Meet Moriah. Geek. Comic book artist. Derby girl. She’s in red, in the middle above.

Here in Fort Collins, we have our very own Roller Derby league, FoCo Girls Gone Derby. Girls form all walks of life come out to play and the community knows their Derby names by heart – Moriah’s is The Original Skankster.

In the game and beyond, they add a lot of value to our community. Every 3 months FoCo Girls Gone Derby picks a different charity and gives a portion of their bout sales to them. In Moriah’s words, “It’s just something we do to provide more support for our community.”

Tonight (Monday) at 7PM, you can come out to Rollerland Skate Center and support their Skate-A-Thon by sponsoring your favorite derby girl.

I didn’t know they did so much, so I interviewed Moriah about her thoughts on community. Below is our interview:

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Nick: What can local charities do to connect more with their local community?

Moriah: It’s definitely hard right now because so many businesses are hurting, but Foco Girls Gone Derby is a little bit different than other non-profits because we can offer advertising in exchange for donations/sponsorship. I think local charities can connect more with their community by being more present. So many charities go unnoticed because their main focus is on what they provide for the community (which is good), but they need to spend so much time making sure people know they exist. I think local charities should spend a lot of time getting their name out there. People don’t give money to charities because they don’t know they’re out there, and therefore don’t matter enough to get money. It’s hard to say what each specific charity should do, but if you think you’ve marketed enough; you haven’t.

(Post-interview aside from Nick: social media for charities is a start, but connections create so much more leverage – Moriah is on-point here.)

Nick: How can you incentivize charitable individuals to make connections between local groups and local charities?

Moriah: The more information you have the better, so I think collecting some demographics from your supporters is very important. Find out where they eat out, where they shop, and what they believe in. If you know what they are passionate about, then you can team up with other charities in order to capitalize on donations.

Nick: How do you associate your local group with a charity without “charitywashing”?

Moriah: In terms of roller derby we feel like we don’t charitywash because we have an actual fan base, offer an actual service (or product if you will), and we are a non-profit. Everything we make gets put back into the league to make it better; no one makes a salary or pockets anything. We sponsor a local charity every quarter because we want to be involved in the community. We do this by being sponsored by businesses and advertising, but we also want to support our charities by giving them a portion of all of our proceeds.

(Post-interview aside from Nick: honest intent is a very powerful connecting tool. These derby girls have it in spades.)

Nick: Is there a special connection for you with the Boys and Girls Club?

Moriah: There’s no “special” connection. We’ve sponsored the bike co-op, the battered women’s shelter (which is something personal to all of us) but we pick charities that have a significant influence in the community.

Nick: What can people do to support you and donate?

Moriah: Come to our bouts! We love donations but we love fans for life way better. Come to our bouts, buy something from the bake sale, maybe buy a button, and bring your awesome energy! People can sponsor me for the Skate-A-Thon by coming tomorrow to Rollerland Skate Center at 6:45pm and asking for The Original Skankster. Admission is $3 and even if they don’t want to donate we would love it if they came.

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Lots of great ideas for charities or businesses wanting to connect more with their community, and it all starts with associations.

Good luck to The Original Skankster and all the FoCo Girls Gone Derby girls tonight!

This is a tale of woe – a long one. More accurately, it’s a tale of WHOAOMGWTF. And it’s one of the reasons I’m no longer officially providing website development services.

I’m sharing it now because I want it to serve as a learning experience.

Back in April 2011, I was contracted to build two websites for a client. It was one of the first few contracts I’d landed after making the decision to trek out on my own on Christmas Day, 2010. After being under the wing of a single client for so long, it was good to have my choice of work.

I’d guessed the creation of two websites – one pretty easy, one deceptively complex – would take about 20 hours of my time. Normally, I’d bill that out at $75/hr – or $1,500. Keep in mind, I was just back on the beat as a web designer – so, as many of you can guess, I severely underbid the project. I offered the project for $1,250, a discount to an hourly rate of $62.50 for 20 hours. Here’s the kicker – I did this because, and I told the client this as well – I thought it would be a fun project to try. I wasn’t sure how I’d do it, but my contract indicated he’d have the choice to accept any budget increases or not.

