cros.land

just figuring things out

Finishing Ambitious Projects

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Where do I even start?

Over the course of my life I had started many ambitious projects and had abandoned most of them. I’d begin a project with enthusiasm, but somewhere in the middle I would regard my efforts as feeble and inadequate, and wondered whether or not it all was a waste of time. Forcing myself to work made it worse, and sooner or later I found myself “postponing” my projects indefinitely, giving myself false reassurances that I’d come back to them one day when I had more free time.

I’ve danced this dance longer than I care to admit, and there came a point where all my unfinished novels, all my unpublished stories, and all my other discarded ideas became such a weight on my emotions that starting anything new seemed to require an almost superhuman effort.  Eventually, I gave up on bold ideas completely because it was too painful to have great ideas only to realize that I didn’t have the motivation or the discipline to bring them to fruition.

I managed to bury the desire to create for five years. As much as I tried, however, it didn’t go away completely. It registered as dull pain just below the surface, a mixture of restlessness and regret that brought about fatigue, stomach disorders, neck and back pain,  and depression. These symptoms were my subconscious’ not so subtle way of saying “Listen up. You’ve got to make a change.”

So change I did. I quit my job to start working for myself. Soon the big ideas I had suppressed for so long came flowing back, and it was not long after this that I got the idea that would change the focus of my career: goldhat.org.

The idea behind Goldhat was simple:  I imagined a musician playing on a street corner passing the hat around for the loose change of onlookers. If the musician was good enough and if the crowd was large enough, the musician could earn a decent living. It was then that I thought, “why not bring this street corner to the internet?” A crowd could only get so large on the street, but on the internet you could have tens of thousands, millions even, tossing their spare change into a virtual “hat”. If enough people were willing to give, this could change the way content creators made money on the internet.

Although the idea was simple enough, the steps I needed to take to make it a reality were unclear. I didn’t know how to program. I barely knew HTML, and I had no idea whether or not a social donations site was practical. Considering the emotional baggage of all the projects I had started and abandoned in the past, it’s a wonder that I started this one in the first place, let alone finish it. So, when I finally launched goldhat.org just last week, I looked back at the seven months I had spent working on it and realized that there were five big differences between the project I had finished this time, and all the other projects I had abandoned before.

The five big differences were:

  1. I made no excuses
  2. It was larger than me
  3. It was closer to the money
  4. I was incompetent
  5. I had nowhere to run

1. I made no excuses

When I was writing my novel, I always found excuses to do something else than write. I was either too tired, too stressed out, or simply “didn’t feel like it.” I told myself that whatever writing I did when I was in a less than optimal state would be crap anyway, so I chose not to write. These excuses were pretty lame and deep down I knew that if I had cultivated the discipline of writing every day that it wouldn’t matter if I was tired or stressed out when I sat down to write, but I didn’t want to let go of a convenient cop-out.

When I started working on Goldhat I was well aware that my past excuses hadn’t gotten me anywhere, so I resolved not to make a single excuse for myself this time around. If there was an obstacle, I’d find a way around it. If there was a skill I needed to learn, I would learn it. If the next step to take wasn’t clear at all, I’d gather as much information as I could until I got an idea of what actions I could take to move forward.

2. It was larger than me

It took me a long time to admit it, but one of the main reasons I wanted to write novels and have them published was so that everyone would see how brilliant I was. This kind of ego-driven pursuit was unsustainable because being a writer means receiving criticism and rejection on a daily basis, and I wasn’t ready to deal with that.  If my mission was more focused on bringing joy and meaning to my readers, I probably wouldn’t have minded the first few rejection slips that I had received. Instead, because my main purpose was self-glorification, the rejection slips and poor reviews stamped out my biggest source of motivation. I just couldn’t continue when it was gone.

It would be disingenuous to say that some of my motivations for creating Goldhat didn’t stem from wanting approval from others. This time, however, I made sure that my main drive was purpose, not pride. I knew that if I could succeed in bringing goldhat to the world, more starving artists could make money from the content they worked so hard to create. This was something I strongly identified with, and I felt I owed it to all those artists to at least try to make this idea a reality. When times were difficult, the fact that Goldhat was larger than just me was one of the main things that kept me going.

3. It was closer to the money

Although some fiction writers make a lot of money, the majority don’t make much at all. Because the chances of making money in the immediate future were so low as a writer, it was difficult to think of writing when I had bills to pay. I was afraid of starving, and it’s extremely hard to be productive when you’re wondering where the next paycheck is coming from.

Goldhat was different because it was a real business. I could see plenty of ways that the site could generate revenue. Although it wasn’t guaranteed that Goldhat would make money, I felt that the chances of making money in the immediate future were much higher than writing a novel and trying to publish it. I know that money isn’t everything, but sometimes the LACK of money can be a real distraction. The fact that Goldhat had commercial potential meant that I didn’t have to worry about money so much and could focus on whatever I needed to do to make it work.

