“You would think that student loans are young people’s only priority,” argues New York Times columnist Charles Blow. “They’re not. In fact, a cleverly designed survey released this week by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics asked respondents ages 18 to 29 to choose between pairings of issues to determine which ones they felt were more important. Among domestic issues, creating jobs always won.”

Student debt wouldn’t be such a big deal if recent grads could find a job. Because the problem isn’t the loan, but the job to pay off the loan to start living life. You only care about paying off student debt if you’re ready to settle down, buy a house, get married, and have kids. But young people delay adulthood. We buy houses later. We get married later. We have kids later. So it doesn’t matter that paying off loans comes later too — if you have a job.

While there has been much ado about the cost of tuition – college debt has reportedly tripled since 1981 – students rarely pay the full tuition cost because scholarships and financial aid have risen as well.  “For the current school year, the average sticker price for tuition and fees at a private, nonprofit college is $28,500,” reports NPR writer Jacob Goldstein. “And yet, the average price students actually pay is less than half that — $12,970. That’s almost identical to the $12,650 that students paid, on average, in the 2001-2002 school year.”

Not to mention, college debt is a deliberate choice young people make. I’m from Illinois, but went out-of-state for school. My mother pleaded with me to go in-state. Same education, lower cost. Of course I knew she was right, but every college student knows the price of higher education doesn’t simply include courses, room and board, but the experience of stepping out and being on your own. An experience I simply didn’t want to have in my hometown.

Many other young people have made similar choices. Kelsey Griffith, 23, attended Ohio Northern, a private college that costed her nearly $50,000 a year. “As an 18-year-old, it sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it,” Ms. Griffith, a marketing major, told the New York Times. “I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But when I graduate, I’m going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that.”

You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t sympathize with Ms. Griffith. Smart enough to go to a private school, but can’t do basic math? I pity the marketing budget she’ll soon manage.

We deliberately choose to take on debt to get the best possible education. And while the same could be said of mortgage debt and our pursuit of the American Dream, unlike the the housing crisis, student loan interest rates are low, and the forgiveness level is high. If you don’t have a job, you can delay payments. If you’re experiencing economic hardship, you can delay payments. God forbid you want to go back to school and incur more debt, you can once again delay payments. The system does everything it can to help you get on your feet.

Personally, I went to a public school trading the corn of Illinois for the cows of Wisconsin. At the time, University of Wisconsin-Madison’s out-of-state tuition was the highest among Big Ten schools. The University of Illinois-Champaign-Urbana (located in my hometown) was the lowest. My debt totaled around $12,300 (the average per borrower is $23,300, not the $60,000-$100,000 outliers often strut out in news stories). I paid it off earlier this year, in part, because I’ve been continuously employed since graduation.

Many other young people aren’t so lucky. A whopping fifty-three percent of recent college grads are jobless or underemployed, and that’s why we care eighty percent more about creating jobs over addressing social security, lowering the tax burden on Americans, income inequality, combatting climate change, reducing the role of big money in elections, or developing an immigration policy.

Not a generation to be down on our luck, we’ll take a paycheck where we can get it. Recent graduates are now more likely to work as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined. Steve King of New Communications Research argues “the grim job market is another key reason more young Americans are pursuing work as independents (temps, freelancers, etc.).”

Gen Y just wants to work. So let us. Provide jobs that could change the educational system, the economy, the world, instead of fussing about student loans. Then Gen Y could pay our debts, and that would be energy well-spent.

The old design was reflective of my mood at the time – a bit serious, but also clean and modern. For the new site, I wanted to keep the clean and modern, but dial up the happy factor. And in fact, this is the most color I’ve had on my site. Ever. And I love it, because it’s so much more reflective of who I am right now. Plus, the new site matches our couch pillows. How awesome is that?

