On December 28, 2009, I posted this on my name site. It was not a manifesto, to be sure, but it was a promise I made to myself.

The Goal: Quit my job and be working as an independent by June 30, 2010.

Goal achieved. In fact, I was out of my job on June 15, and sitting at this desk, looking out onto a tree-lined brownstone street in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

Then, in January I posted this on getting my financial and physical house in order. I had grand plans of having six months income socked away before I started my new life. That was before I remembered that I’d blown my savings on some family obligations. I don’t begrudge those expenses (much) but it has definitely made things a little more, um, pressing. Yesterday I had $50 in my checking account; today, a client’s payment arrived and I am back in good shape. By the end of September, I’ll have enough to get me through the end of the year, even if I didn’t do another job. That’s a liberating feeling, even if it was a nail-biter for a few days.

A little later that month, I ruminated on my procrastination, my disaffection for the job I had (or really, the industry I was in), and also noted that I wasn’t that into a guy I was certain I wouldn’t go out with again, but instead dated unproductively for 3 months. Oh my, how I can wallow in something unpleasant for awhile because coping and dealing and figuring out can provide enough cognitive load that I don’t worry about anything else (though that’s because I become a big ball of worry).

Anyway, it’s now the last full week of August. A lot has happened. And as I look back on those early posts – those little prayers tied to the fence posts, I have realized something very interesting: I don’t have a process for this. I can map out a strategic plan for a client, sketch a campaign, develop a methodology. But for me…

I do leaps. I do tricks. I get from here to there on what feels like and sometimes looks like wild instinct. I react. I make moves out of the pure sense of growing panic, that if I do not do this thing, I never will, that if I never do, I will go crazy, or worse.

Then I second guess, I question my own credibility, I wonder if maybe the headhunters are hinting at something, that maybe I need to build a brand at some hot agency before I can do this on my own. But I also know that I will lose a part of me if I do, that I won’t be any closer to doing what I want to do, and that I will be doing it under someone else’s aegis. Fuck that.

So anyway. This past week I dwindled down to my last $50. I put Drano on a credit card to fix my clogged tub. I tucked into my cupboards and freezer. I permitted friends to buy me a drink or two. And this morning, with my housekeeper coming, and a doctor’s appointment later in the day, I poured the change in those two Ball jars into a hot pink nylon shopping bag, tucked it into my purse, and carried it like a baby on my hip to one of those banks with the ‘penny arcade’. There were $106 in those jars. Enough to pay the housekeeper and the co-pay, and buy a sandwich later on. I would make it through today, even if the check didn’t come. I’ve been this close to the wire and on the other side of the zero balance before, but it never gets easier.

I thought of my dad, talking about days when he had half a tank of gas in the car, and the knowledge that today he had to make a sale, because the baby needed shoes, or the baby needed diapers, or they needed to pay the electric bill. He’d hope the car wouldn’t break down and the half a tank of gas would be enough. And to remind him what he was doing this for, he’d come into the baby’s room and look down, and there I was, smiling back up at him, so happy to see him. That image would motivate him to get his ass out the door and on the road and in those offices, selling, selling; that image would break his heart.

I have nothing like that at stake. But I relate to the sense of urgency, the sense of responsibility. Just as he wanted me to be happy and cared for, to love and respect him, I want to feel that way about myself, provide that to myself.

So at about 2:30, I went downstairs, sure that the check would be there, half-believing it would never come, unlocked the mailbox and took an envelope from the stack containing the payment for consultancy on a project. I took it to the bank, and deposited it, and am breathing easier. It’s all going to be fine. It’s all going to be awesome, actually. But at this particular moment, I feel like I got pulled back from falling onto the subway tracks, just as the train came barreling into the station. The adrenaline rush is quite something. Here’s to no more of that.

Girl and Woman are not adjectives. They are nouns. Those are the ground rules for this post. I do not spend a lot of time waxing feminist. And I don’t want to spend a lot of time doing that here. But there are a few things that I’ve encountered since my decision to go out on my own that have been causing me slightly absurd levels of self-doubt. So I thought I’d air those here, since that’s basically the tone and tenor of the blog this week.

Freelancer

Freelancer, in the estimation of some people I’ve spoken to, means “unemployed.” It suggests a condition that someone, well me, needs curing. This is not true. There are loads of people from the advertising industry and its adjacencies who have recently decided to eschew working for big agencies to do work they enjoy, find meaningful, or that simply earns them more revenue they get to keep. No, freelance is a business decision for some of us. I recognize that freelance is also a condition some people are thrust into unwillingly. But that is not the case for me, nor for most of the freelancers I know. They took a risk, leapt from the seeming safety of a corporation and the benefits and steady pay that those claim to offer, into the possibility of greater rewards for their own individual effort, and for the sole responsibility for their own individual failure.

