I’ve moved this blog to a new domain, blog.JTimothyKing.com. (That’s not how I’ve been an idiot.) And I’m changing the focus, because the focus of my life has been changing. The fact that it has been changing for the past 2 years but I haven’t acted on it– That’s how I’ve been an idiot.

Actually, I did act on it… kinda. But I didn’t really have a vision for where I wanted to go. Or more accurately, I didn’t truly believe my vision was possible. And so I let my efforts get confused. On the one hand, I was doing what I believed I should be doing to get ahead. On the other hand, I was doing what I really enjoyed. And while I truly believed the two could be integrated, I never acted to integrate them. Because I didn’t truly believe what I wanted was possible… I’m babbling. Let me clarify.

The story begins in November of 2005, almost 2 years ago. That’s when I started a storytelling blog, called Be the Story, to begin exploring that shift. Here’s how I described it in a private e-mail to a group of my friends:

About this time in a software developer’s career, he must decide whether to keep developing software, go into management, or do something else. Early in November, this really hit me. I felt that if I remained a staff software engineer, my life would stagnate. Most of what we do in this industry isn’t engineering, anyhow, and that grates on me…

At the time, I was reading The Leadership Challenge by James Kouzes and Barry Posner. It inspired me. I made a list of the things I’m passionate about, what I believe in. I also listed the kinds of things I’d been good at in the past. Then I brainstormed about possible industries I might want to work in and the roles I might want to have.

That exercise definitely pointed me toward a more creative career than software development has become. So I started bethestory.com, a blog and podcast celebrating stories and those who tell them. The art of story is the thin strip of land on which a writer meets his audience…

I’m not quite sure where I’m going to end up. I may become a writing consultant or coach or maybe a story-game developer. One of the items on my brainstorming list was creative director in video games, but I thought that was too silly. (Whoever heard of a “creative director”?)… Then I played Psychonauts and saw Tim Schafer, the genius behind the game, at the top of the credit sheet listed as “creative director.” Tim Schafer is my hero.

Okay, here’s the thing…

I didn’t try any of those. There were other things high on my list that I would love to do, too. For example, I would love to be a novelist. Except that there’s no money in writing novels, unless you’re Stephen King. So why not change my name to “Stephen”? Seriously. Not literally, of course. But why not try writing fiction, selling it, making some money, and enjoying it? It wasn’t until recently that I started seriously writing online fiction, a serial drama called The Conscience of Abe’s Turn, and one of the characters is a software developer. (Of all the characters, she’s the one who has the most in common with me personally.) But all the characters have come alive to me. That’s probably because they’re inspired by the storytelling style of Gilmore Girls, whose fans have argued interminably and passionately about its characters. For me, personally, this is an incredibly enjoyable and exciting project.

All told, I’ve spent a lot of time and effort on things that supposedly can’t make me any money. And because they supposedly can’t make me money, I haven’t constructed a vision around them. Yet, these projects are the most enjoyable part of what I do with my time. The thing is, I have never actually tried to make money doing what I enjoy. In the email I quoted above, I mentioned being a writing consultant. What I specifically had in mind was to consult with writers on their stories. I concluded, however, that there would be no money in it. But would you believe that I never even offered my services as a paid story consultant? Never. Never even constructed an offer. Much less tried to persuade someone to hire me.

Yet many have applauded the stories I myself have written. A filmmaker friend of mine was so excited by what he read that he decided we had to work on a project together. Sure, why not? I reviewed his latest script, we got on the phone, and within a couple of hours, he was seeing a whole new exciting vision for his film. There were several Aha! moments in that discussion. And he actually took my advice. My point is, I certainly have something to offer fiction writers as a story consultant. How do I know they wouldn’t pay me, unless I try to offer it to them?

Meanwhile, I’ve been maintaining the fiction that this blog, about my life, is supposedly a software-development or technology blog. How can that be when my life isn’t about technology? When my life hasn’t been about technology for the past 23 months at least? I’ve maintained the fiction that I can write about technology and entrepreneurship, because I’m still a damn good software developer, and because I’ve been doing web development and marketing. Yeah, that involves a lot of writing. And there is money in it. And it’s fun, too. But…

I’m like one of my fictional characters.

A good fictional character might say one thing, but then he thinks and feels and does something else. That’s a very powerful way to describe a fictional character. Because character is what’s inside. It’s what you do when no one’s looking, as Holly Lisle puts it. And when a character says one thing but does another, that tells you that he really doesn’t believe what he himself says. That tells you he’s a hypocrite. And moreover, that there’s a conflict inside him. Good writers do that with their characters all the time. I do it with myself.

No matter how much I’ve held on to being part software guy, most of what I’ve done of late has been related to writing. Truthfully, I’m no longer a software developer. There, I said it. (The first step, as they say, is admitting you have a problem.) I’m a writer. I love to write. So why not just bring my efforts in line with what I really want? Why not construct an outwardly coherent vision for my life? Rather than saying one thing and doing another?

To that end, here’s what I’m doing:

1. I’ve moved this blog to blog.JTimothyKing.com. Any links to JTSE.com/blog will be redirected to the new location, so no fears.
2. In these pages, I’m going to talk more about what I’ve been doing as a writer, not just as a software guy. And I’ll post some of my fiction from time to time as well. That should result in more posts.
3. I plan to re-theme BeTheStory.com, and make it a companion blog. That should result in more posts there.
4. I’m actually going to sell my fiction. Not just one book. But book after book after book. And I’m starting with Abe’s Turn. (Updated.)
5. I’m going to offer a series of writing resources and storytelling kits, one of which I’ve already mostly finished. (Why did I let it stall? It was fun and exciting to work on, and it’s valuable to writers.)
6. I’m also going to offer website design services to writers and filmmakers, via my Lucrative Web Design site. (I’ll probably end up moving to a better domain for that, though.)

I don’t know what I’m going to do with JTSE.com or with regard to software development. But I’m clearly fading out of the business, whether I want to or not. I use software development for cash, as much as I can find time to earn, but at rates that sometimes don’t seem worth the effort. Software development for me is a commodity. Yes, I know, there are ways to make software development a specialty, by giving seminars, consulting on processes and technologies, and so forth. But none of that really excites me anymore. I might as well admit it. To do otherwise would be to continue to be an idiot.

-TimK

My story began with an email from said major blog network, an email that was obviously written by a lawyer.

To understand the story, first I have to go back to last November, when I created a website dedicated to fandom for the TV show Gilmore Girls. This is Gilmore-ism.com. Being a software geek, an innovative feature inspired this site, an on-line database of short quotes from the TV show Gilmore Girls, with analysis. But being a software geek, I couldn’t help but add feature upon feature to the site.

One of these features is an on-site feed reader. I chose and categorized a number of important Gilmore Girls-related RSS feeds, and I provided a feed-reader service on the site, for people who don’t know RSS and don’t want to. Very much like I can share my BlogLines subscriptions. I’m not the first person to provide an on-site news aggregator, of course. But this is another feature Gilmore-ism.com has that no other Gilmore Girls fansite has.

The on-site news aggregator is primitive, yes. Primarily, it’s useful only for sharing lists of RSS feeds with other Gilmore Girls fans. Indeed, these pages get less than 1% of the traffic on Gilmore-ism.com. Most visitors either sign up to the original site’s feed. Or they sign up to my email list, expecting me to keep them up to date.

I Receive a Nasty Email

One of the blogosphere’s Gilmore Girls fan blogs is a member of a well known blog network, which I will call “Network 23.” Not their real name. I’m calling them that, after the fictional TV network in Max Headroom. The Network 23 blog is one of the sites I’ve recommended to my fans. And it’s one of the sites I’ve linked to, many times, both on Gilmore-ism.com and in the Gilmore-ism.com e-Newsletter.

So imagine my surprise when I got an email from one of Network 23’s staff, with the subject line “Unauthorized Use of Network 23 Property.” The email was clearly based on a template that some lawyer somewhere came up with. And like most lawyers’ letters, it did not give Network 23 a good name. Even less did it resolve any conflict. I’ve put a lot of time and energy into making Gilmore-ism.com a unique and original website, with innovative features found on no other Gilmore Girls fan site. Sending this email could only have accomplished one thing. And that is to sow angst while simultaneously covering your legal ass-ets. (Note that I am not a lawyer, which is how I can say this with a straight face.)

Let me take a moment to reiterate something that needs to be said much more often, especially to small business owners: You may need a lawyer for legal advice. But always remember, he is not the businessman. He doesn’t know your market. He doesn’t know your customers. And he doesn’t go bankrupt when they all desert you. So use your own judgement, and be polite to your customers. It’s your neck on the line.

