The (Belated) Recap

Meant to post about this yesterday, but a non-stop string of Cyan and Long Tail meetings kept me, sadly, doing actual work rather than writing up inane summaries of my rampant social alcoholism.

Despite a slow start (involving a terrifying initial half-hour of sitting at a table by myself, imagining that nobody would show up at all), the inaugural S-A Block Party collected a crowd of seventeen different attendees over the course of the evening, five of whom I’d never before met live, making it, in my opinion, an unqualified success.

As it was also the first chance for a crowd of my friends to meet Abigail (who showed up with a couple of her own friends in tow, presumably as reinforcements), the event brought together ‘holy crap there are real people on the other end of that email address’ internet weirdness with ‘so this girl really exists after all’ dating weirdness, yielding an event that was, in equal parts, exceedingly awkward and absolutely excellent.

In short, my kind of party.

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Haiku

haru tatsu ya
gu no ue ni mata
gu ni kaeru

[spring begins–
more foolishness
for this fool]
– Kobayashi Issa, 1823

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Lindsey Tucker: Incompatibility

Continuing the new ‘guest blogging’ trend, a quick story courtesy of my wonderful Boston-based friend Lindsey, about the speed dating event she was dragged to last night:

background: 18 guys, 18 girls, 4 minute match-ups, a whistle blows and the guys rotate to their right. no last names, no numbers, just circle Match, N/F (networking/friend) or NO on your score card.

very cute boy, david. very exciting, since very cute boys were not so
plentiful among the 18. he sits down, all business, none of this ‘so, what are your hobbies’ bullshit.

his question: what’s the worst case scenario boy for you?

my answer: um, a right-wing, bush-loving, evangelical christian republican.

him: i’m pro-life.

me: you like my CHOICE bracelet?

him: if i got a girl pregnant, i don’t think i could let her have an abortion.

me: and, we’re done here.

(3 minutes, 30 seconds of staring at each other)

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RE:

[Yes, they’re still coming: another installment of Radical Entrepreneurship.]

In the introduction (Chapter 0: Build Your Business), I beat to death the idea that the single most important part of building successful companies is unfailing persistence and determination, an unflappable commitment to start your company, and keep it going, no matter what.

But thereís one other trait that nearly all successful entrepreneurs share: they network like itís their job. Because, frankly, it is. A strong and extensive network is far and away the single best tool that any entrepreneur can have at their fingertips.

Literally every other aspect of starting a company ñ from hiring and financing, to sales, execution and business development ñ is largely made possible by the same thing: knowing the right people, or being a single introduction away.

That last bit is key ñ itís not just who you know, but who they know that makes networks powerful. If you have 250 names in your Rolodex, and each has 250 in theirs, youíre suddenly one step away from over 60,000 potential customers, collaborators, investors and employees. Sixty thousand!

That estimate of 250 people per network, by the way, comes from Joe Girard, a Chevrolet salesman whose prolific success put him in Guinness as The Worldís Greatest Salesman. After researching the question of average network size, Girard concluded that most people invite about 250 friends and family members to major life events ñ weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs. He coined that fact Girardís Law of 250, and credited his business use of it with much of his success.

[Girard wasnít just a salesman, he was a decent researcher, as recent academic research on human networks seems to confirm that most people have networks of 200-250 people they know well enough to, say, stop and have a drink with if they ran into them at a bar.]

As Girard knew, each person you bring into your network, each person with whom you build a relationship, can put you a step closer to 250 friends, family members and colleagues, any of whom might invest in your company or work for it, buy from your company or cut you a great deal on the services and supplies youíll need to run and grow it.

Hiring, fundraising, sales ñ theyíre all numbers games. The techniques and tactics Iíll be sharing in subsequent chapters can help you boost your batting averages, but only networking can push up the number of times you get to go to bat.

2.1 Time to go Fishing?

Of course, if your network consists of an average number of people you know averagely well, youíre bound for decidedly average results. So, for a moment, stop and see exactly where you stand.

First, check your contact list ñ hopefully itís electronic, perhaps itís a Rolodex on your desk. If you donít have anything but numbers in your cell phone or a rough list in your head, at least you have nowhere to go but up.