So, headhunters, potential employers, clients, colleagues, when someone says they are a freelancer, do not leap to the conclusion that this is against the speaker’s will.  It’s a growing trend, and one that I feel speaks more to the failings of big shops than to the failings of the person who is now a freelancer.

A Girl Nerd

I guess my main point here is that a nerd is a nerd.  I don’t spend ages and ages playing WoW, but yes I know about the RealID controversy, 4chan, Chatroulette, Reddit v. Digg, cloud computing, hyperthreading, edge security, 3D television, augmented reality apps, QR code, the accelerometer and the gyroscope, and…

10 years ago, I was making javascript video games, figuring out how to script a website to autoscroll horizontally, testing OpenGL databases, rocking a webcam in the office, downloading The Matrix off of Hotline (yes, Virginia, there was P2P before Napster)… 15 years ago I’d already been online for 5 years, getting cheat codes off of forums on Prodigy and doing research for class papers on Compuserve.  I could do basic HTML coding and was FTPing a student magazine to the web press for printing.

I grew up reading Isaac Asimov, Robert Asprin, Douglas Adams (and that was just in the As!).  I can recite chapter and verse from Star Wars, watched classic TV based on comic book superheroes, have seen all the Star Trek movies, and saw Avatar in 3D on Christmas Day.  Also, I loved Inception because of the plot, the CG and the score – which I realized was based on the motif from “Non, je ne regrette rien” during the movie.

I blog about robots and rockets and ray-guns; I read comic books on my iPad; I spend hours a day learning new hooks for WordPress; I drool over pixel resolution and bit rates; I like things that are shiney.  My new company makes digital content, and tries really hard to be smart about it.

All this proves is that I am a nerd.  Girl Nerd seems like an unnecessary designation.  Clearly, nerdness is in its ascendency, so why does it still come as a shock that a late Gen Xer like myself would be one of the many nerds of my generation?

Now, at the same time, I notice the gender imbalance at events like DigitalDUMBO, tech meetups, and so on.  My only solution is to suggest that all the Girl Nerds start showing up to those places, and start contributing to those groups.  Which brings me to…

Woman Entrepreneur

Last night I went to DigitalDUMBO, as I have for the past five or six of these events.  The theme for the event was a job fair, and I was hoping to meet someone who could code/develop an iPhone app.  In other words, I was looking for someone to hire.  But I was met with some hostility by one of the organizers because he assumed that I was a recruiter.  Apparently recruiters are identifiable because they are well-dressed women; he told me he assumed that because I was ‘dressed up’.  I was wearing a dress, and some low heels, yes, but I wasn’t the only woman dressed that way at the event.  Something about the way I was dressed, and I suppose, that I dared to ask about name tags, suggested to this (in the end, seemingly very nice) guy that I was free riding on an event meant to – you know – connect small businesses with great digital talent.  When I clarified that I was not a recruiter but an entrepreneur, he very graciously suggested that I come back to this DigitalDUMBO thing (his next assumption was that it was my first time there) next time.  Finally, he gave me his card and said he’d be happy to connect me with a developer if I need help finding one.

It’d be easy to suggest that this is sexism, guys assuming women can only have roles women usually have.  A woman at a digital meetup? Dressed well? Must be a recruiter.  But he was not the first person I encountered who treated with me with some sexism last night.  The first person was a woman.  She made a point of introducing herself to all the men I was standing talking to before she introduced herself to me.  She then made a point of asking them all what they do but did not ask me.  Her body language was so clear that there was no mistaking it – obviously these guys were the people to meet at the networking event, that girl there must be nobody.  She avoided eye contact with me, until she overheard me talking with a friend who is developing an app for time-shifted social viewing of online TV and video.

And here’s where it all comes full circle: The next woman I spoke to translated ‘entrepreneur’ as ‘freelance’, and ‘freelance’ as ‘unemployed’ and became my personal cheering section to go meet … well, to go meet the guy who thought I was a recruiter.  Because maybe they’re hiring, and they do work sort of related to the business I told her I’d started.  And wouldn’t I really just like to be taken care of?

My slightly pissed off internal optimist makes this sincere wish:  maybe if we all stop making assumptions about gender, employment status and nerdness, we’ll get to be a lot better at networking, and therefore become far more successful.  Wouldn’t that be nice?

Walking home last night, a very clear, succinct thought passed through my head, and I wonder if it’s passed through yours, too: Action is the best expression of intention.