Why do I think this email originally came from a lawyer? Firstly, it began, “To whom it may concern:” even though everyone knows me by name. And the person who sent the email also knew my name, because my name is displayed right there on the “Contact” page of Gilmore-ism.com, whence he sent the email.

Secondly, it contained paragraphs like the following:

It has been brought to our attention that the web site located at gilmore-ism.com, for which you are the site author, is distributing, displaying and reproducing unauthorized copies of Network 23’s content.

Actually, it read an awful lot like the note that Paramount sent to The Movie Blog… (Cue Twilight Zone theme.) Except I could have handled receiving that note. It at least said exactly what Paramount objected to and what they wanted The Movie Blog to do about it. The email I got from Network 23 was missing these key elements. But I’ll get to that in a sec.

As I said, I frequently linked to and referred my fans to Network 23’s blog. I quote from the same original sources. And I once had a rather marked difference of opinion with an editorial posted on that blog (though very few people seemed to care about the issue). But copyright infringement? Imagine my shock at receiving this email!

I pride myself on being a legitimate website operator and a responsible, upstanding netizen. I use double-opt-in on all my email lists, never send spam, and my email subscribers even tell me when their email addresses are changing, so they won’t miss a beat. And I respect copyright, even though I don’t always think copyright holders act in their own best interest. Still, I believe the only correct solution is to persuade them to adopt a better way… Or to provide their readers with alternative sources of vibrant, original content. But to rip them off? Why would I even consider such a thing?

The Network 23 email also invoked the ever-fearsome 4-letter acronym “DMCA,” requesting my “assistance in the removal of all Network 23 content from this web site and any other sites for which you provide services.” But as I said before, it omitted key details. In particular, Network 23 did not tell me which URLs were infringing, even though this is a DMCA-notice requirement. So I replied, politely asking which URLs Network 23 believed were infringing their copyright, so I could address the issue.

Let me reiterate again: Do not let your lawyer tell you how to interact with your customers, against your better judgement. And do not let your fear of legalities bully you into doing something stupid. Emails like this scare the recipient at best, and anger them at worst. Witness how The Movie Blog reacted to the Paramount notice. And by making demands specific enough to appear to have the force of government behind them (even if they don’t), yet vague enough that the recipient can’t actually know what he’s actually being told to do, to the recipient, this message could only feel more like dealing with a mob boss than with a respectable business… Except that a mob boss usually tells you exactly what he wants, even if it’s unreasonable.

For the record, this email did not come from the author of the Network 23 blog, but rather from a different Network 23 representative. And I don’t even know that the blog author had anything to do with it, even though it claimed to be written on his behalf. Again, that’s probably just legal boilerplate that means nothing. I’ve read plenty of legal boilerplate in my time, and plenty of it even contradicts the document of which it is a part.

Why BlogLines is Not Search-Engine Spam

Let me talk about how search-engine spam intrudes into my Gilmore Girls research. I see more search-engine spam than most people probably care to think about, because I use search feeds, from engines like Google and Technorati. For example, to get scoop on Gilmore Girls stories before anyone else does, in my feed reader, I have automatic searches set up to monitor the blogosphere for stories about Gilmore Girls.

Unfortunately, I’ll frequently see a story appear, followed by a dozen copies. All the copies are from spam blogs, which have illegitimately copied the original article. They do this so that when you go to Google or another search engine, and you type in “Gilmore Girls,” the spam site will be one of those listed. The site doesn’t actually contain any new information on the subject, much less any original content. But if you go there, you’ll see loads of ads.

Google and the other search engines hate search-engine spam, of course. And they have algorithms in place to filter it out. However, I end up seeing a lot of it, because I have my search feeds set up to give me up-to-the-minute results. I guess I see these results before the search engine’s filtering algorithm can kick in or something.

BlogLines also provides its own blog-search feature. But of all the feeds it tracks, and all the feeds that its users subscribe to, and all the subscriptions its users make public… Now, at this point, I was going to say that BlogLines prevents search-engines from scanning its users’ public subscriptions. Because I know I have a line in my robots.txt file to keep search engines out of my “aggregator” pages. This in fact is the default behavior in the latest Drupal. (Gilmore-ism.com uses Drupal, BTW.)

I assumed BlogLines did something similar. But then I double-checked. Google does index these pages. Which makes sense, because they’re not disallowed, either by robots.txt or by <meta> tags.

So… How do BlogLines public subscriptions differ from search-engine spam? One reason is that there aren’t many people using them for this purpose. Indeed, why would a spammer do so? If you want to do search-engine spam, you plop up WordPress blog with an aggregator plug-in and some pay-per-click ads. You’re trying to trick user into coming to your spam site, because some portion of them will click on your ads. You can’t do this with BlogLines, because you can’t put up your own pay-per-click ads.

BlogLines is similar to what I do with the Drupal aggregator. Sure, my news aggregator is primitive. It’s missing features you expect from any serious feed reader. For example, after you read an item, you can’t mark the item as “read.” But the Drupal aggregator does behave at its core like a reader. It aggregates feeds, which appear on a separate page and not with the other content on the site. And the software caches aggregated items only temporarily, purging them after a period of time, just as you expect a feed reader to do. And as I said, I get no search engine traffic from this content, because it’s merely displayed to my site visitors as a service to them, not actually published with the rest of the content.

Second Thoughts and Feed Readers

As I had designed the feed reader portion of the web site very carefully, when I received the email from Network 23, it never entered my mind that this was a problem. As I said, the email didn’t specify which URLs they found objectionable. It only made sweeping generalizations, leaving me to try to read between the lines. And reading between the lines is something I’ve never been very good at.

(This is an argument my wife and I are continually having, so much so that we’ve gotten used to it. She tells me what’s wrong, but always leaves out the part about what she expects me to do about it. And I have to ask her for specifics, which annoys her, and so forth. Engaging, challenging, and way better than being lonely.)

If you had been inside my head, you’d understand. At first I thought I might have quoted more from one of Network 23’s blog posts than they might have liked… Although most of these posts basically copy content from other sources. Then I thought it might have something to do with the heated exchange of opinion between our two blogs some months ago, even though that’s a long time. I did quote heavily when I wrote that piece.

After I thought a little more, I considered that Network 23 might be objecting to the on-site feed reader. But why would they? The feed reader is only available to visitors of Gilmore-ism.com, not to search engines. It does not replace Network 23’s blog, but rather aggregates it with other sources, linking to all the original sources, as a good feed reader does. And its only possible use is to allow users to read the RSS feeds, which is (I assume) what the feeds are there for– so that people can read them without repeatedly visiting Network 23’s and the other blog sites.

In fact, I’ve analyzed traffic patterns for the aggregator. Less than 100 people look at it each month–hardly worth the effort. And after they look at it, then they go off to visit the linked-to blogs! (Duh. Like, what else would you expect, man?) I gather that they probably subscribe to those blogs directly, or decide they’re not interested at all. Of course, this is what sharing RSS feeds is all about. But it’s hardly a benefit for me, if I’m interested in keeping people at my site. Rather, it’s a perk I provide my visitors when they come to my site.

Still, the whole topic is a gray area. There are no established rules for what makes a public, on-line feed reader okay or not. This is unfortunate, and it seems to be resulting in some silly demands by bloggers.

More and more bloggers are including a copyright notice on their blog feeds:

This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement.

There’s even a WordPress plug-in that adds a copyright message like this to your feed. Sounds pretty reasonable on the surface, but what does it really mean? The whole license hinges on the question, “What is a news aggregator?” And it seems, different people have different ideas of what a news aggregator is. (One notice I saw even said that I could only view the feed on a reader that had no ads!)

• If you read an article on BlogLines, is BlogLines guilty of infringement because “your” news aggregator is a different service?

• Okay, so what if you read it at work? Does that make the use commercial?

• What if your feed reader stores items on a company computer? What if your company or ISP uses a caching web proxy?

• What if the blog post inspires a million-dollar idea that makes you rich? Will the blog author come after you for copyright infringement? (Crazier things have happened.)

• Since FeedBurner and FeedBlitz provide on-site renderings of their customers’ feeds, complete with their own embedded ads, does that make them copyright infringers? Neither’s terms of service claims a license to do this.

• What about blog indexes with integrated feed views, especially popular among podcasting directories?

• What right does any blog author have to tell you how you’re allowed to read his feed? He makes the feed available to be read. Fair use demands that you be able to use any suitable method to read it; and it’s your choice, not his.