Keep that project rate of $1,250 in your mind for later. There’ll be a test.

I realized after quite a bit of tinkering, research, trial-and-errors, and trying to build my own code on top of WordPress, that I could not complete the more complex of the two websites. I offered the client a refund or the choice to work with us to get the project developed through a third-party coder. I’d pay the coder the difference from my project fee of $1,250 after I developed the second site. The client chose to keep working.

After meeting with the coder I knew could build it out, I discovered they were already committed to several projects, and ultimately, couldn’t begin to work until November. But, there were things I could do to speed up the process. Again, I informed the client, and asked to start in on the other site. A while went by and the design was finally issued for the other site, which I coded out immediately. Total billable coding time, plus two rounds of revision time, came to 12 hours, or $750 of the budget. I delivered the site and the client seemed to be pleased.

I started in on those things I could do to speed up the project – to compile all the information that the third-party coder would need to develop the site. Getting the full functionality outlined, gathering bits of code, recommendations for what modules to use, lots and lots of research to see what might exist out there to help this project go smoother. In all, I’d spent four hours gathering information to get the site organized. This amount, $250, also came out of the budget.

Last week, I received an email from the client asking if the full $1,500 of development fees were available to put toward the third-party developer’s rate. I was taken aback by the question, considering I’d already delivered one of the two websites in the contract. I hadn’t noticed the mistakenly inflated project budget (the client had paid $1,250 for the project).

I outlined the budget, how it’d been used so far – all in line with what the contract stated. By my math, if the contract was $1,500 (whoops) and $750 had been put to use to develop one of the two websites and $250 had been used toward the second - we had $500 left for the developer to work with.

The client was outraged the full project budget didn’t remain. The client demanded an immediate refund of their $500.

I gladly complied – it was my mistake. I didn’t charge my cancellation fee I’d built into the project. I didn’t charge for my unbilled time at the start of the project, the time invested before I figured out I couldn’t do the second site. I just issued the refund because I felt it was the right thing to do.

In my mind, I’d underbid the project. It had drug on for months because I’d chosen a busy developer to continue the work – in my opinion, the only one who could complete the project as requested and for a reasonable budget. And, apparently, I’d been so eager to take on the project, that I hadn’t fully explained the contract to the client – that it did in fact, cover both sites we’d talked about at our meeting. That my work was valuable and that my time cost money – and when I was working, it would come from the project budget. That they’d be paying $1,250 total and that it wouldn’t turn into $1,500 total down the line when they wanted to see what was left for the developer. Those things, I guess, weren’t explained… even though I remember explaining those things (except for the last one, because it’s just absurd).

I’m not sure how the client became so… confused… but in any case, I was doing the right thing by issuing the $500 refund.

Can you see the problem here? Let me outline the math: a $1,250 contract, minus $1,000 in work leaves… $500? Whoops.

Fast forward to the end of the story – the client, despite numerous requests to return the overage, has opted to keep the extra $250. Because they felt like it would teach me a lesson. Despite my explanation of the mistake. Despite being shown a manifest of how the budget was used. Despite the contract being explained. The client, indignant, decided they were OK with being a thief – exploiting an honest mistake by someone trying to do the right thing.

Did I screw up? Sure. Lots of times. Does that give the client the right to become a thief? Well… Do you know that $250 can pay for 50 kids to have memberships at the Boys and Girls Club for a year? Or pay for 1,000 meals for local families at the food bank?

So you might wonder what my lesson is here. Am I about to tell you to not try? To, you know, stop being ethical because apparently most folks don’t give two shakes about your morals, doing the right thing, or being honest?

Nah.

It’s hard to be ethical when it seems like unethical behavior is rewarded more often. Just remember, being unethical pays off immediately – but the rewards dwindle just as fast. Those unethical kinds of folks damage their community – and there’s lots of them. Every freelancer I’ve ever met has a list as long as their arm of clients who owe them money, undercut them on a project, or behaved unethically.

I could have been unethical, too. I mean, I own the hosting that the client’s domain is pointed to. I hear the Tijuana Donkey Show has a website now. It would be really easy to redirect the client’s site to that less than reputable website until they returned the $250.

