For Stephanie Price, her job was copywriter at Y&R in New York. And her __________ was helping earthquake survivors in Haiti.

After volunteering for a couple of months immediately after the disaster, Steph came back to the States to work full time. But a year later, the experience in Haiti still hadn’t left her.

Then, instead of taking another leave and volunteering for a month or two, Stephanie did what so many of us have fantasized about.

She quit her job to follow her heart. And in Steph’s case, her heart told her to move to Haiti to help rebuild people’s lives.

Stephanie Price does her thing in Haiti

Today, she is working with a school that teaches English to Haitians for free. Turns out, there is a shortage of skilled labor in Haiti, and jobs in restaurants, hotels and offices all over Port-au-Prince need workers who speak English.

For a while, English in Mind Institute was being funded by a British NGO. But they’ve since pulled out of Haiti and are no longer backing the school. So Steph has created this IndieGoGo campaign to help them raise the $10k they need to stay open through the 2013 school year. Books, supplies, and teacher’s salaries are all covered in this amount.

From the campaign:

There are plenty of English schools here in Haiti, but they’re expensive. We don’t believe that learning English should be a privilege of the wealthy. Even though some of our students are willing to pay, a vast majority can’t and we believe it’s important that we keep our doors open to all.

Since I worked with Steph in 2004, my life has taken about a dozen sharp turns. But none of them have been so sharp and so intentional as hers. I’m just floored by her commitment to her brothers and sisters in Haiti. Her heart inspires me. And I hope it inspires you, too.

Contribute to Stephanie’s “Keep English in Mind” IndidGogo campaign here.

Without hesitation, I said, “Go to film school.”

Of course, the reality is that money is an object. There are mouths to feed and heads to keep roofs over. So spending two years and fifty grand would not be possible unless I suddenly decided my career is more important than my family. And it isn’t.

But no sooner did I say those words than an opportunity to attend the Wild Mind Film Camp presented itself. Ten days in the mountains of Washington studying under one of my favorite documentary filmmakers, Doug Pray. It’s not an accredited film school, but it is an incredible opportunity to learn how to be a better filmmaker and practice this craft of mine.

My wife, God bless her, was willing to sacrifice a family vacation (again) so I could be part of this thing. Every time I think I’ve asked too much of her already, her generosity re-blows my mind. I can’t imagine doing this with anybody else in the world but her.

All I can say is, all this sacrificing now for a better tomorrow? It WILL be worth it. I promise.

“I’m worthy. At least, I’m worthy.”

I’ll never learn how to ride a bike!

I’ll never get past yellow belt!

I’ll never be a better swimmer!

I’ll never get better at hand writing!

It’s a nasty habit, because the more he says it, the more he believes it. The best we can do as parents is to show him that he can. To point to the successes in his life when he proved himself wrong.

Pam Slim calls it Success Dysmorphia. No matter how much or how often we succeed, our default setting is to magnify our failures.

My wife and I always say our children are bellweathers. If we want to know how we’re really feeling or what our sunconscious minds are really thinking, we need not look any further than the two hyperactive mini-us’s running around our living room.

Like my son, confidence is not my default mindset. Deep in the recesses of my brain, I think, “I’ll never make enough money. I’ll never be successful. I’ll never break into that next level of creative, of writer, of director.” Overcoming that thinking is a daily battle of meditation and exercise and affirmation techniques and vision boards.

All I know is that both extremes breed themselves. The more I beat myself up, magically, the world agrees. But the more I confront my judgemental side with understanding and patience, the more doors open up and the better life is.

If I want to teach my children these lessons, I must live them.

I mean, I’ve worked. And very hard. But not for anything that’s earned any income.

Entering the otherwise quiet month of December, I felt great heading into 2012. The second half of last year was rockin’ with commercial directing work for Dell and Yahoo!. I also started blogging for Forbes and made several trips to Detroit to screen the short for “Lemonade: Detroit.” And I took a big chunk of the directing money I made (okay, almost all the directing money I made) and paid off much of the debt that has haunted me for so long. All the things on my vision board were coming to fruition.

