Do you often find yourself daydreaming of doing something better? Here’s the thing: Most people should not make their passions their professions. Over at US News, I share three common reasons why people want to pursue their passions, and why those are completely misguided. Read it here.
The American Dream speaks the language of ambition and its tongue whispers it is not for lack of luck, but lack of effort that you are a failure. Put in the work and you’ll become a success. Luck nor social constructs or randomness or the genetic lottery create the richest men of the world – and they are men – but an exchange of value. The rules are: work hard and be rewarded in return. Except we know that’s not true.
“The U.S. has the 4th-highest degree of wealth inequality in the world, trailing only Russia, Ukraine, and Lebanon,” reports former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. “The 400 wealthiest Americans own as much wealth as 80 million families – 62% of America. The reason is the stock market. Since 1980 the American GDP has approximately doubled. Inflation-adjusted wages have gone down. But the stock market has increased by over ten times, and the richest quintile of Americans owns 93% of it.”
This quintile, they don’t work hard – they don’t work at all – and are rewarded in return. They don’t work hard and amass influence. They don’t work hard and acclaim power. They don’t work hard, and yet millions try to emulate them. Those millions do work hard, and in systems and institutions with large trompe l’oeil ceilings of the sky. That is the American Dream. The illusion creates hope. But we no longer have hope.
“More and more I get the sense that we’ve lost it,” argues New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, “and by ‘it’ I mean the optimism that was always the lifeblood of this luminous experiment, the ambition that has been its foundation, the swagger that made us so envied and emulated and reviled.”
We hit the faux-hope ceiling and facing reality has been unseemly ever since. No one likes work. Bosses are crappy. No, really, really bad. Most bully to cover their own insecurities. Workers never feel appreciated. And none of us are really sure what we’re doing matters anyway. Whatever the job, you’re expected to show up and know the job, not learn the job, not make mistakes or take risks.
A mere 13% of workers are engaged. But unlike the days of the company man, where you could put in your time no matter how boring or rote it became, then retire after 30 years with a pension, today’s employers rid themselves of such responsibility. The loss of loyalty not only means the loss of security, but the deep and meaningful work that comes with dedication and duty.
“The world’s leaders have coolly, calmly, rationally, senselessly decided that bankers, CEOs, lobbyists, billionaires, the astrologers formerly known as economists, corporate ‘people’, robots, and hedge funds are worth more to society than… the young. The world’s leaders are letting the future crash and burn,” argues Umair Haque in the Harvard Business Review. Our youth “is getting a deal so raw that no one but a politician or a serial killer could offer it with a straight face. So let’s call it what it is. Not just unfair—but unconscionable.”
In such demanding and depressing times comes innovation, and it tells us to pour our resources and energy into entrepreneurship. Become a freelancer. Work on the side. Explore your “freedom.” And companies love it. Your corporate sovereignty means no salary, no pension, no retirement plan, no healthcare, no 8-hour work day (you willingly work more), no boundaries, no stability, no safety, and no fealty.
And with everyone out for themselves, there is something more immediate lost than the safeguards of our future; we trick ourselves into believing we’re changing the world. No matter the bills aren’t being paid or we can’t get up in the morning or retirement won’t exist when we reach 60, 70 or 80 years old.
We hold onto the idea that “money isn’t meaning,” and that’s a pretty story. It comforts us while we filter photographs or swipe credit cards for a new pair of hiking boots. But the more we encourage such misleading mindsets, the more off-kilter and out-of-balance not only our economy, but our personal lives will become. Money has always been an exchange of value, and it’s only recently that money has been an indicator of meta non-value.
What I mean is the wealthy don’t acquire money through an exchange of value, but an abstraction of money at a higher and higher level. Take a look at Appaloosa, a hedge fund that employs 250 people and Apple, a company that employs about 35,000 people and earned around $6 billion in 2009. “Appaloosa, the hedge fund, earned about as much as Apple in 2009 by speculating on… well, we don’t really know,” argues former Seventh Generation CEO Jeffrey Hollender.