• If you choose to use a web-based feed reader, does that make you a copyright infringer?

• What if you can access the web-based feed reader anonymously, without registering?

• What if the feed reader provides public views of subscribed feeds, like BlogLines or NewsAlloy? How long before United Media sues NewsAlloy for copyright infringement because you can read the Dilbert feed there?

• If you select a group of feeds your fans might like, and you link to (or frame) a BlogLines public view, so that your fans can read those feeds there, does that make you a copyright infringer?

• What if you allow them to read those feeds via a public feed reader? Does that make you a copyright infringer? Just because you’re making it easy for a very specific audience to view very specific RSS feeds?

Well… I guess if I put it that way, it doesn’t even pass the laugh test, does it? How silly is it of me to make it easy for my fans to view someone else’s published content? Why would I even want to do that? Because it benefits us both. That’s the power of the blogosphere. And that’s one of the advantages of social media.

The scary part is that the rules aren’t clear. If I provide a news aggregator service innovative enough not to fit into a certain blogger’s unstated conception of a “news aggregator,” I could get sued. And if I read someone’s RSS feed on a non-approved aggregator, could I get sued? You wouldn’t think so, but the rules are unclear. In either case, even if I’m right, and even if I were to prevail in court, it would cost us both many thousands of dollars. Because in any court battle, there are 4 parties: me, my lawyer, my opponent, and his lawyer. Two are winners, and two are losers. The lawyers never lose.

What’s a Blog For, Anyhow?

If I wanted to keep my content off the Internet, I’d have it printed in a book. In fact, I’m actually having a small booklet printed, but not to keep it off the Internet. Rather, to make it available off the Internet. But that’s a different story.

If I wanted to make my electronic content available only to certain people, I’d put it behind a login screen. In fact, I do that on Gilmore-ism.com, and I’m right now planning other sites that have content and features that require a user login.

If I wanted to try to force people to visit my website every time they want to read my content, I’d avoid RSS. In fact, some pages on some of my sites are never in an RSS feed, for a variety of reasons. Actually, there are plenty of good reasons to avoid RSS. But trying to make people visit your site repeatedly is not one of them. Because now automated programs will visit your site on the user’s behalf, alerting him when the content changes.

And if I want to make my content available to a wide and growing repeat audience on an ongoing basis, I put up a blog. This allows people to read my content using a feed reader or feed-reading service, as they see fit. It allows services like Technorati and Google to store and coallate my content so that people can find it easier. And for those who don’t yet do RSS–and there are many who don’t–there’s still the web interface.

The thing is, once I let that RSS feed out into the wild, I have to expect users to do things with it that I didn’t anticipate. I expect them to use transport mechanisms, software, services, and storage mechanisms that I could never even have imagined. All four of these are present in any feed reader, of course. But too many bloggers assume the technology won’t progress. It’s like, they just learned RSS, and now suddenly people are doing new things with it, and all the rules are changing.

By publishing an RSS feed, I’m giving permission for users to view that information. I’m also giving them permission to copy it for personal use, because that’s fair use. I don’t expect them to only use the technologies that I already understand and have approved of. I do expect them to use the full power of the Internet. And I expect third parties to provide services that help them do all the things they can do with my content.

Moreover, I expect them to link to my blog posts, because this is also one of the prime characteristics of the blogosphere. A blog is not just a means to publishing content. It’s also a means to take part in the global conversation. Even if I didn’t support comments or trackbacks on my blog–and I do support them both. But even if I didn’t, I would still expect people to respond to my writings. And as a good netizen, I expect to reply in turn. This is also one of the great powers of blogs as marketing tools, something many corporations don’t yet understand. A blog is not just a one-way communication medium; it is 2-way. It enters you into the conversation. Before blogs, in order to do that, you’d have to go to an online bulletin board or forum. And that meant you had to give up control to the operators of the forum, or you had to create your own forum and turn it into a community. Now, you can become part of the community from your own website. This is all a primary purpose of a blog, because RSS is the technology that makes this all possible.

Unfortuantely, opinions differ, even among bloggers. And technology is progressing way too fast for the law to keep up, putting us right in the middle of a huge legal grey area. As Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted to me in an email:

The copyright issues around RSS feeds are one of the great unexplored mysteries of the cyberlaw world. The answers may differ depending on whether your site or servers actually copy the feeds, or simply link to or frame the feed source. But the most likely answer for any of these questions is “nobody knows for sure” and “if you get sued, it will be expensive no matter how it turns out.”

As RSS continue to become more ubiquitous, I fear, it will continue to become a legal quagmire waiting for victims.

But there is an ironic up-side to all this.

Here’s What I Did

I waited a day for a response from Network 23, but I got none. By that time I had decided to take down all references and links to Network 23’s blog from Gilmore-ism.com. If you go there now, you wouldn’t even know Network 23 had ever existed.

I am not the only blogger to react this way to a legalese-filled email. Bloggers take note! Blogging is more about community than it is about right. If you are too centered on controlling what others do, you will lose the friendships that make your blog worthwhile. As the writer to the Hebrews noted, “Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.” Therefore, treat others with respect, and assume good intentions on their part. If you fail to do that, it may not matter whether you were right or wrong.

(I finally did get a response from Network 23, but they never identified which URLs they believed had infringed their copyright, and I still don’t know for sure what they were talking about. But I’m thinking my educated guess is probably correct. They didn’t want my site visitors to read their blog. And now my site visitors, and all the people on my email list, aren’t.)

One final note, for the record: You may with any of my RSS feeds, transport them, view them, and provide services that allow others to view them, using whatever technology you choose. That’s what they’re there for. This includes my upcoming fiction blog, The Conscience of Abe’s Turn. You can even share my RSS feeds with others. Just please keep them intact. I will never come after you for doing so…

In fact, I’m formalizing this statement. Even when I publish content that is “All rights reserved,” if that content appears in an RSS feed, the RSS feed itself is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs License. I’m currently updating my copyright notices to state this on each site and in each feed. (Of course, some of my content uses an even less restrictive Creative Commons license.) In brief, the CC BY-ND License (as it’s more affectionately called) allows you to distribute or “publicly perform” the RSS feed, as long as you don’t change it and you attribute the original author. I think that should cover it.

I’d also encourage you to do the same for your RSS feeds. And get this legal nonsense behind us, so we can continue building the blogosphere.

-TimK

… I’d like to hire a personal shopper, or try out Peapod. (Click here for $10 in FREE groceries from Peapod!)

-TimK

And that’s what happened to me. I faced an opportunity to innovate on one of my websites. My first instinct was “That’s crazy!” Fortunately, I knew enough to put my feelings in perspective. And this opportunity opened up a parallel market.

It all started with fanaticism for a TV show. As a storyteller, this is one of my all-time favorite TV shows. I’ve seen every episode at least 3 times. The earliest episodes I’ve seen close to a dozen times. I’ve learned more about telling stories watching this show than I have from any other source. If you were to ask me what is my favorite episode of this show, I wouldn’t be able to tell you which episode it is, because I love them all. Every single episode is a classic, in my opinion.

If you know my work, you already know what TV show this is. I won’t keep you in suspense. It’s Gilmore Girls. Not usually something you would expect a software developer to like. But it’s something a musician and writer should love. (And I am a musician and writer.) And one of the things about Gilmore Girls is its “Gilmore-isms.” Gilmore-isms are witty allusions to pop-culture buried in the dialogue. Yes, all TV shows have lines that refer to other TV shows, movies, books, or whatever. But Gilmore Girls has made them an art in themselves, via one of the title characters, Lorelai Gilmore.

Lorelai is intelligent and well-read. But she’s a rebel with an abrasive, off-beat sense of humor. And she rarely passes up an opportunity to meld the two. For example, in the pilot episode, she invokes both Jack Kerouac and Officer Krupke (from West Side Story) and her daughter Rory mentions RuPaul and Macy Gray. (Like mother, like daughter.)

That’s 4 cultural references within the first few minutes of just the first episode. Many episodes have dozens of Gilmore-isms. And fans talk about them. They mention them on their blogs. They list them on their websites. They talk about them in on-line forums. They read the little “Gilmore-isms” booklets that come in the DVD box sets. They pick out their favorite ones. Me, I like to discover them, understand them, and find them in real life. My Netflix queue is half-full of stuff that was mentioned on Gilmore Girls. Just because it was mentioned on Gilmore Girls and I want to know what Lorelai was talking about.

