Put two “pay days” per month on your calendar, with recurring reminders. This is important for several reasons.

1. If you’re structuring your business soundly, it should actually pay you routinely, because you’re keeping your personal and business finances entirely separate). Having separate accounts, separate accounting, and a specific documented act of transferring payment from the company to you personally, even if you’re the sole proprietor, can not only keep you out of tax hot water, it can reduce personal liability for the company. I use Google Calendar and have reminders set for two specific days of the month selected because, between the two, all my various recurring bill due dates are covered.
2. When you were an employee, paydays were when you got money to pay bills. This is something it’s even more important to recognize and stick to when you’re self employed. It’s easy to just sort of check your accounts when the bills are due, and pay as you go, but effectively operating a business is partly about financial planning. The first and most important reality is time. Debts or bills always have a due date associated with them.
3. This lets you monitor how much money you’ll need by each pay date in order to pay your various expenses (both business and personal), and then up your rate of work and/or growth strategy and marketing activities accordingly. It’s easy to treat “off” time the way we did when we were employees – as time to play video games. Likewise, you worked on a model of putting in time (e.g. 9-5). But when you’re self-employed, a good chunk of time spent growing and maintaining the business (marketing and account) and, if the work needs doing faster or there’s more of it, you’re not simply off the clock – the company’s needs are now your needs. You are the primary investor, and if the company doesn’t bring in enough money, often enough, it’s back to employment for you.

Be smart about credit. Personally, I maintain a personal and business rewards Visa or Mastercard (works in more places) which could float me for a few days (not a few weeks – that’s not acceptable) if it ever makes the difference between being able to act smartly or take a loss. If you maintain cards for that purpose, strive never to have to use them that way. Treat credit cards as debit cards that you include in your payday bills almost like deposits instead of payoffs. Always cover the full balance all the time.

1. Cautious use of credit can help keep you indepdent. Incautious use can enslave you, or send you back to employment lines to pay off the corporate loan sharks. Your primary activity is bringing in income. That means a) marketing for new clients or repeat business, and b) completing projects. Focus on that stuff, and credit will be available but not necessary.
2. You’ll be going out and shopping less and doing more purchases of both business and personal kinds *from home*. So having separate business and personal cards (whether debit or credit) helps make it easy to cover expenses when you’re busy and need to make a purchase fast, and avoid “fudging” when it comes to comingling of business and personal funds. Personally, I also use Amazon Prime, too, so I can get what I need with 2-day free shipping and no minimums. That further reduces the need to “shop” which is the least productive activity on earth.
3. Since you’re paying your bills semi-monthly, pay card balances in full *both* times, so you never hit the 25-30 days before there’s a finance charge on the months with 28-31 days (i.e. all the months in the year). The banks know what they’re doing, you know.
4. Rewards cards either put money back in your pocket (it’s equivalent to a stackable discount of 1-2% that lets you still use coupon codes, etc), or let you eventually fly for taxes and fees without base airfare (although you have to turn over enough points to make that worthwhile, because the cardst that pay the most points have annual fees), or give you points you can use in places you do business (like Amazon, if you use Discover).

Do really good accounting. There are three things you have to consider every bit as much a part of your core work now, besides the “work itself”. 1. The legal formalities. You absolutely have to make sure you use proper contracts, non-disclosures, a proper legal entity for your company, even if it’s just you, and proper reporting and filing with any relevant government or private agencies or associations. 2. The marketing. A company that isn’t growing is dying – it’s just a matter of time. So you have to have a plan for growing your company when you’re not actively working on a project, or even when you are. Letting your marketing die has a cumulative negative effect – it’s harder to start it back up later, like a car that’s been sitting all Winter. Always carve out time for growth. 3. The accounting. If you aren’t tracking expenses and income, you can’t get a picture of your profit and loss, or provide one should you need to. You can’t make healthy business decisions on where to invest (e.g. marketing) or what to purchase, or even what you have to charge. But you’re also extremely vulnerable from a legal and taxation standpoint. Make sure you do it right.

1. I use Quickbooks Online, which is the standard for a corporation or LLC – there are other excellent Web 2.0 alternatives as well. If you’re a sole proprietor, and aren’t planning to form a corporation or LLC any time in the near future, or else you are willing to use a second tool (like Google Spreadsheets) to do some of the tracking, you can use Outright, which is a superb tool for freelancers.
2. If you can’t afford software, or feel more comfortable with spreadsheets, Google Spreadsheets is very good. I use it for personal finances, because I absolutely can’t stand Mint and the various Mint clones, and I need features they don’t have, which I’ve constructed myself in a spreadsheet environment. Spreadsheets have the advantage of letting you custom formulas to see various data in various ways. They have the weakness of containing no canned reports, such as a company balance sheet or Profit and Loss statement. You can, of course, make sheets in your workbook to serve those functions.
3. Again, keep personal and business account separate. Of course each one will have a corressponding entry, when you pay yourself, but that’s about it.
4. Be militant about entering receipts for your expenses and paid invoices for your gross income. Every ten dollars you let fall off the truck in business expenses is $3.30 in extra income taxes you’re going to pay. That’s expensive. It’s already outrageous to have to pay a third of everything you make to pad the coffers of government and government’s friends, not to mention paying it several times over on every dollar, but paying it on money that’s a business expense is insane if you don’t have to. You can bet the big corporations are documenting all their expenses. Also, you don’t want to be in the same bind if the IRS asks you about income, because one of your clients is audited, and you didn’t account for the money they paid you.
5. Get good tax advice, pay attention to quarterly filing laws (which *do* apply even to employees, though most don’t realize it), and make sound decisions on what you expense, how much you expense, and your tax strategy as a business. It’s not only not illegal to have a tax strategy, you can bet any business of size has one. That’s partly why the IRS asks you about your accounting methods, your accounting year, and your main income type, when you file. Nothing we say here is “good” tax or accounting advice; you’ve got to go looking for the real deal.
6. You totally can go paperless when it comes to receipts. The laws have been updated. Receipts need to be stored in a way that’s reasonably searchable (get specifics via Google). Services like Shoeboxed make it definitely possible. I personally use a Fujitsu Scansnap and a cloud backup service, but there are lots of ways to go about it.

Plan Your Health & Finances. Now that you’re not a traditional employee, there’s no one else ‘doing the laundry’ so to speak. You’ve got to take care of the whole enchilada, or else see that it’s done.

1. Maintain a financial plan. I use David Ramsey’s steps. They’ve helped tremendously over the years. If I’m dogmatic about much, it’s probably that. The plan is designed to be useful regardless of where you are financially. Your place on the steps might be ready for a Roth IRA or might not be. The goal is to implement rationality as a principle into our finances.
2. Maintain a health plan. I use an HSA with a high deductable plan, and then cover the deductable gap with gap insurance. There are other ways to go about it, but I’m looking for sustainability in the long term, and my health plan includes insurance as one component, but also constant work toward healthy lifestyle. The goal should be a combination of health-driven activity and laying up against health-related exigency. Keep in mind that, while there are some totalities in health that can’t always be controlled, your wellbeing, comfort, and longevity may depend utterly on financial considerations at some point. If you live in one of the few advanced nations to have rejected universal healthcare (basically, just the United States), this concern is of such agonizing and deadly seriousness that it simply can’t be overstated.

Self-employed people simply have to reconsider their finances when leaving traditional employment, at least in the details, but potentially overall. It really depends on what you were doing before. Jobhacking is really a form of lifehacking, and it begins with hacking your finances – that is, breaking them down into components and restructuring them for sustainability as an independent.

Parents: “It’s time to give up. You’ve had four years to be happy and do what you want.”
Jack: “But I want to do what I want my whole life.”
Parents: “Awffff! Jack, life is not a fairy tale.”
Jack: “But Dad, I don’t want to be some zombie climbing the corporate ladder.”
Parents: “You’ll learn to like it.”