How many records do you have? More than 250? More than 500? At the moment, Iím at 2,243, and I suspect I still have a very long way to go. Consider senators and presidential candidates, who in one study were all found to have significantly more than 10,000 live contacts each!

Importantly, thatís 10,000 ëliveí contacts, the only ones that really count: those people youíre still actively in touch with, those with whom you have strong and ongoing relationships.

How many of your contacts are really ëliveí? Head to the first contact on your list whose last name starts with the letter ëpí, then pull out the next ten to check.

Of those ten: how many have you spoken with in the last six months? How many have you not spoken with in more than two years? What are the odds that any of them, if called last-minute, would get out of bed to pick you up at the airport at two in the morning?

And, if they wouldnít make that airport run, what would possibly make you think theyíd come through for you in business situations, most of which involve them putting their own reputation on the line?

Next, take another look at those same ten people. Do you know their birthdays? Their spouseís and kidsí names? Where they were born, where they went to school, what they do for fun?

All of those pieces of information are invaluable intelligence. If you donít know them now, itís time to start collecting.

Which, basically, is the point. Wherever you stand, you can always improve. Read the rest of the chapter, put the ideas to work, then come back in a year and do the same self-tests again. I suspect youíll be pleasantly shocked by how far your network has come.

One last test, this one to simply gauge whether youíve been getting out to meet enough people in the first place ñ people who might eventually end up in your network, and point you towards the investors, employees, customers or collaborators your company will need.

This particular test is courtesy of Malcom Gladwell, as detailed in his great book on the power of social networks, The Tipping Point. On this page is a list of 250 surnames, pulled at random from the Manhattan phone book. Head through the list, giving yourself a point for anyone you know with that surname. For this one, use ëknowí loosely ñ if you sat next to a guy on an airplane who introduced himself with the same last name, thatís good enough. Give yourself a point for each, and multiples count ñ if you know three Johnsonís, thatís three points. Ready:

Algazi, Alvarez, Alpern, Ametrano, Andrews, Aran, Arnstein, Ashford, Bailey Ballout, Bamberger, Baptista, Barr, Barrows, Baskerville, Bassiri, Bell, Bokgese, Brandao, Bravo, Brooke, Brightman, Billy, Blau, Bohen, Bohn, Borsuk, Brendle, Butler, Calle, Cantwell, Carrell, Chinlund, Cirker, Cohen, Collas, Couch, Callegher, Calcaterra, Cook, Carey, Cassell, Chen, Chung, Clarke, Cohn, Carton, Crowley, Curbelo, Dellamanna, Diaz, Dirar, Duncan, Dagostino, Delakas, Dillon, Donaghey, Daly, Dawson, Edery, Ellis, Elliott, Eastman, Easton, Famous, Fermin, Fialco, Finklestein, Farber, Falkin, Feinman, Friedman, Gardner, Gelpi, Glascock, Grandfield, Greenbaum Greenwood, Gruber, Garil, Goff, Gladwell, Greenup, Gannon, Ganshaw, Garcia, Gennis, Gerard, Gericke, Gilbert, Glassman, Glazer, Gomendio, Gonzalez, Greenstein, Guglielmo, Gurman, Haberkorn, Hoskins, Hussein, Hamm, Hardwick, Harrell, Hauptman, Hawkins, Henderson, Hayman, Hibara, Hehmann, Herbst, Hedges, Hogan, Hoffman, Horowitz, Hsu, Huber, Ikiz, Jaroschy, Johann, Jacobs, Jara, Johnson, Kassel, Keegan, Kuroda, Kavanau, Keller, Kevill, Kiew, Kimbrough, Kline, Kossoff, Kotzitzky, Kahn, Kiesler, Kosser, Korte, Leibowitz, Lin, Liu, Lowrance, Lundh, Laux, Leifer, Leung, Levine, Leiw, Lockwood, Logrono, Lohnes, Lowet, Laber, Leonardi, Marten, McLean, Michaels, Miranda, Moy, Marin, Muir, Murphy, Marodon, Matos, Mendoza, Muraki, Neck, Needham, Noboa, Null, O’Flynn, O’Neill, Orlowski, Perkins, Pieper, Pierre, Pons, Pruska, Paulino, Popper, Potter, Purpura, Palma, Perez, Portocarrero, Punwasi, Rader, Rankin, Ray, Reyes, Richardson, Ritter, Roos, Rose, Rosenfeld, Roth, Rutherford, Rustin, Ramos, Regan, Reisman, Renkert, Roberts, Rowan, Rene, Rosario, Rothbart, Saperstein, Schoenbrod, Schwed, Sears, Statosky, Sutphen, Sheehy, Silverton, Silverman, Silverstein, Sklar, Slotkin, Speros, Stollman, Sadowski, Schles, Shapiro, Sigdel, Snow, Spencer, Steinkol, Stewart, Stires, Stopnik, Stonehill, Tayss, Tilney, Temple, Torfield, Townsend, Trimpin, Turchin, Villa, Vasillov, Voda, Waring, Weber, Weinstein, Wang, Wegimont, Weed, Weishaus.