Now tell me our ignorance and unwillingness to fight doesn’t have something to do with the tradeoff between money and meaning. Money isn’t evil. Only the systems we’ve designed and encouraged to make it so. We keep following the rules no one else plays by, but expect the same result. When it doesn’t happen, we create worth and are happy if someone “likes” it on Instagram.
But your value is worth more than that. It’s worth more than massive debt, overwhelming anxiety, being underchallenged, underemployed or unemployed. It’s worth more than what’s in your bank account and it’s certainly worth more than what you’re getting paid (despite any lies the Microsoft CEO will tell you).
Want to fix the economy? What — too big? How about your life? Want a fair shot at the American Dream? Or just a better boss? Or maybe a chance to just give your kids something, if you can’t give them everything? Want to fix the wanting, the feeling, the gnawing? We have to align worth and wealth.
Doing my dream job part time, still working full-time with full dread! How long did it take your confidence to make the jump? Should I set a time/deadline for myself?
How do you get money to come to you? To do what you want to do because you love it and not for the money.
So if someone said to you that they love to write and have always thought they were going to be a writer but found themselves always working in the Defense Industry, what would you say to them… especially if you saw their written work and writing potential …?
A lot of people want to turn what they love to do into what they get paid to do. It was a common question in last week’s AMA, and I often get emails from folks looking to quit their job. Usually they’re asking permission, but sorry, not-sorry, that’s not how I roll.
Since it comes up so often, I want to be very clear about my philosophy on dream jobs:
You probably can’t make money doing what you love. Writing, for example, is a good example. And I say this not because you’re not a tremendous, dedicated and talented writer, but because you’re not a good marketer. And to make money, you have to be good at sales. Most people who are good at writing aren’t that great at sales, or simply don’t put in the time and effort to sell. But making money on what you love requires you to sell what you love. Do you think you can do that? Here’s how to check. Finish these sentences:
“Sales makes me feel…”
“Business makes me feel…”
“Marketing myself makes me feel…”
If you answered anything but “excited,” “creative,” “energized,” or “awesome,” to those three statements, you can’t sell what you love. Not yet anyway. It will require a major mindset shift, and a good dose of coaching and knowledge.
You can use your full-time job to support your passion. We put a lot of weight onto our passions to support everything in our lives. We want what we love to do to give meaning and purpose to our days, and add money to our bank accounts. But it doesn’t need to be that way. We don’t have to do what we love for money. We can make money in a different job to support what we love. There’s a tremendous freedom in that, actually.
Try a mental mindset shift where you think of a full-time or part-time job as the catalyst and support for your dream work. Instead of thinking of it as something you have to do and dread, think of it as this great thing that allows you and pays you to do what you love. Because a regular paycheck isn’t anything to sneeze at!
When you’re able to align money as something that enables you instead of prohibits you from doing what you love, I guarantee you’ll be in the position to make a lot more of it.
If you can make both mindset shifts above, you pass Go, and can proceed with the following plan to turn your passion into your career:
1. Make some money. If you can’t make money now, you probably won’t be able to make money later. You already know how to do what you love, but do you know how to make money? Get a raise. Get a side job. Build a side hustle. Rent out your extra room on Airbnb. Sell your old stuff. However you choose to earn more money, make a lot of it and store it away like a squirrel would store acorns before the worst Winter of his entire life.
Shoot for a six to twelve month emergency fund, and max out all your retirement accounts too. With a full-time job and extra income coming in every month from just one of the activities listed above, this will go much faster than you think. Depending on your hustle, you could be good-to-go in three to four months.
2. Make some more money. Now that you’ve made enough money to support yourself for awhile, should you quit your job? HELL NO. Now you start making money with the-thing-you-love-to-do. If you think you can’t start your passion on the side, please stop reading right now. I hate you. For the rest of you, now is your chance to use all the sales and marketing lessons you learned in step one and apply it to building your passion business.
