Yesterday I went from a person who only had a vague notion of Seth Godin as a marketing-guru-slash-author to one of those people who quotes Seth Godin like he’s the number one God of all things futuristic and innovative.

Sorry if I’m late to the party, friends. I attended an all-day conference with the man and got to hear his unique wisdom in a freewheeling, unscripted session. It was a crash course, but also confirmation of a lot of things I already held true.

What Mr. Godin kept coming back to again and again was this notion that we are now living in a “connection economy,” where marketing has gone from the mass to the mini-networks we can grow and cultivate. 

He kept throwing out good litmus tests for our ideas and aspirations:

• Are you willing to get arrested for this idea?
• What story are you prepared to live?
• Are you doing work that you care about so much that you are willing to fail?
• Are you willing to explain to the world why they should pick you?

There a lot of safety in mass market products, what Godin calls “average.” With these, you use a megaphone to try to sell as many widgets as you can to as many people as you can. The problem is that nowadays, many of us are trying to sell something hand-crafted to a very specific group of people. Our products have a point of view that maybe isn’t all things to all people. Naturally, the sales process becomes more personalized, more dependent on an authentic grasp of what drives the audience, what they need.

That takes a lot more time, but it can be much more rewarding.

The discussion reminded me of a terrific class that I took while at film school, taught by a producer named Richard Miller. It was my first brush with the business side of filmmaking, and it centered a lot on marketing. In the film business, a distinction is drawn between something called “marketability” and something called “playability.”

“Marketability” is being able to draw a huge opening weekend crowd with a blitz of print ads and TV commercials. “Playability” is when a movie has “legs” and stimulates word of mouth. In the class, we were taught to see the distinction literally in dollars and cents.

Marketable films often had a huge drop-off after the opening weekend, which meant the marketers had been successful in hooking an audience in, but that audience didn’t love what they saw. Playable films were a slow burn. You’d see a less precipitous fall-off in box office numbers because each audience member was telling a friend about how much they loved the film.

And word of mouth marketing is some of the most effective marketing there is.

What I learned yesterday from Godin is that we’re all searching for playability. Small guys have more power and opportunity than they’ve ever had, but we need to be always putting our strongest asset, our passion and authenticity, at the foreground.

We have to strive to make things that people will not just like but love, and want to tell others about, even if that initial audience is small.

A great question to ask therefore: who will love this? 

“Why would I want to work from someone else’s office when I get so much done at home?” was one of my friend’s reactions when I tried to explain to her what I was doing booking random desks around the city via LooseCubes for a spell a couple of weeks ago.

The “why” was not so readily apparent, even to me. It was something that took some investigation, a little trial and error.

I mean, was I getting more work done? Was I fulfilling a long-time dream of voyeuristically watching other people’s office rituals? Maybe. But I think I was also getting benefits that were not so obvious at first glance.

After experiencing it for myself, I highly recommend the LooseCubes experience to anyone freelancing, looking for work, or just keen on a change of pace. But it’s helpful to have a few things in mind before you jump in. So here are my tips for making the most of your own LooseCubes experiments. 

Expect the unexpected

My first week of LooseCubing, I worked at DUMBO Startup Labs, Undercurrent and the LooseCubes HQ. They were all totally different:

• DUMBO Startup Labs was spacious and fairly quiet (apart from the guy who was watching TV on his computer)
• Undercurrent was electric and a bit like being on a reality show about the super cool workplace of the future.
• LooseCubes HQ was relaxed, bright, friendly and welcoming. With its tented conference room and modern furniture, it was a bit like the most awesomely artsy Scandinavian summer camp you could imagine (if such things existed for adults).

Have a good, quick spiel about who you are. 

Beside carrying your laptop and personal effects into a LooseCubes situation, you’ll also need a little precis about who you are and what you’re working on. I pretty much said something different each day, mostly because each day I was working on something different. But having something to say is key to the next point…

Be open-minded about what you’ll walk away with

Many times during the week, I did ask myself whether I could be more productive from home. The answer is: I’m not sure. What I can tell you is that there was never a day where something valuable didn’t happen as a result of my being in unfamiliar surroundings.