4. I was incompetent

Because all my teachers and professors had praised my writing in the past, and because I had graduated with honors from the University of Washington’s English department, I had built up an image of myself as a “great writer.” Thinking of myself as a great writer was all I had to buoy my self-esteem. I didn’t want poor reviews and rejection slips to tarnish that image. The easiest way to avoid all that was to stop writing completely.  Also, because I thought I was “great,” I felt that I didn’t have to try as hard as other people to get my work in print. This feeling of false superiority didn’t get me anywhere, and it certainly didn’t get me to finish that novel.

How liberating it was to be an idiot! Because I never thought of myself as a programmer, my ego wasn’t tied up in my code. Because I didn’t have a background as a code warrior, I didn’t have to worry about how “perfect” my program was as I was putting it together. Also, because I knew that my knowledge of programming was inadequate, I felt that I needed to work harder just to produce anything of value.

5. I had nowhere to run

When I had a job, it was easier to abandon my writing and immerse myself in work. When I was working on Goldhat, however, I had already quit my job in Tokyo and had moved out of the country. Although I was tempted to get my old job back several times, the fact that I was in another country and would have to reestablish a life that wasn’t right for me was reason enough not to turn back. There were times when I was plagued by self-doubt, and there were one or two times when I seriously considered giving up, but because there was no alternative but to move forward, I had no choice but to find a way to do so.

Working on Goldhat was both a stressful and rewarding experience for me.  In many ways, it was hardly any different from working on my novel five years ago. This time, however, I was lucky to have been able to change my attitudes and my perspective. Making these changes didn’t make it any easier, but at least I could accept the fact that it wasn’t easy and find the resolve to do it anyway.

What about you? What ambitious projects have you finished? What helped you push through to the end?

Photo by: hashashin

The Greatest Lesson I Chose Not To Learn

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Truth is on the other side. Do you have to courage to look?

The only way have principles but not live by them is to avoid the Truth, to fool yourself into feeling that you’ve honored your  principles when in reality you haven’t.  In order to do this you create  excuses to shelter yourself from the Truth,  and thus avoid the fear and uncertainty that comes with facing it.

The Truth is incredibly simple, so simple that proverbs like “When there’s a will there’s a way,” and “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” sum them up as clearly as anyone possibly could. The problem with these proverbs, however, is that although they may represent the Truth, they fail to carry the force of the Truth because we’ve spent so much time learning to ignore them. Over time, our denial of the truth in these proverbs have reduced them to nothing more than  lifeless clichés.

We don’t just ignore proverbs, however. We ignore even the powerful messages of great works of art, literature and film. These works express profound truths so clearly that you would think they would be obvious to anyone. And yet,  all we do is nod our heads sanctimoniously and come up with new excuses of why the truth in this or that particular book or film does not apply to us.  In this way, we can have as many principles as we like, and not actually live by any of them. This is something that I have done more often than I’d like to admit.

Ikiru

Ever since I can remember, I believed it was much more important to pursue one’s passions than it was to pursue comfort, riches or security.  I had read many books and had seen many films that reinforced this belief. None of them, however, was more powerful for me than Akira Kurosawa’s film Ikiru (Ikiru is the Japanese word for “to live”). This film had conveyed the message of the importance of a living a meaningful life more than anything I had read or seen before. And yet, despite the power of the film, and despite the fact that it was probably my favorite film of all time, I failed to live by its message.

The Original Preview of Ikiru:


The first time I watched the film was just before I went to Japan to teach English. It told the story of bureaucrat by the name of Watanabe who had spent his whole life stamping papers in a dusty office. For 35 years he kept the same routine. He clocked in, stamped papers, clocked out, went home, went to sleep and clocked in the next day. There were no divisions between the days, and  all of it blended together into a single lifeless moment that passed by in an instant.

The film takes a turn when Watanabe finds out that he has stomach cancer, and finally makes the realization that he hasn’t done anything meaningful in his life. At first he tries to distract himself with drinking and the Tokyo nightlife. Soon, however, the weight of his immnanent death is far too heavy for him to ignore. He eventually makes the decision to spend his last six months doing something meaningful. Although Watanabe is on the verge of death, he becomes absolutely committed to leaving a legacy in the short time that he has left.

The message of the film was clear: do something meaningful now, or your life will end before you know it. Although I had heard similar messages before, never had it been as powerfully conveyed to me as it had been in that film. I walked out of the theater with tears streaming, and I vowed to live my life on purpose from that moment on.

How I Managed to Ignore The Lesson

That vow, as soon as it was made, was not fulfilled. I acknowledged the truth of the film but failed to live by it. In order to help me avoid the truth of the film, I came up with excuses:

Excuse #1: “I Don’t Need to Change”

Because I believed in living a meaningful life, I had the conceit that I was more enlightened than Watanabe was. After all, I had graduated with a creative writing degree. My life goal at the time was to inspire people with my stories. I wasn’t about to sacrifice my life to get some boring yet secure government job like Watanabe had. Soon after graduation, however, that’s exactly what I did. I latched on to the first easy opportunity that fell in my lap: a teaching job in Japan. All the time that I taught English I never thought of myself as a teacher, but as a novelist. And although I only fiddled with my unfinished novel about once a month, that was enough for me to sustain the illusion that I had chosen the road less traveled by, even though I hadn’t.