The goal is to make enough to cover your expenses when you quit, so that you don’t have to dip into your emergency fund at all. I also like to make enough to continue saving a bit too. Just depends on your risk tolerance. This is made much easier if you have a partner or spouse and their income can help support you both.
3. Reassess your goals and dreams. If you’ve gotten to this point, f*ckin’ amazing work. I’m beyond proud of you and I don’t even know you. But now I want you to look around and assess what a suh-weeet situation you’ve got. Because I always advocate for folks to have multiple burners running hot. Why? Because it’s when you have the most control. You don’t have to take shitty clients because you don’t need the money. You don’t have to stress out about your maniacal narcissist of a boss because you don’t need the money.
Anytime you don’t need the money, you’re in a better negotiating position for your life, your goals, and your dreams. It may be more work, but it’s less stress. And it leads to the greatest financial security. Which is what keeps most of us from pursuing our dreams in the first place.
4. Leverage your network. Before you replace your dread-job with your dream-job, reach out to your existing network and ask them if they are looking for the services you provide, have contacts that might be useful, and any other ways you need help. Be specific about what you’re looking for. When I took my consulting business full-time a few years ago, I was able to replace my full-time salary within one day of sending emails out. That’s the power of weak ties. I didn’t email a bunch of my best friends. I emailed folks I had met a few times and kept in decent touch with.
I’m not trying to be a debbie-downer here, but I want you to be realistic about what it takes to succeed since so many people are not. Most emails I get from people are from folks who love to dream. And if that’s your jam, dream on.
But if you really want that-thing-you-love to make you money, go through this plan step-by-step. I’ve seen people skip a step here and there, but only because they have super advanced mental capacities. I know that seems weird, but most of us aren’t ready to do what we love. We’re just ready to quit doing what we hate. If you change your mindset and follow this plan, you can do both.
The majority of self-employed workers seek independence to be their own boss, retain a flexible schedule and build unique career paths. Still, many find that with increased control comes increased responsibility, and economic viability is harder than anticipated. Before you decide how many lattes you can afford as a self-employed worker, you need to take control of your finances. Over at US News and World Report, I talk about five steps to build your self-employed budget. Read it here.
When you’re starting a business, it’s crucial to find the best lawyer to protect you. With the right expertise on your side, you can feel confident you’ve got your legal ducks in a row. Over at the Daily Muse today, I sit down with start-up lawyer Steve Kaplan to get the low-down on how to choose a lawyer and what to expect from the attorney-client relationship. Read it here.
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?
Liam (name changed) runs an online business where he sells digital goods on a subscription basis. After approaching nearly $1 million in revenue, he experienced a mindshift. The shift was subtle and unconscious; he didn’t realize the harm he caused until later.
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.
A born entrepreneur, the ex-CEO of Seventh Generation talks about today’s labor movement, changing the rules of business and politics, and the biggest failure at his old company.
More than twenty years ago, Jeffrey Hollender founded Seventh Generation and went on to build the fledgling company into every affluent customer’s favorite badge of sustainability. In October of last year, Hollender was forced out of the company. Today, he continues his fight to provoke business leaders to think differently about the role they and their companies play in society.
K: What’s going on with business and politics nowadays? The Federal government almost shut down last Friday. Are business and politics inseparable with the amount of lobbying, influence and corporatism?
Hollender: Business has far too much influence in politics and that is bad, on the one hand, because citizens feel disenfranchised and don’t feel that they have a vote and don’t participate in the political process. But worse, we have a situation where a relatively small group of very large companies have our political agenda and our economy effectively held hostage to their own interests.
If you just look at the recent controversy surrounding the fact that General Electric pays no taxes and in fact will get a $3-4 billion tax refund, we have also created a terribly uneven playing field. How can small and medium-sized companies that create most of the jobs and are critical for our economic recovery compete with large companies who get large subsidies from the government and don’t get to take advantage of the loopholes that a company like GE gets to take advantage of?