With January came the promise of new projects and continued momentum. In early January I was bidding for two new gigs. Ironically, both came from former bosses at their new ad agencies. And, ironically, both were directing commercials for their health care clients.

Before I go on, you must know that 2011 was a gift. The assignments from Dell and Yahoo! were single bid. I was incredibly fortunate to start my commercial directing career off the way I did. But these two new potential projects were more traditional and competitive in the way they were awarded.

Now, I’ve been in situations like this on the agency side. My partner and I would get a TV project to work on, present a bunch of ideas, and the client would narrow it down to two or three. Sometimes, they’d end up producing ours, and sometimes, they’d produce another team’s instead. The latter was always a psychological blow, but at the end of the day I’d still get a paycheck.

As a business owner, if my ideas don’t win, there’s no revenue. And as it would turn out, both of these new assignments went to another director. As did the momentum I had accumulated in 2011.

My confidence, however, has never been higher. And here’s why.

1. I learned more from not getting those assignments than I would have had they been awarded in my favor. In both instances, I had the luxury of personal relationships with the creative directors, so they were candid about why they went in another direction. And while neither had anything to do with the treatment I wrote (both said I presented the best ideas on paper), they both taught me the value ofcompetitive bidding. At the risk of oversimplifying, it really came down to which production company provided the most value. I lost one because my competitor made a case for a less elaborate production at half the cost. And I lost the other (mostly) because of a production company that could do it two weeks sooner than we could. I’m not saying either presented less worthy ideas. I’m just saying, all things being equal, logistics and budget ultimately weighed in their favor.
2. Those treatments I wrote absolutely put me in a position to bid on the agencies’ next projects. The creative directors went out of their way to tell me that if it just came down to the treatments, the jobs would have been mine. So rather than sheepishly going into the next bidding cycle, I feel confident that I’m doing that part rather well.
3. I have no business debt. All that credit I freed up in 2011? I’m looking at that as an emergency small business loan. Don’t get me wrong, I hate the idea of living off credit again. I really thought those days were behind me. But my success in 2011 allowed me the credit to fall back on in 2012.
4. There are lots of rumblings about new projects. For the aforementioned reasons, Ifeel great about my odds when they present themselves.
5. There are lots of rumblings about freelance. I still have great relationships in the agency world, and I’m keeping my portfolio fresh with new work. (Hint, hint.) It takes a while to prime the freelance pump when you’ve been busy with other work, but it has been the once constant in an otherwise unpredictable revenue stream. Consider the pump primed.
6. There are lots of rumblings about “Lemonade: Detroit” funding. Any one of a number of hot irons could decide today that they want to underwrite the whole feature-length production. In which case, I will look back on this blog one day and think, “Silly Erik. All that concern for nothing.”

“Nobody said life would be easy, they just promised it would be worth it.” -Harvey Mackay.

I love that quote. I live by that quote. Let’s do this.

Last night, something very strange happened.

I met two friends in Chicago for dinner. The kind of dinner I would normally blow off because it came after a day that featured a 5:30 AM call time and 10 hours of filming outdoors under the opression of a 110 degree heat index.

But here’s where the strange part kicks in.  We sat for two hours, each taking turns in describing the amazing things that are happening with our careers. Josh, who got laid off from his agency account service job almost two years ago, is now on retainer with two companies doing strategic planning work. Plus he has a roster of his own clients that are growing rapidly.

Becky left her miserable job in Michigan, moved to Chicago, and is now doing agency PR for Cramer-Krasselt. Plus she’s making a killing as a freelance photographer. All of which has allowed her to pursue her passion for skydiving. (And if I know Becky, I wouldn’t doubt that THAT will be her career one day.)

Then, after telling them about the great day I had directing some commercial work Yahoo!, and talking about moving my family to Austin, it struck me that in over two hours, not one of us had bitched about our jobs. Not one of us complained about an unfair boss or a pain in the ass cubicle mate or working late hours. We were just sharing stories. Reconnecting. And appreciating this wonderful moment in our lives and careers.