Excuse #2: “My Situation Is Different”
Although I sympathized with the plight of the main character, never did I think that I would end up stamping papers in a dusty office, living a life devoid of meaning. This was the easiest excuse for me to make. I wasn’t, after all, a bureaucrat wasting his life away  stamping papers. I was an English teacher wasting his life away repeating the most mind-numbingly simple phrases to students over and over (and over) again. When I wasn’t teaching Japanese salarymen how to ask directions to the post office, I partied with friends, watched television and played video games.

Although the context of my situation was different from Watanabe’s in Ikiru, the essence was the same.  Watanabe passed his life away in a government office while I did it in a corporate classroom. I clocked in, passed a few hours of my life, went home (maybe after a few drinks), went to sleep and clocked in the next day. Because of these superficial differences it was very easy for me to buy into the illusion that my situation was different.

Excuse #3: “I’ll Change Later, But Not Now”
Eventually I came to terms with the fact that my work was not meaningful for me. I left the teaching world, and fell into a job as a corporate headhunter. Because my job was 100% commission based, I became obsessed with work. I made an average of 80 to 100 phone calls a day and worked about 70 hours a week, sometimes more. The job was much more meaningful for me than teaching English, but I knew still that the job wasn’t ideal for me. I didn’t want to be a headhunter forever, but I thought that I could make a million dollars first and then go off to do  something more meaningful later. It took a very long time to admit to myself that by the time I made a million dollars I would probably become trapped by the lifestyle and comfort that my income provided me, making it that much more difficult to leave and start something new.

The Epiphany

It took me five years to finally accept the truth of the movie Ikiru. I had created walls of excuses, rationalizations and delusions to shut the Truth out, but when confronted with the daily realities of my life, my excuses could not pass muster. One by one, they began to fall down. When there were no more excuses left, I had an epiphany: live a meaningful life now, or you never will. This was something I had believed in for a long time, but because I had no excuses left, it seemed infinitely more clear and powerful to me.

It was then that I realized that an epiphany is not a sudden insight into the Truth, but rather it is the moment when when you run out of excuses for yourself and nothing is left but the Truth.

Let me say that again:
AN EPIPHANY IS THE MOMENT WHEN YOU RUN OUT OF EXCUSES FOR YOURSELF, AND NOTHING IS LEFT BUT THE TRUTH.

I distinctly remember the moment when the last excuse came crumbling down. It was the “Not now, but later” excuse. I was sitting in the Tokyo Shinagawa Immigration office waiting to renew my visa when I was suddenly confronted with the fact that I had lived in Tokyo for five years, and had never intended to.

I had originally  resolved to stay in the country for just one year, but because I told myself the “Not now, but later,” excuse every day, one year quickly became five. Renewing my visa, and seeing the stamp permitting me to stay in Japan for three more years brought this fact into focus. Although I had known the Truth all along, this was the first time I confronted it without excuses. The moment I saw that stamp on my passport I knew that if I didn’t resolve to leave and start my new life today I would still be telling myself the same “Not now, but later” story in 20 years. The only difference between now and the future was that there would be more stamps. Eventually, there would come a point where I would wake up and realize that, just like Watanabe, I had wasted my entire life.

Two months after I had this realization I quit my job, cleaned out my apartment, and bought a one-way ticket to Seattle. My folks picked me up at the airport and I went back to my old room at my old house. I had no friends, no connections, and no career history in the new areas that I wanted to explore. Was I scared as hell? You better believe I was. The Truth, however, was so obvious to me at that point that I could no longer rationalize against it. I had no choice but to take action.

One year later, I find that I am far from what I can consider an ideal career. I work full-time for little or no income and on top of that I’m still living with my parents, but I have no regrets. In this one year I’ve learned more about myself than any other. I understand my strengths, my weaknesses, my passions and my purpose more than I ever had before. Although I admit that I have few material achievements to my name as of yet, I feel like I’m on the verge of something big. In the near future, I plan to launch a web application which could change the way people do business on the internet. The application itself is complete, and all that’s left is to deal with legal and tax details. Even if this venture fails, I’ll have proof that says to potential employers and business partners that I’m a self-starter and that I follow through with my goals. That right there is worth more than any MBA.

What Are Your Excuses?

Hopefully it won’t take you as long as it did me to accept the Truth. The only way that I can think of to do this is to take a good look at your principles and ask yourself: “Am I really living in accordance with these principles?” If you aren’t, think  of the excuses you tell yourself in order to avoid them. The first step in shooting down your excuses is to know exactly what they are.  The moment you know your excuses and confront them  is the moment you accept the Truth, and will finally start living by the principles you’ve had all along.