It’s a serious, serious problem that is, I think, crippling our economy and spoiling our environment.
I want to circle back to that, but first let me ask you this. I just moved to DC from Wisconsin, and am wondering, have you been following the fight with WI Governor Scott Walker and his attempt to eliminate collective bargaining?
Yeah.
To me, it seems like Walker was trying to destroy the Democratic party and it wasn’t really about labor unions. However, the idea of eliminating labor unions doesn’t seem all that outdated to me in a world where transparency is king. Curious to know your thoughts.
Over a 30-40 year period we’ve seen membership in unions fall roughly around thirty-five percent to under ten percent. A significant amount of that decline is a result of business’ influence on politics that have increasingly made it difficult for unions to organize and acquire new members.
There is no question that there has been a campaign by politicians as well as certain companies to marginalize, if not totally eliminate, the union movement in the United States. And I think that’s dangerous because the unions were probably the only significant political counter balance to big business in America.
Right…
As a co-founder of an organization called the American Sustainable Business Council that has 65,000 small and medium-sized companies as members, more of these businesses have taken a position to support labors like collective bargaining and we don’t see that as bad for business. We believe, as I do, that we need more good-paying jobs because an economy where people are making minimum wage is an economy where the government will endlessly have to subsidize families because they can’t afford the services that they need to survive.
Do you see any differentiation between public and private sector unions though? Where public sector unions might not be as necessary as private sector unions?
No, you know, I don’t see a large difference. I think there are a huge number of challenges with the way the teachers’ union has functioned. And I think the challenges that we have in eliminating bad teachers from the system are problematic. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a teacher’s union. I think the issue is that we need to make some changes in the way a teacher’s union functions. But I would not ever go as far as saying teachers should not be unionized.
Okay. Let’s move on. It seems like a lot of your initial drive in this area of social justice was a result of the privilege that you had growing up. Do you see, at all, that being socially conscious is a luxury of the privileged class?
No, I think that being socially conscious is in no way something that is a luxury of being privileged. There is a tremendous social consciousness within the union movement. There is tremendous social conscious in all aspects of society. I wish there was more social conscious within the privileged. I think too many people who are very comfortable and affluent don’t accept their responsibility to share that wealth with too many other people and to advocate for people are aren’t was well off as they are.
It’s sad that, statistically, lower income people give away a greater percentage of their income than affluent people do, and I think that one fact alone would cause one to not come to the conclusion that the privileged are more socially conscious than the unprivileged.
What about being environmentally-friendly? Is that a luxury of the privileged class?
Well, environmental consciousness has become too much of a luxury of the privileged class for a couple reasons. One, environmental products are often more expensive than traditional products and one would not expect people from all economic classes to choose to pay a premium. Secondly, because people who are more affluent tend to take advantage of and access higher levels of education, they better understand the reasons why sustainable products are important.
I have always said that one of the biggest failings of Seventh Generation was that it reached primarily more affluent consumers who were already healthier and living more sustainable lives, and was not effective at reaching more people broadly.
That is true generally of all types of green products and organic food, and underlying that is an economic problem. Why is it that green products or organic foods should cost more money? They shouldn’t. They cost more money because those businesses don’t externalize their costs on to society the way other businesses do. By internalizing those costs, the product costs more money. But it shouldn’t be that way; it should actually be the reverse. Sustainable products – because they don’t have as negative an impact on society and the environment – should actually cost less money.
I completely agree. What is the solution?
Well, the solution goes back to where we started the conversation. As long as large companies control the political process, we won’t make much headway in changing the tax laws or any of the issues that allow businesses to externalize their costs. We take one example alone, global warming, and we can’t even get there to be a price on carbon. We’re a long, long, long way from changing that playing field. Unfortunately, we live in a society today where we make products that are often bad for your health and bad for the environment artificially cheap. People consume those products that adversely affect their health and the environment and we move more quickly down the road in the wrong direction.