It seems pretty obvious, right? But how much time do we all waste in protesting that we ‘didn’t mean to’ do or say the thing we did or said? How much effort do we put in to letting ourselves off the hook for the things we don’t do by promising ourselves we’ll do it tomorrow?

And how much does fear, or the feeling of being overwhelmed, or self-doubt (which I suspect are all different flavors of the same intoxicant) keep us from doing what we mean to do?

The best line Mr. Morton ever uttered I’ve quoted here before, “Act, or be acted upon.” He had another one, though, that I think was one of my brother’s favorites: “In not choosing, you have chosen.” Choosing to do nothing is still a choice.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been choosing to do a lot of nothing. That’s not a fair statement – I’ve been working and dealing with the admin hassles of setting up a new bank account and paying my taxes and so on.

But this is not the meaningful work. This is not the work I need to do to set up my business or do what I love to do. It’s just work for its own sake, for the sake of cash flow, for the sake of having something to do.

Not doing something, it turns out, is at least as stressful as doing something. Two weeks ago I was sitting in my apartment trying to get started. I knew exactly what I should be doing – there were things I needed to read, blog posts to work on, a business plan to revise, all sorts of stuff – but I couldn’t get started. I thought I would sit and meditate for 10 minutes, try to clear my head, and begin again. I sat, concentrated on my breathing… In: 1. Out: 2. In: 1. Out: 2. Over and over again, I counted.

The next thing I knew I was bowing forward, as if in prayer, in tears. Sitting properly for a few minutes hurt like hell. My shoulder and neck were in spasms of pain, I couldn’t stop thinking about the aching, couldn’t feel anything else.

I hadn’t done anything to injure my neck. All I’d done was let stress and fear and anxiety build up in my back and neck and then, when I thought I would take some new-agey route to focus, it reached up out of my back and neck and punched me in the face.

It goes back to the stories we tell ourselves about what we are capable of, what we deserve, what is possible. We experience a failure, perhaps. It happened. But we tell ourselves that it happens. Or worse, we see someone else do something and succeed – but we tell ourselves that we are not like that person, we don’t have the money, personality, contacts, whatever to make it work.

So we have to let things be what they are, and what they were, and what they are going to be. And we have to know the difference.

Let’s go back to the top: action is the best expression of intention. I’m not talking about grand gestures, big roll-outs, major launches. I’m talking about simple, small stuff. Little things that add up to something important and enormous. Small actions that speak volumes about who you are and what you do.

Aside: Huh. Maybe this is the part where I do relate to Don Draper in the season premiere of Mad Men. Why doesn’t the work speak for itself, then? I do all this stuff, why isn’t that enough? Here’s my slight cop-out of an answer: action is the best expression of intention but you must do that for yourself and for the enactment of reality. Narratives, storytelling, framing – that’s what you have to do to help everyone else understand. (And they’re not that interested in what you do, they want to know who you are. Yet another thing to work on. Oh well.)

The first challenge then was to seek actions that would get me out of my funk.

1. Get a massage to do something about my damn neck. If you live in NYC and want a recommendation, I have the place for you.
2. Call some friends. Make dates for dinner with people who believe in me, inspire me, respect me. Who want me to succeed.
3. Come to grips with the fact that ADD is a negotiable obstacle. Start negotiating. Does that mean meds? Maybe. Might that help with focus and task completion? Maybe. Is it worth a try? Hells yeah.
4. The tricks of magical thinking. My to-do list (while I await the teuxdeux app’s approval by the iTunes store!) was becoming, frankly, the opposite of useful. It was too long, not specific enough, didn’t have due dates. I was punishing myself with a list that was unachievable, not giving myself clear enough instructions, and defaulting to triage as the only tactic for getting through the day. My new to-do list is little pieces of paper in a ziploc bag. I jumble the scraps and then pull one out. I do that one. The trick is to make them clear and achievable. “Spend one hour researching competitors’ offerings.” “Sign up for three meetup groups.” “Write blog post about The Fantastic Four: Issue #2.” Then what to do first is out of my hands. I can pretend it’s fate, or God, or the fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Here is my to-do list:

Okay, those things done, I gave myself the leeway to simply say – this week has gone tits up. Who cares? Let it slide. I’ve been doing too much of that lately, though, so I had to put a deadline on it. Sunday, July 25 was a good date. The date of my dad’s birthday, three of my friends’ birthdays, the Mad Men premiere. And it was soon. Seemed auspicious enough. Plus it would mean that today would have to be different.

So on Thursday I had dinner with a friend – someone I wanted to work for early in my career, who I was blessed enough to work with in the middle of my career, and who is a dear friend and potential partner at this new phase of my career. We had a lovely meal, drank some delicious cocktails, caught up on stuff. And I had a moment of knowing what needed to be done.

