Archives for March 2012

Come on in and take a seat. I’m going to tell you a story.

Since January 1st, 2012, I have been on a mission. I decided that I was going to set the extremely ambitious goal of finishing the Akron Marathon in late September. Now, that’s not saying I’m going to run the whole thing or that I’m going to even try to be competitive. I just want to start at the starting point and still be alive at the finish line. No one could be more shocked at this goal than me. I’ve always HATED running. Back when I was a kid and we’d have to run a mile in gym class, I’d stop a few minutes in. I wouldn’t even try to walk it because it felt embarrassing. I would just tell the teacher my side hurt (which was true) and I’d sit it out. But my goal for 2012 was set. I was going to get in shape and I was going to do a marathon.

I’ve been training pretty darned aggressively all year long. There is a certain pattern to the work-outs. One week emphasizes cross-training a bit more, one week concentrates on strength training a bit more. I’ve gotten to the point where I can walk/run 6 miles and not completely collapse in agony. All well and good, certainly.

Last week, the plan was that I was going to go up to the art museum with my parents, and we were going to get a pretty early start. I was slotted to do 6 miles and I knew I probably wouldn’t do it after walking around a museum all day, so I got up early and gave myself an hour and a half to complete my goal. It was pretty chilly, rather rainy, but I had my eyes on my mission, so I went on ahead. Things went pretty swimmingly too, till about 2.5 miles. I was taking a walking break and reached a point in the lap I was in where the ground was pretty darned slick from the rain. I was trying to walk fast so as not to lose time, but I thought I was being careful. Suddenly, I found myself on my right knee, my right hand flat on the ground, and my water bottle rolling away as if to avoid being collateral damage.

At that point, I felt rather pouty. Not only does falling down hard kind of hurt, but this was really messing up my whole plan. What if I couldn’t finish? What if it took me too long and I threw off the whole day? I got up and finished up pretty much on time. I did not really take inventory of whether I had injured myself. There was no time. I had my eyes on my mission.

Fast forward to almost a week later and I am still suffering from the ramifications of that fall. It seems I put my right arm out of whack a bit. My left knee is really sore, so I’m thinking I twisted it. Because I didn’t stop and evaluate my situation after falling, I probably made things worse for myself. But I was on a mission, and I wanted to complete it.

Is your mission blinding you?

In the online world, we see all kinds of advice for entrepreneurs. Don’t worry about failing because you can learn so much, right? Keep plugging ahead. You always have your kids but your business needs to be nurtured. That company needs to grow. You need to meet your goal for success, right? You’re on a mission, and you want to complete it.

But what are you missing along the way?

Maybe a really valuable team member resigned to go somewhere else and you’re finding it difficult to replace everything they did. But you keep plugging away. Maybe you had the worst month in company history, but you can’t take the time to figure out what happened. You’ll just beat it next month, that’s all. You have to. It’s part of your mission. Maybe you suffered a PR disaster. But you don’t have time to go back and fix that. You’ll catch it on the flip side, when you take a breather. Right now you’re plugging ahead. You’re on a mission.

As long as you keep on running, a little spill here or there won’t matter, right?

Except one day you realize your company’s knee is twisted or your own health is deteriorating, and you realize, “Huh, actually…I can’t keep going on the way I’ve been going. I’ve got some real problems here.”

The mission isn’t everything

Having goals is great. I’m nothing if I’m not a goal-oriented person. And being dedicated to your goals- hey, I’d have it no other way.  But sometimes there are things more important than that myopic mission view. My knee and my wrist are telling me I need to take a short break from my mission before I do worse harm to myself. What is your company (or your life) telling you? What pitfalls are you setting up for yourself as you walk past danger signs towards your one and only end-goal? What weaknesses could be fixed if you just took the time to stop and fix them? Or just to evaluate them?

Is your mission blinding you? Is it time for you to take a step back and evaluate where you are?

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cori_m/6596284261/ via Creative Commons

Everyone these days seems to have a lot of advice about how you can find success in the online world. There’s advice about how to create compelling content. There’s advice on how to get the best results from Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook, and Pinterest. There’s advice on how to make loads of money using affiliate marketing, and there’s advice on how to create a compelling email campaign.

The best advice I have to offer can be boiled down to two words. Two small words.

Don’t lie.

Every problem I’ve seen in the online world could have been avoided had the folks involved heeded this advice.

Don’t lie.

Don’t tell me you’re interested in community building if you’re having someone else communicate for you.

Don’t say you’ll do something if you have no intention of doing it.