I am not a web designer, but I’ve always worked on my site myself because I enjoy the heck out of it. Except when trying to get the placement of an element just right, Ryan says to me, “Babe, I love you” and I turn around with a voice reminiscent of Gollum and exclaim, “Don’t talk to me!” Because that’s just how the process goes. (Thank you, baby, for always being so understanding.)

(Also, if you use Internet Explorer to read my site, I hate you.)

Of course, the site is always be a work in progress, and you’ll continue to see changes and updates over the next few weeks and months. But I’m super pumped to throw open the curtains today. I hope you’ll agree that it’s not just some new paint on the walls; there’s a lot of great functionality on the site as well -

1. Email Optimized.

First and foremost, I want to stay in touch with my readers. Back in the day, bloggers encouraged readers to subscribe via their RSS feed, but that never really caught on with the non-techies out there (although I still swear by my Google Reader). Today, email remains the preferred way to communicate, and I made sure to strategically place email opt-in forms throughout my site to reflect this.

2. Responsive.

Mobile is kind of a big deal, so I created a site that is responsive. That means not only will the site look good on your computer, but it is also optimized for mobile and will look good on your iPhone, iPad, and so on. I’ll admit, the responsive versions could still use some finesse, but this is my first try at it, and I’m stoked to be at the forefront of how we experience the web today.

3. Content Strategy.

My primary goal is always to be extremely useful and valuable to you, but the site’s layout and organization hasn’t always reflected that. The new site has topics and highlights organized so you can find and discover your favorite content fast. Over time, I’ll continue to organize my old content (there’s a lot of it!) to make sure these resources are even more valuable.

Please do let me know if you see any odd layouts or broken links via email, especially if you’re looking at the site on your mobile phone or tablet. I don’t have access to every device to test so your help is most appreciated.

If you want to go ahead and let me know what you love most about the new design, or just say great job, leave a comment below.

Thanks for helping me celebrate my new digs!  We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming this week.

Quick background: I spoke at the meetup DC Tech earlier this week, which is a monthly event that rivals the NY Tech scene with more than 1000 attendees. My brief talk was about how you can “fake it until you make it” when learning how to code. It was so well received, and so many people requested the presentation notes, I thought I would share a special screencast version of the presentation created just for this blog.

Also, the sound on this video seems loud to me, so you may want to turn down your volume a bit before watching.

Transcript of this video:

I am not a developer. No one would ever hire me as an engineer. But I do love to tinker.

I believe that anyone can build a site and in the process, begin to learn how to code. And I’m going to share with you how I’ve done that today.

For many of you, this will seem too simplistic, but I wanted to show the non-techies out there how easy it is to create a minimum viable product with little to no knowledge of code.

Last year, I tested several of my start-up ideas. One of the last ideas I explored was for a site called Design Pluck – a sort of Pinterest meets Craigslist. The idea was to help design enthusiasts discover design one-of-a-finds in their local neighborhoods. It’s not something I’m pursuing, so feel free to steal the idea. It’s gotten great feedback.

I used three different approaches to “fake” my way into building Design Pluck with only rudimentary knowledge of code:

1. The Search Approach.

I used Google to find a pre-made theme that I could just download and install on my WordPress site. WordPress only takes a quick ten minutes to set up and allows you to change and interact with your site without looking at or touching the code.

Now if you’re not familiar, WordPress themes are completely useable out-of-the-box, but I specifically searched for a theme that was fairly plain and simple, so that I could treat it more like a paint-by-number canvas and customize it the way I wanted.

Most of the differences between the original theme and my site are purely stylistic, or what the web world calls CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). If you had a set of boxes in your living room, you could fairly easy paint them different colors, and that’s exactly what I did.

What was once mostly white and pink on the original theme is now mostly gray and blue on Design Pluck.

CSS isn’t difficult. You just replace one color code with another, and like switching out lipsticks, you’ve just given your site a makeover.

2. The Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V approach (i.e., Copy-And-Paste).

When I wanted to have the search bar functionality follow the user as they scrolled down the site, similar to how Pinterest’s navigation bar follows you, I found a Java code snippet via search that I copied and pasted into the site’s documents. And let me back up and say, I had no idea what I was doing or where to put this Java snippet. I just tried many different places until it worked.