Now compare. In most groups, the aver
age score floats somewhere between thirty and forty. Well networked people score above ninety or a hundred. Where does that place you?

Here as well, however, there isnít a ërightí score. Simply gauge where you stand, follow the ideas in this chapter, come back in a year for a retest, and find yourself pleasantly thrilled by how far your networking skills have come.

And, trust me, itís well worth the effort. As I said before, literally every aspect of starting a company ñ from hiring and financing, to sales, execution and business development ñ all are largely made possible by the same thing: knowing the right people, or being a single introduction away. Made possible, in short, by building the right network.

2.2. How to Fish

Building a network is really a process in three parallel parts:

ï First, you need to identify and meet people who make valuable additions to your network.

ï Second, you need to establish the initial relationship ñ meet with the person one-on-one to bond and build an initial tie.

ï Third, you need to constantly build and maintain that new relationship, keeping it strong enough to draw upon when you need to, possibly years down the line.

All three are crucial to a successful network, so letís look at them each, one by one.

2.3. Where the Fish Are

In some ways, networking is one the easiest and most enjoyable parts of your job as an entrepreneur. Sure, itís technically work, but it certainly doesnít feel like it. Your rat-race employee friends will be insanely jealous ñ you get to meet interesting new people, have breakfast or lunch with them at new restaurants, and you get paid to do it? Hard work indeed, youíll reply, but someone has to do it. (Hah!)

Because networking is so fun, however, because it likely wonít seem like real work to you either, itís very easy to slack off as the pace of your company picks up. Donít! Donít let networking fall by the wayside. The more successful your company becomes, the more youíll need the flow of new and growing relationships that persistent networking provides.

To that end, make networking a habit. Start now, and donít stop doing it, ever. Meet someone new every week. One new person a week is exceedingly easy, doesnít take up much time. But, by the end of the year, those fifty new contacts will put you one introduction away from over 12,000 new people in their respective networks.

Never giving up, the most important part of entrepreneurship, is a mental stance you need internalize; networking, the second most important part of entrepreneurship, is a behavior you need to habitualize. Making sure youíre building that habit is the point of the one new person a week minimum.

In other words: no matter what else is going on in your company, always find time to meet someone new each week.

That leaves you, minimally, 50 new people to find this year. Which begs two questions: what kind of people should you meet, and where do you find them?

[Cliffhanger of an ending, I know; as this chapter (like most of the coming ones) is rather long, I’m splitting it up over several subsequent postings. Stay tuned.]

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Services

Like any good Jewish boy, I spent this Easter Sunday attending church.

It’s a long-standing tradition, as trumpet players, especially trumpet players who can nail Baroque chorus-backing descants, are in high annual demand, regardless of circumcision-status.

And while I, technically, was paid to be there, I suspect I’d have gone either way, as I’ve come to enjoy the spectacle of Easter services. While varying quite a bit between denominations, all seem to possess an underlying performative quality that appeals to my closeted love of musical theater. Harmonized singing! Costumes! Bellowing organ music! Under the spell of it all, I start to imagine the priests are quietly soft-shoeing beneath their flowing robes.