So what’s bad for you is good for the economy? Is that how it’s playing out?
What’s bad for you is good for a select group of large companies.
Right.
It’s actually not good for the economy because when people eat the wrong things and don’t get healthy, what we see is rising health care costs that ultimately make America less competitive with the rest of the world.
What we have today is a paradigm where companies are making the most money they’ve made in sixty years. Corporate profits are at an all-time high and growing faster in the fourth quarter of 2010 than they’ve ever grown in sixty years. At the same time, as we have massive unemployment and an environment that is being degraded. And unfortunately we’ve created a system that allows companies to make huge profits while people are unemployed and the environment suffers. So we have systemic problem in the way we’ve designed our economy.
In Part 2 of this interview (coming next Friday), Hollender talks about how he would launch a company today, the tensions of scale, and what motivates him the most.
Tech Crunch founder Michael Arrington argued in “Too Few Women in Tech? Stop Blaming Men” that he and other men already do plenty for women: he has a female CEO, two out of four of his senior editors are women, and he begs and pleads for women to speak at his conferences.
Arrington’s counter-point, an article in the Wall Street Journal, is equally insidious. The Journal reports that Mediaite founder Rachel Sklar “co-founded a group called ‘Change the Ratio’ to shine a light on women in entrepreneurial roles, and to address the dearth of women at start-ups” and goes on to report that technology investor Fred Wilson said “the industry needs catalysts to spark a virtuous circle of more successful women-led tech start-ups leading to more women in tech start-ups.”
Wilson pledges to “write about successful women entrepreneurs and prod conference hosts to include women on panels. ‘Little things like that will make a big difference,’” he says.
Arrington, Skylar, Wilson, and the many, many other opinions in an uproar about this are really arguing the same thing: we need more exposure and awareness around women and tech. Their points of differentiation center on how much exposure will actually move the needle and create an acceptable number of women in tech. But how much or how little is irrelevant.
Women don’t need exposure. We need strategy. We need equality.
Interviewing women and inviting women to conferences and reporting on women-founded start-ups and creating women-focused events and so on and so forth might make everyone feel a bit better and be politically correct, but does little to actually support women. These obvious proof points make it easy for Arrington and Wilson and Sklar to say, “Look! I’m doing my part!”
But women are less likely to advance in their careers despite all this “support.” And that’s because they’re not actively sponsored the way men are, the Harvard Business Review reports. “Many women explain how mentoring relationships have helped them understand themselves, their preferred styles of operating, and ways they might need to change as they move up the leadership pipeline.”
Arrington’s ideas are a good example of such encouragement; he argues that women may be too nurturing and risk averse for tech and alludes that changing that behavior is the key to more start-up companies founded by women.
“By contrast, men tell stories about how their bosses and informal mentors have helped them plan their moves and take charge in new roles, in addition to endorsing their authority publicly,” the study says. Men develop a special kind of relationship with other men that goes “beyond giving feedback and advice” and instead has men using their influence to advocate and ensure the success of male friends.
The rules of the old boys club have already been passed down to the young boys and without the key, women have somehow garnered special attention and kid glove treatment. But we need more than well-meaning supporters and intentions.
Just let us play the game on the same field.
To Michael Arrington’s credit, his walk seems to outpace the talk of Fred Wilson and Rachel Sklar. But watching the pendulum swing between who to blame neglects the obvious: equality isn’t about keeping score. That’s what business is for.
See you in the club.
Oh, crap.
My adrenaline starts to pump and the anticipation in my stomach rises so quickly that a little laughter escapes. But at 10:03 pm on Monday, the 22nd this is a bad time to laugh.
I yell to my boss Mark, “Tech Crunch just published!”
“What?” he yells back.