We were….happy.

I was an above average football player in high school.  All State honorable mention for offensive and defensive tackle for Division 1 high school in NH. At 6’0 and 215 lbs, I relied more on speed than size.  But when I tried to walk-on at the University of New Hampshire, there was no way I could play in the trenches with the 275 lb+ linemen of a 1AA college. It meant that if I wanted to keep playing football, I had to change positions.

It also meant that I had to change my body. I lifted weights like a madman and ate and ate and ate in the dining hall next to the Williamson dorm. I added about 15 lbs and improved my high school 40-yard dash time from 4.9 to 4.69 seconds.

I guess it was one of my first attempts at reinvention.

So I walked on as a fullback. But thing about moving from lineman to fullback is that it’s a completely new language and skill set. Almost nothing I had learned in high school applied to this new position. The reads, the sequences in play calling . . . everything was different.

For instance, when my high school quarterback called a 42 DIVE, I only had to worry about the second number in that sequence. It meant I had to block the defender away from the 2 hole. Simple.

But as a college fullback, it meant I WAS the 4 back, and I had to get the hand-off from the quarterback and run THROUGH the 2 hole.

The result for me was that I completely lost my instincts and confidence for the game, I spent the entire spring season getting yelled at by the coaches. “You’re gonna hurt someone out there, Proulx!” Or, “Look at the size of you! Why are you so timid?”

It was like I had never played before. And in a sense, I hadn’t. This was a completely new game to me now.

Spring football in college is capped off with the annual blue-grey game, where the offense scrimmages the defense. It’s meaningless in the NCAA rankings, but it does determine your place on the team for the coming fall season. Having spent the entire spring making one mistake after another, I knew there was no chance I would be invited to camp in the summer. All I could do was study the playbook and try not to hurt anyone when my number was called in the spring season finale.

The night before the game, I couldn’t sleep. I was so scared I was going to fuck up and that my utter incompetence would be on display to all my friends who came out to support me.

Then I remembered a simple piece of advice my high school line coach gave me as a sophomore, right about when I was having the same trouble as a lineman. He said, “When in doubt, just hit someone.” If I didn’t know my assignment, if my brain was lost in a haze of numbers and audibles, just locate the nearest off-colored jersey and knock the snot out of him.

The one similarity between being an offensive lineman and a fullback is that you need to be a great blocker. Only, if you do it right, it’s way more fun as a fullback because you can get a full head of steam on you before you make contact.

So I went into the blue-grey game in the spring of 1990 with a singular mentality. “If I don’t know what I’m doing, just hit somebody.”

And boy, did I. Everything just clicked. The studying I had done the night before and this newfound spirit of aggression freed me up to just play without overthinking every down. On one tailback sweep, I hit a defensive back so hard that he left his feet and landed on his back. I saw the running backs coach jumping up and down on the sideline screaming, “There it is, Proulx! Yeah!!!” For as long as I was in the game, I just hit someone. I even ran the ball through the correct hole and caught a pass for a first down.

It was the most fun I had not just in college, but in the 6 or so years I had played the game.

Just hit someone.

So why am I rehashing my sports glory days? Well, it occurred to me that I am stuck in a similar state of paralysis lately, the same way I was as a college walk-on who had never played fullback before.

I have no idea what I am doing as a small business owner. Things like mapping out a plan for the new year and developing a marketing strategy freeze me up. Write a business plan? How do I do that? Do I need to? A small business bank loan? What if I’m denied? How do I pitch funders for “Lemonade: Detroit”? What do I do? How do I apply for grants?

So rather than figure things out, I leave everything half-written, half-executed, and half-assed.

And the same goes for my directing career. While I am learning as I go, there are all kinds of skills I could be developing but haven’t yet. Why? Because I’m afraid I don’t know what I’m doing. I keep going back to the well of what I know without challenging myself, doing the same things over and over like a short-circuiting robot.