1. I need to write the elevator pitch for the new company. What is it, what does it do, what doesn’t it do.
2. I need to build a rolodex – resources I can use to execute the work I want to do so I’m not playing catch-up when the first project starts.
3. I need to build the brand, which means I need to build my brand.

My friend agreed that these things were critical, gave me some useful things to think about, and said once I was ready, there were projects he wanted to do with me.

On Saturday, my other friend, someone I met when I first moved to NYC on Friendster(!) who works in the event planning industry as the editor of a trade magazine gave me some terrific ideas for number 3 on my list.

And this morning, just reading the Mashable app gave me some good ideas for number 2 on the list.

All that’s left is number 1 – which feels the most daunting, but is also the most exciting. Number 1 should be reframed as this simple question: Who do I want to be? The first step to answering that question is writing a short paragraph to post on a website. That’s it. One tiny step that will begin to unlock all the other little steps to the near future.

In the meantime I started this day by simply getting out of the house. I found a new cafe with wifi and coffee and bagels and decent music, and I’ve been here, reading and working on this post.

Which pretty much brings you up to date on where the hell I’ve been and what the hell I’ve been doing. Answers: Under a rock, being scared of the world.

Right then, that’s over (for now). On to the next thing.

So, the moral of this very long, very self-indulgent bit of bullshit is this: Get out of your own way. Do something.

Or, to quote the Levi’s campaign: Go forth.

Click here to view the embedded video.

i am going to remind you. in multiple places.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[gratuitous use of a puppy is within my rights]

i’ve been working in and around advertising for 12 or 13 years.  i’ve been a copywriter and a web designer and a planner and a strategic consultant and a qualitative researcher and an innovations lead and a ‘corporate intellectual’.  yesterday i was described on a phone call as an ‘expert on brands, strategy, research methodologies and implementation. and she’s a wild blogger.’  practically feral, i’d say.

but wait – “implementation.”

now that takes me back to the beginning, when i was making websites and ads and games.  and it reminds me of a really early conversation i had with a client who wanted to get into the e-commerce world.  this had to have been 1999, it was Ron Herman, who owns the Fred Segal store on Melrose.  he was turned on by Helmut Lang‘s website, but also by the Gap. but he didn’t have the fulfillment capabilities to ship everything anyone wanted, and he didn’t have the inventory system to know what he had and link it to his stores in both a virtual world and a brick-and-mortar one (remember how we all used to say that? i’m so glad it’s gone).

what he did have was a line called RH Vintage – which still exists, though at the time it was basically bedazzled vintage bought out of poundage.  the line was comprised of jeans or cords, t-shirts, and belts.  no two of anything was alike.  the prices were comparatively reasonable for a Fred Segal shopping trip.  we thought – let’s experiment:  let’s put up your jeans, your cords, your tees and your belts.  you have three choices to make as a customer: which of these 4 categories do you want to shop from, are you a guy or a girl, and what’s your size.  tick those boxes, and the good people at RH Vintage will pick out your clothes and send it to you.  it’ll probably fit.  it’ll probably be what you want.  it’ll definitely come in a branded bag, with a branded receipt.  it’ll make you think that you actually got in your car and went to Fred Segal.  you can pretend to your friends at Brown and Wesleyan and Amherst that you shopped there (and you sorta did), and you’ve got the threads to prove it.

Ron loved the idea – i’m not sure what happened next, but here was an answer that wasn’t an ad.  it was a micro-model for doing business.  it was a branded product line with a branded distribution system and a branded user/shopping experience.  yes, it would have a website.  probably taglines would need to be written and designs made &c.  but it wasn’t an advertising idea – it was a business idea.

the best stuff i’ve ever done in anything related to advertising has always been ‘this is what you should do‘ not ‘this is what you should say‘.

i was talking to Seth Wolk the other day at Saatchi about who in the business is making things.  (he’s so great – really smart and candid and clear and open.  frankly, a rarity.)  but he did cut to the quick: maybe i’m barking up the wrong tree.  maybe i’m expecting places who don’t, as a matter of course, do what i do, to want to do what i do – and to know how to package it, sell it, and implement it.  maybe people like me need to find a new roof. or build our own house.

it’s really important to not only think about what you do as the definition of who you are, but to make sure you’re in the right place, the place that will not only let you be you, but wants you to be more of you, is hungry for you, is receptive to you.  people like me should be in places where people say ‘this is what you should do’ – and then adds, ‘we’ll build it for you.’

and here, then, is my question:  where are those places, really? lots of places claim to be doing that, but are at heart still ad agencies or branding companies.  is it, as Seth suggested, media properties and platforms?  is it tech startups?  who are the companies that are looking at brands on a holistic level and then suggesting – and implementing - action instead of talk?