On the Internet are many lists of Gilmore-isms. Fans love to list out their favorite Gilmore Girls quotes. The problem is that there are a lot of references that I don’t get. Because I’ve never seen the movie or read the book being referenced. And there are also many that I don’t get because they’re subtle. Sometimes, I don’t even know that they’re references. I’m always becoming obsessed with Gilmore-isms. I end up spending hours digging up answers, and I still feel like I’ve missed a lot. Of course, that’s part of the fun behind the show’s witty banter. But it’s also why I thought it would be cool to have a website that had all the Gilmore-isms. And the more I thought about the idea, the more excited I grew. And the bigger the concept grew. And before I knew it, I was facing a grand vision of the Gilmore-ism Database Project, the Gilmore witticism site.

Since then, the Gilmore-ism Database Project has changed significantly. Now Gilmore-ism.com is a Gilmore Girls fan-site, including lots of quotes you won’t find anywhere else. But before all the general features, it was only about Gilmore-isms. Users needed to be able to register on the site, log in, and add their own Gilmore-isms to the site. Think Web 2.0. Might as well throw in RSS feeds, too. Each Gilmore Girls quote can refer to a cultural reference. And the database also needed to keep track of which episode each quote came from. And not just the quote itself, but also a detailed description, an explanation of what the quote means in context. This is especially useful for the more subtle references.

To make a long story short, I settled on using Drupal to build the site. And I used a custom-programmed Drupal module for the Gilmore-isms themselves. And so began the long job of adding quotes and their descriptions to the site. I also set up an e-mail list. To this list, I send personalized e-mails, talking about Gilmore Girls, Gilmore-isms, and other stuff. This is an incredibly effective way to keep in touch with other fans of the show and fans of the site.

But a surprisingly high percentage of people who knew about the e-mail list didn’t sign up. And a surprisingly high percentage of people who signed up quickly unsubscribed, or even hit the “spam” button. I didn’t understand what was going on. The messages I send are decidedly not spam. Not even close. They’re packed with fun facts about Gilmore Girls and about Gilmore-isms. And I get numerous e-mails from engaged and thankful fans who want to chat about our shared interest. That’s exactly what the e-mail list is there for. I absolutely love to get e-mails like this.

And the more personal the e-mails, the more enthusiastic the comments. For example, on Valentine’s Day I sent out a quick e-mail wishing everyone a happy holiday. And I told the story of how the kids that day had to stay home from school because of an unexpected snowstorm. This was a mid-week break from the usual weekly e-newsletter format of new content on the site and so forth. I got more great responses from that single Valentine’s Day message than from anything else I’ve ever sent out. People wishing me a happy Valentine’s Day, too. Talking about their own Valentine’s Day plans. Talking about snow. It was overwhelming. It made me feel connected to other people. It made me feel good.

And then I got a positively acerbic comment from someone unsubscribing from the list. Usually, when people unsubscribe, they don’t say why. They just go away dissatisfied. And this is one of the unfortunate realities of marketing. But this one person did say exactly how she felt about me. She wrote:

A lot of it had nothing to do with Gilmore Girls… Your not going to school and the snow, what does that have to do with Gilmore Girls? And the GG quotes… You had the quotes then some explanation or something. How stupid! We just want good quotes and not their explanations.

As Lorelai once put it, “Ouch.”

Every once in a while, there will be a wave of posts around the blogosphere, all about how to handle negative feedback. And by “negative,” we usually mean feedback like this. Not just negative, but feedback we perceive as nasty. Our first instinct is to respond in an equally nasty way. Get into an argument. Or flip them off. Or if we are “in control” of our emotions, we just write off the complainer.

And this was my first instinct as well. “She just doesn’t understand. After all, look at all the positive feedback I got from all these people who loved this e-mail. I guess you just have to break a few eggs if you want to make an omelet. You have to say something meaningful if you want anyone to listen. And you’ll have people who love you. And you’ll have people who absolutely hate you. And that’s okay.”

And it is okay. It’s okay to have people who hate you. I’ve even heard of consultants firing their clients, as it were, because the job was a poor fit. That’s very professional. And I’m all for people unsubscribing from any of my lists if they don’t get what they want. My hatred of spam is not just philosophical; it’s practical, too. I’d rather have ten subscribers who are engaged with what I have to say, who hang on my every word, than ten thousand who don’t really care one way or the other. That’s why I use mailing lists that make it incredibly easy for people to unsubscribe, risk-free. Yes! Unsubscribe if you don’t get what you want!

But in this case, there was more to it. There was something happening here that was not just weeding out those who didn’t want to be on my list. There was something happening here that made me want not to just “fire my customer.”

Instead, I remembered a point that Peter Drucker had made in his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship. This is one of those classics that I keep on the shelf, except when I’m reading it. And I read it over and over again. And I discover new insights each time I do. And on this occasion, I felt one of these insights tunneling through my mind.

One of the things–in fact, the most important part of the book. Drucker lists 7 sources of innovation. The most reliable of these is also the most frequently overlooked. And that was the source of innovation I was facing. Just like Ford did with the Edsel.

This is one of the examples Peter Drucker gives in his book. Legend has it that the Ford Edsel was a market disaster. And it was. Legend also has it that Ford had no idea what they were doing when they designed the Edsel. And this is a myth. Ford knew exactly what they were doing with the Edsel. It was to complete their product line. They had a plan. Everything fit. They used the best marketing. They had the best data on what customers wanted. They did their utmost to make it a quality product in the eyes of the customer. They poured their heart and soul into the Edsel. The Edsel was Ford’s crowning achievement. And it was an immediate and incontrovertible failure.

The first question most of us ask is, “What happened?” And this is an interesting question, yes. But it’s the wrong question to ask first. The right question is, “What did Ford do about it? And what would we have done?”

Most of us would probably blame the customer. He doesn’t know what he wants. Or he wants the impossible. Or there are better people out there who do want an Edsel, and we just have to find them.

But that’s not what Ford did. They knew they had done everything right. And still, the Edsel failed. So they reexamined the market. They questioned all of their initial assumptions. And they made a remarkable discovery. The automobile market was changing. Whereas before customers bought a car based on social class, now they bought based on lifestyle. Or at least a new kind of automobile buyer was emerging on the market. And he was buying something different in a car than anyone thought.

With this new discernment in hand, Ford went back to the drawing board. And they came out with the Ford Thunderbird. Yes, the Thunderbird rose from the ashes of the Edsel. It’s the cycle of life and marketing. Without the failure of the Edsel–and failing as it did at the time it did–the Thunderbird may never have come to be.

The lesson here is that negative feedback is valuable. Stark criticism is valuable. And when one of your customers uses words like “stupid,” you should be listening. Yes, he might be a jerk. But he might also be handing you information you can use to innovate.

When I realized this, the first thing I did was to reply to this unsubscriber’s comment. I wasn’t interested in getting her to resubscribe. But I did want to let her know how much of a help she had been to me. I told her, “Thank you,” and explained that she revealed to me something right in front of my face that I had been too closed-minded to see. Judging from her reply, I think she was taken aback.

Then I looked at what I was offering users of Gilmore-ism.com. Each week, when a new Gilmore Girls episode aired, I went through the episode and picked out all the interesting quotes. I did this as a matter of course. Then I typed them into a free-form notepad, on a special “planning page” of the site. But I didn’t enter these into the database, because I had not researched the quote. Researching the quote is a lot of work, relatively speaking. So only a few select quotes got full entries in the database.

This detailed information is what I valued. And I know that many fans also value it. Especially fans from other countries, who sometimes have trouble understanding references to U.S. pop culture. But I never stopped to think that there were visitors to my site who just wanted quotes. Or if they did that they would come to me when there are so many sites that already have long lists of quotes on them. But these visitors did want just quotes. Lots and lots of raw quotes. No background. No story behind the quote. No research on the cultural references. No quality, as I defined it. But quantity. Just lots and lots of raw Gilmore Girls quotes… Which I already had, but I was not giving them!

Less than a day later, I had made some simple changes to the database. And I was entering in all the raw quotes from that week’s episode. I also created a new e-mail list, a weekly dose of raw Gilmore Girls quotes. When I announced the new list, there were a few who switched over, and a number of people who subscribed to both. It’s almost a useless little change. But my unsubscribe rate went way down. Because I was now giving each kind of subscriber exactly the content she wants. And I am now also tapping a market I hadn’t even known existed.

The thing is, Peter Drucker didn’t even address this specific situation. But his advice applied precisely. This isn’t the first time Innovation and Entrepreneurship has bailed me out. And it won’t be the last.