But I didn’t. And I won’t. I just put up a simple “under maintenance” sign instead, at their request.

I have a long list of clients whose projects I did my very best on, folks who speak well of me. Each time, I bent over backwards to make them happy, just as I tried to do in this case. I just bent a little too far. My friends that I do business with – the very, very good business people I’m pleased to count as mentors and friends – they have similar experiences.

One oddball, dishonest client out of a bunch of awesome clients is pretty small fry. I doubt folks who act unethically – even occasionally – are aware of that kind of peace of mind. It doesn’t come from redirecting bad clients’ websites to bestiality blogs.

Doing the right thing is usually a bitch – and sometimes it bites you, but it’s still worth doing. The effort proves you care. Being ethical pays off slowly – in that you grow the community for your efforts. That’s when being truly ethical pays off – because the community values your input.

The gray area exists for a reason; everybody thinks they’re in the right, even if they’re not. The only real question is – how much does your community value your input?

(Header photo: Community)

About April of 2011, I was putting together my first TEDx conference.

Organizing your first TEDx conference is one of the most stressful (and rewarding) things a human being can do, I suspect. Because it was the first one in our area (Northern Colorado), we didn’t have a lot of clout. Or a lot of guaranteed funding, either.

So I had to ask for favors.

If you know me, you know how much I hate asking for favors. I think if you’re doing work, you should get paid that work’s worth and not a cent less.

That being said, barter can be a good idea when you know you need help and you won’t waste the other person’s time. Or when you can offer a trade equal to or greater than the favor. When you’re asking for a favor, understand exactly the value that the other person is being asked to provide – and respect that. You might not agree with their value, but if this person is willing to help you – don’t argue.

Back to TEDxFoCo, I asked two videographers for their help. The first one turned us down outright. The second one… didn’t. In fact, they filmed the event, produced it, and delivered videos in the right format.

Videographer #2 was pure awesome. And now that I’m planning the next TEDxFoCo, I’m keeping them in mind for paid work. With a decent budget, I can pay them what they’re worth. This videographer also gets mentioned every time one of my clients needs video work.

The other videographer? I don’t actively campaign against ‘em – because I get it. The drive against doing free work for any reason is huge. Maybe it wasn’t a good time to ask. Still, this person is not my first choice for paid videowork. I can’t promote them to friends, clients, whatever – because I couldn’t count on ‘em when the cards were down.

When you’re being asked to barter, do work pro-bono, or donate time of any kind – always temper that instinct to say no against who’s asking you and what the opportunity is. Unless they’re a complete slouch or dirtbag, if someone’s asking you a favor – their butt is probably on the line.

Just don’t get overbooked.

(Header photo: Trading by Eddy Van 3000)

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This post is part of the January Word Carnival — a monthly group blogging event specifically for small business owners. (It’s the most fun you’ll have all month!) Check out the rest of the fabulous carney work here. And don’t forget to join us for our Twitter Chat on Thursday (Jan 26) at noon (Pacific). We’ll be tweeting up a storm under the #WordCarnival hashtag.

Note from Nick: this is a guest post from my friend Rebecca Tracey, of The Uncaged Life. Her blog is unmitigated genius – great holiday reading, if ever there was any. I asked Rebecca to share with you something straight from the heart. Told her she could even swear if she wanted. And this is what she came up with – enjoy!

When Nick asked me to write a guest post, I sorta freaked out. My business is new, I’m still establishing my own website, and I don’t have nearly as much ‘expertise’ as he does.

Yet not once did he ask for my resume, my credentials, or check up on me to make sure I really know what I’m talking about. Why would he want me to write for him?

I mean, I know I’m a great coach. I have fantastic insight, amazing life experience, and a finely tuned bullshit meter. Of COURSE I’m valuable to Nick’s readers.

Thing is, on paper… I’m not so hot. My resume – it sucks. Sure, I have an undergrad degree (in a totally unrelated field), I did post-grad training as a nutritionist (so what, right?), and I’ve gone through a few intensive coach trainings (Finally! But – I don’t even list those on my website/resume).