Don’t say you like someone only to turn around and bad-mouth them to other people.

Don’t lie to yourself about what you know or about what you are capable of, and don’t lie to other people about that either.

Don’t offer false advice because you don’t have the real answer.

Don’t offer advice that you don’t follow.

Don’t lie.

Even if the truth may hurt. Even if you are afraid people might think less of you. Even if the lie is so much more attractive.

Don’t lie to me. Don’t lie to other people.

And most of all, don’t lie to yourself.

That is the most straight path to online success and contentment I can think of.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/juehuayin/4654551155/ via Creative Commons

In September of 2010, the news came that a promising Rutgers student named Tyler Clementi had committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington bridge. The news at the time tied his death to some actions of his roommate, who had set up a webcam, caught Clementi engaging in homosexual activities with said webcam, then tweeting about what Clementi was doing. Clementi said goodbye via his Facebook page. It seemed like the whole case was something new for the world of social media to worry about – the use of social media networking sites by bullies at all age levels. More and more stories started surfacing about children who were horrifically bullied and abused online to the point where they decided to take their own lives.

This past week, Clementi’s roommate, Dharun Ravi, was found guilty of several different faults, including invasion of privacy and tampering with evidence (he went back and tried to delete some of the tweets he had sent out about Clementi and his webcam). Ravi will be sentenced on May 21st.

Here’s the thing. Even though the story originally was framed as a sort of “the evils of social media” story, I’m not 100% sure that’s really the main story. Now, it’s great that the dangers of social media were introduced, but if you look at the story as it was told during the trial, most of Ravi’s actions could have been carried out before the advent of Twitter. Indeed, many of his actions could have been carried out before webcams.

The lack of privacy in college

Here’s the odd reality about living in a dorm – you are sharing space with another person whom you may not know at all, and the space you are in may only be 20 feet square or so. You have enough room for the beds, the desks, maybe a mini fridge, and that’s about it. You shower with everyone in your hall in a lot of cases. To put it mildly, privacy is something you learn to live without during your college years. As fate would have it, these years are the years when you might need your privacy the most. It is during these years that people begin to identify themselves as individuals separate from their parents and families. They begin to explore their sexuality and all sorts of other things. Life can start to get messy, and just at that point, you’re shuffled into a tiny living area with no dividing door or curtain.

When I was in college, we didn’t have Twitter or Facebook. AOL IM was still pretty magnificent as technology went. Our campus “broadcast” system was also mind-blowingly exciting. You could broadcast a message to everyone in your dorm with one simple click. Wow! But a case like Clementi’s still easily could have happened. The walls of our rooms weren’t exactly soundproof. You saw who came into a room and who came out. It wasn’t rocket science to figure out what had happened. Add to that the intense desire to gossip, juvenile jealousies, and general twenty-something craziness and there was plenty of fertile ground for drama of the most dire kind. In fact, during my freshman year, when I lived in an all girls dorm, one woman in particular was often singled out and made fun of because other women assumed she was gay.

Cutting to the core

Perhaps the main role social media played in the events surrounding Tyler Clementi’s death is that instead of just broadcasting his actions to a group of friends or to a dorm, Ravi, by using Twitter, was essentially broadcasting something veyr personal to everyone in the world who could see his tweets. This amplification of what could easily happen on any campus in the world is certainly a problem, but to my mind the priority remains the bullying itself. The webcam is something that existed beyond the realms of social media. The sense of discomfort Ravi clearly felt that homosexual relations were going on in a room he also lived in is something that we should talk to our kids about. And of course, there is the question as to why Tyler Clementi’s wish to have a new roommate after he discovered Ravi’s actions was not granted. Maybe college dorm counselors need to be trained in new ways when it comes to intervening in complex situations like the one Clementi and Ravi were involved in.

None of these things corresponds directly to social media though. Social Media is merely the amplifier of offline actions.

I am not sorry that Clementi’s death caught so much attention in the online world. I am not sorry that his tragic case made people question whether social media is truly safe for our young people to use. I’m not sorry that the case raised questions like social media privacy – when should a parent stop monitoring their child’s social media world?

But I think there are OTHER issues that may be just as weighty. Is there a better way to house students on college campuses? Is there something amiss in our society that Ravi could put up a webcam and not think he was invading anyone’s privacy because the webcam was up in *his* room?

We are living in complex times, and our young people seem to be in danger of bearing the brunt of it. That is the overriding concern. Social Media is just a small piece of the puzzle.

Do you agree?

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dborman2/3258371445/ via Creative Commons