When I worked in a Dilbert cube, I relied on this book and on The Effective Executive. I used these to help me understand how my role fit in with the rest of the company. I used them to help me understand how I could make a difference in the organization. (Unfortunately, I was still miserable. But that’s another story.)

Now that I’m self-employed, I need to understand these principles more than ever. In fact, if Gilmore-ism.com is to thrive, I’ll need to take advantage of an upcoming opportunity. You see, this is possibly the last season of Gilmore Girls. Rumour has it, the show will probably be canceled this year. There’s a huge write-in campaign to keep it on the air. And I personally would love for it to continue for another season, or two or five. Because I love the show.

But the show being canceled is also an opportunity for a fan-site to innovate, because it will suddenly change the way fans interact with the show. It will change the kinds of fans looking for community. It will change the kind of community they want. It will change the alternatives available to them. It will change everything. It’s a big change. And change means opportunity. And big change can mean big opportunity. I learned that from Peter Drucker.

As I said, Innovation and Entrepreneurship is a classic. That is, the examples are a little dated, but the advice is timeless. I bring it out from time to time. Sometimes just to look something up. But I can’t really just look something up in it without getting sucked in again. I end up reading large swaths of the text. In writing this blog post, for example, I ended up re-reading the whole first half of the book. And I bookmarked the second half for later in the week. After all, I need to refresh my memory. What are my options in the next two months, assuming that the CW announces in May that this is the last season of Gilmore Girls?

(That’s actually pretty impressive for a 260-something page book. I read through about half of it in one night.)

I’ve mentioned this book before, too. It’s one of my ten favorite books. (Though I grouped my 3 favorite Drucker books into one item on that list.) I also talked about its lessons with regard to web site marketing and questioning whether Google thinks it’s bigger than the market. And it’s interesting that each of these examples draws upon a similar lesson.

The thing is, innovation isn’t complicated or mysterious. The best innovations are so obvious and simple that you end up with a V-8 moment. Like I did when I figured out what was happening with my Gilmore-ism e-mail list. I should have known it all along. I felt like such an idiot. And then that night, I attended a talk by Jared Spool in which he told of much more idiotic mistakes made by people with a lot more to lose than me. And I felt a little better.

(Read more about Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker at Amazon.)

By Friday evening, I was completely incapacitated and coughing up big wads of… Well, suffice it to say I was feeling awful, and starting to worry a little. My cash-flow plan depended on me being able to bill enough hours for November in order not to starve the first couple weeks of January. So, I went to the emergency room. (And my first executive decision, to opt for COBRA coverage, turned out to be the right one.) And the doctor gave me some really nice drugs. And I slept straight through Saturday and most of Sunday.

Now that I’ve been doing it for a week, here are 10 more things I’ve noticed that are different since I started working for myself.

1. The coffee tastes better. Seriously, it does. Because if it didn’t I would buy different coffee, or I would brew it differently. I get to drink just the coffee I like, brewed just the way I like, brewed with whatever equipment I want, in whatever cup I want to drink it out of. So it tastes much better than if I had to compromise with dozens of other people.

2. Expense comes before income. As an employee, I got paid in rapid iterations on a rolling schedule. With this, it’s possible to live hand-to-mouth if you need to. Whatever money you make, you spend it after you put it in the bank. As a self-employed person, I need money in the bank before I do the work. Because how else can I finance my business equipment and expenses? And I bill on a longer schedule, monthly. All of this means the money isn’t in the bank until long after the work is done. So, I have a strict budget now, and a cash-flow plan, and I talk about “paying myself” a monthly and weekly allowance, and I worry that an unexpected expense will crop up and ruin my cash-flow projections. Still…

3. I don’t freak out as much about money. The car started squealing at me that its brakes need tending. Our other car was still in the shop. And I really wasn’t planning on more car repairs right now. Normally, this situation would stress me out and plunge me into worry and denial. Because if the money ain’t there, the money ain’t there, and there’s not much I could do to fix it. But this time, the burning feeling in my stomach and the tightness in my neck just weren’t there. Because my life no longer depends on one company who owns me. I have several buns in the oven. I don’t even need that car, actually, since I do most of my work from home. And if worse came to worst, I have a client I could work extra hours for in order to earn extra quick cash. I have options. And that means I control the situation; it doesn’t control me.

4. I don’t “get” Dilbert anymore. Reading it doesn’t feel the same as it did before. I mean, yeah, it’s still funny. But in a Scrubs sort of way. I find myself asking, “Do real offices really work that way?” Well, yeah, they do. I understand that, because I’ve seen enough of them first-hand. That used to be me. But that’s part of a different universe. I used to laugh at Dilbert, because I identified with him, because I myself lived in a cube. But now if I laugh at him, it’s ’cause he’s so silly. I think I need a new favorite comic strip.

5. No more office noise, except for the noise I want. This is pretty obvious, but it’s still worth mentioning. The office noise always used to bother me. When I need to concentrate, I need quiet, and I never got it in an office. On the other hand, when I wanted background noise, I had to use headphones.

6. It’s harder to say, “No.” When I was an employee, it was relatively easy not to obsess over what got done or how many billable hours I put in. Because ultimately, it was someone else’s problem to deal with real-world constraints and still make the company profitable. Now, it’s my problem. Now, I need to tell myself, “No. I won’t be able to complete all these things in this short a time-span. You’ll have to figure out which items are less important and put those off until later.”

7. My upper-back hurts, but my head doesn’t. I never realized how bad my home-office setup was, because I just didn’t spend enough time here. My wife, who is a physical therapist, had to point out to me that I’ve been rolling the chair back and leaning forward to reach the computer keyboard. No wonder my upper back and arms hurt. I’ve adjusted my posture, though, and they’re starting to feel better. Still, that stress headache I’ve had on and off for the past 3 years is gone now. And I mean really, it’s gone. And I don’t think it’s because of the Tylenol with Codeine the doctor gave me to help me sleep. Because I only used a few of them, and I haven’t been touched them for over a week now. I’m really not sure why the headache is gone, whether it’s just the endorphins, or whether it’s really because I’m feeling less stress. Probably a combination of the two.

8. My kids are behaving better. Again, I’m not sure why this is. But it could have something to do with the fact that I’m home when they get off the bus. I think they appreciate that I’m there for them, even if I do immediately have to sequester myself back in my office. I’ve also been able to set effective limits with them when I’m working, something I always had trouble with before. They’re more sympathetic to me when I’m working. When I was an employee, it was harder to get the rest of the family to accept that what I did in my home office was “work,” because I always went somewhere else to “work.”

9. I don’t feel stressed out about sleeping in. I would if it damaged my performance. But it hasn’t yet. As an employee, if I had a bad night, or even a late night working, I got stressed out about sleeping in the following morning. Especially if I woke up at noon. Now, no problem. I’m still working enough billable hours. I’m still getting enough work done. This especially came in handy the last few days of November. I was in full crunch mode, cramming in as much work as I could before the end of the month. My sleep schedule got royally frelled up. But I got a lot of work done.

10. If I get tired, I can take a nap on the couch. But I haven’t needed to lately. Working in an office, I frequently needed to take naps. There was a time in the afternoon when my head just felt like it was going to explode. And I needed to find a dark, quiet room to decompress in for a half-hour. At my last job, the only dark, quiet rooms I could find smelled like moldy carpet. And I found myself longing to lay down on my couch. Now I can lay down on my couch, anytime I want. I can cozy up and close my eyes for twenty or thirty minutes. Surprisingly, though, I haven’t wanted to. I haven’t reached that point where my head feels it’s going to explode.

And a bonus: My wife has been spending much more time building her business. We both have options. I can get the kids from the bus. She can schedule more patients on more different days. As a result, she’s busier than she’s ever been before.

So, some good things, some bad. It’s a trade-off. But even the bad things I’m happy about. When I wrote “Top Ten Reasons to Remain a Wage Slave,” I was being sarcastic. Not everyone seemed to get the sarcasm. I guess that makes sense, because sarcasm is based on irony, which contains a kernel of reality, or at least of plausibility. Reading it now, though, those reasons just sound silly. Why would anyone ever want to live for someone else, rather than living for himself? It just doesn’t seem real.

-TimK

If you recall, I quit my job and struck out on my own. But I still have a few more days before my last. Four days, to be more precise. You see, the thing is, I had already prepared a smooth exit even before I gave notice. So everything’s all set for me to go. Except now they’ve got me hacking a new feature into another impossibly low-quality module. I’m somewhere inbetween demoralized and just plain exhausted.