– Glory Daze

Add to this “set me apart as a visionary” Gingrich’s attempt to inject a pulse back into Republican credibility with creative brainstorming about ‘solutions’ like work programs in grade schools. Just as the drama about identity theft led to registering and tagging of children, much like livestock, one could argue, in a corporate farm, so the introduction of kids to a half-way house for economic contribution and tax supply is likely to tightly wed their potential for independent wealth generation to monitoring and tracking.

FYI: Lest anyone suggest we’re advocating tax evasion, that would be to almost intentionally miss the point, for which we’d zonk you on the head for the intellectual dishonesty that gets trotted out whenever one suggests power isn’t an absolute deserving of worship. We’re not aware that evasion of monitoring is the same as tax evasion, however.

In short, we’re likely going to see the rise of the independent professional not as a surprise to those who plan and regulate, or those who wield political control. The only surprised people are the ones who still call for the plant to re-open long after the company has moved on – those who keep calling for “jobs”, and are conditioned by their political leaders to do so, because “job creation” is an almost religious placebo in rhetorical manipulation of crowds. Everyone else knows the culture has shifted to a condition more similar to the pre-industrial era and, therefore, going after evil deadbeat independent workers, not evil industrialists, will likely be the next big trend.

Rao’s piece, The Gervais Principle at the same time discusses the sociological bubble currently experienced by the corporation. One wonders if the corporate types denying there’s anything wrong realize that that one is going to break as well. Rao ties all this together with discussion of Whyte’s book. Highly recommended reading (all of this stuff).

Here then, for your consideration, is submitted an action plan and manifesto for the jobhacker. Here is how we occupy the American economic system.

The Action Plan: If we want to truly Occupy America, it’s harder work that carrying a sign, camping in a park, or going to jail.

• Start a business – occupy the economy. If you want a voice at a corporate board meeting, you have to buy shares. If you want an economic voice, you can’t be the cattle on the economic farm, or the battery powering the cubicle farm. You gain shares in the economy by building a wealth-generating property upon it. You want to occupy Wall Street? Create a company.
• Collaborate and engage in coworking and startups. Founding businesses is the original basis of our founders’ democracy – ask those guys who opposed the stamp acts. They didn’t call for more taxation of business – they were business founders who knew that business that was neither subsidized by taxation (like the megacorps in big food, big energy, big pharm, big finance) nor heavily burdened by taxation (e.g taxing gains and dividends) were the cornerstone of all possible liberty. They were, regardless of size, what we today call “small” business owners. They weren’t camping, they were creating.
• For every grievance that the 1% has exported our jobs, create a new job to replace it. You can’t complain that someone else is responsible for keeping jobs here, if you aren’t producing any jobs yourself.
• For every grievance that corporations aren’t taxed the same as we are, get yourself taxed the way they are – start a business, make it profitable, and earn capital gains. Yes, our system is designed to favor businesses, because business is the free economic engine that powers liberty. Depending on a dispensary of jobs empowers dependency, not liberty. Don’t complain about bad treatment from the farmer – stop being a cow (say “moo”). You have every right to create your own business entity, as long as it honestly intends to make a profit – do it, and then make some real money. The US doesn’t have a shortage of tax income – it has an excess of spending and waste and a shortage of tax producers.
• For every grievance that the corporate ‘animals’ are getting fewer and bigger, eat bigger animals than yourself. Become predatory about irresponsible or unhelpful corporations, like the mongoose going after the giant snake. One day, you can collaborate with enough other small businesses to buy the big corporations out, but meanwhile just do it the usual way – put them out of business by being more agile, lean, creative, and innovative – by the time you get done, they won’t be worth buying anyway.
• Liberate the economy, for yourself and for everyone else: build, invent, innovate, create, and sell.
• Above all, sell. What is needed now isn’t more political ideas. In this economy, with the candle burned down to this nub, any idea that doesn’t make money is wasted. It’s the same with the environment and climate change, isn’t it? We’re in a state of emergency. You think taxing the rich will save us? It won’t even buy you more Cheetos on the way down. We need ideas that lead to the generation of work, wealth, and the rebuilding of the collaboration and community of mom and pop businesses, entrepreneurs, and free agents (we used to call those yeomen). We need a renaissance of the things that start up an economic engine, because this one, and indeed the world that has come to depend upon it, is stalling, and it’s about to be a dark, ugly, brutal fight for the last of the fuel.

The Manifesto: You want to carry a sign? Let it be your brand name, and it should stand for “I add value to the economy. I am self-sustaining. I create work. I make new things. I have new profitable ideas, and then build an enterprise out of them that puts wealth into ordinary circulation. You are a jobhacker, and this is your manifesto:

• I build more than I use. I build enough for three people. It’s not enough to just support yourself anymore. If you want to have a world to live in, you have to support those who will be your clients and fellow consumers too. Don’t just use only what you need, like the guy who just buries his talent and doesn’t grow it. If we are to survive, you must not only not waste – you must create excess. You must contribute to genuine societal wealth in ways that trebly exceed your own use of it.
• I create the economy I want to see, not rob it from others like cave men in a famine surrounding the village with the granary and wielding their demands and their clubs (We are all bludgeons, you know, or else we are builders, growers, and makers of things). The economy is only a dictate if we allow it to be. They can’t repair or restore it – they don’t know how, and couldn’t if they did. We are the builders of the emerging economic order, not them. Recognize they’re dinosaurs and stop focusing on them and the old economy – focus on what *you* are doing to create the new one.
• I don’t wait. You still want corporations to *assign* us things to make? Why are they the only source of ideas? That’s thinking exactly like the 1% wants you to think. It’s their competitive advantage. Be a thousand points of innovation, and found not a thousand new camps, but a thousand new successful startups. Camp on the economy they want to control.
• I don’t lament a lack of jobs. Who ever told us that we were guaranteed a job for life, ensured by corporations, the government, or society? Our parents? They were wrong. Who made us think we were entitled to a job? They were wrong. There may be few jobs, but there’s plenty of work, because the field of innovation is unlimited – not enough of us are discovering and doing it. Create your own job – employ yourself, and be an example for people to do likewise. Create the new model, don’t depend on the old one. Thinking of a job as a social entitlement that someone gives you is thinking of yourself as just as much a tool of corporate greed, a farm animal, as if you were the “Megamart” or “Megapharm” CEO looking down. Build a better alternative. Take responsibility for your own skill set and how it adds value to society. If you truly can provide a service someone wants, you don’t need a job, you can sell, contract, or employ yourself.
• I don’t lament jobs moving overseas. Don’t want US jobs exported? Create several new ones in the US, or wherever you prefer to live. If there aren’t enough jobs where you are, it’s because there aren’t enough job creators there doing new things. A lot of innovation is happening overseas, of course, but that isn’t the only cause of the drain. Instead of lamenting brain drain, be a brain yourself. A brain in this case isn’t a genius – it’s just someone who thinks about how to create value where s/he is. It’s not someone else’s responsibility to employ us; it’s our responsibility to employ ourselves. And if we can’t sell our services and skills on the open market, we own that and must revise our skills or our strategy. The alternative is the confession that in fact they, whoever is “responsible”, owns us in that way. I don’t want to have owners. I do not lay eggs or say “moo”.
• I don’t lament big corporate control. Don’t want to be dependent on big corporations? Start a small company and be just and ethical and open and curious and flexible and experimental and responsive and everything your last ugly company wasn’t. Enough of us will exceed and supplant them.
• I focus my voice on the core method of control. Want a democratic voice? Be like the first US citizens who had one – oppose heavy taxing of companies and found companies yourself, like they did. We were once “une nation de boutiquiers” – a nation of boutique owners – of shopkeepers. Enough of us owning a sector of the economy free from excess interference is a cornerstone of democratic freedom. And now, you don’t even need the shop to be a shopkeeper.
• I protest every day. Engage in the ultimate protest against corporate hegemony – start your own company, do contract work, become a freelance professional – ditch the dependency on a corporate job (or the lack of jobs), create *multiple* income streams instead of buying into their dependency system on just a single one for life – and then you are as free as they are. I don’t want a career, because a career is an unreliable myth – I want multiple or highly flexible income streams and the agility and mobility to change them as needed, adapting to demand, the economy, and my ability to innovate and create value.