At the same time, much as I enjoy them, these Easter observances always seem completely foreign to me, to my understanding of religion and prayer. Weaned on years of synagogue attendance, I tend to think of prayer, even when mandatorily conducted in a group, as an intensely private, internal, meditative thing.

Yet, just a few days ago, we Jews also celebrated a thoroughly over-the-top holiday, Purim. Based on the book of Esther, Purim lauds Queen Esther of Persia for owning up to her Judaism and standing up to her husband, King Ahashueras, to save her people from massacre at the hands of Haman, Ahashueras’ sinister right-hand man.

It’s a unique story from a theological perspective, not just for its female protagonist, but also because, unlike in Judaism’s other holiday stories, where God steps in to save the day, in the story of Purim, it’s the Jews who have to pull it together and save themselves.

Beyond social-action implications, however, Purim is also a night of obligated revelry, an occasion when each Jew is Talmudically advised to drink “ad d’lo yada”, or “until one can’t tell the difference” between the names of Haman and Esther’s uncle Mordechai. (Or, at least, until one stops wondering exactly how undercover Esther’s Judaism could have been, considering she had an uncle named Mordechai.)

Besides ritualized liver damage, and the obligation to give to the poor (“matanot l’evyonim”), Purim also features “shalach manot”, the obligation to send gifts of food to others. Jews and goyim alike are doubtless familiar with one of the most traditional sent gifts: Hamentaschen, triangular cookies filled with preserves.

As I was growing up, my mother would bake up a batch of Hamentaschen each year, working off a stained photo-copy of her own mother’s recipe. My brother and I would help, cutting the flat sheets of dough into circles, spooning filling onto the center of each, folding them into triangles (careful to pinch the corners, so they wouldn’t unfurl while baking), and brushing on a thin layer of egg to turn the finished crusts golden brown.

This year, as in year’s past when I’ve been on the wrong coast to pitch in, my parents sent along a handful of the finished Hamentaschen. And, lest I might otherwise doubt their love, each individual cookie was wrapped first in Saran Wrap, and then in aluminum foil, before all of them were placed in a Ziploc bag, further ensconced in bubble wrap, and boxed up for urgent overnight FedEx delivery.

Apparently, it’s not just religion you inherit from your parents, but borderline OCD as well.

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No Soap, Radio

Continuing the trend of leveraging the soapbox of this site into chances to pontificate similarly in front of ever larger audiences, I’ll be live at 7:00am (PST) tomorrow morning on Seattle’s Robin & Maynard Show, Buzz 100.7 FM, railing against the evils of ‘Casual Friday’ and corporate dress regulation in general.

Expect a recap as soon as I’m off, as I honestly have no idea what the hell I’m getting myself into here.

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Matchmaking

Tallying in a recent revelation, I’m now up to six.

Six girls I’ve dated, that is, who, in the last twelve months, have gotten married or engaged.

Apparently, a few months with me, and you can’t possibly wait to get out of the singles scene for good.

But, on the plus side, as my mother points out, I could likely leverage that into a solid side-business: dating unhappily single New York women, who could then move on and rather instantly get hitched.

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Checklist Power + Scheduling Procrastination

[This one’s for the 43Folders-ites and GTD dorks; apologies if readers less obsessed with life-hacking find it far too anal retentive to sustain their interest.]

Though I’ve been GTD’ing for about three years, I’ve recently stumbled across two things that have done wonders for inching me towards a watery mind and away from my naturally procrastinatory ways. Thought I’d toss them up, in the off chance that others might find them useful.

The first is the power of the checklist. Though David Allen mentions checklists throughout GTD, I and (from the implementations I’ve seen) most others seem to give them short shrift.

In my myriad approaches to wrangling GTD details, I’ve always had particular trouble with recurring tasks. I play the trumpet on the side, for example, and try to put the horn on my chops for at least a half hour of daily practice. When I was using to-do managers with recurring task capabilities, I was able to set recurrence daily, and check off trumpet each day. But, using VoodooPad as I do now, I didn’t have a good approach.