The lesson here is that you’re allowed to experiment. You won’t break anything. A voice in your head may tell you, “no, don’t touch that!” but you can and you should. Your site is your sandbox.

(Just make sure to copy or back-up the existing code before you do anything so you can go back and reference the original if need be.)

So as you’re browsing, the Java snippet allows the search bar to follow you, so when get overwhelmed and decide there are too many choices and you only want to see red items, you can tell the search bar just show me red items in my neighborhood, and voila!

Now, the Java snippet allowed me to have this search bar follow the user, but it didn’t create the custom search in the first place. The way I created my custom search was through my third and final approach.

3. The Download/Upload Approach.

It’s very easy to find different plugins that again, similar to themes, allow you to create the functionality you want on your site out-of-the-box. You simply download them from the many repositories out there, and upload them to your site.

Plugins are modules that allow you to completely bypass the overwhelming process of coding everything from scratch.

Like legos, plugins are out-of-the-box blocks that play nicely with others, and as you fit more and more together, you can create something very complex and very powerful.

The plugins on the Design Pluck site include the custom search boxes, the sign-up form, custom fields, custom posts, the like button, which allows users to like their favorites which will then show up on a favorites page – also a plugin – location maps, an email plugin and more.

All of that functionality is as easy as clicking download, and then clicking upload.

Learn to Code
Of course, eventually you will hit a wall, and will want to do more than these three approaches will allow. In the process, you’ll begin to learn how to code. For this site, I learned a ton about PHP, a bit about JQuery Masonry, and a whole lot more.

I ended up writing some simple code, but what I’m most proud of is that I wrote several of my first functions simply by mirroring  the code I saw in other places.

Just one example of those functions is on the individual store pages. I wanted a store’s products to show up below their store information, and wrote a function to make that happen.

So if you click on a store page like Miss Pixies on 14th St, you would be able to see their store information at the top of the page, and at the bottom, you’d find all of their current inventory to shop.

To you, it may seem like a minor win, but to me, when I figured this out, it felt like I had literally changed the world.

I hope you enjoy changing the world in your own way with these approaches.

Have you ever used any “fake-it” approaches in building a website, or just in business and life?

I hate meeting people. I would prefer to be holed up in my apartment, lovingly arranged to every last detail purely to make me comfortable, than to present myself to the world. It’s not that I actually dislike people, but the whole process. The getting ready, the logistics, scheduling a time, finding a place – nevermind if you can’t meet me in my preferred five block radius. If it’s raining outside, I will cancel. If I have a blemish on my face, I will cancel. If you want to meet for no reason, I will cancel.

Meeting people is like writing is like exercise. All take convincing. You have to talk yourself into it, hype yourself up. Then things go fine. Great even. Sometimes amazing.

Last week, I was in New York for a media tour. That’s where you pack twelve meetings in two days and meet with anyone – editors, reporters, interns – who will listen. And oh, holy crap, how I loved it.

Sure, we could have saved a couple thousand in expenses, and done the same thing over email, or the phone, over web-ex or even text. But the power of face-to-face, to see these people in person, to meet and speak… to have a conversation.  Well, if I could do media tours full-time, I would (except, with my own bed at night).

Technology is supposed to make it easier for us to connect, but it actually makes it worse to have a conversation. That’s the argument of Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and professor at M.I.T. and author, most recently, of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.

“We are tempted to think that our little ‘sips’ of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don’t,” Turkle argues. “Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.”

Nowhere is this more important than if you’re trying to do something. Build a company. Launch your career. Get a raise. Do anything but settle. Meeting people is the quickest way to success.  I used to say when you put yourself out there, the universe rises to meet you, but really it’s your network.