If some of these items could be more specific, they gain by being more flexible and open to movement and differences of understanding. This isn’t the magna carta – we’re not going to post this on trees in the local park, although you may feel free to, if you give Jobhacker.org the credit. This is more or less a statement of principles that many of us are already living or engaged in, but it’s helpful to encourage ourselves and one another, and share with others the opportunities we see for not only making a meaningful contribution to our society, but also for defending our civilization from the decay into which both the Occupy Movement and the government and counterpolitical response indicate we are descending. Now is the time of our revitalization. Join us. Become a jobhacker or, if you are one, be bold and act knowing you are rescuing the bright city from collapse into a new dark age.

See you at the revolution.

1. Consumer interests became total: One of the great developments in the evolution of the consumer age is that there are enough choices with enough complexity that consumers now have the option to live more holistic, integrated lifestyles. Instead of having one or two of anything to choose from, they can get access to countless variations or instances of most products and services. Therefore, people are applying their matrix of social, political, creative, ethical, philosophical, and art and design attitudes to their selections from among the many competitive offerings. Ask someone why they choose a particular service and, where once they might have said, “well, there were 3 choices in the phone book, and I took the one with the biggest writing or that answered the phone first”, now they are liable to say, “I like how this company is changing the market, where they are ethically, their attitude toward design, and how they approach the world in general.” And they could be talking about Netflix, Patagonia, Zappos, Amazon, Tom’s Shoes, iHerb (or we can name a few dozen others off the top of our heads). New consumers aren’t just looking at the information exchanged by looking at each other (what you think is great about what you’re selling and whether they can use it) – they are also looking at the how you look out at the world together. How do you integrate into the total landscape of outlook, attitude, living and lifestyle? How well do you fit their lives? There are of course holdovers, for whom shoes are still just shoes, who don’t care about anything else, and they won’t care about anything but your sales material – but if that audience is your target, you’re competing on price – because they can get the same shoe, more or less, elsewhere. And commoditizing your product or service (it applies equally to both) isn’t the way to profitability in an age of abundance and maximum options.

Sure, people care about quality as well as price, but two things have changed there, too. 1. Quality is a discussion – it has become part of the total social expression of and livable reality in one’s life. Just ask the maker’s of Van’s shoes or North Face clothing – or of course anyone can point to Apple. Quality, in short, is part of an overall lifestyle choice that is part of a larger dialogue among consumers (and with some key innovative businesses) about lifestyle itself – not just about some austere value like sturdiness in particular – a dialogue in which you are either involved or not involved. 2. Quality is no longer part of a binary equation pitting price against quality and either balancing the two or shifting the balance to produce either luxury or economy products and services. Quality is part of a larger perceived discussion about design, about how design and objects d’art fit into one’s daily life and one’s personal statement about the self, and therefore one’s personal philosophy, and now one’s ethos. Now we really must cite Apple, of course, which has based much of its success on the recognition that people don’t want to shape their lives to a device as much as they want to buy design elements that integrate with and extend how they already live, which is partly based on their attitudes about the world. Workmanship now must take into account not just hand stitching but what the stitching is made of, and more than just whether it’s efficient and sturdy but whether it is aesthetically challenging in a way that translates directly to lifestyle. We keep using product examples, because they’re easiest, but the term “value added” in any service industry is expanded in the same way that “quality” is in product design, manufacture and marketing.

Again, not only design has changed, and not only manufacturing, but marketing also. Price and quality aren’t the whole thing any more, consumers are more savvy and have more options, and there are more kinds of consumers now who aren’t boiling it down to a simple equation – there are more criteria, and those criteria are largely about lifestyle, attitude, and outlook, about the self and about the world. That’s the kind of discussion therefore occurring in company blogs and social media venues from the most agile, cutting edge, responsive companies out there, and some of those most highly profitable and fastest growing ones. They are no longer message-neutral or value-neutral. They are blogging, tweeting, and creating an image out of of discussing life, lifestyle, attitude, outlook, the self, and the world. A result is that blog content is focused more on looking outward at the world, not inward toward one’s own organization.

Life, lifestyle, attitude, outlook, the self, and the world are the topics, and inevitably these aren’t value neutral, so the discussion involves some sense of values, philosophy, and company ethos as ethos in and about the world itself, not just about internals. Companies with no ethos, or only an internal one that doesn’t touch the outside world or that don’t talk about anything of relevance to that world, are ultimately being Walmartized, commoditized, and having to compete solely on price vs. pointless (luxurious) quality for a shrinking audience of binary-minded consumers. Where is the traditional luxury car, otherwise known as “the boat”? It’s dead. Why, because people don’t like well made things? On the contrary – it’s because it doesn’t say anything about the world that consumers are interested in anymore – not in enough numbers – it doesn’t integrate with their lifestyles, values, outlooks and attitudes. Even in the new luxury arena, a Lexus isn’t looking much different than a Mazda, so a lot of wallets are shrugging where there’s no ethos differentiator.

When there were fewer products and services on the market, or less access to them because people were limited to local venues within a few square miles – that is before the internet and supply chain economics), marketing was often the dispensing of price and quality data with a few gimmicks. You talked about the product or the service (endlessly parroting the “we offer this” and “we offer that” talk of bigger, dumber companies), and invariably (as you gained competitors who could replicate that product or service, reducing inherent differentiators) you went on about yourself as a company, what’s great about us, how our attitude is different. It looked a bit like a discussion of values, because you’d seem to say what your values were – “At Johnson Plumbing, We Believe the Client is First”. Then as more people did that, it became “At Jackson Plumbing, We REALLY Believe the Client is First”, and the jig was up. Pretty soon value discussion was as cheap as first liners in a singles bar. But it never was really value discussion anyway, because it was still not about the world – and values are always really about the world. Sure, OK, professional ad campaign firms did better than that stuff, but it still wasn’t a discussion, and the values were caricatures of values. It was about McEthos.

As their options grew, consumers showed they hated the fake value discussions by exercising the Walmart response in droves. They flocked to the big box stores and said, “look, if it’s going to be about bullshit, just tell me the price”. Some companies made the mistake, at that time, of deciding a company ethos really was bullshit and tried to compete solely on price and consumer loyalty. This actually *helped* the supply chain became ever more cheap and globalized, and smaller companies went under trying to compete with the huge supercenters. In short, they actually helped drive the cart leading to their own destruction. They lamented the death of consumer “loyalty”, but loyalty doesn’t come out of simply repeating past behavior, because someone is always holding out a better deal. Loyalty comes from authentic shared values at a core level, when it happens at all – values in the sense of not accepting the world as it is, and insisting on a different way. Loyalty isn’t “You know Jack here, he’s the vacuum cleaner wizard – he always has the best prices and he’s a home town boy…” Loyalty is the stuff Patagonia gets. In my case it’s Google, Netflix, and Amazon, and I can communicate the ethos of any of them and why it’s important to me.

The recovery of profitable small business that has become, in many cases, big business, was the rediscovery of authentic values that we’ve been calling ethos – ethos as a discussion about the world. The rise of the ethical consumer, often parodied as the vegan soy non-fat whole earth naturally sweetened middle class affluent, was quickly understood as a real and lasting change – not merely a small subculture. The rise of Whole Foods, Sunflower Markets, and Trader Joes attests to this. Companies like the aforementioned Patagonia started becoming the norm for a growth model that built trust with consumers not by saying “you can trust us” in an age where it turns out most every industry has been harming us in some way – big food, big energy, big medicine – not “We’re reliable, trustworthy, and those are our values here at Super Mega Mart, where you’re number one!” That was all rightly seen as bullshit, even in the cases when it was true – bullshit because it didn’t take consumers seriously – it treated them like cattle to be herded by a few buzzwords instead of people with complex, fully human motivations. Companies like Patagonia addressed the underlying problems of the world, in a way people were interested in. Companies like that started talking about the environment, cruelty, ethical sourcing, etc. And of course, they became an icon.