Reinvention is scary. There’s no road map for change. There are no wise mentors knocking on my door who are begging to help me. If I want long term success, I have to walk these unmarked trails and be willing to make a few wrong turns along the way. I have to have, as Hall of Fame linebacker Andre Tippett calls, the “Heart of a Beginner.”

But walk I must. And when I’m unsure of which way to go…

Just hit someone.

Right now, I’m on the Boston to New York Megabus on my way to film a commercial for Yahoo! And it got me thinking, “How did I get here?”

I mean, two years ago, becoming a director was the last thing I would have imagined. Climb the ladder to creative director? Sure. Own an agency some day? Possibly. But film director? Those were the specialists. The hired guns. That could never be me.

Yet here I am, one and a half films and a few commercial shoots into my new career as an independent film and commercial director. There have been so many divergent paths along the way. But as the months go on, I am doing more directing and less ad-guy freelancing, and I have to say, it’s incredible.

So I thought it would be a fun exercise to plot my career path in much more detail than the greatest hits you’ll find on my resume and LinkedIn page.  I think it’s a pretty good example that even if you’ve spent most of your life doing one thing, it’s not too late to evolve into something else.

Here’s a rough time line of my work history from college graduation to present day:

• 1993: Graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a Bachelor of Arts in English/minor in Journalism.
• 1993: Worked for the Boston Phoenix Personals department in their call center, helping singles write things like: “29 yo man seeks woman for long walks along the Esplanade. Must share  passion for leather masks.”
• 1994: Realized this was not a gateway to more serious journalism. Quit and moved to San Diego without a car or a job.
• 1994: Became a receptionist at Flowers Group Advertising & Design in San Diego. Published my first ad copy. (A coupon ad for Sea World.)
• 1995: Homesickness and a desire to pursue copywriting bring me back to Boston. No job, but a clarity of purpose.
• 1995: Odd jobs at mutual fund companies and call centers as I worked on my spec copywriting portfolio. Most likely interrupted your dinner to sell you an MBNA credit card. Sorry about that.
• 1996: My first advertising job! The Morrison Agency in Atlanta takes a chance and hires me as a junior copywriter. Start to believe I’m hot shit.
• 1997: After roughly a year at TMA, I get homesick again and move back to Boston. This time, though, I had a job lined up at Allen & Gerritsen. My account was to be Sybase.
• 1997: Writing sales sheets for enterprise software was not exactly what I pictured when I got into advertising. Where were the frequent flier miles? The Super Bowl commercials? The stays at Shutters?
• 1998: Enter the portfolio program at the Creative Circus in Atlanta (my second stint in that city). Even though I was working in the business, I wasn’t doing the kind of work I wanted to do. And my portfolio wasn’t strong enough to get me into the agencies that were. Time to start over.
• 1999: Graduate from the Creative Circus. Get a job at a Boston-suburb startup agency called the Donovan Group.
• 2000: Win my first advertising awards.
• 2001: The Donovan Group closes its doors after several dot com clients stop paying their bills.
• 2001: Move to Cleveland for job at Brokaw.
• 2004: Move to New York for job at Lowe
• 2005: Lowe restructures management. With new management, I go “out with the old” and rack up my second layoff.
• 2005-2006: Permalance at StrawberryFrog.
• 2006: Move back to Boston for job at Arnold
• 2007: Create campaign that won Volvo business. Feeling secure.
• 2008: Get offered raise and promotion from direct boss.
• 2008 (two days later): Get laid off. For a third time.
• 2008: Start writing this blog.
• 2009: Make a movie about people who reinvented themselves after a layoff.
• 2010: Begin production on another movie about the reinvention of Detroit
• 2010: Get my first commercial production work for Dell.
• 2011: Get my second commercial production work (also for Dell).
• 2011: Finish 15-minute short of Detroit film. Continue production of feature.
• 2011 (today): Hired for more commercial production work, this time for Yahoo!

I’m having a blast, and I have the forced exploration into alternative careers to thank.