So if meeting people is like fruit, technology is like candy. And the longer we stay in front of our computers, the more sluggish we feel. The anxiety kicks in. So do the excuses. Then it’s just easier to stay home, send an email, and do absolutely nothing.

We convince ourselves that working works. But it doesn’t. So get up. Talk to someone. Have a conversation. Tell me how it goes. Tell me how things start happening for you. It is single-handedly the best thing you can do for your career, company, life.

(Technology gives us shortcuts. This isn’t one of them.)

I love Instagram.

It gives me a great deal of pleasure.

I’m not kidding.

Ryan and I had a big argument about this. He said he felt like a lot of people were on Instagram – including himself – to satiate the human desire to fit in and not be left out. I said it’s because Instagram is art.

Creating is fundamentally part of the human experience. Construction workers report high levels of satisfaction at their jobs (if the project is on time), because they can step back and look and see what they’ve done at the end of the day. And damn, that’s satisfying.

In contrast, a lonely knowledge worker has little to show for herself. Unless you’re a developer, we don’t create much anymore, and we certainly don’t create much with meaning.

But Instagram lets you make art. It’s different, because unlike Facebook or even Flickr where you can mass upload your life, Instagram forces you to make choices, filter, edit. Not all, but most times it makes ugly pretty and pretty ugly. It creates interest and intent.

You make many of the same choices you would in a darkroom. Should you edit the photo? Do you want to crop it? How will you adjust the coloring, the lighting? Do you want to overexpose it? All the principles of art still stand – proportion, balance, rhythm, pattern – you still need those to make a compelling photograph. But Instagram allows you to do so by elevating ordinary life while providing a mechanism to examine life. It accomplishes what street art tried, but never quite achieved: art for the masses.

Instagram helps to define how you see the world, how you move through the world. You begin to realize you have a certain way of seeing and experiencing day-to-day. You develop and refine that. Your collection is there for a reason, to tell a story, a viewpoint, a life.

Art is translating your experience to the world. Instagram is shared experiences. Instagram is art.

It is visceral and short of being there side-by-side with someone it allows you to experience what they experience. This breeds empathy, joy, understanding.

And for those reasons and more, it’s important to note that Instagram’s billion dollar sale to Facebook is not just an investment in a thirty-million person community, but an investment in art. Forget that we may or may not be in a bubble and Instagram has no revenue stream. Forget that everyone thinks Facebook will ruin it. This is a billion investment in our generation’s creative renaissance, plain and simple.

The pictures don’t lie.

On the side, I consult for Liam’s company. For weeks, I tried to convince Liam to test changes on the site that could potentially increase sales to no avail. I couldn’t understand, why didn’t he want to make more money? Or at least try? Wasn’t that why he was paying me?

Exasperated, I exclaimed, “You’re essentially telling customers to cancel during every step of the process! And then they do. How can we ever expect to grow revenue?”

Liam paused. “You know what, Rebecca,” he said. “When we came close to $1 million in revenue, I thought, is this bad? Are subscriptions evil? Am I taking advantage? Is my business model inherently wrong?” His answer was to place detailed instructions on how-to cancel everywhere on his site.

More than 150,000 people have downloaded Liam’s products. He’s a smart guy. He’s also part of the Google generation where “Do No Evil” is the motto for life and business. Increasingly, that means making stuff, but not making money.

Freelancer Amber Adrian (disclosure: she works for me through Alice) recently launched a series of essays on perfectionism. Her pricing strategy was “pay-what-you-can,” with a suggested price of $5.

“I wanted to get this into as many people’s hands as possible,” she said, “to pave the way for a bigger package that will be a set price. I’m hoping that people find it super valuable and share it around and that brings in more people.”

She told me readers paid more than what she would have charged, but I still cringed. I had heard about the amount of work she put into those essays. Not to mention, she already wrote (for free) about these topics on her blog. If she believed the essays to be super valuable, why not come out swinging with a price that indicated that value?

