What do you do when you’ve lost faith?
Perhaps it’s lost faith in your religion, in the spiritual practices that once brought you comfort..
Perhaps it’s lost faith in your community, in the people around you that once inspired you.
Perhaps it’s lost faith in yourself, looking in the public or private mirror, seeing less of what’s supposed to be there.
How do you recover your faith? How do you rebuild that energy, that belief, that conviction, the passion that drove you to impossible ends, forcing the very gossamer clouds to crystallize into bridges to the stars through your will alone?
Losing faith is losing light, losing illumination, losing your way. All seems to be darkness around you. Confusion, despair, depression, forsaken. We hope for a helping hand or someone else’s light, and for a short time, a friend may help us find the path, but darkness inevitably returns. How do you find the light that you know used to be there?
Faith, light, and hope come from within us. We lose our faith when we lose our will to search, to quest, to seek out more, to be more than we are and closer to who we can be. An apathetic jeweler who loses the will to polish a gem ends up with a pile of only rough stones, barely hinting at their potential glory. A carpenter who has lost their way builds only small huts instead of grand palaces fit for emperors. So it is with all of us.
But how do you re-ignite that fire, that light? Where do you start when all is darkness?
With a single match and a small pile of tinder, the same way you start any fire. You go back to your basics. The wonderful thing about having lost faith is that you’ve already discovered the process by which you create it. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just build a new one – and build it better, tempered by the experiences and wisdom of your previous efforts.
Back to the basics. Back to what you know, back to what you are proficient at, even if you don’t believe in yourself, your skills, your friends, your anything. Back to the beginning of the trail, back to the plain white belt around your uniform. That’s the wonderful beauty of the basics. You don’t have to believe. You merely have to do.
From the basics, you build momentum. You pick up that camera more frequently and take more shots. You write those blog posts a little sharper, a little fresher. You pray a little harder and share a little more with every parishioner. You polish those gems a little more crisply, build a little bit taller with every time-tested basic you know by heart.
From dimly glowing embers on a pile of tinder, you add kindling. You practice and execute your basics over and over again, seeing the results, feeling the comfort that familiar ground and old friends bring. You add twigs, sticks, branches, then logs, until the fire is rebuilt.
Before long, your fire is brighter and hotter than it’s ever been. The way is lit again for you, the furnace ready to forge your victories once more. You dare to believe again, this time better, stronger, wiser, more focused, more ready. The light inside of you illuminates the pitfalls ahead more clearly. The anvil and forge you burn away impurities with will make even stronger tools to guide your will.
At the end of the process of rekindling your faith, you may even notice that the light blazing inside of you is lighting the path for others to find you. Pass them some embers, and see where their faith will take them.
May your light shine ever brighter.
Spigit, the maker of a social networking platform that lets businesses use crowdsourcing to solve internal problems, is launching a new platform today that will allow external crowdsourcing as well.
ContestSpigit is a $5,000 a month software-as-a-service offering for businesses that want to interact with an external audience of customers, partners or the community at large, said Richard Tso, head of marketing for the Pleasanton, Calif.-based firm. “It’s like the next generation of crowdsourcing, if you will.”
The three year old company has raised $14 million in venture capital, most recently a $10 million round from Warburg Pincus in October 2009. It’s also undertaken efforts to fold itself into the Microsoft SharePoint collaboration platform.
Spigit’s existing platform, EnterpriseSpigit, lets companies solicit feedback from its employees on how to solve a problem. Pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer, for example, used EnterpriseSpigit to get suggestions from employees on how to lower costs, create new products and pursue innovation.
ContestSpigit is a platform for creating contests designed to invite people to interact with a company. Cisco Systems already uses ContestSpigit for its iPrize initiative, a competition to help create Cisco’s next $1 billion business.
Pepsi and Chase bank use social networking to guide their charitable giving, although not on Spigit.
ContestSpigit gives companies four basic models for holding contests, said Hutch Carpenter, the company’s vice president of products:
* The “You Vote, We Decide” model invites participants to vote on an idea and provide feedback, but the ultimate decision rests with the company. A public company like Cisco or Pfizer would have to consider shareholder issues, for instance, not just the consensus of the crowd.
* The “Crowd Decision” gives all authority to the crowd. The highest vote getter wins. This model is not likely to be used for strategic decisions, Carpenter said, “but this concept is great for engaging your audience … and for letting them communicate to you what they think is the meaning of your brand.”
* The “Expert Decision” model is reserved for highly specialized or technical decisions made by a smaller crowd of experts. Netflix, not a Spigit customer, used this model to conduct a contest that awarded $1 million to the first person to improve the accuracy of its movie recommendations for subscribers by at least 10 percent.
* The fourth model is the “We Vote, You Decide” model, which Carpenter also affectionately calls the “American Idol” model. In this case, the company solicits all sorts of suggestions, but narrows down the choices over time, just as Simon, Randy, Ellen and Kara do on the reality TV show, then turn the process over to the fans to pick the winner via phone call or text message. “The experts make a selection and kind of filter out the worst of the crop … guiding the process toward a certain area,” said Carpenter.