2. Marketing ceased to be monologue: Another great development in consumer evolution and the market is the overthrow of monologue. It was a virtually one-way discussion before, and consumers took it back, insisting on a participatory model – a dialogue. Consumers also have their own ideas about ethos – about the world and about values. Big corporations that thought they could dictate these like they had everything else, or that thought they had the pulse of the culture down to a formula (like they once did, when commercials were a lot like sitcom programming – a catchy jingle, a little problem to be solved, a touch of sex, etc.), made embarrassing asses out of themselves engaging in monologues about what’s going on in the world. Especially when they didn’t take that language seriously (any more than the old buzzwords), and their business practices didn’t match their rhetoric, consumers reacted vehemently or with scorn or (worst of all) ridicule. And with a vast network infrastructure for communication and production of media available to the average consumer now, they let their voices be heard everywhere. They made youtube videos mocking companies, did twitter protests, used facebook to distribute the embarrassment nationwide or globally within seconds. Everyone was a publisher, reviewer, camera person, news reporter, and opinion maker. Companies that dismissed that sounded like Hilary Clinton dismissing Wikileaks as insignificant because they’re “a web site”. In short – these companies looked retarded. And in terms of the cultural demand, they were. In fact, some went so far as to use force – lawsuits, getting legislation passed – to stop people from registering domains like AcmeEnterprisesSucks.com – it became an absurd, dictatorial attempt to quell the very force of discussion they presumed to lead.

Companies that got it, though, ditched a century of indoctrination – just tossed it over their shoulder. What did they have to lose? They could go under doing the same old car lot song and dance about “we’re reliable, effective, and the customer is king”. They could go down in flames being value neutral and competing on price, while the supply chain kept pushing the binary quality-price equation against them, and big boxes just waited them out. They could make asses of themselves by trying to control the emerging web culture and social media and get destroyed by looking ridiculous and alienating their audience. Or they could do the counterintuitive thing, throw out the presumption that marketing is monologue, and engage their prospects in dialogue – make them intellectual and moral asset holders in the enterprise. Companies that did that found people weren’t responding to bland, valueless thinking or attitude about the world, because that’s not how they themselves lived. As with ideas, consumers were no longer looking to have products and services merely dispensed to them – they were looking to include companies, products, and lifestyle services (any service can become a lifestyle service) in their social circle as equals – as part of their lives and lifestyles. And they didn’t want bland, soulless ‘friends’ who had no thoughts or ideas on anything important to them, or who spent most of their time talking about themselves, whether corporate or personal friends. They wanted what real people want in friends – to look out and talk about or engage the world together. Did you see that episode of Walking Dead – isn’t that crying girl annoying? It needs to be more about zombies. What’s up with dark beer having to be heavy all the time, like oatmeal? Dude – I get sick of when the wheels on my mountain bike go squishy on gravel, but I’m holding out on new ones because my girlfriend pointed out they use slave labor to make that stuff in Bodegastan. Etcetera. Consumers voted to look outward with business or look elsewhere -to make it either part of lifestyle or not even part of their lives.

That’s when you saw companies learning to be counterintuitive about controlling the message and saying things in their forums like: You’re right, that video did suck, but we got you to laugh *at* it at least. We’re working on a cool one for late November though. Who do you think we should get for the next spokesperson? Well, you’re right she probably doesn’t represent our values as well as we’d like. So, someone a little more in tune with green technology, then, huh? Oh he’d be awesome – I’ll get that to our marketing director, Jeff, and see what he thinks. Send me your e-mail, and I’m sending you a case of our latest just as a thank you for the suggestion. You want the corporate swag t-shirt, too, or just the product? OK, well we want both your daughters to have T-shirts if you like the new ones that much – I’ll get the stuff for you and 2 shirts XS out by Fedex by Wed. Keep talking with us. Peace out.

A more recent example is “Oh yes we did!” – that’s Dominos pizza after admitting their pizza sucked and totally revamping it. The domain, by the way, was pizzaturnaround.com – Instead of protecting their image at all costs (people don’t care about your image, they care about their own – e.g. as people of taste and discernment), Dominos went counterintuitive, had the discussion with their clients, and threw out the old product altogether for a new one that addressed customer concerns. They turned their losses around. That’s like a beer company developing a new taste online through it’s blog channel, by crowdsourcing it to consumer discussion. Yes, beer companies have actually done that now, more than once – this isn’t some pie in the sky theory we’re talking about – this is how business is effectively operating now – which is why the new craft brewing industry emerged largely as savvy social media users who were first part of a connoisseur community. Only later did the big spirit makers start focusing on craft beers or trying to fake it by creating pseudo-craft labels. But the growth in that sector came from a community dialogue. And that leads to our next point:

3. Product and service development became communal: The crowd decided it would have a say in design and manufacturer, not just marketing. When we say product development also became social or a dialogue or communal, it’s where we actually get to switch from the notion of “products” as items you shove on your shelf or into your game console and talk about them as including services, things that you actually do for your clients and get paid for. Services are products too, now more than ever, and they go through the same product development cycle. That’s huge. The guys that say “all us estate attorneys or real estate appraisers do the same thing” are way out of step now – partly because it ain’t true – and partly because if it were true, you’re down to competing on price, which is why you get all those useless calls shopping you from the internet from a web site that sucks, because the approach doesn’t position your market differentiators with any real value added, because you haven’t actually differentiated enough in the first place. Consumers can now find 1500 plumbers in a metro area, or attorneys, or home inspectors or whatever, just like they can pairs of pants or office shredders, and you’re telling them yours is the same as everyone else’s. When it’s really the same as the other guy, then a service really is just a product, even if you dress it up with the old ‘fast, fair, friendly’ stuff and talk about what you believe in, like a politician. That only leaves price shopping you – what do we expect? Same isn’t good enough when there are enough options, in services or anything else – it’s a losing game and a slow starvation. And the principles of marketing new products apply equally to services – not only does it need to be different – it needs to not be neutral – and it needs to take into account a discussion with your potential market on equal footing that you either are or are not currently having. If not, you have to find a way to engage them in meaningful dialogue. What other companies have found is that it’s by ditching the value neutral message and starting to engage the world itself, not just talk about your company or the services themselves, but what do your services really imply about the world? What do you want them to imply? If you don’t have an ethos, then asking questions, expressing desires, hopes, wishes is the pathway to developing one – to finding your communal voice within and together with your market.

Crowdsourcing – the practice of turning a problem over to the general public or a specific market segment to solve – is an acknowledgment that the community is really involved in defining or redefining your service now, or your product. Companies that only take polls and hire marketing research firms aren’t engaged in the kind of ground level, real life discussion that gives a full picture of what modern consumers want. They’re getting the aerial view, but they’re not hearing it friend to friend. And that barrier between consumer and the development or enhancement or refinement of your product or service is its death knell as “market segments” become increasingly agile communities with excellent internal lines of communication (via social media) an unlimited capacity for expression (blogs, youtube, consumer reviews), and vast options for obtaining services (supply chain economics, search engines, online and mobile everything, etc). Think about how Netflix blew it, repeatedly, in recent months. We get their core ethos, and how they’re trying to get everything into streaming format, and need revenue to push it. I’m not one of those who hated the price increase. But the back and forth with separating their service lines was a fiasco, and the overall problem is that management is making decisions without crowdsourcing – they’re failing to consider their market part of the decision-making apparatus in the company – and that’s deadly now. The market simply will not be dictated to. It won’t put up with it. So far, their blog (as an example) is just too distant, sterile, and commercial.