I don’t have 10 years of coaching under my belt. I don’t have an MBA or any particular entrepreneurial skills training. I’m not an expert on blogging, or internet marketing, or technology. I have more than one series of year-long gaps on my resume where I chose to drop out of life as I knew it and focus solely on travel, play, and neglecting all my responsibilities. Not exactly a marketable skill, right?

In the traditional sense, on paper, I’m crap.

But in life, where it really counts – I’m more than “qualified” to be doing what I’m doing.

And, true story – many great innovators are in the same boat. Mark Zuckerberg. Bill Gates. Einstein. Disney. Oprah. Dropped out of school, fired from jobs, kicked out of college and told their ideas were shit.

We seem to have this insane want for more education, more degrees, more time spent in the classroom, more training, more courses, more hours and dollars spent to prove to the world that we are worthy.

We use the excuse that we just need to learn a little bit more before we can be great.

And it’s a fucking cop out.

What if you chose (yes, voluntarily) to leave your education out of the equation. What if you focused on what you have to offer, in real life skills rather than obscure letters after your name? What if everything you’ve ever done and everything you know NOW is all you need to create the dream job you crave?

Stop putting it off because you’re not perfect on paper yet. Start believing in more than what’s on your resume and what letters fall after your name.

Save your money, save your time, and have the balls to just GO FOR IT, regardless of how qualified you are on paper. Because if you really wanna go places in this world, your resume means jack shit.

xx becca

Rebecca Tracey | The Uncaged Life
As a Life-switch + Career-shift Coach, Rebecca Tracey helps cubicle-phobic crusaders bust out of their self-imposed cages, by taking big risks + bold swings—the kind that pay off, in more than just cash.

Explore Rebecca’s rule-bending riffing on radical life design, road-tripping + rock climbing at TheUncagedLife.com… and schedule your no-cost Uncaged Chat, to see if 1-on-1 coaching is the awesome-sauce you need to activate your dreams.

(Header Photo: This is happening without your permission)

As the year comes to a close, you’re going to get a lot of people reflecting on the last year. Lessons they learned, things they did, all neatly summarized into a cute blog post with a cute image, maybe of some ducks crossing the road.

They’re going to give you advice. It’s going to sound sage. And practical. And you’re going to think to yourself, “Holy crap, I’d better do that.”

And I’m here to tell you: it’s the same as it ever was.

The same as it ever was.

Every revolution around the sun, we try to make some meaning of the craziness. To ordain some life lesson from the heaping mess we traveled through. And, let’s face it – we’re still in a mess.

• 1 in 2 Americans is poor or low income (1 in 7 is hungry) even while Black Friday set records.
• Gays are still persecuted and don’t have the same rights as straight people.
• Transgendered teens are still required to use staff bathrooms, or face suspension.
• The Internet’s future is being debated by people who still probably use IE6.

It’s 2011. About to be 2012. Gay people being gay is still a thing other people get fussy about? We haven’t figured out how to reduce or eliminate poverty? One in seven American households goes hungry?

WTF people? You can take your year-end synopsis and shove it. Keep your silly advice and to-do lists and holiday cheer and photos of ducks. We’ve got some serious shit to do, here.

We’ve got Star Trek level-technology like iPads and iPhones and replicators without Star Trek-level ethics or Star Trek-level living standards to back it up. And don’t tell me that Star Trek is socialist. That’s bullshit, watch some Deep Space Nine and educate yourself, fool.

It’s time to start fixing things. Nobody in charge seems to have any idea what’s going on. Or what to do. Or how to fix these huge problems. And even if they do know what’s going on, or what to do, or how to fix it – they’re being held back by the idiots who like things just the way they are.

This year, I ran the Digital Gunslingers through enough classes to raise $500 for the Larimer County Food Bank, which is 2,000 meals for local families. It’s a start.

I’m going to do an experiment starting in January. Over the course of the year, I’m offering 12 businesses a simple WordPress website – one per month, with a simple store, up to 10 products, a year of hosting, and basic SEO. No crazy custom designs, just a simple, easy-to-use website. $500 is the cost – a lot less than what I usually charge.

The $500 will go directly to the Larimer County Food Bank. At the end of the year – that’s $6,000 or 24,000 meals for local families ($1 = 4 meals), or 12x better than I did this year.