I was talking to Michael Hastings-Black of Desedo Films the other day about a great many things – it was sunny out! and we were in SoHo! with coffee!

But one of the most tactical parts of the conversation was also perhaps the hardest question.  How do you price what you do?  Furthermore, what’s the ‘right’ way to price it?

I’m aware that hourly billing is pretty standard, and that day rates are common among consultants (I even charge one, as do the bigger companies I work with).  But I’m much more comfortable with pricing the value of the thing itself.  You are paying for an answer – a design, a film, a campaign, a website, whatever.  How much time it takes to get there is agreed upon by you and me in the form of deliverable dates; the form the answer takes is also something we negotiate and discuss, preferably really early on.  But how many hours or days I commit between now and then begins to suggest that ideas happen ‘on the clock’ and that a sum of the process equals the outcome.

Which makes me (and clearly others, as the quote below illustrates) wonder, what are we really selling?  A process, or an outcome.  I’m more interested in outcomes, and I think that’s why people want to work with me.  But then we start working together and the process begins to subsume the thing itself.  I want to bust out of that.

I think it’s a better idea and more appropriate for clients to understand they are paying for a solution and not for the time associated. A designers’ job is to solve problems. One of these problems is helping clients understand the creative process, and, in turn, the value behind design.

thanks to #ideasareawesome and idApostle.

[oh, and the discussion in the comments section is pretty interesting too]

I’m looking at my desktop.  I have 8 short stories I’m supposed to read and give comments on.  I have a short story to revise, another to finish, and about 6 good starts to short stories that I am tempted to work on instead of the one I need to finish.  And there’s always the temptation to start something entirely new based on a fragment of conversations overheard at brunch.

I am looking at my coffee table.  I have a stack – nearly a foot high – of magazines I want to read.  1/3 of the stack are issues of Vogue that I want to flip through in search of hairstyle and clothing inspiration (I’m planning yet another makeover).  The other 2/3s are miscellaneous mags that have articles I want to get to… eventually.

I am looking at the whiteboard in my home office.  It has four columns of ideas for projects, and lists of people and tasks under each one of them.  Then there are the post-it notes and the clipboards.

I know I’m not alone here – people who love to make stuff have no shortage of stuff they want to make.  Some get only as far as the sketches – books and books full of sketches, drafts, schematics, flow charts.  Others actually get started on prototyping but don’t get through the revision process.  Folks like Seth Godin remind us that the measure of success is ‘shipping.’

So this article in GOOD has an interesting couple of ideas on how to overcome the gorging on ideas that some of us suffer from.  One idea I really was drawn to is the idea of the “sober monitor” – someone who isn’t high on ideas and can help you see the ideas worth sticking to and to be skeptical of the half-baked or far-fetched.

There are some other really useful ideas here – and I bolded the ones I like best…

For his part, Karnjanaprakorn has made some major improvements. He divided up his projects with an action-oriented partner, and he has committed himself to saying no to the majority of new opportunities and ideas that come up. He explains, “When your purpose and mission in life is to make the world a better place, it’s really easy to get distracted and overbook yourself. You’ll paralyze yourself and end up doing no good.” Karnjanaprakorn has also taken some practical steps to increase his focus and productivity. For starters, he has completely cut out meetings during the day that have no intended outcome. When people contact him out of the blue—or when a meeting doesn’t have a clear agenda—he politely declines. The problem, as Karnjanaprakorn describes it, is that everybody, especially in the world of social innovation, loves to talk about changing the world. “The problem for me is that I get excited about a lot of these ideas and it gets me sidetracked,” he says.

The action-oriented partner is the thing I’ve recently started using a lot more.  It helps that I’ve met some amazing people who are interested in collaborating; and that I have a few old friends who have always been incredibly supportive (to the extremes of: giving me places to live, finding me jobs, introducing me to cool ideas and new fabulous people).

The second one seems trivial by comparison but is a big problem for me.  Like a lot of people in the strategy/planning business, I start out the week with a few conference calls and meetings already on my calendar, and then I watch the week fill up with them.  I’ve started pushing back on meeting requests using a tip from Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek.  I ask people for a quick agenda, “so I can be prepared.”  Then I can cut down the meeting from 2 hours to 10 by answering the questions that can be dealt with in e-mail.  Often it means not bothering about a phone call at all.

But it’s too easy to blame all those external distractions when the real problem is addiction to new ideas.  We need air traffic controllers and co-pilots to help us get the right ones off the ground.