The truth is, unless you have an extremely wide reach, discount or zero pricing does not work. And hardly anyone has that kind of reach. The majority of us (start-ups, freelancers, small business-makers, entrepreneurs) are in markets with smaller audiences and niche targets. And that means premium pricing.

Charging for your work or products, however, just doesn’t seem to jive with the so-called basic rules of the Internet. Somewhere along the line, Free! became an acceptable business model, and revenue and sales became a sign that you didn’t get how the new economy worked. Suddenly, we’re afraid to make money.

“It feels weird to be selling to my blog readers,” Amber says. “The lines are a little blurred and I’m working to draw them more firmly. I’m very emotionally attached to my blog and it feels weird to try to turn it into a business space.”

But the lines don’t get less personal when you aren’t marketing to friends. Liam spoke to me about how his customers are from modest means, and he is often more concerned that his customers save money, rather than he make it himself. Even with a healthy level of success most would be envious of – and a growth rate a fully-backed and funded start-up would salivate over – Liam is often worried. And he seems to feel bad and apologetic at his success.

A good many of us want to start and grow businesses (or nonprofits or blogs or something). But the majority of us cannot. Our minds won’t let us. We put up all sorts of barriers and paradigms that tell us no, this isn’t right. Even if you manage to get an idea off the ground, your negative nellies will tell you that the product isn’t great/has bugs/isn’t ready/is stupid and the big one: you’re not good enough.

We all tell ourselves these invisible scripts every day, and they go into overdrive when we try anything new. We literally have a physical and biological reaction that tells us to stop, back away and let it go. Financial expert Ramit Sethi has an exercise in one of his courses where he asks people to identify these scripts. Here is a sampling of what people say:

What will I do if I succeed? Do I deserve to succeed?

Not good enough – Just writing those words makes me irritated as hell. But that’s what I battle with.

What skills, expertise do I have that someone will be willing to pay top dollar for? I’m afraid I’m just not good enough, special enough, have great enough ideas to warrant the financial life I so desire.

And the fear of not being good enough, or un-deserving, does all sorts of weird things to us when we try to implement our ideas. We decide it’s more important to be right, than effective (we don’t want to fall flat on our faces, after all), and we move forward with assumptions that are clearly incorrect.

Despite the current obsession with tracking, testing, metrics and analytics in the start-up world, we still primarily make business decisions based on emotions, not data. Business risk doesn’t depend on your conversion rate, but what you say to yourself in your head.

“It did feel more comfortable for me to do pay-what-you-can,” Amber said, “because I’m still a little uncomfortable with this whole Pricing My Work thing. There’s definitely some fear involved.”

For Amber, having people pay-what-they-could helped her plow through that fear. “Most people ended up paying the suggested $5, but a large number paid in the $10 range,” she reports. “One person even paid $50. Only one person paid less than $5, at 99 cents.” Amber plans to charge upwards of $50 for her next product.

As for Liam, I asked him to reframe his worldview. Instead of worrying if he was ripping people off, he should focus on providing as much value as possible to his users. If you are providing value, there is no reason not to charge, no reason to feel bad. We don’t need to be so wrapped up into “do no evil” that we talk ourselves right out of profit.

Instead of our emotions plowing us into despair over success – or potential success – we should focus on the fact that growth, even and especially financial growth, is healthy. Of course it will take work. Things will change, and with it will come more responsibility and expectations, but only if we can accept that we’re worthy and good enough to provide mad value and make mad money in the first place.

Levo League launched last week by founders Caroline Ghosn and Amanda Pouchot. It’s a professional social network for Gen Y women, and is funded to the tune of $1.25 million by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Ning founder Gina Biancihini, and Gilt Groupe’s Susan Lyne among others.

Oh, and it sucks.

Big connections mean big expectations and I’d say with the exception of some fantastic and probably un-deserved PR (Can you say privilege? Co-founder Caroline Ghosn is the daughter of Nissan and Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn), the launch has fallen spectacularly flat.