Finding Happiness in Self-Employment: A Postal Employee Goes Rogue…in a good way

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This is a guest post by  Jennifer Monahan. Jennifer was kind enough to share with me her experiences in creating an ideal career for herself despite the uncertainty and risks that go with it. It’s stories like these that reflect the core of this website’s theme. If you have such a story to share, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Our readers would love to hear it.

I am a 16 year postal veteran.  For years, I worked behind the counter selling stamps in a small Florida town.  Who knows, I may have sold a postcard stamp to you or someone you know who was on vacation in the Sunshine State.

All those years I was selling stamps, I was looking for a new career, because I knew I wasn’t a “lifer”  in government work.  I was not going to put in 30 years and retire.  That’s what’s known as a delayed life plan, and I wanted nothing to do with it.  The photo of the lemonade stand on Kenji’s blog, Unready and Willing, looks just like the stand I set up when I was ten years old.  The photo sums up who I am, an entrepreneur at heart.

I’ve always had the drive and determination to work for myself, but it took years to figure out what that career would look like.   The long search was worth it.  I got answers and finally made a move.  It was a scary leap of faith to leave behind the benefits of a steady paycheck, paid vacations, health care, and sick leave, but I dropped the “golden handcuffs”  of a government job and became a freelance bookkeeper (Talk about being Unready and Willing!).  My motive to jump into self employment was to work when I wanted to and take time off when I needed it most.

How did I do it?  I asked myself the following questions:

  • What service can offer the community?
  • What am I already good at?
  • What do I already know how to do?
  • What am I genuinely interested in?

And then I listened and watched for the answers.

Through the years, I was learning about personal finance and investments to benefit my own financial situation.  I read books, publications, and attended those free seminars that accountants, stock brokers, and lawyers give to educate the public about investments, wills, trusts, and estate planning.  I applied what I learned to my own life with great success which gave me the confidence to share what I had learned with the community.

The first clue into my new career was revealed to me when a postal customer came to my counter and said, “My husband just died, and I don’t know how to handle the finances.  I have these stock certificates to send in (mailing them registered mail) and I don’t know what I’m doing.” In that moment, I realized I had  something of value to add to the lives of others.  I decided to become a private bookkeeper to the elderly.    My personal interests matched their personal needs, and I could help them get through a difficult time in their lives.

Eighteen months into my new career, things worked out so well, I took a two month trip to Australia over the turn of the millennium.  While on vacation, I kept a daily journal for the sole purpose of being able to revisit the journey long after the memories faded.

This journal soon turned into an outline for my first book, An American in Oz, and helped me segue into a career as an author.   My interests had moved beyond numbers, and friends and family suggested I write about my experience in the land downunder.  It was an idea I took seriously because: a) I love to write.  It’s something I’m already interested in, and b) I could reach a wider audience and experience another level of freedom as a published author.

Oftentimes, the answer to our deepest longing (What do I really want?) is right in front of us, so close we cannot see it, but when recognized, lives change.

An American in Oz was released on Australia Day 2010, January 26th, and I no longer work as a freelance bookkeeper.  Additional career opportunities are opening up now that the book is finished, and a wide range of groups are asking me to speak about careers, the writing process, and, of course, Australia.   Quitting my job at the post office was one of the best decisions I ever made.  Joining www.toastmasters.org several years ago was another good choice.  It helped me prepare for the speaking side of being a writer.  I continue to share what I’ve learned along the way, and while the subjects may change, the core desire to reach out remains the same.

I might have been Unready and Willing when I left the 9-5, but taking a leap of faith was the only direction to go.  Finding work that fulfills us is one of life’s greatest rewards.  I’ve come a long way from selling stamps, and every step led to where I am today.

Wherever you are in life, fellow adventurers, follow your hunches, trust your ideas, and recognize the answers when they show up.  They always do.  Continue to grow and learn and to find what makes you happy at every stage of life.  You have a destiny that is great!  And that’s the Truth with a capital T.

Jennifer Monahan: Author and Adventurer

To read more about how Jennifer transitioned from government employee to freelance bookkeeper, go to www.jennifermonahan.com Her story is told in the 11-page Introduction of the book An American in Oz: Discovering the Island Continent of Australia.  You can download the Introduction for free on her website.  No strings attached and no email address required.

If you’ve always wanted to go to Australia or know someone who does, check out www.AnAmericaninOz.com (The photo of the outback is worth the visit.)  An American in Oz is all about Australia from an American perspective and an intimate look at the largest island continent in the world.  It’s also a story about trusting life to unfold one day at a time through a “no plan” plan, because setting goals can be highly overrated.

You can also follow Jennifer on her blog at www.anamericaninoz.blogspot.com

The Self-Employed Mindset

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If you Google the words “How to become self-employed,” you’ll find a lot of advice about quitting your job, creating a plan for your own business, and of course, a few too good to be true pyramid schemes that promise a six figure income in just half a year. Most of these blog articles and MLM pitch pages fail to recognize, however, that not having an employer is only part of what it means to be self-employed.