So, I lied a little – this post does have some advice.

First: be a little nicer to everyone – you never know who needs a sandwich, a hug, or a closer bathroom.

Second: get off your butt and start fixing some problems. Doesn’t matter what you do. Just do what feels right.

(Unless it’s being a douchebag towards gay people or beating up hungry hobos – don’t do that.)

(Header photo: Duckies!)

If you weren’t aware, I’m a huge geek.

In the very rare moments when I have spare time, I like to write Star Trek fan fiction in audio drama form. Think old-school radio programs like The Shadow and you’ve got the general idea.

Technically, doing that – publishing and distributing a work of fan fiction the way we do it – breaches all sorts of copyright laws. It’s not like it’s a parody or something that could be considered protected first amendment speech. It’s copyright infringement, pure and simple (even though we don’t make a dime from it).

Even so, Paramount and Viacom leave us and others like us alone. Why?

Because we’ve stolen like artists. We might be breaching copyright, but we’re feeding the beast – the drive to buy the DVDs and costumes and books and movies and pay insane amounts of money to go to conventions and wait hours in line for a chance to say hi to William Shatner, Patrick Stewart, Kate Mulgrew, Avery Brooks, and Scott Bakula. We’ve taken our favorite series and expanded on it. We made our own characters, created our mark on a universe that was otherwise limited to what you saw on TV and in the movies. We’ve expanded on the original work, created something new and valuable, and made the original works that much more powerful.

I’ve taken to licensing most all of my work under Creative Commons. It’s a bolt-on to copyright – it doesn’t eliminate the copyright you hold on your work, but allows others to remix your work without having to seek out permission every time. Depending on the license, as long as they credit you for the original work you did, they can use your work to create new works of their own. To me, this is the future of creative processes – it’s the start of new markets, new mediums, new methodologies.

However, it does have a dark side – stealing like an artist can backfire when the new work devalues or damages the intent of the original. Take the commercials from the car dealerships featuring loud “occupiers” demanding cheaper cars and higher Miles Per Gallon. When mindless overspending was partially responsible for the mess that led to the anger which led to the protests, you’re not doing your business any favors by pretending you understand what the movement is about.

All of the header photos you see on my blog are Creative Commons licensed. All of the books I release are Creative Commons. All of my new projects have a creative commons component to them.

I challenge you to steal like an artist in December – taking the best bits and pieces, mingling and merging and molding disparate domains of work together into a new, amazingly complex hybrid. Whose ideas will you improve on? Tell me in the comments!

(Header photo: Sorry Today)

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This post is part of the November Word Carnival series. For more on the Word Carnival, and for more great posts from my friends – check out the Carnival.

There. I’ve said it.

Social Media Makes Business Owners Stupid. (Happy Thanksgiving, by the way).

I was reading up today on someone who Klout considers a star (his score is 55, mine is 53, for what it’s worth). One of the key factors they believe he’s a star is because he uses the GKTT (Guy Kawasaki Twitter Technique), or what I like to call the HERP.

Horribly
Egregious
Repetitive
Posting

Guy Kawasaki’s AllTop is hurting the web. Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against Guy himself, he’s a great human being as far as I can tell. Looks very huggable. However, hiring armies to “aggregate” (read: scrape like a meth addict) content from the web, reposting an excerpt on your own site like you created it, and promoting the crap out of it over and over and over again with different titles so your web properties show massive traffic is not just downright dishonest, it damages the web.

Remember why Digg took a massive geek-cred hit a while back? They added a “landing” page so you -had- to visit Digg at some point before you visited the content that people actually wanted you to see.

And it works, because you fall for it. Like an alzheimer patient oscillating between two Starbucks on opposite corners – we keep on clicking on. And on. And on. Have you tried their Salted Carmel Mocha? It’s delicious. But if you’re in Fort Collins, nothing beats the Honey Vanilla Latte from Cafe Ardour.

Let me ask you something: what happens when you see a brand new hilarious commercial on TV? (that is, if you don’t skip past them pretending to be some evil DVR-toting timelord). You laugh, right? Maybe you laugh so hard, you have to change your pants. Hey, it happens.