The value of the social web is clear, even if we’re still trying to figure out a demonstrable ROI from it. Gary Vaynerchuck probably put it best. When asked what the ROI of social media is, he said “What’s the ROI of your mother?”

(Something we’re all thinking about this Mother’s Day. Although I’d warn against writing “You’ve delivered a very high ROI to me, Mom” in her card this Sunday.)

When it comes to leveraging the power of the social web to lead those you need engaged with your efforts, it’s about time. Thing is, time is too precious to waste learning fly-by-night, passing-fad tactics or tools. Stick with strategy and governing principles, I say, and let the tactics flow from there.

There may not be a decidedly proven way to measure the ROI of tactics on the social web. But there certainly is a way to gauge its results. We have been for a long time, actually. To illustrate his broader themes about what motivates people, Dan Pink wrote about a 1998 study in his book Drive. I think it’s interesting to cast the study in terms of the social web’s value.

Anyone (Mom or Dad) who has a kid in daycare knows the dynamic: After a day at work – confronting and selling and vying – you battle your damnedest to make your daycare’s pick-up deadline. You fight the commute like an MMA fighter. You arrive there with a gaggle of mini vans and SUVs, jockeying for position, jackal-like.

One extra question from the boss or one extra response to that 4:30 email and you’re late. Happens a lot, to you and plenty of the other working parents with kids in the center.

You’re tested, tired, and the daycare workers are too. You want your kid, and they want to be rid of your kid. Nothing personal, but they need to clock out just like you did and the daycare’s budget takes a hit the longer the kids stay – someone has to look after them.

Say you’re in charge of the daycare center. How do you reduce the number of late pick-ups?

You’re an PFT Animal, so there’s little doubt that you’d come up with some pretty creative solutions. But the most obvious one is to impose a fine. You’re late, you pay.

Deterrence hypothesis. (Or in Pink’s parlance, the “stick” part of  the “carrot and stick” metaphor.) We’re almost hard wired to jump to it as a solution.

Does it work? Hard to know, really. It’s a hypothesis used and tested across many disciplines. Legal, criminal, management, psychology.

The study Pink uses took a look at late pick-ups at private Israeli daycare centers to test deterrence (here’s the study’s PDF draft). Working with 11 centers, they didn’t do anything with four of them (Control Group) and imposed fines for late pick-ups at the other seven (Fine Group).

The result? Late pick-ups increased – sharply and significantly – within the Fine Group. They remained the same in the Control Group.

Sharp and significant increase. Didn’t decrease, didn’t even remain the same. Increased. And when researchers removed the fines in the Fine Group, late pick-ups plateaued at their new levels. In a way, the fine system set a new standard of behavior.

The study doesn’t go so far as to increase the fine in order to find the threshold. Certainly there would be a tolerance to what parents would be willing to pay for a late pick-up – or the parents would just take their business elsewhere. Either way, I suppose, the late pick-up problem is solved.

What the study was interested in understanding (based on my reading – there are certainly more conclusions to make as Pink shows) is the value of social contracts. By removing the connection parents had with the people behind the center, and creating more of a pure transactional relationship, they’ve turned late pick-ups into acceptable behavior. They removed the social contract.

I give a presentation called Leading in a Social World. In it I suggest that in order to grasp the significance of the social web, a leader (by leader I mean all of us – anyone involved in trying to inspire one or more people to do something) must value it first. What’s the asset or capital the social web brings to bear for me or my company? Then a leader must understand what makes it tick. What’s the nature of the system? Then a leader must evaluate what kind of leadership skills are required to be successful when leading people in it. How will I engage those I require to move my efforts forward?

Then, and only then, does it make sense to think about the tools and tactics you’ll use to inspire people to engage with your brand, movement, or cause. Because tactics and tools change. Especially in and around the social web. What should matter to you and I is finding those enduring templates that travel with us through the changing realities of our careers, our company’s strategic landscape, and the people who flow in and out of our leadership contexts.