Spigit compares its service to Salesforce.com’s Salesforce Chatter offering, which was released in beta form Feb. 17. Chatter is described as a “real-time enterprise collaboration application and platform” that also includes some of the features of consumer social networking apps such as Facebook, Twitter and Google Buzz.
But Spigit goes Chatter and the others one better with what Tso calls “idea trading,” in which one person’s idea is commented on by others and builds support among members of the crowd.
“You can buy and sell the idea on an open market within the organization … based on the likely outcome that it will be adopted by the organization,” Tso said. “We aren’t just a ‘post and vote’ type of platform. Our algorithms surface the best ideas.”
Spigit’s next effort is to deliver ContestSpigit on mobile devices from Apple and RIM. Salesforce Chatter is already available on mobile devices.
Tags: Chase, Cisco Systems, Hutch Carpenter, Micosoft SharePoint, Netflix, Pepsi, Pfizer, Richard Tso, Salesforce.com, Spigit, Warburg Pincus
Simple answer: the fan. Job done.
Except no, that’s a bit facetious. There is a big debate around who’s responsible for managing artists’ interaction with their fans, as the channels through which they can do it continue to multiply. Is it a label thing or a manager thing? How much should the artist be expected to do, and what happens if they don’t want to get their hands dirty with social media? That kind of stuff.
This is the subject of the key afternoon debate at Music 4.5 today, kicked off by Wingnut Music’s Erik Nielsen – who as co-manager of Marillion, has been doing this band/fan D2C stuff for a long, long time.
Marillion had a 12-15,000 person mailing list back in 2000, and the band asked its fans to help pay for their next album – “would you buy it if it doesn’t even exist?” – five or six thousand people said yes, and thus the band’s self-releasing career kicked off.
“The question here is who owns that relationship? The answer is the artist,” he says. “By maintaining control, you can make sure you hire the right people to do the job. I’m not a carpenter, so I couldn’t put an extension on the side of my house… It’s important that the artist maintains control, but also admits that they can’t do everything.”
Onto the panel discussion, which Nielsen is taking part in. Moderator Nic Howell from New Media Age asks the panel for stories about how music distribution has changed. Billy Grant from TwoPointNine is first up – an independent label that’s also a management company.
“It’s very important to build audience and build communities,” he says. “We made records – this is about 2003 – and before we knew it, we started building on the British Asian scene, picked up on some of the producers and artists in that scene, and found a community around it. We tapped into this and used our Western marketing experience to build communities out of it.”
So for Grant, the big change has been the way fans are able to communicate with artists and labels, and the way they can get music. In a nutshell.
James Proud from Giglocator is next up, saying that the big change for his company has been Ticketmaster opening up to allow ticketing startups like his to sell its tickets.
But from a personal perspective: “When I started listening to music, I bought a cassette. When my little brother started listening to his first music recently, he did it on Spotify…”
Next is Susie Moore from BrandRock. Her background is in branding and marketing, and used to work at O2. She agrees with Feargal Sharkey’s claim earlier that there’s never been a better time to be a fan. “It’s the fans who are driving the distribution of music,” she says. “We should embrace it… rather than try to stop it with traditional ways of doing business.”
Next up is Shamal Ranasinghe from Topspin, which has just opened up an office in London. “Marillion is an example that we cited from the inception of Topspin,” he says, before talking about David Byrne and Brian Eno’s last album in 2008, which Topspin worked on.
They had two options apparently – releasing through a label or going it alone – they chose the latter. David Byrne had a mailing list of 3,000 people at the time – which seems low – but when they let people stream the album two weeks before release, they signed up 30,000 extra people. The stream was also embedded in 160 blogs across the web.
“They made up the advance amount that they were offered [by a label] in 50 days, and they got to keep the rights to their music,” he says.
Now Nielsen, who says he’s here to start a fight. Who are the villains in music distribution? “Everyone who gets in the way,” he says. But then moves on to something else that Marillion did – they had 12 t-shirt designs, and asked fans which ones they liked best before kicking off a tour. And guess what – the ones the fans liked sold better at gigs.
“If you give them a large percentage of what they actually want, they’re gonna buy it,” he says. “But having a large number of people in the way telling you what your fans want, is where the problems lie.”
So is owning customer data as important nowadays as owning the master recordings used to be seen? “Very much so,” says Billy Grant. “It’s very important that the artist is able to communicate directly with their audience.”
Nielsen also says that people mustn’t forget that “it’s the business of the music that’s communicating with the fans” – artists can choose to be personal if they want, but that’s not the core focus here. Which is interesting – artists can choose to be personally enigmatic when it comes to social media, but as a business they need to be using it to communicate with fans.