What happens an hour later when you’ve got your new pants on, and you see the same commercial again? …And again five minutes later …and again when you change the channel …and then again on every channel?

If you’re anything like me, you start wondering if the remote is sharp enough to perform Seppuku.

I’ll say it again: social media makes business owners stupid. Drunk with our own power at rummaging up hundreds or thousands of people who’ve decided at some point to click “follow” or “like”… the tendency is established that at some point, we’ll lose our minds. Just look at APlusK.

Enter: repetitive, slightly modified tweets. Observing, and consequently catching, the HERP. Writing banal blog posts to net SEO gains. Pitching discounts indiscriminately on every channel when times are slow. Ignoring industry standard rules because it just doesn’t look as good. Comic sans.

What’s worse: when one business owner shares this horrible advice with another. The cycle continues. Look, here’s the deal. What I like to call the “where’s the beef” of social media (because that other list of 10 things was taken by some dude who got freaked out by a brushfire):

1. Thou shalt not assume any random assclown shall care about thy Tweets.
2. Thou shalt worry about the number of meaningful conversations thou is having, not the number of thy followers.
3. Thou shalt not make life or death decisions based on thy Klout score nor any other social media “metric”.
4. Thou shalt seek either fame and fortune or meaningful conversation. Those who seek both are destined for pain and warm rootbeer.
5. Thou shalt blog with fresh, insightful, meaningful, funny, touching, or otherwise “fucking great” content, else thy can discontinue thy bitching about thou’s lack of readership.
6. Thou shalt not expect thy customers, family, high school friends, or other random folk to giveth a crap about your overly repetitive marketing messages.
7. Thou shalt not attempt to automate socialization or thou shalt be smited mightily.
8. Thou shalt not attempt to utilize “social media” as a one-way street, bullhorn, billboard, or glorified RSS feed.
9. Thou shalt not scrape social media sites for mine email address and then opt-me-in to thy mailing list against mine will.
10. Thou shalt not flood every medium with the same message. Show respect and shake it up, mine dawg.

And a bonus, for those of you paying attention:

• Thou shalt avoid YouTube commenters no matter the cost.

All sacrilege aside, before you do anything on social media, you should consider The Golden Rule. Treat others how you’d like to be treated. Work with people the way you’d like to be worked with.

Everything else is blasphemy.

(Header photo: Boy by Jacob Johan)

A quick preface, this post has a lot of swearing. I like swearing. It’s cathartic. So if that kind of language bothers you, I’ve got this nice video of puppets singing that you can watch. Now, on to the story:

When I was 10, I joined the Denver Nuggets Junior Basketball Camp. My friend, Drew and I, were placed on the same team – the Raptors. Our jerseys were bright red and I was #4.

I practiced almost every night – layups, free throws, stepladder dunks. Just incase, you know, I had a growth spurt mid-game or something. Gotta practice your dunks if you want your photos to look cool in the paper the next day. Incredible 10-year old Nick Armstrong, the next Jordan – seen here levitating in mid-air for a full thirty seconds before an unprecedented 360-behind-the-back-upside-down-dunk.

We had games every weekend. My team and I – the 10-year-old basketball prodigy, the next Jordan – went 0 for 10.

For those of you who aren’t hip to the sports jargon, we lost every game.

At the end of the season, we had a pizza party. And got trophies. Small, shiny, victoryless trophies with our names on ‘em. So did the 10-0 team.

For the record – that was the only trophy I ever got for participation. Trophy generation my ass.

Anyway, it wasn’t the pizza or the trophy that mattered. It didn’t matter if we won or lost, how many points we got, or who fouled who.

The only thing that ever mattered to me was getting called in. I was chubby. If you wanted a chubby brick wall to stop mid-run to draw a foul when another kid ran into that brick wall, I was the one to call. It was a brillant strategy, except that I only made about 25% of my free throws. Even that didn’t matter.

More than anything, I loved just being in the game. For me – every time I got to play – that was winning.

Nick – we get it. You were a chubby, somewhat delusional 10-year-old who relished in the spotlight any time someone took pity and put him in. What’s your point?

My point is: working for yourself is a lot like being the coach of an 0-10 little league basketball team. Especially at first.

