The Draper having an epiphany themselves that the best way to get to the top is through being networked, notable AND nice.

This is the video my son is watching right now. Earlier today, he wandered into my office holding a math book with a confused look on his face. One look at the page of quadratic graphs led BOTH of us to have confused looks on our faces. First thing I did after fumbling through the pages of the book trying to figure this stuff out, was to search on Google for solutions, but I got really awful results (so much darn SEO crap). So I turned, in desperation, to Twitter:

And got back multiple replies: offers for help, introductions to professional tutors online, links to websites and suggestions for resources (including the awesome YouTube video above from YourTeacher.com).

Within minutes, my son was watching the video on YouTube and went from utter confusion to ‘a-ha!’ – disempowered to empowered. And all that needed to be in place was:

• People who are generous and wonderful enough to spend the time to create these awesome resources online (for free!) to empower kids.
• Generous and knowledgeable friends in my network.

Okay, so it’s not as simple as I make it sound, but this is the most powerful personal experience I’ve had on the web in a long time. It solved a real-world problem and made a huge difference in the life of my son, who I care about more than anything. This is the real promise of the social web. Let’s not forget that.