Archives for October 2011

ETA: At the current rate, I will reach 400,000 contributors in about 300 years. While I’m optimistic I will live that long, I can’t bank on it. Therefore, I will end my blogging hiatus satisfied that 26 wonderful people helped and many many more helped spread the word. Thank you!!! 🙂

This morning I saw an amazing story – the kind of story that puts everything into perspective and makes me want to get up and do something equally awesome.

The story was about a woman named Luma Mufleh. Born in Jordan, Luma came to the US, attended Smith College, and then got a teaching job outside of Atlanta, Georgia. A wrong turn took her to an apartment complex where barefoot children were playing soccer on a makeshift field. It was a scene Luma had seen in many other places in the world, but not in the US. As it turned out, the children were all refugees from countries that had been torn apart by war and violence.

What began as Luma bringing the kids a new soccer ball to play with evolved into the creation of a Fugees (for Refugees) soccer team. That evolved into an academy that helps the children in school, because no one was paying attention to the fact that these kids couldn’t read or write in their own language, not to mention in English.

Now, Luma wants to create a permanent home for her kids called the Fugee Village. It will be a school, a home, and a place for these kids to safely establish themselves.

But creating something like that needs money. Lots of money. And the Fugees are not funded by the government.

The minimum recommended donation is $12, because $12/week is enough to help one student get tutoring for a week. If 400,000 people donated $12, Luma would be able to build her village. How many people in the online world have that many people following them on Twitter right now?

I think this is entirely doable.

So, I’m going to leave this post up until we have gotten that many people to donate. I don’t need to write posts. There are plenty of people doing that. This is more important to me than any other message I could put here.

All you have to do is let me know you donated – you don’t have to tell me the amount. You can comment here or anywhere else you know me, and I’ll keep a running tally.

Let’s change the world, starting with one little village in the state of Georgia.

I am donating $12. You can donate here. Or visit the Fugees wishlist for in-kind donations, including clothing and soccer equipment. We’ll certainly count those contributions too!

Tally of contributors: 26

Image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/falto

There are two pictures that are circulating of Steve Jobs that still really affect me. The first is of him and his wife after his final Keynote address, and the second is a picture that was released of him about a month before he passed away. He was barely able to stand. It was shocking.

There’s been a lot of talk about Jobs over the last 2 weeks. He has swiftly been elevated to a heroic status, and in many ways I suppose it is well deserved. Ultimately, Jobs was a human being, but there are a few things he did not do that would have been so completely human. So completely understandable. And yet, he refrained.

Steve Jobs could have told the world a few years ago about the depth and severity of his illness. He could have said, “Hey, I’m on borrowed time here.”

Steve Jobs could have used his illness to sell more products. He could have said that a certain percentage of all sales would go towards pancreatic cancer research and support organizations.

Steve Jobs could have marched his family out and said, “Hey, I’m going to have to leave these beloved people a lot sooner than I would like. Buy my company’s products so I can rest assured they will remain in good stead financially.”

All of these things would have been understandable. They would have been forgivable, certainly. Maybe barely noticed had he walked that path, that ever so human path, of wanting sympathy and attention.

Instead, Steve Jobs got angry when people wanted him to discuss his health. He kept it as low-key as possible. He diverted the focus away from him and away from his situation and reflected everything outward, all towards his company, his product, and his customers.

As you contemplate your online content and what you are putting out there, consider this very unexpected path that Steve Jobs traveled. Consider how he recoiled from attention-getting tactics and merely worked on building his legacy.

Which path do you want to travel?

Image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Mattox

Alright, confession time. I admit that I am a sucker for Biggest Loser. I went through an Oprah phase back in college. Dr. Phil became my companion for awhile when I was in grad school. I know the jargon is what I’m trying to tell you. Here’s what I have learned from all of these years of …  professional study.

If you can’t make the time and effort to be good to yourself, nothing else will work for you. All of the advice that people will throw at you won’t stick. Why? It takes a willingness to do something for yourself to do all of that stuff people talk about. If you want to improve your health by exercising and eating better, it takes time. If you want to accomplish a specific goal, it takes a dedication to yourself and your wishes.

This does not mean that it always needs to be “me me me.” It does not mean you need to be selfish. But sometimes, regularly, you need to stop and ask yourself, “Hey,what do I want? What do I need, more to the point?”

The first step in making a better world is making a better, stronger you. After all, you need to be on pretty solid ground before you can pull someone else up, right?

But I don’t have time to be “nice!”