I run into his office, “Tech Crunch just published their post!” The rest of the sentence, that they published an hour early, an hour before they were supposed to, an hour before the embargo lifted and we were going to launch the site doesn’t need to be said. Hundreds of people are already on the site. Are we ready? I’m not ready! I thought we had an hour.
Around me, I feel like everyone is running and rushing. Mark and Brian meet instantly and make a split-second decision.
“We’re going live!” Brian exclaims. “Right now! Go! Go! Go!”
He sweeps through the office as excitement sweeps through our fingers. It’s bad that Tech Crunch published early, but their article is good. I’m shaking a little and smiling. Mashable emails me. They have to publish their article now too and I tell them it’s okay. We’re turning on the site now. We’re opening the doors. It’s starting. Alice.com is launching in beta.
The rest of the night is quick, blurry, surreal. When new press comes out, we yell, “CNET is up!” “Business Week!” “Financial Times!” and I throw the links onto Yammer. I refresh my screen every few minutes to watch the bar on the new customer graph rise. I work more than seventeen hours, my co-workers even more, and none of us really notice.
Some of the developers bring sleeping bags, the customer service girls bring a blow-up mattress, and the rest plan to sleep under their desks. At Alice, each employee is assigned an animal. I am a crane, which means, in part, that I’m particular. I want my own bed, so I drive home in the middle of the night.
The highway is completely empty, black and shiny. I own it. The asphalt, everything beneath and all the buildings lined up along on the side are mine. No other cars or people or lumbering trucks. I drive fast because I’m tired, and I want to sleep, and I want to get up and do it all over again.
Considering my co-workers only got two or three hours of sleep, I know they feel the same. The Alice team is more than dedicated, more than hard-working. This is the start-up life, our life.
There’s a lot of talk about balance. Some of the most popular authors preach zen-like attitudes, getting out of work, and lifestyles that are built on, well, not a whole lot. And then there are those who talk about sacrificing your health for your start-up, who talk in terms of not just passion, but obsession for your profession, and whose idea of fun is innumerable hours spent on a single idea.
Fighting balance across the fence is blur. And that is where I live. A life that should preclude me from having any sort of relationship with anybody or anything other than work, but in reality, betters those relationships. A place that makes me excited to be young and in love and working hard.
Peace, it seems, can not only be discovered in the quiet pauses of life, but also in the often forceful and uncertain flow that rushes against walls and norms and status quo.
Update: A version of this post was published here as an opinion editorial, and another version was featured here on Brazen Careerist.
The pull Madison has is inexplicable, but powerful. It is this magic that sleeps in the winter, and then explodes in the spring like confetti on your twenty-first birthday, that makes me love the city. Even the winters become part of the voodoo that creates the vibrant mix of people and food and ideas and lakes.
Madison defines who I am. My career, friendships, and relationships are delivered to me from the city stork, like they were birthed directly from this intoxicating energy.
My affair with the city is an epic romance. But the city doesn’t know it.
Madison isn’t alone. Despite consistently placing in the top of every list imaginable – from Playboy to Forbes – Madison, like many other cities, is ignoring one of its most competitive advantages. That is, young people.
See, as cash cows go, Gen Y is a big one, and cities are ignoring us – the young leaders, entrepreneurs, professionals and creatives – in their plans for economic development.
Partnering with Gen Y should be of the utmost priority for cities since we are uniquely positioned to stimulate economic development. For example:
1. Good jobs come from good people. Economic development starts with human capital. The war for talent is one of the most interesting and challenging issues that cities face today. Young people actively promote and contribute to the high quality of life in cities, and need to be able to connect to both people and ideas. We are the quality workforce that is indispensable to basic sector job growth. Without a strong cadre of young talent, employers will be unable to expand.
2. Competitive advantage starts with entrepreneurship. More than any other generation, young people today are entrepreneurs. To meet the small business owners, the tenants of research parks, and other key entrepreneurs in cities is to meet an under forty demographic. There is ample opportunity to provide dynamic support for young entrepreneurs and the talent coming out of universities. Young entrepreneurs are a powerful determinant of a city’s future economy. They cannot be an afterthought.