Perceptive companies now are not engaged not in simply creating something they hope will sell (build and pray), or paying a firm for market research and trusting that implicitly (numbers tell all), let alone trusting in their executive expertise (the marketing and business books are too often written by other people who don’t get it, and make it all sound like yet another arena for manipulation). Rather, they’re working on either becoming fully embedded in an existing or emerging community or else helping to create the community they hope will accept them as an equal partner in furthering some life goal or vision of the world. Examples of that in the skateboard and surfboard communities abound. The successful companies there have not come in from outside and said “Here is a product backed up by thousands of billable hours of market research and everything we learned in business school. Enjoy. Make us rich.” Instead, they come from within the community, or they build meaningful bridges between communities, and involve the people they’re trying to reach in the discussion about the needs of those communities. What they value, what their goals are, what they’re trying to accomplish, and the larger implications, and how those integrate into a the whole person’s integrated lifestyle, are core business conversations, minus all the traditional business trappings. The transformation from a few market segments, as though consumers were individually separated silos (joined only by their recognition, acknowledgment, and servicing by corporations) into more integrated lifestyles, loosely federated into overlapping communities, with powerful and effective independently operated media and communications networks of their own, has doomed the old product (and service) development cycle forever. Unless catastrophe sends us back to the stone age, and we’re lucky just to find hot soup, or some entity manages to drug us all into Matrix-like docility, this change is here to stay. The 20th century was a time of hunter-gatherer consumer opportunism – seize what you can find. In the 21st century, you can find anything and have it on your doorstep the next day, even if it’s in Tanzania. And so now, companies compete not just to get our attention but to be included in our conversation or how we’re living, and eventually to be allowed to contribute to it.

Services and products exist not so much on their own anymore as at the behest of the consumer, who either helps shape or helps reject them, who determines the bulk of communication about them not from a centralized corporate media outlet but from a gazillion points in overlapping networks of other people in a position to directly affect perception. This is why the product development cycle (again including services) is no longer linear – a straight line from development on through to marketing. Now it’s a cycle, of continual return to innovation, invention (reinvention) – it’s a continual repeat of startup mode. Successful companies in the new millieu stay agile (more like project teams, less like traditional, static corporate teams), continually stay connected to the external audience of key influencers of the product or service and contributers to refinement of the message, leading to integration into a community rather than sitting above it or above the consumer, and a constant return to innovation – remaining very much in that startup culture that has supplanted so many stodgy corporations. Those corps felt secure, until the changes in society that occurred with people’s independent access to vast information, media production capabilities, and communications resources – following on the heels of a sophisticated global supply chain and a culmination of consumer interests as total lifestyle components involving ethics and other attitudes. New companies stay new, if they want to be successful, and they do it precisely by being integrated with a larger cultural movement that evolves and changes, but is still going somewhere specific over time. The company is not the pinnacle anymore – the tribe is, to borrow Seth Godin’s metaphor. In exchange for adding value to such a movement, they get to become a member of the tribe.

Stop into a BMX bike shop and ask some real BMXers who they admire in the way of companies, and they’ll actually have an answer, and be able to convey reasons that relate to core attitudes and values. Companies are admired now, by their communities, not simply dealt with out of necessity or because they were in the yellow pages. Every other lead now is more like a referral, even when it’s based on interacting with something you’ve done in the public eye or said online – it’s a conversation, not just a pipeline. The era of the Sears and Roebuck catalog has not been simply replaced by the internet, like some phone book of business web sites, each of which is an ad. The change is exponentially more multi-faceted. Instead of a 3 sentence blurb but with more space now, we’re in the arena of meaning, and product or services or companies have to actually matter in some way in order to thrive.

One of the questions I often get as a business developer and web producer is: why should companies blog (the core social media form) and, by extension, get involved in other social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube? The easiest way to express it is these three principles that reflect what has really changed in business development itself, in marketing, and in the cycle of innovation.

1. Consumer interests became total.
2. Marketing ceased to be monologue.
3. Product and service development became communal.

You can do the old type of business, and companies will continue to do it for some time. But it will drop off industry by industry as someone in each field discovers how to really integrate with their community and with holistic lifestyle choices by an incredibly sophisticated (informed, communicative, networked and connected) consumer market.

This is an incredible opportunity for startups and small businesses, especially those appealing not just to other individual consumers, but whose clientelle are other startups and small businesses. There’s an ongoing dialogue already, a community already developing and evolving, that a lot of larger competitors cannot successfully be a part of, unless they change significantly. It involves lean business (including new spaces for work – like coworking) – taking what you need without having a mortgage on what you don’t, new team dynamics and new work culture (levelling the hierarchy – where years in the same role aren’t automatic entitlements, but contributing at a high level and generating new ideas, partly by distilling the input of consumers, is the primary currency of respect) in which titles are sometimes half-hearted tongue-in cheek items (just look at the fun ones on LinkedIn for some of the new companies – “chief brainstorm provocateur”), agility in project management (new kinds of communication, for instance – tweeting is the fastest growing project management tool – business is mirroring the larger social community), and nothing short of the formation of a new work culture with a newly emerging ethos.

In short, regardless of the line of work you’re in, or aspire to be, there’s a growing network of collaborators and community of like souls who are seeking together what ultimately amounts to a new society, a redefinition of work, and the empowerment of companies willing to change in ways that many of us feel are more genuine, constructive, and conducive to work as the most meaningful part of life. The revolution in business is a revolution in work, and it is happening at exactly the right time, as jobs are scarce (work is still plentiful), collaboration is at an all time high (it’s almost an artist’s rennaissance in small business culture now), and people seeking ways to not go back to the same old dependencies on corporate provision for a single income stream, career, and lifetime security and benefits (which haven’t been reliable for a couple of decades now and are never coming back). It’s an exciting time to be in business We get to be more authentic, more human, more involved with one another than the last 30 years have conditioned us to expect. Anyone now can start a business and utilize expandable cloud servers, outsourcing, global supply chain services, and professional space in the same way that anyone can produce TV or radio on the net, or start writing and build an audience. Our interest is always work as a source of meaning, whether that’s bettering society or ourselves. We think all these developments are lovely and hold vast promise for precisely that potential.

A recent question was why do we include author names, comment capability, and post dates on business blogs. The short answers, having mentioned the things above, are:

• Author Name(s) – because the new market wants to connect with, “friend”, include in their network, and engage with actual people, for the simple reason that actual people are the repository of real values, of an ethos. The impersonal, vanilla, corporate entity that consumes and conceals all trace of personality, verve, idiosyncracy, or attitude is falling away into oblivion. This is illustrated by the death of white label branding brought on by the failure of big corporations to create alternative social media venues under their own control, and the new open (read shameless and unembarrassed) collaboration of web 2.0 companies (that often feature the logos of the brands they use right on their home page). By ditching control as a primary need, and the appearance of dominating the entire supply chain as a cultural insecurity, smaller companies exuded authenticity and created authentic relationships. In a blog, this means using your name. You are, ultimately, your first and most important brand. Companies that still don’t get it are trying to squash what employees can say in online in social media – it’s retarded. They don’t get that it’s OK now, more than OK. Anyway, read the blog at Tom’s Shoes. Do you or do you not get a strong sense of personality? What about from the writers of Patagonia’s blog?
• Comment Capability – should now be obvious – it’s not a monologue – how do you know if what you’re saying is resonating with the community you want to reach and how do you plan to include them in your thinking to keep enhancing your message and service offerings which, if your marketing sounds like the old song and dance, “we are constantly striving for perfection…”, is going to take a hit. But we’ll add just one more reason: if you can interest a potential client – really interest them enough to engage you, they’ll help you interest someone else. There’s a reason the biggest predictor of a “tweet” (a post) on Twitter being re-tweeted (shared) is when someone re-tweets it: being authentically liked is going to introduce you to others who also like you. The more people engage, the more people engage, if it’s real. At a party, the conversations that attract the most participation are the ones that start attracting some participation. In the meantime, by keeping the comments open, you don’t seem shrill by having a one-sided conversation no one can respond to. Tip: Don’t think treating people like commodities and paying people to comment (some companies look ridiculous after doing that) will get you anywhere – it just doesn’t work.
• Post Dates – because a dialogue is ongoing, even if it isn’t always with the same people. Not every post will get a response (and in the beginning, it’s likely none of them will – unless you do a strong job of engaging the community where it already is, not expecting it to come to your web site just because you are there). But if the information is static, it’s not a discussion, and it’s more like a flyer from the old Mad Men era than the respect that includes your community in your thinking, and makes it obvious you do. It’s more like the final word, and hence a monologue, than like the thoughts of someone whose ethos and offerings are constantly developing, and for whom “quality” is not a buzzword meaning merely the routine workmanship or processes invested in something, but is in fact the attributes of a thing, for which an extended discussion is possible in terms of what those attributes imply for the world as a whole and for the consumer as a person integrating those attributes into a lifestyle. Dates – because your friends aren’t people who rarely call or who leave two-week old food and month-old roses out for you – friends keep engaging. Dates – because if you’ve run out of things to say, you’ve run out of relevance, and the count of weeks since your last post is also numbering your days before someone else who is more fun or interesting or just consistent becomes your market’s new best friend.