Alistair Cooke said, “A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn’t feel like it.” This quote is sometimes used by the more pointy-haired to brow-beat their underlings into a sense of pride. And that’s complete B.S. Each of us, professional or otherwise, does his best work when he’s engaged and happy. A professional is someone who can do a competent job when he’s disengaged or unhappy. But he’s not going to do his best work.

(Note: My manager is not quoting me Alistair Cooke. But bear with me.)

Ever since I started here, I’ve billed myself as the guy who can help them improve their codebase. I know how to turn it around, change it from a time-wasting, bug-ridden disaster into an architecturally sound, maintainable work of art. And I still sell myself as the good-code guy.

But I ran out of energy a long time ago. I’m tired of being the only one on the team who is actively improving the codebase. Fixing this system is a gargantuan task, one I can’t do on my own. I mean really: I physically and mentally can’t do it on my own.

What makes me good at what I do is that I’m both innately artistic and fundamentally lazy. On the lazy side, something deep inside me can’t stand to waste hours wrestling with problems we ourselves keep causing. But more than that, it physically pains me to churn out ugly code. I intuitively know high-quality code from almost 20 years of programming. And what I’ve got here goes against my nature. It’s frustrating and stressful. It makes me angry, and it gives me headaches. Literally. I have to pop a few ibuprofin.

This is an unhealthy situation. But they said the bad design was the product of contractors who are no longer with the company. And they said they wanted to redesign the system. I can help with that, whether it’s a rewrite from scratch or whether it’s a systematic refactoring. But what actually happened was I led cheers for improving the design and the process. Meanwhile, everyone else went on doing what they always had.

I discovered a great truth. A capable team will make great software with very little help. A mediocre team will make poor software, no matter what you do.

I’m still willing to do contract work here, but on my terms. In particular, what I’m working on now is not a feature I would have contracted to deliver under these conditions, because the code is impossible. I don’t understand how this code works, or even what it does. I talked to the guy who wrote the module. I walked over to his cubicle and asked him, and he doesn’t understand it, either. There is no way I could possibly deliver any new features against this module without first refactoring it or rewriting it. And that will take a long time and involve a lot of risk. As a consultant, I would refuse this job under these conditions.

I actually considered refusing, even as an employee. Why should the two be any different? The worst they could do is to fire me, ask me to go home 4 days early. That can’t be as bad as losing my temper and wanting to put my fist through the computer monitor. Or feeling like I’m going to cry, for all the grief this mess is causing me. Or going home every day with a headache and taking a nap to avoid snapping at my wife and kids.

But I think I’ve discovered a mantra that can get me through. I drew it on my dry-erase board. I wrote “4 days left,” and under that “IDCAM,” which stands for “I Don’t Care Any-More.”

• I don’t care whether the code I leave is maintainable. The code I’m hacking on reads like the result of a chemical-factory explosion. (It’s a mess.) I can’t stand messy, unmaintainable code. It’s a waste of time, and it frustrates me. Except today, I’m not going to fix it. I won’t make it any messier. But I’m not going to clean it up. I just don’t care anymore.

• I don’t care that the manager jokes that he came in early to make sure K. was at work on time. K. works an earlier schedule than the rest of us. She laughed. She and the manager are pals, and she knows he’s just joking. The manager actually came in for a customer meeting. It had nothing to do with K. That doesn’t make it funny to the rest of us. But I don’t care anymore.

• I don’t care that the one thing I thought I made progress on is completely wrong. It’s wrong because I needed to enter the data in two completely separate places. One is a configuration file. The other is hard-coded in the software. If these two don’t match, the software will silently behave in strange ways, and you won’t find out about it until you try to use the software’s higher functions. Yes, that’s a fundamental design problem. There’s no good reason for having the same information entered in two places, and it’s not documented, and it would take me 10 minutes to fix it. And no, I’m not going to fix it, just as no one else who’s ever worked on this part of the system has ever fixed it. I’m not going to be the one to take the initiative, because I don’t care anymore.

• I don’t care that I’m wasting the company’s resources. There are other developers here who have proven they can hack with code they don’t understand and sign off on it. I can’t do that. That’s why I usually deliver what I say I will, when I say I’ll deliver it, and it actually works. There may be other things I could help with that would utilize my strengths, and everyone could be happy. But in order to get there, I’d need to sell my manager on it, because it is his responsibility, one way or the other. And that’s just too much work, and for the sake of a few days, I just don’t care anymore.

• I don’t care whether I accomplish anything. Because that would require that I take the initiative and take the leadership role. And it would require an emotional investment. And that would stress me out. I know, becoming emotionally invested in my work is my natural tendency. It even gets me into trouble sometimes. And I’m willing to live with that, because it’s also what makes me a professional. Except that today, this would turn me into a basket case. So instead, I simply take a deep breath and chant my new mantra. “Just four more days. That’s all. I can make it. IDCAM: I don’t care anymore.”

But what concerns me is professionalism. Is it okay for a professional not to care? Maybe. Because I didn’t promise to care. All I promised to do was to stay for 4 more days. And in my weekly status, I even told my manager that it was unlikely I’d work all the bugs out of the stuff he left me with.

I wonder what he’s thinking about this. Does he realize how dissatisfied I am with the task he gave me? Does he know I’m just wasting the company’s money? Sitting here, bashing my head against the cubicle wall. Is he disappointed in me? Does he want better “performance” out of my last four days of hell? I could ask him. But that would require that I take the initiative (again) to open up the lines of communication between us. And I just don’t care anymore.

-TimK

My first reaction was, “How cool is this? I’m rockin’ now!”

My second reaction was, “Oh s***! What have I just done?!”

Leaving Normal

The reason my NetFlix queue as not been moving is that I’ve been watching Roswell on DVD. This is a teen-romance serial drama set in Roswell, New Mexico. And it has aliens, too! That makes it a sci-fi teen-romance serial drama set in Roswell, New Mexico. But what I enjoy about the show is the complex stories only a character-based serial drama can deliver. It’s the same reason I like Gilmore Girls, Sex and the City, and now Grey’s Anatomy. Yeah, House is cool, too, but not as much as the others on this list.

(Oh, and Katherine Heigl has starred in exactly two TV series AFAICT. In Roswell, she played Isabel Evans. In Grey’s Anatomy, she plays Isobel Stevens. What’s with that? She can only play characters named Izzie?)

One of my favorite early episodes of Roswell is “Leaving Normal.” (Bear with me. This does have something to do with me quitting my job.) In the episode, Liz Parker, who is human, has a thing for Max Evans, who’s an alien. But they can’t be together, because… Well, it’s complicated. Suffice it to say that Max saved Liz’s life by using his alien powers, and now he’s trying desperately to blend in, not to draw attention to himself. Because it would be really bad if anyone else found out he was an alien.

Liz begins the episode by asking her diary, “Can life ever go back to normal?” Then her grandmother ends up in the hospital. And inexplicably, she calls Max. She knows she shouldn’t. Later, she explains to him that “when something like this happens… you don’t listen to logic, to what you’re supposed to do. You listen to your heart, and my heart told me to call you. Because you were the one person in the world that I really wanted to talk to.”

So that’s why, Wednesday morning, as my wife was faxing a contract I had signed as a consultant, I asked my manager to chat in the conference room. I told him that I had wanted for some time to start my own business. He knew this, though he may have forgotten or may not have realized how serious I was. I said, “I’m going into consulting, so as of November 22, I resign.”

We left the way open for me to do further work for him, under contract. But for now, I’m really on my way out. The paperwork has officially been set in motion. I am officially now self-employed. Or at least I will be giving thanks for that, come Thanksgiving, whether I want to or not. The consulting job will have me working with an old friend, a developer I met many years ago, while we were still in college. Aside from working with some good developers— I know they’re good: I’ve seen their code. This project will also allow me some flexibility to build my business, to refine the idea and prove the technology. Most importantly, it will force me to treat the job like a business. It will force me to be truly and solely self-employed.

And that’s the scary part. Fear is what actually held back Liz and Max in Roswell. That’s the only thing that could hold me back. What if I can’t find enough consulting clients to provide for my family? What if I don’t have the energy to do consulting and build my business? What if my business idea falls flat?

Here’s the idea, the vision, the ultimate goal. Consulting is just a bridge on the way. I want to help small, growing businesses bring in more customers via the Internet. I want to do this by applying story-based video-game design principles to corporate websites.