LooseCubes bookings demand flexibility though — I’d say if you want absolute quiet, predictability, you should stay home. But what’s life without a little unpredictability?

Make the most of every opportunity 

If you’re going to LooseCube it, I would say plan to show up when your reservation opens up and stay for the duration. Don’t schedule a lunch for yourself if you can help it. You might be surprised — at Undercurrent, a chef showed up and I had a catered lunch with their team. At LooseCubes the whole gang went on a walk through the streets of DUMBO in search of a hoagie. Don’t miss out on this sort of thing!

If any of the above sounds intriguing to you, I’d say don’t delay — get booking! It’s so easy and truly so much fun.

And happy coworking!

Starting in June, I’ll be teaching some Skillshare courses as a a fun, quick and useful way to learn to leverage various digital strategies to burnish your business or career.

I hope you’ll check them out!

Mon, Jun 4th · 6:30 pm: Build a Killer Email List

Thu, Jun 14th · 7:00 pm: Build a Killer Email List

It doesn’t matter if you’re a business or an individual with a film, event or mission. If you’ve got something to push, whether its a Kickstarter campaign to a opening to a product launch, a killer email list is the exact ingredient you need to rise above the competition.

Thu, Jun 7th · 6:30 pm Fast, Cheap and Under Control: Website Bootstrapping 101

You have an awesome idea or a growing small business but you have no idea how to start harnessing the web. The good news is that the tools exist today to get you a brilliant, clean, useful web presence for little to no money and only very rudimentary knowledge of the bits and bytes that power the whole thing. This is a crash course for those who yearn to establish their own website but have no idea where to start.

 Mon, Jun 11th · 6:45 pm The Writer’s Guide to Creating An Awesome Website

When it comes to launching a kick-ass website, scribes who would not blanche at dispatching a novel or a twelve-billion word investigative report suddenly go all knock kneed. But with great content (or a great idea), you’re already ahead of the pack. The tools exist to bring your vision to digital life, you just need to harness them. This class will equip you with a fantastic range of ideas and tools for launching your own website, even with no budget or particular coding aptitude.

When I was at NYU film school I had one of the coolest jobs ever. I was a teaching assistant.

Sometimes I worked with the same professors, and sometimes I rolled the dice and let the administrators pair me up with someone new. One semester I got assigned to an instructor, a gentleman from the former Yugoslavia, who had a reputation for being somewhat difficult. He was prone to barking at people, and thus was not among the most popular professors.

Sometimes he wrote notes on films with a pen that had a giant feather puff on the end, so I realized that his reputation for humorlessness was not totally deserved.

Some of his shortness, I came to realize, was due to the language barrier. He was an ultra-smart guy and would be totally articulate if you were talking to him in Serbo-Croatian. Many English speakers, unwilling to try and figure out what he meant, would just treat him like he was slow.

Once we cleared the communication hurdles we ended up hitting it off and at the end of the semester, he presented me with a book called Making Movies. Not the Sidney Lumet book, but the one by John Russo, chronicling “independent film” before there was such a thing — essentially when it was being made by genre filmmakers like Sam Raimi, George Romero and other great horror autuers.

He wrote over the title, so that the inscription read: “I hope that you will spend your life Making Movies.” I just love the way that he had put it, and how it suited me so perfectly, the path I took from there. I worked as a camera assistant for several years out of film school, and then read genre scripts for Dimension Films. Some people revered “films,” but I was all about movies.

I stopped “making movies” quite a long time ago, but with all of the changes in technology I’m dying to explore new toys and tricks.

The HD Go Pro Helmet Cam for instance. I saw a crazy video on Vimeo where dogs in the dog park run around wearing these cameras. When I saw one at Costco for $200, I had to have one.