Image by cuoreinternational.com

The Occupy (Wall Street) movement is as much about the destruction of the job market as anything and, as such, has the earmarks of a workers movement – perhaps less obvious because so much of the US is out of work. In essence, the Occupy movement is a strike called against the culture as it has been transformed by establishment elites. Targeted at “corporate exploitation and greed” represented by the icon of Wall Street and the financial apparatus that is subsidized and protected from consequences and responsibility by the government, it tries to address the havoc wreaked upon the average person’s opportunities to pursue a vocation and an individual profit.

Instead of offering yet another agenda with yet another national spokesperson, it has decided instead to *be* fundamentally different – in other words, to first address structural issues. That’s quite profound. The Occupy movement, far from being a flash in the pan, is a cultural innovation currently in startup mode, currently discovering its own identity by creating its own organizational culture counterintuitively – that is, by rejecting traditional hierarchical approaches. What you see, if you go to a meeting in your local area, is that those who contribute have a voice, those who participate have a say, those who invest, who risk, who add value get to make recommendations. In short, it’s got a lot in common with healthy companies which also tend to turn away from traditional top-down corporate cultures and innovate from the ground upward.

One can’t help note, therefore, certain strong links between healthy companies with a deeply satisfying internal culture and some amazing external results, and successful grass roots movements and revolutionary or protest ‘projects’. Here then is a brief survey of commonalities:

They have a project-based mentality that is agile and lean: Where you find the most interesting countercultural thinking in business (constructive alternatives and counterintuitive innovations in problem solving) is in project management and project based operations. The discussion is over how you get a maximum of burn with less money, fewer contributors, and yet still be able to respond quickly to changes, needs, and opportunities. Think Che Guevara for a minute. Regardless of how you feel about his politics, his movement could turn on a dime, and run without a surplus of fuel. His tactics were revolution of a particular type that is studied in West Point, CIA training, and political science departments alike. “Corporate greed” (or the corporate compensation model) encourages individuals to “go it alone and cover their own butts” [1] – that means corporations that work like that require more people to succeed, a lot of funds, and top-down hierarchical control. They can’t react quickly, and they can’t be very open-minded to the need to change.

They have service-based teams which help each other be successful: In unhealthy corporate environments, you get silos – people who play god, as Early Jabay says, and create bottlenecks – if you want x from me, you have to do what I want you to do – etc – and it really harms companies by worming them out from within – it’s all about personal power, domination, and controlling others. Someone is always concerned with who has too much power, how they can get some, and how they can withhold it from others. It’s toxic thinking. In a healthy company, departments are service-based teams that look to solve problems that other teams need solved. Marketing figures out how to help sales achieve its goals of more adoption of what the organization offers. IT and tech helps every department address underlying needs like what technology will let them share project data internally, or coordinate schedules, or keep track of team members’ contact data effectively.

Contribution is preferred over control: Healthy democratic movements are about service, also. Martin Luther King didn’t lead by telling people what to do – instead, he risked the most, contributed consistently, and people naturally followed. Nelson Mandela didn’t demand people do things his way – he contributed – he capsulized the movement as a whole by contributing every day – he spent a good chunk of his life in prison as part of that, and people naturally looked to him, because his contribution level was so high and extraordinary. In healthy democratic movements, they’re less about leaders and more about contributors. The same is true with healthy companies.

Questions always arise. How do we maintain a healthy culture and implement planning without a harmful hierarchical structure? How do we coordinate without telling people what to do all the time? Technology provides some solutions (like project spaces to help individual teams track their contact info, schedules, and foster internal discussion and planning) but treating goals as projects, teams as service providers, and contribution as more valuable than control, ensures democratic movements don’t sacrifice their core identities by reproducing the mirror image of the entities they are challenging. In short, healthy companies and successful democratic movements avoid getting sick by not acting like the less successful versions of themselves with which they set out to compete.

Access usually includes use of conference rooms, training rooms, and meeting rooms on a sign-up basis, and there are often other amenities, like big screen monitors and a special connection for broadcasting available. Some makerspaces focus on the artist movement side of independent working, some on the industrial side and can even include machines involved in prototyping design ideas. Others tend to be hubs for software developers – often called hackerspaces (if you still think a hacker is someone who breaks the law, you’re out of touch). And yet others are packed with design people and various web 2.0 company operators.

I have an excellent home office, but I also need a place off-site where I can write creatively, apart from the distractions of multiple businesses and the demands of home life. Coffee shops are often uncomfortable with loud thumping music or emphatic ideological discussions that get in even around headphones, or there are lots of flies, bone-crushing seating that can make working painful, dim lighting, amplified musical acts, or other problems. Ordinary diners often don’t have reliable internet, or they’re just too hospital-sterile and brightly lit, with not enough other people around engaged in creation and innovation. So I rent my 3hrs/day of time from a collaborative coop and get what I like about coffee shops (coffee and other creative people around) but with more of an emphasis on work and productivity. I get what I like from a corporate office (high dollar office chairs, professional workspace, solid connectivity, and a pro environment) – but without the sort of ever-present feeling of corporate hegemony, needless restrictions, or accountability to an HR department. It’s a place of self-direction and independence.

Think of it like this: Why would any startup or independent professional go to the expense and hassle or taken on the responsibility of leasing a whole building, setting up utilities, maintaining security, etc. when, through a coop,  you can get all that for a much more reasonable fee, without the obligation, but also be in the company of other people who are what you want to be, doing the things you want to do? We’ve learned that innovation is social – it’s about momentum and collaboration and likemindedness. Even technies are part of this ‘artists movement within work itself’, if you’ll permit me to borrow an expression from my colleague Steve Pruneau at Free Agent Source. We’ve figured out that a lot of us, perhaps most of us, work best when the hassles are removed, all the right stuff is taken care of, and the opportunity exists to collaborate and socialize with others going similar directions (or even radically different ones). I mostly keep to myself, but having the other people around, working, does a lot to keep me engaged with my own work. Some small companies like it so well, that they just go ahead and set up shop in coworking spaces indefinitely.

If you’re interested in collaborative workspaces or other types of shared arrangements, check out coworkingregistry.org and sharedbusinessspace.com as well as hackerspaces.org and coworking.com and makerspace.com - Also, kudos to my own current coworking coop at okccoco.com - they’ve got a great facility in a perfect location, and they’re steps from a great coffee shop too.

“The man who judges by the group is a pea wit… I’ll be treated as I deserve, not as my father deserved.” – Gettysburg

In it is denied the theory that significance comes from lineage, from the works of another person, from belonging to a class, a culture, or an ideological group – in short, from having power over weaker persons, and from being above them in some way – from having access to a reality that they do not. That film argues for a shared reality – one we all get access to – for the opportunity of each person to do things he can take seriously.

And yet, the aristocratic view of vocation – that it belongs to those who are already exceptional because of some other un-earned status – birth or fate – rather than each person having the opportunity to find and pursue his own unique vocation, still ensnares the imaginations of Americans. How many movies have you seen in which we get:

• A man discovers his true birthright, his heritage, (he’s not really an orphan, but is secretly a child of nobility) and so he steps up to be great, because he’s actually already fated for this by birthright (as in this wretched film).
• The boy or girl who learns she is “special” – she has special powers – magic powers, psychic gifts, special perceptions – whatever – just like her grandma (the Jensen women have always had this in the family… or  ”you’re special, Harry, just like your parents…”, etc.)