Escaping From Cubicle Nation

And with impeccable timing, Pam Slim posted on her Escape from Cubicle Nation blog, a list of fears and excuses for not playing big, and how to get over them. I don’t believe it: I actually am escaping from Cubicle Nation. That feeling is so overjoying. I don’t believe it: I’m actually escaping from Cubicle Nation. That feeling is so terrifying.

• I really don’t know what I’m doing. Yes, I’ve been studying and experimenting with business for years. I’ve been studying marketing intensely for over a year. I’ve been programming software for almost 20 years. I have confidence in my leadership skills. I believe in my vision. But every time I’ve tried to explain it to someone else, they have trouble visualizing it. No problem. I just need to build it. I can do that. Or can I? I’m going to end up looking ridiculous, aren’t I?

• I’ll never get the money I need to survive. My family needs money. The kids need new shoes and winter coats. And I need shirts without holes. In my head, I know that my employer could let me go at any time. That risk is as real as contract work disappearing. I know that I can earn more income during the good times to get through the lean times. That’s something you can’t do as employee. But what if I can’t work enough due to illness? Or what if I just can’t increase my passive income enough? Or what if everything just falls apart?

• I’ll never be able to justify my credentials. As a software developer, I’ve been programming for almost 20 years. Here’s my code. That’s never been good enough in the past. As a writer and entrepreneur… Want my credentials? Well, your reading it right now. Everyone will dismiss me as a writer, because I haven’t spent the last decade as a starving novelist, because there’s no money in being a novelist. They’re going to dismiss me as an entrepreneur, because I’ve been employed for most of my life.

• I’m going to turn out like one of those desperate MLM types who can’t get a real job. Or even worse…

• I’m going to end up having to get another “real job.” (Shudder.)

Despite these thoughts, I know that leaving Cubicle Nation is the right decision. And I know it’s time. I worked it out long ago. If I found a suitable consulting opportunity, I’d take it. Because this is what I want to do. If nothing else, I want this experience. Or in Lorelai’s words, “I say if we go down after two years, it’ll be the most exciting two years of our lives.”

Following Your Heart

Liz’s grandmother never made it. But she was able to deliver her dying wish to her granddaughter: “Promise me one thing, that you’ll follow your heart wherever it takes you. Trust it.”

The episode then ends with this passage from Liz’s diary:

The tough thing about following your heart is what people forget to mention, that sometimes your heart takes you to places you shouldn’t be, places that are as scary as they are exciting and as dangerous as they are alluring, and sometimes your heart takes you to places that can never lead to a happy ending… And that’s not even the difficult part. The difficult part is when you follow your heart, you leave normal, you go into the unknown… And once you do, you can never go back.

Something deep inside my gut tells me I will never work in a cube farm again.

-TimK

If I had to sum up the “Things to Make My Life Perfect” in two words, those words would be freedom and responsibility. These are basic qualities of my creative personality. I’ve worked in an environment that nurtured these. I loved working there. Of course, some of the items on the list are basic to human nature, regardless of what kind of a personality you have:

• Happiness is more valuable than paperwork.
• No one tells me how I ought to feel.
• When I grow hungry, I eat.
• When I grow tired, I sleep.

When I wrote the Things, I looked at my job at the time as well as where I had worked before.

What makes me happy or unhappy at work?

In response to Alexander’s post, I pulled some items from the Things. But I drew much more from my current job. Here’s what I came up with.

Things that make me unhappy:

• When someone who is not doing the work armchair-quarterbacks.
• When my manager tells me what to do rather than what to accomplish.
• When I am pressured to sacrifice my professional standards for expediency when it would not be expedient to do so.
• When my manager tells me what I do that upsets him, but never what I do that makes his job easier.
• When management makes decisions about my work but never asks me about them.
• When I express my ideas regarding my own work and end up being labeled “confrontational,” only because I have a different take on it than management does. (That’s collaboration, not confrontation.)
• Management assigns blame rather than looks for solutions.

Things that make me happy:

• What I do affects someone else.
• Focus on one thing at a time, and see it through to completion.
• I sit physically close to those with whom I must work daily.
• When I grow hungry, I eat; when I grow tired, I sleep. (Actually, my current situation puts much pressure on me to listen to the clock rather than to my body, and this makes my unhappy.)
• Unconditional love.

It’s incredible what just writing up a list like this can do. I’ve been focusing so much on my new business that I didn’t bother to evaluate my current situation. This is understandable. I’m committed to my business. That is, I can’t waffle anymore. If I’m going for it, it’s now. Because my current job isn’t forever. It may not even be for much longer. I’m moving on, and if it isn’t to another job, it’s as an entrepreneur.

When you leave normal, you can’t go back.

I’ve turned down interviews for good jobs because of this. The first time I did so opened my eyes. A friend and colleague of many years, whom I’ll call “W,” contacted me on behalf of her employer. She begged me to come work there, because they were positively desperate for people with my skills. I’m a software engineer. I went in and met with the VP of Engineering of this small company. I interviewed for a tech-lead position. Aside from W, three other people I used to work with also worked there. One of them heard I was interviewing and walked right into the VP’s office to recommend me. I didn’t ask him to do that. Aside from those four, the VP also personally knew three other people I had worked with.

So here I had an interview for a better position at a good company. The interview went well, and I saw a lot of opportunity for personal and professional growth. I also liked the people I met, and I think they liked me. And I had personal references coming out the wazoo. I felt like I was a shoo-in for the position. Whether that was true or not, I’ll never know.

What I do know is that the VP called me to set up another interview. By then I had mulled over the opportunity. Staring an opportunity in the face is a great way to focus yourself on a decision. The more choices you give someone, the more likely they are to get analysis paralysis. If you want to go for the hard sell, you have to ask them to choose: to buy, or not to buy. As long as I was “just looking,” I had the luxury of time. When I encountered an opportunity like this, I had to come to terms with my own choices.

I told the VP how much I appreciated that he asked me to interview. The opportunity he provided forced me to examine my career. And I decided that I really want to start my own business. I’d been playing with the idea for some time, but I really want to give it a go.

Have you ever had a feeling like the whole Earth has just changed direction?

I’ll have a happiness sandwich.

Alexander has also written about the happiness sandwich in a chapter of his online book The Happy at Work Book. The happiness sandwich is made of two slices of bread, Security and Perks. Security that our basic needs are met, this makes happiness possible. Perks are the extras that actually make us feel valued.

But two slices of bread do not make a sandwich. These two need something to hold them together. And this something is the profundity of the happiness sandwich. What joins Security and Perks is Choice. Choice is magic. It makes us want to be happy.

Have you ever heard a manager or executive say something like “Look, we’re doing so much for our people. We give them a good salary, a gym, child-care and much more – and they still complain. They’re still not motivated and energized”. That’s what happens when a company disregards the middle layer, and creates a workplace where people don’t want to be happy. In this case there is nothing you can do at the perk level. No matter how much money the company spends on perks, they still won’t be happy. Conversely, in a company where people truly want to be happy they’re almost impossible to rattle. No matter what happens they just keep on going with an unshakeable determination and motivation.

Security and Perks are easy, because you can provide them by investing money. You can buy Security and Perks. But in order to provide Choice, you have to invest power. You can’t buy it with cash. As a manager, you can only buy it with part of yourself.

The biggest thing I had to learn is how to be human.

I have a theory, and it’s probably right. Most bad managers don’t mean to be bad. They just don’t know what they’re doing. They’re ignorant and incompetent. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being ignorant and incompetent, as long as your goal is to become more knowledgeable and competent. Unfortunately, ignorance breeds incompetence, and incompetence breeds ignorance, because you can’t learn if you aren’t competent enough to know your own ignorance. Getting out of this cycle requires a kick in the butt, so to speak. If you’re ignorant and incompetent, you need someone who’s neither to give you a reality check.

But bad managers are not only ignorant and incompetent; they’re also insecure. And that means that not only are they unable to learn, they’re unable to accept advice from the only people who can teach them what areas they need to work on. These people are their employees. Your employees are the only ones who can tell you what the results of your management are. Insecure managers treat this feedback as a challenge.

Then, Teresa M. Amabile (from Harvard Business School) talked about her research on the creativity of workers. I started seeing my own life in every word she said:

The team leader’s behavior is critical. I found that there are five leader behaviors that have a positive influence on people’s feelings… One of these is supporting people emotionally. The second is monitoring people’s work in a particularly positive way, and that has to do with giving them positive feedback on their work or giving them information that they need to do their work better. The third behavior is just plain recognizing people for good performance, particularly in public settings. The fourth is consulting with people on the team—that is, asking for their views, respecting their opinions, and acting on their needs and their wishes to the extent that it’s possible. And the fifth category was a grab bag of things. But the most important aspect here was collaborating—that the team leader rolled up his or her sleeves and actually spent time collaborating with somebody on the work.