You lose more games than you win. Your players are unskilled, chubby little runts that get knocked around every game. And you have to take every opportunity to manufacture victory.

Some people call it finding the silver lining. I call it efficient, effective failure.

That’s really important, I think. That whole idea of manufacturing victory. There are days as an entrepreneur when you actually loathe the thought of touching a computer. Or picking up a pen and writing an idea down. Or even putting on pants.

Those are the days you absolutely have to manufacture victory. Because the most important skill you can learn when your work is the only thing standing between yourself and a cardboard box is to find victories anywhere you can. Because it keeps you going one more day at the computer. One more thought to jot down. One more pant leg to slide into.

Why did you decide to work for yourself?

Was it to make money? Or to change something in your community? Or build awareness for a cause? Was it because you had no other choice? Was it something you had to do just so you could get by? Or was it a calling? Something your gut told you that you HAD to do?

Why, if you were so talented, so driven – or at least, talented and driven enough to start a company of your own – did you not find a suitable 9-5? Or a non-profit? Or a volunteer position?

I had a lot of reasons. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. I realized that I could trade the burdens of a 2 hour commute and being required to wear pants during the day to make a living on my own. Without the comfort of health insurance. Or a steady paycheck. Or a 401K. I wanted to stop doing work that I hated for people that didn’t understand Gen-Y and wouldn’t hold co-workers accountable for behaving like bullies and thought I was just “acting out” when I made suggestions.

Fuckers. You know that I was actually written up for being overly direct with my boss? For making a suggestion? Ugh.

To be fair, they weren’t all bad. But most of ‘em were. So I hung up my suit and tie (and, most importantly, pants) and went to work doing just the pieces of things I used to do that I really liked.

And life took on this new normal, right? Cereal for lunch and the more-than-occasional up-til-3AM-sleep-till-6AM-for-a-meeting-the-next-day became standard operating procedure at least once a week. And it was scary (and still is). There were more than a few slow months that I didn’t know where rent was coming from. But each time, I knuckled down. I worked my ass off. And then it was awesome. Caffeine-fueled, sleep-deprived awesomeness.

I went into doing my own thing because I was tired of being asked to do work that I hated.

I was tired of being bullied by a system that didn’t care about me. Or what I was capable of. Or what I knew. Or how full of shit I, you, and everybody else, knows they are.

If I was going to take that kind of abuse, I better damn well be the one inflicting it on myself. Oprah calls that empowerment.

(Header photo: Sports Trophies)

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Schadenfreude.

Get to know this word – because it’s the thing that may eventually cause your movement to fail. It’s a German word for the pleasure derived from the misfortune of others. It’s why TMZ is so popular, and it’s why – despite evidence that the economy is leading us directly towards a civil war – some folks continue to post snarky comments about the Occupy Wall Street movement on Facebook, Twitter, and giggle while the nightly news shows recaps #OWS arrests.

Let me be clear here: I do not want you to fail. I do want you to get a hell of a lot more organized so you can do this thing right.

Schadenfreude only comes into play when there’s an “us vs them” mentality. Our enemy slips up. Someone much more wealthy or powerful than us gets caught doing something naughty. We’d never be that silly. We could never do those things. But when something happens to mom, dad, or our little sister, suddenly we can empathize. It’s personal – it’s just as bad as if it happened to us.

While almost everybody could empathize with the feeling of not being able to pay a bill, losing a job, or thinking that it’s time to whack some high-level bankers like piñatas until no more money falls out, here’s the problem you’re facing (and it’s a big one): occupying a park is not something that everybody can do. Most of the 99% still has jobs (they might not be the best jobs, but we still have to work). A lot of the 99% run their own businesses. And trust me, while I’d have no reservations about chilling in a park all day, working on my laptop – a lot of folks don’t have that kind of time or luxury. Meanwhile, we wish we could do something to help, but we don’t know what – and then we get on with our day while you’re getting zip-cuffed in the park.

So, while we should be empathizing with you, we end up dissociating from you instead. You become “the protesters” and not Mary the 32 year old spinster who barely scrapes by in her apartment on Prospect Road since losing her job at the bank while her former CEO decides whether or not to buy a third gold-lined umbrella holder at Bed, Bath, and I’ve Got Too Much Fuckin’ Money. And it’s not the media’s fault. Got it?