The site is confusing and manages to mash up bad and outdated UI simultaneously, while not making it clear that you need to be “accepted” to use the site. And let’s stop right there and point out that applying to be accepted flies in the face of Generation Y’s most basic principles, the team-building generation that gives everyone a trophy. We like to flatten hierarchy, not build it. While I understand the tactic is more about marketing, creating false scarcity around a demographic that puts inclusion first is lame.

After sign up, you are dumped into an environment with limited content – although what content is there is solid – a teeny tiny job board, a deserted community “lounge” (already?), and a directory of companies with no job openings.

Except, wait, the joke is on you. When you are accepted into Levo League, the content and pages on the site? Exactly the same.

Totally bizarre, to say the least. Let’s not forget, similar, if not identical sites have tried and failed. Damsels in Success, also described as a social network for professional women, launched back when I was a wee beginner of a blogger. Founder Harleen Kahloon also had major connections, lots of press, and good content. And yet, the site no longer exists.

Safe to say, the future of women and careers online is not a directory of companies, job listings, and a social network tacked on. It’s almost as if Levo League should have launched in the late nineties along with Careerbuilder and Monster. But these days, those guys are failing. Monster recently laid off 400 people and just last week, put itself up for sale.

(Sidebar and disclosure: Ryan’s company was also a professional social network for Gen Y at one point. And it too failed. I’ve watched the painful progression and pivots over three years to Brazen’s current, successful iteration that allows recruiters and job candidates to connect in a useful and innovative way.)

The funny thing is, I’m pretty sure Levo League’s founders know this too.  The number one thing you can do for career opportunities and advancement (read: dream jobs, meaningful work, more money, better titles) is to network, network, and network. Eighty percent of job openings are filled through networking (you know, actually talking to people), and certainly Ghosn and Pouchot are masters in this regard. These founders are exceptionally smart and likeable, and engaging to watch to boot.

But managing your career and building a start-up are different. At some point the relationships that give you money, press, and maybe even your first few thousand users will do nothing to retain your users, build loyalty and create rabid fans. PR is only an attention-based mechanism. It does nothing for engagement, retention or product strategy. It is one thing for friends to support you to your face, but it is quite another for them to use the product you’ve built and integrate it into their daily or weekly life. Friends aren’t users.

The Levo League site just isn’t set up to support networking and mentorship between ambitious women. There is an interesting opportunity there, however. Why not create a mentorship site that matches mentors like dating sites match mates? Or even simply match like-minded career women? That sort of algorithm would be awesome and totally useful.

I have no doubt Levo League will be successful, eventually. Their smarts, that kind of money, and their high-profile backers mean Ghosn and Pouchot will have the luxury to pivot, iterate and learn from their mistakes. Let’s just hope they fail fast. I’m ready to see what’s next.

–

What do you need to succeed in your career? Networking, support, advice? What’s missing on career sites today? 

My mother says I am in the real world now.

“Things aren’t just handed to you,” she says. “You have to work.”

She is referring to my history of being blessed, the days when jobs, men, friends, careers, and connections came to me. When I had a wide network, when I knew everyone in my city. The days before DC, maybe even farther back.

I moved to DC for an adventure, of course, but mostly – and more than I knew at the time – to support Ryan and his start-up. In the middle of it all, I grew up. I came to terms with our relationship, compromise, and what I want for our life – and my life.

It took awhile.

Because even though moving was my choice, and I was adamant that it wasn’t a choice to follow my boyfriend, but a choice to follow something new and exciting, I still get frustrated. Angry. At myself.

At slipping, then settling into a lifestyle. That set of patterns and habitual actions holding you to certain choices, responsibility, obligation. All of a sudden, there is more to lose. More face to save. There’s your boyfriend to consider. His future. Your life together. You have rent to pay, loans to pay off, financial goals to meet. Your mother. You want to take care of her. And the job you have. It’s just good enough.