We found three leader behaviors that had negative impact. One was the under- or overspecification of assignments. Much of this has to do with giving people either too little guidance or too much guidance by overconstraining the assignment. The second one is monitoring in a negative form—that is, checking on assigned work too often or not often enough. Or, checking on it for too long, like hanging around and going too much into the details of what people are doing, and giving unconstructive feedback. The third negative has to do with problem solving—either avoiding solving problems that crop up in the team or the project, or creating problems.

In fact, I think I wrote that first. Of course, I used different words, and I didn’t have any research to back up my conclusions.

Happy choices.

The reason I want so badly to work at my own business full time is because I want to be able to choose. As the boss, I can do whatever I think will make me more productive. If I want to sleep in until 11 AM, I can do so. If I want to work from 6 PM until 11, I can do that, too. And I don’t have to give anyone any justification for it. If I want to focus on one thing at a time and follow it through until completion, I don’t have to deal with my manager acting like he had to go out of his way, as though it’s a special privilege. In my own company, I can choose how to run it, and Choice is the desire to be happy.

Okay, that’s simplistic. We always have choices. In an especially dramatic episode of House, M.D. last season, in which Foreman contracts a painful and deadly disease, and Cuddy refuses to allow the tests that could isolate the pathogen and save his life, I couldn’t agree with Foreman more.

FOREMAN: … I’m not gonna forgive you just because you come by here and ask how I’m feeling.

CUDDY: You know I’ve had no choice.

FOREMAN: (yelling) Of course you had a choice!

CUDDY: Regulations are clear.

FOREMAN: And the punishment for violating those regulations?! Is it death?! Hm?! Because frankly, I’m okay if you get a fine, a suspension— Hell! You can spend a couple o’ years in jail if it saves my life!

The reality is that I do focus on one thing at a time. If I were not to, I would get nothing done. And if my manager asked me to focus on several things at once, I would disregard him. In his mind, focus may be a privilege, but it’s one I’m taking regardless of whether he gives it to me.

Likewise, during the fall months, when the days get shorter and my sleep schedule shifts later, as I fight with my own body to maintain a daily schedule that allows me to get work done… I may not get into work until after 11. My manager hates that. It doesn’t interfere with the work. But it means he doesn’t know where I am at some of the hours between 9 and 5. I go out of my way to try to work the hours he wants. But it’s my choice, not his.

And when he tells me what to do, what code to write, I re-frame the problem in terms of goals and accomplishments. What user feature am I adding? What are the requirements and constraints? Because once I start actually doing the work, I will surely find something that requires a different solution than the one he conceived. This makes me “confrontational” (his word), and I’m proud of it. Because solving problems not only gives me satisfaction, but it’s also what they pay me the big bucks for.

These are my choices, not his. But choosing what my manager does not want threatens my job security. This doesn’t bother me so much as a professional. But it does slash my happiness. Security makes it possible to be happy, and without Security, happiness is no longer a choice.

So I choose to build a business. I’ve set up a website at LucrativeGames.com. All that’s there right now is my free guide How To Tell a Story With Advergaming and an introduction to subscribe to my Infogames newsletter. An infogame is a direct-response advergame. Think “infomercial,” but interactive. I’m still working on it part-time, but on the road map are much more web content and several infogames.

I’m far enough along that today I actually felt like my resignation might be just around the corner. That’s a liberating, happy thought.

-TimK

So, Eric, I actually had already read your post. And then I subscribed to your blog.

I can see where Rob is coming from, and I agree with Eric as well. I worked in a very entrepreneurial company for a long time, and I learned a lot. Back then, I toyed around with the idea of striking out on my own, but I never really wanted to go for it. It was just an idle fantasy. Then I got laid off, and it took more than 2 years for me to understand how special that place was.

If you can find a great job that makes you happy, do stick with it. And if you’re the creative sort, like me, and you can find a job that lets you stretch yourself and lets you make mistakes and lets you take control over your own life and supports you in that… I certainly wouldn’t talk down to you for staying there.

Most jobs do not give you room to grow. Most jobs do not let you make a difference. Most jobs do not put you in initiative-driven teams working for good bosses that focus on results and let you be comfortable and fulfilled in your work. And most software engineering jobs do not expect you to sell your time; they expect you to sell your soul.

And Eric, you make a good point. For many people, it is about money. It’s about the fear of being poor, as Pam Slim recently reminded me. They’re willing to sell their souls, if necessary, because they believe it is most likely to keep them sheltered and fed. But I didn’t even remember the connection until you pointed it out.

I didn’t realize any of the connections between all these posts until I sat down to write what you’re reading now.

(Is this what Steve would call “synchronicity”? And what would happen if I re-listened to his podcast #8, “Overcoming Fear”? Which says nothing about money, but which I just now happened to notice in the left column of his website.)

And here’s the real shocker: I was not thinking about any of these things when I wrote “Top Ten Reasons to Remain a Wage Slave.” Rather, I was just trying to be funny. And between quips like “You can be just as miserable without motivation” and “Just think of how bad things could get if you actually became successful as an entrepreneur,” I hope you can see the tongue-in-cheek. But everyone who commented on it or linked to it treated the piece as completely serious. I’m sure they understood the sarcasm, but I wonder if anyone realizes how heartily “Ten Reasons” still makes me laugh everytime I read it… Who doesn’t like having their belly rubbed! ROFL!

[Some time later...] That felt good. I needed that.

-TimK

If you’ve not appreciated the joy of shopping for interview clothes, you’re missing out. And if you think that this joy is just for women… Well, you unfortunately may be right. Women have so many more clothing options. Not only can they wear anything a man can wear, they get to wear skirts, capris, dresses, and even stirrup pants. (But please, ladies, don’t do that.) And accessories! As a man, I can wear a ring and watch. If I want to be bad, I can wear a crucifix around my neck, or maybe a stud earring. If I want to be formal, I can wear a tie. But the girls get to play with jewelry, scarves, handbags, shoes, and just about everything else. And women can get away with colors and patterns that would just make us guys look gay. Yes, women get to have all the fun and creativity.

For many years I cared nothing about how I dressed. I had T-shirts, threadbare, full of holes, sometimes ripped under the armpit where I had outgrown them. I wore them to work, along with my ripped jeans. I hated clothes shopping, which was just as well, because I didn’t care what I wore. I worked for the same laid-back employer for 14 years, and during that time I rarely upgraded my wardrobe. A software developer and musician, I hated formality and hated to be put in a box and told what to do. And I’m still that way. My creativity is one of my greatest strengths. I love breaking the rules, stepping out of the box, doing my own thing for the betterment of mankind. But back then, I didn’t see any use for nice clothes except as a way to conform.

Then I got laid off. And I needed to go on job interviews. And suddenly it was important to look good. And I didn’t know the first thing about the subject.

One day, I was watching the Learning Channel, and I discovered a relatively new show, called What Not to Wear. I watched a few episodes, and I discovered something that surprised me that shouldn’t have. Fashion requires creativity, and choosing clothes requires engineering skills. What makes you look tall, or thin, or muscular? The answer is not arbitrary. It’s your clothes, and choosing clothes is an exercise in bringing out your strengths and managing your weaknesses. You can have an average body, but with the right clothes, you can make an impression that lasts. Or you can have a killer body, and with the right clothes, you can look like a potato.

But there was something else I noticed on What Not to Wear, and something I noticed in myself later. When someone wears dumpy clothes, he behaves like a dork. When someone wears good-fitting clothes that bring out his best, he behaves like a leader. Just changing your wardrobe will change your personality. (If you doubt it, I suggest you try it.) And as a creative type, one thing that gives me great joy is to go into a clothing store, identify some item that I wouldn’t be caught dead in, and putting it on. New colors, new patterns, new prints. It’s a new way to break out of the box.

Okay, there are limits. I refuse even to acknowledge those loose-fitting jeans that look like daddy’s clothes. But that’s because they hide a lot more than illicit weapons. They also hide your best features. Even if you look great under there, they make it look like you have something to hide, like you’re fat and flabby. And that’s how people will perceive you. When it comes to looking good, you can’t take the Fifth.

So, geeks of the world! Break out of the box! Throw away those bland, trashy, wrinkled, dorky, comfortable, old clothes. Show your true colors! You may be surprised yourself at the result.