Here’s a little movie I made about my bike ride from Park Slope to Lincoln Center:

Have you ever been to, or participated in, a “hackathon”?

I have, at Betaworks, where we mixed it up with cohorts from the different portfolio companies (Bitly, SocialFlow, Chartbeat, etc) to create a tech product in a hurry.

The idea with hackathons is to throw a bunch of different people together in a room and force them to solve problems, create and innovate against a tight timeframe. The ticking clock pushes your limits, and hopefully creates some breakthroughs.

At the same time, it can be stressful, very stressful.

When I heard about Storycode’s first “Storyhack” up at Lincoln Center, I was thrilled. I mean, not all of us know how to code in Python, but all of us are united by story, right?

For this weekend-long event, teams comprised of individuals from technical and non-tech backgrounds came together to try and create an immersive story experiences. That immersion could consist of film, mobile, social media and more.

I came to see the final presentations. It was incredible to hear about all of the projects the teams had come up with. I mean, we’re really talking about innovative ideas and connections that really delighted me. My favorites:

• Purest Artistic Focus: I’d give this to the team who made an interactive animation that chronicled a man who was travelling through space. Created in the “choose your own adventure” style, this interactive program asked the user to make different decisions that could mean survival–or death–for the hero. This project seemed the most coherent and self-contained of all the projects presented. The interactive elements made sense and seemed organic to the presentation.
• Most Engaging Presentation: Future Mate concerned a dating program in a post-apocalyptic future where much of the population is sterile. The team did a great job of presenting this story in a truly “immersive” way, complete with “in character” presenters and even a zombie puppet.
• Most Likely to Have Hollywood Calling: Another team offered another spin on dating: Dr. Knightly’s Society for Experimental Courting Services promises daters: “the chance to get to know each other under terrible circumstances.” This was my “most likely to be an actual movie,” a bit along the lines of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The idea is high concept and compelling. And I could actually see successful pairings come out of this, so I appreciated the potential real-life applications. The execution got kind of convoluted though.
• Most Surprising: One team lacked a programmer and found themselves adrift. They decided to take off into the night and chronicle what happened. I liked this idea because it had an interesting experiment at its core, kind of reminding me of Martin Scorsese’s great (and underrated) Afterhours.

The whole event was a hugely ambitious undertaking and the organizers did an amazing job of laying the foundation for something that should become a really wonderful ongoing way for people to workshop immersive story ideas. If I could make any helpful observations that would help them grow, they would be these:

Demystify the tech: I was really surprised that one team practically fell apart because they didn’t have the almighty (and much mystified) programmer. The fact is, you don’t need a programmer to tell interactive stories. Between a team who has an iOS dev developing something fancy and expensive and tangentially related for the iPhone and the hapless non-programmers who came up with an interesting way of telling a story through Twitter, I’d always prefer the latter. The point is stories, not technology, after all.

Find more diversity in ideas and applications: In my admittedly limited experience with “transmedia” so far, about 90% of what I’ve come across is about contagious diseases and/or zombies. That’s part of the reason that the “wandering around the city reality show” was such a breath of fresh air, because it deviated from a well-worn transmedia trope. Very well-represented at Storyhack were filmmakers and, to some extent, gamers. Rare (as far as I could see) were people working in books and publishing. I wonder what would happen if the walls came down a bit more between those very passionate and creative communities?

Establish the ground rules of a good story: This may actually have been part of the event but I hope Storycode (the organizer of the event) will eventually develop a “bible” or set of guidelines that help future transmedia storytellers launch their endeavors and avoid many of the obvious pitfalls of juggling multiple media. For me a “code” would include some guidelines that push participants toward the quickest route to storytelling without bounds (and without lots of gimmicks or use of superfluous tech). While it’s not totally fair to critique this aspect of a super-quick hackathon, I thought that strong storytelling was an area where this event could improve quite a bit.