In fact, all that you need to become self employed is to adopt the self-employed mindset. Adopting this mindset means making the realization that you are already self-employed, that you are, as Brian Tracy says, the “CEO of your own personal service corporation.” You may sell your services temporarily to an employer in return for a paycheck, but ultimately you have the power to decide who you sell your services to, and for how long. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a soldier in the business suit brigade, or a work-at-home T-shirt wearing renegade. You always have the choice to do what you want to do.

If you wish to adopt the self-employed mindset and you’re currently selling your services full-time to a company, it’s important that you yourself these questions:

1. What do I offer my employer?

  • Do I help increase revenues, reduce costs, or ensure that operations run more smoothly?
  • Can other people at my salary level offer more value than I do now?

2. What does my employer offer me?

  • Is my ability to contribute limited by my need for a large company’s infrastructure? Do I need expensive lab equipment or access to my company’s intellectual property in order to contribute value?
  • How much am I getting paid? Are other people who contribute the same level of value getting paid more or less than I am?
  • Will the success I achieve in my current job help me toward achieving my long-term goals, or is it irrelevant?
  • Do I have autonomy at work?
  • Does my work help me grow?
  • Does my work have meaning?

3. Does what I offer my employer match what my employer offers me?

Keeping the Balance

Remember: you’re the one who chooses your employer, not the other way around. You choose to gain the skills necessary to entice an employer to pay for your services. As a seller of your services, you must decide how long and for what reasons you’re selling yourself to your employer for. You must ensure that you’re getting what you deserve from your employer. You must also ensure you’re meeting your obligations and contributing value to your company. If these two are not in balance, and you are not aware of the imbalance, you risk getting fired or squandering opportunities that you never knew existed.

When your Contribution is Inadequate
It can be difficult to admit to yourself that you’re doing your job poorly, but the fact of the matter is there is some work that we just aren’t suited to do. After all, no one would buy computer software from Heinz and no one would buy ketchup from Microsoft.

We all have unique and natural talents, and oftentimes the work our employers choose for us turns out to be a poor application of those talents.  Don’t  be ashamed of your poor performance, but admit to yourself that you are indeed performing poorly. Once you make this admission, you’ll be much more open to the options available to you.

If your work is inadequate but you believe you have the potential to improve, then by all means do so. Take time out of working hours to study and improve your skills. Spend time thinking about ways you could do your work more efficiently rather than doubling your efforts in areas that have proven to yield poor results.

If study doesn’t help, you’re probably much better off doing something else. This doesn’t mean, however, that you have to change jobs. You could, for example, negotiate with your boss to change the scope of your responsibilities so that you’ll be doing something more in line with your natural talents. Negotiations like this are often most effective when you deflect attention away from your poor performance and sell your employer on your greater potential contribution doing some other kind of work.

If there is no way you can change the scope of your responsibilities or no way that you can gain enough skill in the right amount of time, you can always look for another job.  It’s a good idea to explore opportunities at other companies the moment you realize you may not be able to make the best possible contribution in your current job. Changing your job is a big step, and should only be taken should all other avenues be exhausted (despite what headhunters may tell you). Sometimes, however, jumping ship is your best option.

Finally, if opportunities at other companies don’t seem like a good solution, it’s probably a good time to start thinking about either starting your own business or changing your career focus altogether. Both of these options entail significant risks, but risk is the price you pay for freedom. And if your contribution is inadequate, chances are you won’t be risking much.

When your Reward is Inadequate
When your employer doesn’t pay you enough for what you do, it’s important to take advantage of the situation as best you can.

First, it’s important to gauge your current market value: the salary that other employers will be willing to pay for your services. Headhunters will usually be happy to provide you with this kind of information. They’ll tell you whether other people doing your kind of work at your level of responsibility are making more money than you are. If that’s the case, they’ll do their best to arrange meetings with the other companies who are willing to offer more.

When you get down to it though, money is hardly the best possible reward for your services. You don’t have to look very far to find a significant amount of evidence that shows money doesn’t buy happiness. The general consensus seems to be is that once you’ve got the basic survival stuff like food, water, and shelter taken care of, money may elevate your happiness level a little, but not very much.

Considering this evidence, it makes sense that when it comes to work satisfaction, other factors should take precedence over money. Factors like:

  • Autonomy – The freedom to do what you want, when you want. The ability to make decisions without having to defer to someone else.
  • Growth – Doing work that helps you become a more effective person.
  • Meaning – Doing work that has personal significance to you.

To me, these factors are much more important than money when it comes to making career decisions. If I had the choice to choose between any of these and more money, money would lose every time.

Even when you think you might deserve one, stop yourself before asking for a pay raise. Why not ask for an autonomy raise, a growth raise, or a meaning raise first? See if you can leverage your boss’ high opinion of you to negotiate a situation where you have more of these three things (and maybe a little more pay on top). If not, it’s probably best that you look for a new job or start your own business. Large corporations don’t tolerate being underpaid for the goods and services they sell. Why should you?