Today, Chris Brogan wrote a post called “Haven’t had time to blog.” It seems to be in direct juxtaposition, in some ways, with the idea of doing stuff for you. But this hasn’t just started, and it’s not a function of the online world. A few years ago I was talking to a crafty friend of mine and we noted that we both can’t just sit and watch television. Part of our crafting addiction was that it gave us something to do while we relaxed and watched television. We both had been engrained with the idea that sitting down on your butt with a bowl of popcorn and a movie is a bad, unproductive, useless way to spend your time.

Where does this pressure come from?

Why do we feel like doing something purely for the enjoyment of it is a poor way to spend our time? Sure, it’s not saving the world if you go sit on a beach for a week, but how recharged do you feel when you get back to work? And okay, maybe going to your favorite bakery and buying yourself that creme brulee won’t help you achieve that weight loss goal, but gosh darn it, sometimes you need something that tastes of heaven! When did being kind to ourselves become a bad thing? When did it become wasteful to sit and vege out or do something distinctly unproductive from the world’s perspective?

I say, heck, let the blog go for a day. Maybe a week. Hit that book you’ve been wanting to read. That one that has nothing to do with your business. Catch up on your favorite television show. And just sit there and enjoy it. Turn all of the lights off and absorb an entertaining experience. It’s not sinful. It’s a rebuild mode. For a very human computer.

So when was the last time you did something nice for yourself?

If you can’t answer this question easily or without too much thought, we know what we need to work on first.

I have a confession to make. Yesterday’s post about feeling like maybe blogging isn’t the best way to use my time – it wasn’t the 100% whole story. Since I’ve always been pretty darned truthful with you, I thought I should fill in the rest of the story.

See, something really been bothering me for the last month and a half. And I would like to talk to you about it.

Right around Labor Day, a very well-respected man named Trey Pennington took his own life. Friends of his had been seeing all of the signs that Trey was in danger, but he seemed to be getting better. Those of us who did not know him well found out that he had tried to take his life once before, earlier in the summer. These were shocking revelations, because from my point of view, all I knew of Trey was that he was well-respected, well-liked, and well-admired.

Even though I did not know Trey well, I was quite taken aback by his passing. He was one of those people I had always wanted to get to know better, and I figured, as we so often do, that I’d have that chance. However, since I had only exchanged one very brief set of ideas with Trey over my year in the online world, I didn’t figure that any outpouring of grief on my own behalf would really make sense. I reached out to those who had been true friends of Trey’s and offered my support to them.

Then, two things I had thought were unthinkable happened. First, people started trying to ride Trey’s death as a way to get more traffic to their blogs. And second, people showed, in some situations, such a shocking lack of care for the people around them that I considered leaving the online world – it had become a  dirty and marred place for me. It felt like I was sitting in a really muddy reservoir.

The very worst thing I witnessed during the week or 2 that followed was an exchange on a blog post where Trey’s brother was actually popping in from time to time. He was preparing the funeral arrangements for his brother, and what met him was a person who was hurling accusations at Trey and at his friends. Essentially, the person was saying that Trey got what he deserved. An ugly, divisive exchange of words followed in the comment section, all of which Trey’s brother was witness to. All while he was preparing to bury his brother.

Have you ever been out in a restaurant or just walking around town and the person you’re with is acting like a complete idiot? You kind of want to pretend you don’t know them, right?

That’s the way I felt about witnessing all of that ugliness. I still would have been upset about it, regardless, because it was gratuitously unnecessary, but the fact that Trey’s brother had to see all of that, it just made me feel ashamed on behalf of the online world that I am involved in.

To be 100% honest, I still have not really gotten back to the love of the online world that I had before that moment. Every ugly spat I see just adds to that one big mess. And it makes me feel ashamed.

What can we do to get that loving feeling back?

Of course, there is a lot about the online world that I love. The percentage of stuff I enjoy outweighs, but a long shot, the stuff that gets me down.

So when you are feeling kind of burnt out on this here world, how can you get that love for online communication back? The easiest answer is to concentrate on the people, at least for me. How could I dislike something or be ashamed of something that ended up in me meeting people like Sherree Worrell, my 12 most friends, powerful women like Carol Roth, or super duper spitfires like Lisa Barone and Gini Dietrich? How can I hate something that allows me to talk to people from the Philippines (hi Danny), Malaysia (hi Jan), Australia (Hi Sandra), and Canada (hi everyone else!)?

Beyond that though, you can confront whatever is getting you down. In this case, it was utter thoughtlessness, rudeness, incivility, and crudeness that made me feel yucky about the online world. So what am I going to do about it? I’m going to work hard to try to show people that social media can be used for a lot of neat things, none of which revolve around making other people feel poopy. There’s a whole brave new world out there of ways we can use this technology to make the world a better place, and that excitement…that thought…that is what makes me proud to be a part of this world.

What do you think? Can we wipe those shadows and cobwebs away and make the online world shine?

Image by Shannon Pifko. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/SEPpic