Idealism, it drains out of you slowly, hour by hour, cubicle by cubicle, and every time you click open Facebook. And then there’s the revelation: crap (except, imagine stronger language), this is just not where I thought I would be at 28.

We could walk through my list of accomplishments, and yes, I am proud of where I’ve been and where I am now, but that sense of purpose is largely lost. I check off a list that feeds a lifestyle that keeps risk just out of reach.

I feel safe, and it is killing me.

I guess this is growing up. For some. I haven’t mentioned it before, because, God, it’s so hugely embarrassing. To not have taken your own advice. To not have lived in your own expectations. And as much as I try, I can’t eschew those feelings away through candy-coated snark or lift-you-up affirmations. Those people, they make me cringe.

It’s just, life is your responsibility.

–

What are your thoughts on settling? Is it inevitable? Or can you reconcile ambition and reality? How do you get over the feeling that you should be more?

In one recent study, a group of students were asked to take a standardized test covering skills students are expected to garner from an undergraduate education, and 45 percent of students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” during the first two years of college, while 36 percent of students “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” at all over their four years of college.

Traditional models of education don’t deliver a quality education at a realistic or reliable scale – we would need thousands more teachers to appropriately educate everyone, and no one wants to be a teacher because they get paid like crap and are blamed for the dismal future of our kids and the next generation.

So when young people graduate college, the education they receive is mostly useless; we can all get the same education or better online. If we’re self-motivated.

“But how many people really have what it takes — the courage, the stamina, the native smarts, the willingness to admit mistakes without blaming others, the sheer and extreme initiative — to learn that way? The entrepreneurial gene is not widely distributed,” argues Alan Jacobs.

Indeed, MIT offers many of its computer science classes online, but many of us are not likely to start one, let alone finish it, despite any express desires to learn programming. Not to mention the field of computer science has a myriad of resources on the Internet, all of which are free, to teach yourself how to learn math, javascript, html, ruby, and so on and so forth.

And we really need programmers to fuel the next phase of innovation. I work for a start-up, and my company is looking to hire multiple engineers. At every tech meetup I attend, non-technical founders are practically begging to partner with developers. And those who do hold these elusive titles are often recruited with incentives and bonuses.

Seems like a bunch of us would want to jump on the self-education boat and get after this opportunity to become one of the most sought-after titles in the world. But most people don’t follow-through (even when they have the express goal to learn programming). There is still a dearth of developers, despite the wide availability of knowledge on the Internet.

Which begs the question, is web education really the future?

In real life, we idealistically view education as “a dynamic and interactive environment in which students have daily real-world encounters with faculty and with one another, encounters which, unlike Google searches, are not limited by what you already know to search for,” argues Jacobs. “In many cases, those schools also require you to take classes you would never choose on your own, to read books you’ve never heard of, to articulate thoughts about issues so challenging that left to your own devices you’d just go do something else.”

True. But while Jacobs ultimately concludes that DIY education is “parasitic on existing universities,” (he is a University professor, after all), web education will be a force to be reckoned with.

First, we need to come to terms that free education and distributed knowledge is largely useless. Yes, a small cohort of people will take up the cause to learn a new skill or dive deep into a topic of study, but the rest of us will watch TED videos contentedly in our cubicles as our educational fill for the day.

The availability of free information is not enough. It needs to be organized appropriately, with content that is delivered sequentially over time instead of all at once. Each lesson or module needs to build upon the last in a clear path of knowledge. The information needs to be available in different formats and platforms to accommodate different learning styles and technologies (i.e., videos, transcripts, mobile, tablet, etc.).

And web education has to go beyond exceptional content. It needs leaders with expertise and authority, as well as a passion to teach. It needs learners that can use comments or live chats to ask questions and throw out ideas to see what sticks. And those learners need the opportunity to speak individually to the teacher through group coaching calls or individual mentorship.

In essence, online education needs to mirror the best of real-world education. Can it be better than an in-person experience? By far, yes. You can watch video-based lectures over and over again. You can pace modules to your rhythm. And, teachers won’t speak from theory, but success and experience. Not to mention an amazing community that will want to learn with you.