In my view, the deeper meaning that underpins all the treatises from social media “experts” is really a reframing of what leadership books and thought experts have studied for years. Permission, Thank You, Naked, Trust, fillintheblank-a-nomics…these are really just new concepts for building social capital. And social capital has long been an asset that any leader in any time has always had to concern themselves with.

As an asset, social capital results in many tangible benefits. The value of a social contract, as the Israeli daycare centers learned, is one of them. So is the idea of a social license. Most businesses need various licenses to operate: liquor, tax, BMI/ASCAP, water rights, mining. But they need social licenses too. Neighborhood buy-in for the nightclub. Community approval to divert water.

Newmont mining knows this to be true. Their ability to operate in a stable environment and open new mines with greater efficiency depends on their deliberately-planned social license programs. (You can read more about social licenses in the natural resources industry here.) The result? Consistent growth in earnings, and the first gold mining company to be named to the Dow Jones Sustainability index.

As for the rest of us, I use everybody’s-favorite-animal Erik Proulx and a remarkable redhead by the name of Erika Napoletano in my presentation as tangible, everyperson examples of leaders who understand how to build social capital, and the value it can bring.

When you stop to think about it, do you really think Lemonade was made because of a good Twitter plan? Effective blog content that added value to readers? Or was it more because Erik, recognizing he didn’t have the monetary capital to make a movie, had the leadership know-how to build and cash in on social capital?

When Erika Napolatano transcended her SEO writing career and landed a gig with Entrepreneur magazine – on her terms, with her bitch-slap style – did she do it with Facebook? Because she always took the time to comment on all her blog comments? Or because she views the world through a leadership lens that tells her she may not have the reputation capital as a magazine writer, but sure as hell can build and leverage social capital for the same result.

I’ve kibitzed about this before, but I’ve learned more about successful branding – in a traditional sense as well as in our new connected, social world – from leadership stuff than I ever have from marketing stuff. There’s some great thinking out there about the leadership characteristics shared by people who know how to build and leverage social capital. (I’ve got a decent reading list for you if you want to ping me.) Those are the things I’m interested in developing. Not how to send a good Tweet.

As Clay Shirky put it, it isn’t the technical capital that matters. It’s the social capital.

Something I bet Mom knew all along.

On the first day of my first advertising agency copywriting job in 1996, I reeked of insecurity. I checked all boxes of a fragile creative. “They’ll see right through me.” “How long before they realize I’m a fraud?” And the one I battle to this day, “I’m a hack.”

To someone who hadn’t spent a single day writing for a real client, the only tool in my chest was my willingness to work hard. I may not have been smarter or more creatively gifted than my peers. But I could always put in more effort.

I even erected a 50-point-type monument to hard work, printed in Futura bold, spray mounted on black board and mounted on top of my computer.

“Write Another Headline”

It was my daily reminder that I was no genius. There was always another idea, another spin on the brief, another stone buried somewhere in the huge rock garden of concepts that I had yet to overturn.

I was recently reminded of that little sign while listening to an episode of This American Life. In it, Ira Glass documents a “thumbs up/thumbs down” writers’ session at The Onion where peers bless or kill each others’ headlines for the upcoming issue.

Now, you may be thinking that these people are born funny. That everything that comes out of their brains is Sarcasm Gold. But the reality is that comedy – just like advertising or screenwriting or golf or cooking or painting – is all about numbers. You can’t get to great just by jotting down your first, second, or 50th thoughts. It takes discipline to work beyond the moment when you think you’ve come up with it, and keep pushing yourself to find something even better.

From that podcast:

It takes them two long mornings – on Monday and on Tuesday – to come up with these 16 headlines they’re gonna use in the paper this week. And to get to this 16, they go through – and I know this number is gonna sound kind of crazy – 600 possible headlines.

That equation reminds me a lot of a lesson that Sally Hogshead teaches often: “Write 100 headlines for every 1 that you actually need.”

Will headlines 598-600 be the best? Not always. In fact, probably never. But the same can be said for headlines 1-3. You have to do the work.

In any endeavor, simply showing up isn’t good enough. Not if you want to make your mark.