Bringing it into Focus

Having a self-employed mindset is vital to bring clarity to your career goals. When you see yourself as the CEO of a corporation of one, your perspective is no longer limited by the rules set down by your employer, or by anyone else for that matter. You’ll be able to realistically assess your career situation and know which actions you’ll need to take in order to increase both your earning power and your happiness. Becoming self-employed is something that you really can do today.

Fun With Affirmations! *OR* Why You Can’t Become a Space Vampire.

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In his audio series, The Psychology of Selling, Brian Tracy tells the story of a top salesman who attributed his success to just one thing: affirmations. Just before the salesman went to meet with a client he would repeat to himself: “I am the best! I am the best! I am the greatest salesperson in this industry and in this country! I am the very very best!”

As a headhunter in Tokyo, I took this story at face value. Every time before meeting a candidate or client, I would repeat the same affirmations again and again until I felt sufficiently pumped up for the meeting.

These affirmations seemed to have helped when I was in a good mood, but  when I wasn’t, the words seemed hollow, and often made me feel worse off than I had before. There was always a voice in the back of my head that said:  how can I keep fooling myself?

Apparently, I wasn’t alone in my feeling that affirmations didn’t work. According to some recent research, affirmations only work for people who believe in them in the first place. If your fundamental beliefs run contrary to what you’re affirming,  the affirmations will have no effect at all.

But don’t take my word for it, why not try it yourself? Go ahead and try this affirmation below. Don’t worry…nobody’s watching except ceiling cat.

I am a space vampire! I am an ancient undead being from the void who can swim in the vacuum of space. I thrive off the blood of unwitting space adventurers!

After saying these words a couple times, do you feel particularly bloodthirsty? Do you feel confident that you can breathe in the vacuum of space? Does your reflection seem a little less clear when you look in the mirror?

If you  said “yes” to any of these, let’s just say that I’m happy I’m typing this miles away from you with a garlic wreath around my neck.

I’m assuming that most of you didn’t feel a single bit more vampirish after saying this affirmation. The thought that you’re a space vampire is so ridiculous that saying it might make you snicker a little, but not much more than that. It’s so removed from your current perception of reality that you could never take it seriously, even if you say it a million times.

The same thing goes for positive affirmations. If you say a positive affirmation but your beliefs run contrary to it, it’ll most likely have the same effect as saying the affirmation above. If you hold the limiting belief that nobody likes you and you continue to repeat the affirmation that everyone likes you, you’ll get depressed telling yourself something that you don’t believe in.

Most of us don’t want to admit to ourselves that we have limiting beliefs. We don’t want to admit that we believe we are unimportant, that we believe we’re not good enough, that we believe that nobody likes us.  We don’t want to admit to ourselves that we have these beliefs because we know that on an intellectual level they aren’t true. We may have limiting beliefs, but we tend to deny they exist because we know they’re illogical, negative, and just plain wrong.

If we continue to deny that our limiting beliefs exist, however, they will persist. It’s important that we recognize and accept that we have these beliefs in order to get rid of them.

How can we admit to ourselves that we have limiting beliefs?  The Lefkoe Method, which is a system for eliminating limiting beliefs (say that ten times fast!), suggests using a negative affirmation.  Negative affirmations work in very much the same way that positive affirmations do; if you don’t believe in them, they have no power over you, and will feel just as empty as the space vampire affirmation.  If you feel confident that you have no limiting beliefs, then you should feel no sense of discomfort when saying any of the following affirmations aloud:

Nobody Likes Me
I’m an idiot
I’m not important
I’m not strong enough
Nothing’s worth the effort
I’ll never win a hot dog eating contest

If you felt  a sense of unease saying any of the above affirmations, that’s a sign that you’ve been harboring that particular limiting belief. You may not want to have that belief, and you may know it’s wrong on an intellectual level, but you still have it.

Although it might not feel great to know that you have the belief that nobody likes you or that nothing’s worth the effort, the good news is is that you’ve already taken the first step in overcoming the belief: admitting you have it.

It is important to remember that you created this belief, and since you had the power to create it, you most certainly have the power to let it go. Every time you have a negative thought all you have to do is remember the limiting belief that is the source of that negative thought. When you do, the thought will lose its substance.

My Personal Experience With the Lefkoe Method

When I tried out the Lefkoe Method, the limiting belief that I worked on was :  I’m not important. On an intellectual level I believed that I was important, that I could do anything, and could change the world, but after I said “I’m not important” and felt the discomfort that came from saying it, I realized that I still, at a subconscious level, believed that I wasn’t important.

I then began to see how this limiting belief had affected me in the past. Every time I wasn’t invited to a party or a client didn’t return an email I would instantly have a negative thought that sprung from this belief. Every time people celebrated my achievements I dismissed them as flattery, thinking that these people probably wanted something out of me.

I didn’t want to have these negative thoughts. I knew they were irrational, but they just kept coming to me like a reflex.