Chose the right restrictions: I’m not sure the chosen restrictions worked well, and I really wasn’t crazy about steering teams toward incorporating sponsor goods and technology in finished projects. Every time I saw these “integrations” I winced a tiny bit. I think it really hung up a lot of the teams with handicaps that didn’t help them toward the final goal of creating a story experience that really captivated. I was impressed that the sponsors signed on for this project and it left a favorable impression on me of their brands. Having merch worked over and over again into the stories just felt out of step and may have in fact influenced the sameness in story ideas.

The goal should be immersion: One thing that was odd about the final presentations was the I believe that I was one of only a handful of people who was coming into this fresh, which is to say the stories were presented to the other teams, mentors and people who had worked on the event. I think one way to look at transmedia storytelling is as “social storytelling” in some fashion, and so while it would be difficult to pull off, I think a real goal of events like this would be to throw a real audience into the mix and see how they react. How a proposal rates on the immersion-o-meter should be a definite deciding factor on how successful it was.

In general I think it took incredible bravery to leap in there and start hacking. I was really impressed overall by the scope and energy of this effort and I hope that it is just the first of many more.

I’m reading a pretty amazing book called “The Lean Startup” right now.

Actually, it’s more than just a book, it’s a movement…or a cult.

I had learned of it first from a colleague in startupland. At the time I understood it as a book about making more efficient the process of creating innovative technology products.

It does fit the above description, but offers a lot more wisdom that would be applicable to a variety of situations that require both accomplishing great work and adapting to uncertain circumstances. In other words, it’s an incredible manual for anyone who yearn to create, innovate and disrupt.

Two “lean” ideas I’ve been thinking a lot about lately:

Constant customer feedback in essential in successful product development: Many times a product development process takes so long that it falls out of sync with what the market needs. Other times, an innovative player bursts onto the scene and seems really promising but never really finds a market. That’s largely a symptom of not really understanding what customers need and value.

In the book, author Eric Reis demonstrates how to align product development with feedback and research and, more importantly, validation of hypotheses about what customers want and need. It all sounds very scientific method-y but I reckon it’s a pretty powerful way to deal with uncertain market forces.

Minimum viable product: you might remember my post “Easier Said than Done.” What I didn’t know while I was rushing Sane Social Media into the world was that I was getting a crash course in something called “minimum viable product.” I threw something out into the world as an exercise in learning what people value. At the time, I found it hard to articulate what I was discovering, but in reading the Lean Startup, I’m starting to get it. The idea there is to move through these cycles really really quickly, learning, testing and validating your conclusions every step of the way. Ries writes about the way people become delusional around launches and “vanity metrics.” What you are really looking to hone in on are beahviors that show your customers are doing behaviors that help support the business. That’s certainly why I discovered a profound sense that I was only at the beginning during that process. In “lean” terms you’re always aimed at learning and, more importantly, evolving along with your customers.

Of course, it’s only natural to start thinking about other applications of the “lean” methodology. What would “lean” education look like? A “lean” nonprofit? How could you get in touch with the customer to validate ideas about learning or giving? It’s fun to think about.

I am highlighting away, and plan to put some of these principles into action and see how they perform for me.

Last week, I managed to stumble, quite serendipitously, into a burgeoning community of learning called Skillshare.

The occasion was something called the Penny Conference, which was an extremely engaging and well-curated presentation that espoused Skillshare’s own peculiar philosophy on the world. Namely, that “anyone can teach anything.”

Wait a second, you might be wondering to yourself, my high school psychology teacher doubled as the volleyball coach and he didn’t teach me a whit of anything.

In contrast to teacher you may have had phoning it in, Skillshare seems comprised of a growing network of people who teach because they are really truly passionate about it. Plus, one of the joys in perusing their roster of classes is seeing just how diverse they are. Pickling ramps one day, crafting magazine pitches the next. One attendee I talked to said: “Imagine, for $20 you could learn anything.” 

Kind of an amazing idea, isn’t it? It’s all very democratic and driven by the people who really are “in it” to genuinely share. That’s why I was happy to see the challenge that Skillshare is sponsoring with Good Magazine to encourage people to define: “what’s your dream learning plan?”