Web education can do what colleges can’t – deliver knowledge at an impressive scale and at an affordable price to change the direction of knowledge for the better. Log on.

Ideas are common, so I’ll tell you now that how I came up with the idea for Kontrary isn’t interesting. What is interesting is how immediately I jumped into a case of “professor syndrome” where I believed that for Kontrary to work, I would have to be less personal and aspirational, and more editorial and analytical. I know better. I know better, but still, I held onto the notion.

I thought business was serious business. And I confused serious with significance in thinking about charging for content. The mistake has cost me hours upon days of sitting fraught in front of my screen with dozens of tabs of half-finished posts. I struggle to provide high value at a level that is interesting and relatable. That is, I struggle with being myself, because myself doesn’t seem good enough.

We all tell ourselves these invisible scripts every day, and they go into overdrive when we try anything new. We literally have a physical and biological reaction that tells us to stop, back away and let it go. Ramit Sethi has a great exercise in one of his courses where he asks people to identify these scripts. Here is a sampling of what people say:

What will I do if I succeed? Do I deserve to succeed?

Not good enough – Just writing those words makes me irritated as hell. But that’s what I battle with.

I can’t charge for my services. I’m not a professional. I have no CFP. I have no client base. No one will pay me.

My industry is saturated with people who have more experience/qualifications than myself.

What skills, expertise do I have that someone will be willing to pay top dollar for? I’m afraid I’m just not good enough, special enough, have great enough ideas to warrant the financial life I so desire.

If we listen to the imposter, we have to be experts to succeed. Nothing could be farther from the truth, of course. You don’t have to be an expert all the time, and really, people don’t want you to be. The saying, “the customer is always right” is true, not because they are, but because it’s always possible that you’re wrong. That your company is wrong. That your products might suck. That you’ll make mistakes and have to own up.

Maybe it’s because I have run multiple organizations and have had tons of people disagree with me, but I know that people are just looking for you to be human, for your company to be human. To recognize themselves in your products and your values.

When I started my last position, I had a volunteer write a tirade against me before she met me and email it to her entire address book. Point by point, she laid out why I was the wrong person to lead the organization. The Board that had just hired me was incensed (it was an indictment on them as well, after all), but my first thought was how invested this volunteer was in the organization and how highly she esteemed its mission. I immediately asked her to have coffee so we could talk about her concerns. Anyone that is that protective of something is someone I want to meet.  You have to care a lot to write an email like that.

When faced with conflict, I’ve noticed most people’s reactions are to do the opposite. Most people will clam up, stand by their ways, and shine their shoes. Good companies understand that they are not infalliable though. Good customer service understands that you will make mistakes, people will be upset and it is your job to make it right. Really terrific customer service, however, understands that sometimes you will not make mistakes, but people will still be upset, and it is still your job to make it right.

I got into a car accident last year (it was my fault), and I remember calling my insurance company Geico crying. The woman on the other end of the line was asking me questions I couldn’t answer and I snapped. The rep didn’t even flinch. She continued to be so warm that just having her on the phone made me feel safe and like everything was going to be okay (which it was). I had many conversations with numerous Geico reps after that and every single one of the calls was similar. Even when I sold my car and cancelled my insurance, I wanted to invite the woman to dinner.

I didn’t have to train Geico to be a good company; the company trained me to be a good customer.

Your product doesn’t have to be perfect. Customers and clients and readers, they will be patient while you figure it out. We all root for you to succeed. And when you succeed, your customers get to be a part of that. And when you fail – but you’re human – your customers are just as proud to be a part of that.

Expertise doesn’t win, but empathy does. The biggest mistake you can make in any position is to act like a know-it-all. Everyone just wants to be heard. No matter your title, your job is only to make that your mission.

You’re good enough because you try. You’re good enough because you care. You’re good enough because you showed the professor the door. Now, go.