After using the method, it feels as though this belief has gone completely. When people ignore me, my explanation for why they do so is much more positive than before. Instead of thinking “That person must think I’m not important.” I now think “Maybe he/she was busy that day” or, “Maybe that’s how he/she treats everyone.” Conversely, when I receive a complement, I find that I can accept it much more easily because I know, at a deep level, that I’m important enough to receive complements. As far as my sense of self-importance is concerned, I no longer have  to force myself to try to see things in a positive light. I just do.

Now, when I say the words “I’m not important,” they seem as hollow and empty to me as “I’m Space Vampire.”  Conversely, when I say the words “I am important,” I get a little boost of positive energy because I actually believe the words. No longer do the words feel hollow.

If you have 30 minutes to spare, I highly encourage you to try out the Lefkoe Method yourself . The web page this links to turned me off at first because it asked me for my email address without giving any indication of the value I’d receive for doing so, but after reading other testimonials across the web I decided to try it out.

I must say that I was pleasantly surprised how much value they’re giving away for free. In fact, just by knowing how the method works for one limiting belief you can work to eliminate many others without buying their full program. It makes me wonder how these guys stay in business.

How to Sell Ideas

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Why should you learn how to sell ideas? Can’t you just write and let the ideas sell themselves?

It’d be nice, but in most cases you can’t.

It’s not enough for ideas to spread solely based on their merits. There are countless writers, artists, university professors, and inventors who devote their whole lives to creating useful, profound, and interesting ideas. Despite all this effort,however, few of their ideas seem to catch on. So, if ideas cannot rely solely on content to survive, what else is needed?

The answer is simple: ideas are products just like anything on the supermarket shelf, and you need to sell ideas in order for them to spread.

One sales strategy that holds many similarities to the strategy of selling ideas is the multi-level-marketing (MLM) approach. Although MLM has been much maligned as a kind of scam that’s only profitable for the people on the top of the pyramid, when you’re selling your original ideas, you’re almost always starting at the top.

Ideas are bought and sold through the intangible currencies of understanding and acceptance. If you buy an idea, that is, if you understand and accept it, you’ll most likely tell your friends about it. If you’re a writer you may write about it. If you’re a singer you may sing about it. If you come to completely embrace the idea, you essentially become a sales rep for that idea, passing it on to as many people as you possibly can so that they can buy it and pass it on.

The rewards you get when you sell ideas are often intangible at first. You get credibility, authority, respect, and recognition. These intangible assets can help you increase your blog traffic, book sales, or the amount of money you can charge per word as a freelance writer. Even though the monetary rewards aren’t immediate, they will come as a result of the intangible rewards. In this way we can see how the business of selling ideas is very much a business, and it should be treated in a similar way.

In order to sell ideas effectively, you can’t just focus on content. As far as selling is concerned, the packaging can be just as important as what’s in the package. Just as a bag of potato chips needs a label to entice us and tell us what we’re going to get should we buy it, an idea needs a label as well. It needs a meme. There are many definitions for a meme, but for the purpose of labeling an idea I’ve defined it as a phrase of three words or less that can fit onto the space of a gum wrapper or roll smoothly off a cable news pundit’s tongue, yet still be true to the core of the idea.

Some of the best ideas out there are very complex and unwieldy, and as such they can be difficult to distribute from one tier to the next in the MLM pyramid. Complex ideas without a label, without some phrase that brilliantly sums it all up, are seldom passed on because of the sheer effort it would take to communicate the idea and get someone to understand it. Because of this, less people are likely to become sales reps of the idea no matter how brilliant they think the idea might be.

Ideas with a great label, on the other hand, have an amazing way of infecting the public consciousness. Consider how many laypersons with only a cursory knowledge of molecular physics might talk about string theory. The phrase “string theory” has done much to crystallize an incredibly complex idea, even to the point where many people who don’t understand it fully have become sales reps for the idea. In this way, a label can do much to help people sell ideas without them having to explain the idea from start to finish.

The memefication of an idea is also important to preserve an idea’s integrity. If, for example, you write a great article about some social phenomenon without giving it a good label, chances are that not only will the essence of your idea be corrupted telephone game style, but it’ll be difficult for people to figure out who the original author of the idea was. It’s even possible that it won’t be you who is credited for coming up with the idea, but one of your “salespeople” down the pyramid who found your idea and repackaged it for easier distribution.

In order to market and sell ideas effectively then, a writer must learn to master the principles of Idea Chain Management. Idea Chain Management is the process involved when you work to effectively package, distribute, and sell ideas. If you do it well, not only will you get your idea to more people, but more people will become sale reps of the idea.

On top of this, your idea could be picked up by someone down the line who can sell ideas better than you. One of your sales reps may write a book that makes your idea famous. Just like in the MLM scheme where the vendor makes a share of the money from the sale and kicks some of it back up the pyramid, you, as the creator of the meme or buzzword that the book was based on, will naturally get to bask in some of the publicity that the book generated. People who loved the successful book that popularized your idea will naturally want to know about you, the idea’s creator, and whatever you’ve written.

The Principles of Idea Chain Management

Mastering Idea Chain Management is essential if you want to learn how to sell ideas and how to market them, so I’ve come up with some guidelines.