Winners will receive $500 to put their plans into action.

It’s a great question that merits being asked by anyone with ambitious goals.

Think about it: what would you commit to learn if you could?

I’m always learning. I’d like to know more about design and CSS specifically. I’d like to learn more about building efficient systems, and I’d like to perfect my electrical wiring skills.

But the idea of crafting a plan makes it all more tangible doesn’t it?

Make sure to check out the contest.

I always identified a lot with the character of Max in Rushmore.

I didn’t actually get good grades in school, but I was always hatching these crazy elaborate schemes during the times between when the bell kept me in a desk.

In 9th grade I wrote and directed a play about the Pentagon Papers (Daniel Ellsberg actually came to opening night), and later on in my high school career I made a documentary about the Beat Generation for which I interviewed legendary poet Allen Ginsberg.

I’ll never forget something a photography teacher told me when I was around 13 or 14. “You make all of these ambitious plans, but then when something doesn’t live up to your outsized vision, you’re devastated.”

It’s totally true. And it’s not just about being a Walter Mitty-esque dreamer. I’m totally a doer. I know how to execute. In fact, I’ve gone on record about how annoying I find “idea people.”

I’ve accomplished some totally crazy “big” things more recently in my career. For instance, when I was at the Film Society, I was just so passionately committed to building their digital audience that nothing could stop me from engineering the first unified and branded web destination for New Directors/New Films, not even the fact that nobody had done it before and there was no money for it.

But my own crazy schemes? Those have taken a bit of a back burner lately.

Since January, I’ve been doing a course called “Playing Big,” with Tara Mohr, which is a program meant to spur creative and entrepreneurial women onto tangible action. One of the sections we did was about making a “leap,” which is what it sounds like, picking something that seems attainable but a little bit outside of your comfort zone. Instead of spending months planning some crazy ambitious project, you take a slice of a project and commit to getting it out into the world.

It sounded to me like it would be no sweat at all. While I had been planning a rather ambitious educational and training initiative, Upstart U, I could see that there was a “leap” to be had. Producing an ebook, Sane Social Media, perfectly fit the bill. It allowed me to look back on some of the writing that I had produced over the past year as well as do a little actual dabbling in online publishing and distribution, namely the iBooks Author platform. And it would be a great way to set the stage for more elaborate materials to come down the road.

It was a crazy amazing whirlwind, and not what I imagined it would be at all. I mean, totally worth it, an incredible learning experience, but a lot easier in theory than in practice.

Once that train started moving, the momentum of it carried me along. I turned to Launch Effect to quickly produce a one page website that would help drive the email signups.

I launched a Twitter presence and a Facebook page. And then I set to work.

What I want to be writing right now: yeah, it was a total snap. Can’t believe I didn’t do this sooner, everything just fell into place. 

What really happened:

• Everything took way longer than I thought it would.
• Everything went wrong
• I briefly thought this “wrongness” was a sign and it would be better to retreat into fantasy land.

My first Twitter page, after sustaining some great early growth, was inexplicably suspended (Twitter recently reactivated it).

I did a design contest with 99 Designs, did not get a lot of qualified submissions, and found out the winner had used a free online template to make the winning design. I had to start from scratch and try again.

Did I mention that everything took way longer than I expected?

At the same time, there were great signs. Seeing a burgeoning community take shape. Hearing a real responsiveness to the underlying vision. And also feeling the support of a lot of great people around me willing to offer up their sage advice.

But the biggest surprise was something that I’m still struggling to articulate. I think that the best way to put it is that making something real is only step one. 

In my big dreams of a launch, a premiere, a publication, it’s at the end of a road. The thing is, all of that is actually just the beginning. 

The moral to this story can’t be pat. It’s not “How I Stopped Daydreaming and Now I’m a Mini-Mogul.”