3. To new customers, cities have no legacy. Gen Y knows little about the negative perceptions that have been prevalent within the business community. We don’t know the history or the mistakes. This is an opportunity for cities to build positive goodwill through superior customer service for this new generation. Young people can help cities to think innovatively. Cities can then borrow that energy and willingness to change to jump-start a perception shift in the existing business community.
4. Spiky should be funded. Place is extremely important to Gen Y and largely determines our destiny in today’s spiky world, to borrow a term from Richard Florida. To become a taller spike in the world’s economy – to compete – cities needs to attract young talent. In turn, young people will develop businesses and new markets. Cities should allocate money to young talent groups that promote and build upon the city’s strengths and spikiness to create the competitive advantage that allows us to expand business.
Cities must proactively reach out to Gen Y. Young people represent growth, and must be engaged in a city’s future development. We are a natural partner and ally in stimulating economic development.
This post was originally published at Employee Evolution.
Update: You can also find the post at The Industry Radar.
It’s a myth that the workplace is turning into one big leaderless state. Just as decisions made by committee often require head banging, life without leaders would be one big headache. Yes, leadership has changed and decentralized organizations are here to stay, but there will always be leaders. We want success. We want to win, and winners have leaders.
Once you’ve tossed aside the crutch of hierarchical authority though, “knowing how to build relationships, use influence and work with others is crucial to achieving the results you seek,” according to Valeria Maltoni, a specialist in connecting ideas and people.
A Generation Y leader inspires by enabling others to be leaders. They know the strengths of those they lead, and exploit those for the success of that person. A Gen-Y leader delegates to help the worker achieve their goals. They are motivated by relationships and have an obsession with seeing others succeed.
By making room for other leaders, “you attract people who aren’t followers, who aren’t looking for the kind of leader who will save them from the anxiety of responsibility,” according to Michael S. Hopkins. And the millennial generation does not follow.
Instead, we create our own content, build our own businesses, do things our way. Be an entrepreneur or die, says Sam Davidson at Cool People Care. For the Gen-Y leader, it isn’t about ego, but about sharing ownership and building a community of ideas. An effective Gen-Y leader helps our generation to embrace entrepreneurship at every level.
A Gen-Y leader is inclusive and collaborative, and not just within their sphere of influence. An isolated organization will perish. Successful organizations are defining themselves as the gateway expert in their field. On the playing field, in this instance, companies must pick the competitor to be a part of their team for bigger and better results. It’s not enough to have a quality product; you must reach out and promote others. Teamwork is no longer just within a company. It’s industry-wide.
As a result, lines haven’t just been blurred; they’ve been pulverized on high in a blender. Competitors are partners, work is play, and boundaries no longer exist. As such, Gen-Y leaders must be leaders by example, and in every aspect of their life, whether family, work, or play.
Generation Y leaders, however, can and will be easily replaced by their peers. We are a starfish generation. Go ahead and try to chop one of us down, and we’ll grow a whole sprawling forest in that person’s place. We’re that strong. We’re that motivated. We don’t respond lightly to pressure or corruption.
A Gen-Y leader’s efforts to maintain influence will be harder for that reason. Especially because it is often our peers doing the chopping. As a generation, we’re remarkably good at calling bull. We have no qualms about holding our leaders up to the light to check for transparency.
Gen-Y leaders then must know themselves first, and project their authenticity. They must also be constantly learning, experiencing, doing, networking, creating, giving. It won’t stop. Our generation won’t put up with selfish thoughts, unethical behavior, or tired ideas. The Gen-Y leader must be constantly on.
That’s how we will become the next great generation. We won’t stop.
The dynamic leadership requirements for Gen Y are causing Masters in Public Administration, MBA and other education degrees to put an extra emphasis on leadership.