The goals of Idea Chain Management are threefold:

  1. You want to get your idea to as many people as possible.
  2. You want to preserve the integrity of the idea as it gets distributed.
  3. You want to make sure that you get the credit for coming up with the idea.

The first step of Idea Chain Management is to come up with a meme or buzzword that would best sum up your idea:

  • It should be three words or less. The shorter the better. For single-word memes you can make a portmanteau by fusing two words together.
  • It should be completely original.
  • It should be faithful to your original idea.
  • It should evoke an image or emotion.
  • It should be intriguing.
  • It should be quotable.
  • It should make people want to Google it.
  • It should sum up and clarify what people are thinking about at a subconscious level.

The second step is to secure authorship of the idea.

  • Google your meme or buzzword to make sure there aren’t any incidences of it on the entire web. If there are incidences of your meme with an entirely different idea behind it, that’s OK. I did find one page on the internet that used the phrase “Idea Chain Management” but in an entirely different context.
  • Before you publish the article or book or blog entry where your meme makes its first appearance, make sure you register domain names with the meme in it. Before even writing the rough draft of the article I registered the www.ideachainmanagement.com and www.idea-chain-management.com domain names.
  • Set up Google alerts with the meme name to see how it’s spreading on the ‘net. Make sure that people are giving you credit for coming up with it.

The third step is to do your part to market and sell your meme.

  • Use your meme as often as you can. Use it whenever it applies to the topic of your writing, the subject of an email, or even to a conversation you might be having. Use it use it use it. Just like any product, the more you try to sell ideas the more they’ll be bought.
  • Keep track of your most successful memes, the most quoted and the most written about, and capitalize on the success. Write more articles that apply to topics covered by your more successful memes and less articles for the less successful ones.
  • Don’t try to memify every idea that you have, only the very good ones. Too much memefication can be a bad thing and make your writing seem gimmicky. It’ll also diminish the importance of your best memes.

Memefication is Not Easy

After trying a little memefication of my own I realized that it can be just as much work to label and package an idea as it is to come up with the idea itself. It actually took me longer to come up with the phrase “Idea Chain Management” than it did for me to write this article. I had already come up with the concept of working to sell ideas effectively by repackaging them for easier distribution, but I figured that since this whole article was about making memes and using them to sell ideas, I should come up with one of my own. I spent nearly five hours going through my thesaurus looking for good synonyms for words like “ideas” or “packaging.” I also did a million searches on an online rhyme dictionary to see if I could pull a clever pun or portmanteau out of a hat.

One thing that was incredibly helpful in coming up with the meme was discussing the idea with a friend and bouncing meme ideas back and forth. It led me to believe that meme-making, as opposed to writing, is more a social activity than a solitary one. Discussing possible memes with a friend helps you explore the same idea from two different perspectives at the same time. It can make it much easier to distill your idea and find its three-word-or-less essence.

Since the process takes quite a lot of time, save your memefication for your best work. If you have a concept that’s truly great, you may want to pull out the stops and consider implementing some Idea Chain Management. If your idea is half-baked, it probably won’t benefit much from memefication because in the end it’s the contents, not the labels, that sell ideas.

Mini-Memes

Will the concept of Idea Chain Management sell? I don’t have a clue. Just because I put the time and effort into naming the idea doesn’t mean that the idea will catch fire. I’m confident, however, that using the words “Idea Chain Management” will probably take the idea much further than just letting it sit label-less on my website and hoping someone likes it.

Although I feel the Idea Chain Management meme will do well, I doubt that it’ll become a household phrase. It simply isn’t relevant to a general audience–few memes and buzzwords are. There are always degrees of distribution. Take a look at the Wikipedia list of buzzwords and you’re bound to find a few that you’re not familiar with. Some memes and buzzwords are only destined to be mini-memes. They might not enjoy much mainstream coverage, but they can remain very active within certain interest groups.

The concept of “Learned Helplessness,” coined by Psychologist Martin Seligman, for example, is a very simple meme that sums up the idea that people aren’t born helpless, but that they learn to be helpless. This meme doesn’t enjoy much mainstream popularity, but it’s a big buzzword in the personal development community. If you’re a personal development enthusiast, it won’t take you very long for you to bump into this phrase. The more you bump into it and the more you see it in connection with Seligman and his book, Learned Optimism, the more you’ll want to read the book. This mini-meme is one of the factors that has led Seligman’s book to be one of the biggest bestsellers in the field. However, I probably would’ve gone my whole life not knowing about it if I hadn’t been interested in personal development in the first place.

Become the Main Authority

Becoming a master of Idea Chain Management can be very helpful to sell ideas. When you give a brand or trademark to your idea, you become the undisputed creator of it. Instead of being some lowly distributor somewhere in the middle of the MLM pyramid, you jump straight to the top of heap as the idea creator, and as such you’ll be looked to as the main authority behind it. If your meme spreads to a million pages on Google and you decide to write a book about the idea behind it, how long do you think it’ll take before you get your bestseller?