So, I initially set up a daily checklist as a way of managing the larger recurring tasks in my life, things like trumpet practice, blogging, or hitting the gym, which I wanted to do each day, and which didn’t lead from one action to the next, but required the same action again and again. Each morning, I’d paste my daily checklist across to my Next Actions list, and then get to work.

As I started doing that, however, I realized there were any number of other things I did (or, at least, should) daily. Things like taking a vitamin. Obviously, popping a vitamin is a ridiculously minor task, and well under the two minute time cutoff, so I’d initially left it off my task list. But, as it was something I wanted to do daily, I’d been unwittingly carrying around the obligation mentally. Further, there were a number of similarly small action obligations inherent in my approach to GTD itself: emptying my in basket each morning, checking the prior night’s voicemails, or copying the hard landscape of my day across from iCal.

Very quickly, my checklist began to expand, from major recurring daily to-do’s, to the very small ones. And the cognitive energy freed up by getting all of those out of my mental RAM was on par with the initial surge that hooked me when I first implemented GTD. Eventually, I added in weekly (including an action-by-action break-down of the weekly review), monthly and yearly checklists, all of which have been slowly populating with the small, inane tasks that otherwise didn’t seem to fit well into the GTD framework. My brain feels vastly emptier (in a good way!) as a result.

In the process, I also discovered a second, equally powerful, use of checklists: scheduling procrastinatory tasks. One huge time suck for me, for example, is Bloglines. I’d load the site throughout the day, derailing my attempts at staying on task. So, on a lark, I added surfing Bloglines to my daily checklist. Each day, I was giving myself not just the permission, but the obligation, to pull up the site, and read through everything that popped in.

The amazing thing was, the rest of the time, Bloglines didn’t hold nearly the draw it previously did. Knowing that I’d get to check it at least once a day, the constant impulse to make sure I hadn’t missed anything abated.

I added scheduled requirements of other procrastinatory ploys to my checklist, and found the same thing. In retrospect, that makes a lot of sense. I tend to procrastinate not by doing things that are bad, things that I shouldn’t be doing at all, but by doing things that are less good, that I shouldn’t be doing preferentially to my more important tasks.

Still, as those procrastination escapes were things I really did want to do, I was carrying around the mental obligation to them as heavily as I’d been carrying around any other unrecorded project or next-action. No wonder the urge to do them had been popping into my brain at the least opportune moment!

So, fellow GTD acolytes, I’d urge you to give the same hack a try: put together a checklist of the things you want to do each day, each week, month or year. Put really small, stupid things on the lists, every single one you can think of, to free up mental RAM. Then add in a regular obligation to do the things that make you waste time. Do them regularly, do them like you mean them, and discover you’re unbothered by them until you’re required to do them again.

Go to it.

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The S-A Block Party

With spring upon us, and barbecue season consequently at hand, I spent the afternoon thinking about neighbors. About how, in suburban locales, people often meet other people who live nearby. And about how those of us who live in bigger cities rarely do.

For example, despite having lived in my new apartment for over three months, I’ve so far met just three of the fifteen or twenty people on my floor; and I’m embarrassed to admit I no longer even remember those three neighbors’ names.

But if the problem is bad in cities, it’s even worse online. Each day, my referrer log racks up a slew of visitors, and – even generously assuming regular visits by friends, colleagues, ex-girlfriends and my mother – I can only account for a startlingly small percentage. In short, dear readers, I have no idea who the hell you are.

So, in a move that’s either inspired in its community-building impulse, or insane in its likelihood of inspiring restraining orders, I’m fixing to change that, by inviting you to come one, come all to the very first Self-Aggrandizement Block Party.

On Tuesday, March 29th, at 9:00pm, I’ll be parking myself in the back booth of B.B. Doyle’s Pub & Restaurant, 302 W. 51st St. at 8th Ave., and I’m hoping you’ll swing by to join me for a drink or three.

I’ll be the guy with a rose in his lapel (who, more conveniently, also looks pretty much identical to his photo). See you there.

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