It does wonders for explaining amazing contributions to the world – not by reference to the skill, talent, and hard work of an individual – not by industry, and the relentless pursuit of one’s vocation – but as the products of people that were, of course, destined to it, unlike you and I. We do get to dream about it, but you and I aren’t secretly a princess or a wizard. And if anyone does something wonderful, we can look for an explanation in heredity or the coincidence of time and cosmic forces, the modern equivalents of which are the impersonal forces of economics or historical progress. What we don’t do is say “Gee, that guy really rocks – he’s an f*ing rock star, and I am going to try to be like him” – because, of course, we can’t. He got dealt a special hand by the cosmos.

The falsehood is that great contributions come from great semen – from the bloodline – from DNA – or from unexplained forces. It’s a bit like suggesting illness is the result of demons or witchcraft. This is the attitude of cultures that carve out the hearts of those they conquer so, in eating them, they can possess their power, their fortitude, their brilliance – because of course, it’s not in the will, the determination, the attitude – it’s some innate thing they couldn’t help – it’s in the blood – they were special – they just had really high IQs – they have innate magic. Or as any dimestore half wit will tell you about those who make money in the stock market, “they must be really smart”. No, they mustn’t, actually – but such is the hereditary theory of prosperity, happiness, and joy in one’s work among the American people. It’s the mentality of those who, not long ago in the West, drilled holes in human heads to let the other people inside out. To the mediaeval occultist, the source of brilliant talent was ‘genius’ – which was a term meaning a spirit that lived in you, who actually did the brilliant work through you.

We still hear this theory in the rhetoric of those who lobby for a supposed ‘underclass’ – claiming they aren’t smart enough or innately talented enough (by heredity or magic) to take care of themselves. They can’t be expected to create their own value and offer it to society – they must be rescued from outsourcing, from downsizing, from obsolescence, and ‘given’ jobs – even if the jobs are in areas we no longer need. We must replace the machines with more humans, replace automation with more factory laborers, replace the street cleaning trucks with individual people wielding straw brooms. Heck, let’s go back to bicycle messengers or the Pony Express. Why? Because the underclass aren’t even smart enough, so the theory goes, to be re-educated, or insightful enough, aware enough, prepared enough, to even seek or consent to re-education. They’re too far along in life, and have somehow gotten stupider, not smarter. It’s too late for them, etc. Or, if retraining will work, then they can’t be expected to pay for it, because they can’t possibly work their way through school like a kid in state college, nor can they be saddled with the understanding that life involves constant change, constantly reassessing your skills, not resting on the laurels of something you’re good at past the point that it matters. That’s too much to ask. That’s only for the special people. One wonders, if they’re smart enough to receive training at all, why they’re not smart enough to seek it, work toward it, or make it a routine part of their lives.

There’s a false dichotomy at work. The genius-filled, hereditarily smart, magically-gifted special people who constantly reinvent ways to add value, who start companies,or  who look for new ways to contribut, and generate value, are actually constantly reinventing themselves – otherwise, they too lose their companies, and get taken down by the market. If the job seeker made obsolete can receive training at all – if there is any value in retraining or any sensibility in investing in it, are we not saying that the jobseeker not only can but must reinvent himself as well? Perhaps there really is no disparity between the perceived builders and innovators, on the one hand, and the ‘workforce’ on the other. We’re all in the same boat, and the same thing is required of us.

The theory of an underclass who must be taken care of, who is so big that it must not be allowed to fail, who cannot function by themselves without the parental care of those gifted by magic or heredity with the ability to reinvent and innovate, suggests not only that superstition and almost a kind of racism (certainly a theory of people and innate superpeople) govern our policy, but that this same underclass cannot be expected to learn from the continual historical need, obvious everywhere, to reinvent one’s role in society. Instead, they will need to be watched over for the rest of their lives, and their offspring will likely need the same thing. No one seems to be suggesting that the “workforce” wake up and realize there is nothing permanent, and reinventing your contribution is a lifelong requirement, and you’re not even a decent parent if you don’t equip your kids with that understanding. In fact, it is systematic indoctrination taking place in all the training grounds of employment that tells them, no, no, trust us – you get the right certification and you’ll be good to go for life. It’s a lie, and it certainly produces worker loyalty, but at the expense of their lives and livelihoods. Doctrine is wiping them out, not economic change.

Policy aside, it’s most heartbreaking that the culture is indoctrinating the vast majority of people with the notion that there is no “my work” – “my unique work in life” – “my way of contributing” for them – a vocation – one that is expressed not in one particular job title but in a plentitude of possible ways to work, contribute, and live. No, that’s for Harry Potter and Robin Hood, isn’t it? That’s for the girl who discovers she’s a princess, or for the Cinderella who merely attaches herself to royalty – to money, in other words. But unless you find that Duke in your family tree, or you can make your breakfast cereal levitate from an early age or talk to snakes, well you’ll just have to go take the first job where someone will employ you. Jeez, what a bum deal. How lousy is that? You mean the ordinary person, the regular Joe, is basically just a machine? Of course, those who offer us these ideas, in the form of policy or in what they feed us as consumer art, like some of these films, are the special people – the priviledged – explaining what went wrong with the rest of us. We weren’t uniquely gifted. We weren’t actually King Arthur, destined to pull the sword from the stone. But what if that’s horse shit? What if a) each of us is uniquely gifted with something we are capable of mastering with virtuosity, and can apply to a number of possible lines of work, and b) we’re responsible – ultimately, personally responsible – if we don’t? See, it’s hard to get people to sign onto that – it’s a dual edged sword – once you’ve convinced them it’s not their fault – their misery is your responsibility.

It’s true, other people can rob us of our vocations. The person abused from childhood, sold into sexual slavery, forced into machine-like servitude in a Chinese clothing factory, or constantly indoctrinated with toxic ideas is being systematically robbed. We get that, many of us builders do – a lot of us barely made it – a lot of us had zero help from our parents along these lines, and we had a lot of serious harm done – including by idiots in the academy and corporate life. But if the most awful cases, prevalent as they may be, aren’t exceptions, then our parents were right. If we really didn’t amount to anything, really couldn’t contribute anything unique, really had no virtuosity of talent latent within us, wanting to come out, then what’s wrong with being forced into a machine-like existence, after all? We can be robbed of something, precisely because we have something of which to be robbed. Bad parents are bad parents, and we can’t excuse them. But the ideologies of sending money down the castle chute to the helpless below are edifices designed by the abusers. Those are more institutionalized claims that ‘you can’t do anything’ – ‘you’re unable to take care of yourself’ – ‘you have nothing special to give those of us who live up here’ – depend on us – you are not independent – rely on us – you are not self-reliant – don’t create – let us create a role for you. Sure, it appeals to those of the lowest character, but it also corrupts those of the best potential.

“A man can change his stars” – A Knight’s Tale

Frankly, this is why so many of the rags to riches types of builders reject such social policies, and such theories of work, which are really theories of man. It’s easy to say that it’s because they’re selfish, and don’t want to ‘give back’ now that they have received their come uppance from the gods, or fate, or Hogwarts School of Wizards and exceptional entrepreneurs and savvy investors. But many of them know that they really could have failed, that they had to fight against nasty challenges, perhaps even primarily in the form of the theorizers of fated winners and destined failures, to rise. And the last thing they want to do is articulate the same abusive theory. They know that throwing money down the chute, instead of saying, “but you *are* capable of amazing things, and you really *are* able to reinvent yourself, to innovate – yes you *are* smart enough”, is not only wasteful, it’s harmful. It’s insulting. It’s abusive. It’s nasty, and not charitable at all. Rule of Work: Charity is always an affirmation of the other person, never a denial of their uniqueness. You can dump all your scraps down the chute and it still be a form of contempt. Real charity is offered not because there’s no hope, but because there is. This is why I like Kiva.org and microlending so much – because it’s focused on small, impoverished entrepreneurs – it continually reaffirms that people are not destined to oblivion – they can change their stars.