It’s more bittersweet. It’s more about being honest that there’s just something so irresistible about chasing the unattainable. That’s the romantic side of being a striver. So long as you set your sights high enough, you’ll never actually get there, and the destination can remain absolutely perfect. 

Having to put your crazy vision into action demands that you grapple with very real forces. Things that you may not like. It forces you to be honest with your limitations and also tap into you supporters.

Getting to put Sane Social Media out in the world didn’t make me think: OK, you’re done, congrats.

It made me think: what’s next?

Which, I suppose, was the point.

Sometimes I wish I had become a “corporate anthropologist” studying what people do, and who they become, after spending the vast majority of their lives under artificial light and in fabric covered boxes.

I’d be a cubicle-chronicler, looking critically at artificial divisions, and the rules and rituals that develop over time in high-rises and office parks.

As it stands, I’ve worked in countless different offices, from open-plan startup type of places to storage closets (that last one really is true. For a year and a half).

Imagine how thrilled I was when I found out that there’s something called Loose Cubes, which connect mobile workers to open desks in a variety of different work settings all over the world. Cue my fantasy of going embedded in one hundred different offices and reporting back on what I see from the window or water cooler.

Initially, I thought of Loose Cubes as a kind of Air B n B for offices, which is, in itself, a nifty concept. But because I connected with Anna Thomas, Chief Happiness Officer, at the Re:Working Conference, and had a chance to visit Loose Cubes’ DUMBO headquarters, I have come to see the concept as much more encompassing of shift in the way professionals think about work and career.

One thing that I really took away from the Re:Working conference was this quote from Gary Swart of ODesk:

Loose Cubes really represents the forward edge of that shift. Anna told me that the Loose Cubes community really is just that — to be a part of it, you do more than just report to a random desk, you interact with the person or organization that hosts you. Connection, collaboration, the intersection of ideas and common goals become natural byproducts of that process.

One of the biggest problems of working in the same place every day is that the things you once found invigorating or inspiring become too commonplace, easily overlooked. Innovation requires novelty, being thrust out of your comfort zone to be forced to make unusual connections.

An ideal scenario for many workers would be a “home base” that serves them a few days a week, along with the opportunity to change up the scenery. What I love about the Loose Cubes concept is how neatly it fills that niche, delivering constant potential for newness and novelty, all within a framework that fosters connection.

Novelty is not just a benefit for the mobile worker, mind you — it’s also for the company hosting the individual. They get a boost from have someone new in the house — Anna even told me that some companies consider making hires from Loose Cube-rs occupying their space.

I would highly, highly recommend that any indiepreneur or job seeker check out the Loose Cubes site. It’s highly engaging in both philosophy and design, and they have tons of different options at varying price points. Some Loose Cubes are even free!

Think of it not as just a different kind of workspace — though it is that — but as a chance to make new connections both where your professional networks and creativity are concerned.

On Saturday, when the whole world was seemingly frolicking in the sun, I was in a windowless auditorium at the Brooklyn Public Library. And I was thrilled to be there.

You see, I was there to check out PowerUP! which is a yearly competition put on by the Brooklyn Public Library to give small Brooklyn businesses a little startup capital, fifteen grand to be exact.

The room was filled to capacity with would-be salon owners, makers of artisanal beef jerky, and other budding entrepreneurs. We listened carefully as library staff outlined the key requirements for the competition: 

• Your business must be based in Brooklyn
• You must not have made more than $10K or be in existence more than a year
• You are required to submit a business plan and attend certain key events

The PowerUP! materials alluded to “everyone being a winner,” which sounds kind of corny but in this case it was very much true: everyone admitted into the competition will participate in free classes at the Brooklyn Public Library, and each contestant will end the process with a completed business plan. Truly that is an important step that unfortunately many would-be business owners skip.

It warmed my heart to see so many people raring to get their enterprises off the ground.

There are only two more intro sessions happening in the next couple of weeks (and they are required), so if this sounds right for you I urge you to check it out!