Don’t believe me? What did I just say about a banker piñata? Didn’t you get that, “Hell yes” feeling? OK, how about if our banker’s name is now Gary from Littleton, father of two and avid donator and volunteer to the foodbank? Now it’s a little harder to justify whipping out the whiffle bat, right? He might be a rich prick at work, but I can’t shake down a volunteer dad of two.

Schadenfreude is what enables us to disconnect from our morals and justify harm to marginalized groups. It’s why ordinarily rational white folks did nothing while black folks were getting firehosed for sitting in the wrong chair. And it’s why folks who should be supporting you may just be changing the channel instead.

While a mass occupation is great and all – hey, it worked for Woodstock, right? – you’re running out of time to make this personal. You have a serious marketing problem.

You desperately need a leader. Someone who can stand up – someone well-spoken – and deliver a speech that makes these things personal. Remember Obama’s 2008 campaign? He took this country by storm, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop him. Why? Because he was the guy who understood our problems. The guy who told us stories about people just like us - who came from roots just like us - and had a plan to try and fix the problem. You need an Obama. And you need a plan.

What’s #OWS’s plan? I’ve been watching for a while now and I don’t see one. If you (and even if you aren’t a part of the #OWS) want to get sh!t done, you have to get activation.

The public’s lack of activation for your cause is not a sign of laziness, but instead a lack of clarity on how to help. Any project must have that clarity to succeed.

So here’s a plan of action for you – and anyone else who wants to make something happen – because you need it:

- Get Your Message Straight and Align it with What Your Audience Wants to Hear: Stop the political preaching on your blog. We get it. Instead, I want you to start posting the personal stories (video if you can) of every single person you can – always include a photo – hopefully of the person with their family. Once a day, non-stop. Use a secondary Tumblr blog if you have to. Make this thing personal. For the titles of those blogs, first name, town name, age, and family stats.

- Get Your Message to the Right People and Be Consistent: Send these out as press releases. Flood the media with them. Give Obama-type online talks and post them online for all to see once a week.

- Develop the Right Platforms and Design a Clear Path: Create a newsletter. Your website is not enough. Get people to sign up to your newsletter and give them a weekly course of action, not just events or marches, but 5 small things they can do that week to help the movement and raise awareness.

- Make Spreading the Message Simple: Create a guidebook that you can use to educate the general public with stats directly from the Government on why things are so bad. I’m also working on an ignite-style video with those same stats. Release everything you do under Creative Commons so anyone can reprint and share it without asking for permission.

- Generate Sympathy and Camaraderie: Nominate a leader in each city who can speak for their movement. This person should be well-spoken, well-groomed, and very sympathetic. No political preachers, no lecturers, just a plain-jane-family guy or gal. Then have them share the stories that came out of the occupation that day. Have them give a speech twice a week to rally support, to give followers a list of tasks to take on that week.

- Find Allies to Help You: Start courting small businesses. Don’t expect handouts or freebies, but promise to shop in their stores in exchange for spreading the word or standing by you if they get interviewed (or, better yet – ask them to do a video interview for you and post it on the blog: the more business support you have, the better you will do).

- Change Your Tactics to Leverage the Element of Surprise: Silence works better than any other method of intimidation. Instead of loudly protesting outside of a bank, instead, line up, side-by-side, five rows deep, and *stare* at folks who cross the line. That’s creepy as all hell and will get you all sorts of attention.

- Engage the Desire to Belong to Something: Give everyday joe’s an ability to show solidarity. A bumper sticker, a t-shirt, something… and a check-list of activities to perform (ie: join a credit union, don’t shop at xyz) so that we can help you, even if we can’t occupy with you (as an aside, this will help you raise some money to afford to sit around in a park all day).

With all that even marginally attempted, Occupy Wall Street (and all the other Occupy movements) would become an unstoppable force, so what’s stopping you?

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This post is part of the October Word Carnival on productivity. Check it out for more great advice on being productive!

(Header photo: Occupy Wall Street)