Incidentally, I’m not dismissing outright charitable giving by referring to Kiva and microlending to the poor, but I select charitable projects (I use GlobalGiving.org) with which I can help enhance the possibility for individuals to extend their reach and the effectiveness of their lives for pursuing their own vocations (which is most projects on GG – every project I’ve seen, in fact) – and so I refer to it as investing charitably, not giving per se in the sense that people often mean something one is randomly throwing away. I am buying a kind of world I want to exist. I am literally making and creating the universe. As such, I consider it a godlike act, and the ultimate purpose of wealth, the capacity for which I was endowed with by my Creator. To be like him, I must create as he created and, like him, the world I desire to exist is one in which each of us can find the straightest path to our reason for being, our salvation, our god-given work that we each will find it supreme joy to do.

“What does that mean to be noble?” – Braveheart. 

The United States is a country founded on the belief that nobility is a plenitude – it’s available to everyone. It has never lived up to that doctrine, I’m sorry to say. Ayn Rand successfully pointed that out. But those of us who look out over its expanse and see not its limits but a vast potential are still trying to prove that any man can be a king.

On that note: Screw Robin Hood. To Hell with Harry Potter. Get up, especially if you are among the rich (or the “cable” poor). You were given an incredible mind, an amazing set of survival skills, and a plenitude of raw talent – and that’s just the one of us that’s below average - as well as some really nice environmental advantages. There is no me vs. you – we’re the same. Sure, it’s great to laud someone who does something wonderful. I look up to a host of people. But they’re not gods, not wizards, and they’re not princes. Each of them is one of us. We can’t take credit – like people who don’t know crap about science do when they talk about “us” having made great scientific advances. But we can take inspiration. Let’s be honest about this stuff. When one of us rises up and does something extraordinary, it’s not another testament to fate or affirmation of the importance of heredity, it is yet another affirmation that any of us can do something extraordinary. And some of that, honestly, is lost in all the cries about the top 1% controlling everything, and alienation from the means of production. The marxism of the NYC occupation is a mistake, though I sympathize deeply with some of their attitudes.

There is one fundamental philosophical error at work in the West that has you and I enslaved to these ridiculous ideas that are part of a magical worldview – and it’s just as prevalent among the atheists, voodoo though it may be. It is the confusion of person with operation – the conflation of who one is with what one does. Robin Hood and Harry Potter tell us that great achievements are a result of things one couldn’t help and can’t really take credit for – that they are matters of identity not industry – they are the result of who the person is, not what the person does. One cannot really create these things – we are powerless – we can only enjoy them. Anything that isn’t built into us from the beginning is impossible. Identity is destiny. And that’s a biological theory of superiority that we fought a world war to refute. It is cultural heresy, folks. Character is destiny. Identity is who you are – character is how you live – it’s what you do about the world, not who you are in it.

This is the biggest beef I have with video game and role-playing game culture. It’s always your “stats” that make you extraordinary, sometimes enhanced by money or equipment. It’s rarely, almost never, hard work and real thought. “Fun” in that crowd is being something you’re not – presumably only then can you do something you otherwise couldn’t – and this form of entertainment is sought out in the extreme by those who don’t feel extraordinary and so don’t think themselves capable of extraordinary things. Those of us already doing extraordinary things are easily bored by games, because they aren’t delivering the real deal. If you made something new today, or had a new idea, or built something that works and makes the world better, then who gives a shit about slaying orcs or what level you achieved in Call of Duty? The error that makes what we do that is either extraordinary or banal into who we are removes both responsibility and ability. It’s like one of those tar pits that trapped ancient creatures who struggled, died, and are preserved to this day. Somewhere, a guy who games 20 hours/week is embalming himself with bean dip and will be held up as a specimen a millenia from now – some poor, hapless creature who wandered into purposeless oblivion and finally accepted his ‘fate’.

Such people, and their social sponsors among the “priviledged”, look at someone who has not founded anything, or built anything, created anything, made anything, etc. and conclude that it’s because he is incapable, because he is inherently not a builder or creator or founder or maker. He is a permanent, biological underclass, because of lower IQ or bad genes, or because it’s not possible to exceed one’s upbringing, which is supposed to be absolute. And that is an entirely different view of man, an entirely different anthropological philosophy, than that which prevails among people who do innovate, who do contribute heavily, who do constantly reinvent and offer value. It is a philosphy of supermen and machine men – it is the ultimate elitism – not a meritocracy but a hereditary aristocracy. And frankly, it’s been distorted into a 60 year argument between fascists and socialists – between the right and the left – people who want the wealthy to receive more dividends regardless of the havoc they wreak on society as a whole, and people who want the ordinary to receive more distributions without any expectation of adapting, overcoming, reinventing new ways to add value. And both sides want to be the parasitic administrators of whichever deal they’re sponsoring – both sides want to rob the innovators to fund their ideology. Both hate man, have an attitude toward man that is mechanical and destructive. And both are missing the point. And it’s awfully tempting to take up with one or another of those seedy, bankrupt, superstitions isn’t it?

“No man has to bow, no man born to royalty. Here we judge you by what you do, not by who your father was.” – Gettysburg

To paraphrase: there’s a difference between operation and person – between what you do and who you are. You may just be Joe – average Joe – and the possibilities for what you do may not seem endless. But they are extraordinary. Can’t afford college? I’ve got 3 degrees, and I think they’re in a notebook somewhere – they aren’t worth a dime to me right now. Can’t afford to start a business? I started my first one with $100 and a crappy old hatchback. It can be done, and there was nothing “genius” about it. Can’t get a job? Hell, I couldn’t keep a job. I got laid off more than Colin Farrell’s been laid. Think you’re too old to reinvent yourself? I thing I began adulthood at 25 (and took about 10 years to really get into it), and I didn’t figure out my vocation until 35, and was 45 before I dumped corporate life to really even start work on it. What, you needed to have it done by now? It’s not like we’re farmers in the 1800s that died of old age at 40. Besides, you and I have learned something by now that will be useful, that we wouldn’t have known at 18. I’m less worried about how old I am, and more concerned with how I spent this afternoon. You can get old without growing old – you know? We can’t afford to worry about that stuff. Get excellent insurance and save all you can, but put your thinking into what you’re doing now – especially if you can’t yet afford excellent insurance or to save anything.

I do realize that some people really want to be employees – great – but then accept that you are giving up a lot of control over your destiny, and don’t whine about it when the job ends. Everyone is a contractor now. There’s no such thing as permanent employment, except as a status on paper.  But it’s a fiction. Don’t ask people to sympathize because you wanted with so much of your heart to believe it, that you abstained from taking responsibility for change. Change is coming. Always. If employment, for you, is just a cop out – just a way of not having to think, of letting someone else take care of all the details, then you’re living in Harry Potter’s world, not this one. Eventually Hogwarts restructures, closes down, sells out, or just doesn’t need you anymore. Back to contracting or, as employment-minded people call it, “the job market”.

There are a series of questions we ask ourselves in life that take our whole lives to answer, and you can’t let them be confused with one another. Who am I? What is the world? What is my relationship to the world? What must I do? If you don’t know any of the answers to these questions yet, you’re not too old to get started – you’re too young to stop. And if you do know some of the answers, you’re already moving in a useful direction, and you just have to self-correct. Thinking the world would always give us a job is like driving in a straight line and thinking we’ll never hit a fork in the road. The world will never just hand us continuity, because continuity forever just isn’t possible. We’ll have to choose a different path, always – but every time we get to do it, it’s not a limitation imposed on us, but a normal exchange of continuity for more options. In other words – no job? OK, you have more options for what you do next than you did when you were punching a clock. Not to be flippant, it’s really true that we aren’t “destined” for anything – greatness or despair, failure or success. We don’t have to have our blood checked to read our future like tea leaves, and we needn’t shrug off greatness because no one dropped a magic sword into our laps. Frankly, a rampant desire to be Neo, the “chosen one”, puts all our minds in the Matrix. If you really want to free your mind, it’s not the spoon that doesn’t exist. It’s Neo. We’re all chosen ones. Sorry Keanu.