Ranasinghe says Topspin’s software was originally designed for artists to “get up every morning and check in” – but actually it’s the digital marketers behind the artists who are using the software day-to-day. “The toolset we provide is a pretty powerful marketing toolset, but 99 times out of 100 it’s the business team behind the artist using it, not the artist themselves.”
Is it easier nowadays to break and achieve success as a new band using all these new tools? “I have to prove that to myself,” says Nielsen, who’s working with a new band called A Genuine Freakshow to do it. “All it is now for me is where do I get the money from?” Back to the investment question from earlier.
Do fans expect it to be the singer or guitarist communicating with them rather than their new media guy or business manager? Nielsen says it depends on the artist – some tweet and Facebook without being asked, while others rely on the people behind them to do it for them.
Moore agrees that the band is the brand. “What fans want is… they buy into the music. The band will be a total business of people, maybe a few people working on that band’s music, what that band believes in, their identity and values. It’s like any brand marketing exercise.”
But yes, it all depends on the artist. Twitter and Facebook are powerful and necessary ways to promote music, but if artists don’t want to get their hands dirty with them, they shouldn’t have to.
“To me it’s like a Darwinian process,” says Ranasinghe, citing the Beastie Boys as an artist who do it themselves, and have had huge success with it. But then other artists copy and paste a press release into emails to their fans, and don’t have much success.
I’ve been overwhelmed with the comments in support of my last post. Staggered actually. It prompted around 3x the usual Saturday traffic. 95% thumbs up, wishing a fool good luck or merely interested to see how it will pan out? I guess I must be doing something right, even if some think otherwise. Who knows?
When I look at all the posturing that goes on in the US about paid for shilling, it is hardly surprising that the knee jerk reaction is to push everyone down a road that requires us to state ‘I got paid for…’ I understand the paranoia around transparency in a world where trust and attention represent the real value of content in which you are expected to believe. But it makes for a horribly messy way of doing things. Even then can you be sure? That’s always going to be a question to which there can be no definitive answer. Instead, I prefer to think that people will read, ingest, think and come out the other side with a nuanced version of their own. Guess what? It happens anyway via comments and riffs on blog posts. Mostly. Sometimes it reverses an otherwise perceived truth although that usually takes a bit of time.
Many take the argument information wants to be free. Never had an issue with that per se but see later. Value is a whole different thing. There’s a reason why some content is valuable and others not so much. It’s part perception for sure. If you don’t know something and find someone who does then the information they provide might be of value to you. What will you give in exchange?
Check the story Frank Scavo told me in email:
I like to tell the story about the carpenter that was able to fix a creak in the floor after two other handymen had failed to fix the problem. He hands the homeowner a bill for $75. The customer says, what the hell—you only spent five minutes hammering!
The carpenter takes the invoice back, scratches out the $75 and writes, “Hammering: $5.00. Knowing where to hammer: $70”.
That’s taking information and turning into knowledge. That’s the bit that people really want. I can go buy (at low cost) or find (maybe) on the Internet something tax related about which I might need be aware. But taking the interpreted rule book alone isn’t going to get me very far unless there is understanding. That’s one of the central flaws in much thinking around social computing. The relentless pursuit and promotion of Twitter has failed to grasp its fundamental weaknesses. Look at what happened yesterday. But then just because Google can index something doesn’t mean it is right or appropriate. Look at how Andy McAfee has moved from what seemed a given ‘truth’ to something very different. Has he got it right even now? It would be presumptuous to say one way or another. All any of us can do is make our own discoveries based on experience and…knowledge, apply and move on. Hopefully with the help of others.
All of which brings me to the question of sustainable information. Cathy Davidson wrote what I think is an incisive piece on the topic where she says:
My own idea is that Information Wants to Be Free is about as supportable as the Free Lunch—as in “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” By that I mean that, as with the proverbial free lunch, free information is never really cost-free. On the most basic level, there are labor and environmental and opportunity costs–and other costs too–that go along with the inarguable and inestimable benefits of free-flowing information. More than that, anyone who thinks such things as a Google search of the Web is “free,” is, to put it bluntly, a fool. Any multibillion dollar global corporation that mines your data even as you supply more and more of it with every search is not supplying you with anything for free, no matter how much you may believe that to be the case.
That pretty much says it all for me. The illusion that somehow people can have it all for free serves no-one, least of all the producer of value. There has to be a better way that meaningfully yet fairly rewards endeavour. Hugh MacLeod found a model by ignoring everyone and trusting that those who like his work would find it valuable when repackaged and personalised. I’ve had no qualms in paying Hugh for some of his prints. They have an ongoing value for me. So I pay. The same theory goes for some of what I am about to embark upon.
The difference between what I am doing and how others go about the same thing comes in the way it will be organized. It will all be in one place so that it will be obvious and entirely choice driven. I will allow some limited re-use in the public domain. Why not? And oh yes…I’m calling it The Clubhouse. It will be like the place you go and buy a drink or pay to use the pool table. The service will be friendly, prices reasonable though I fear the decor might be boring. As the advert goes – simples.
OK – let’s get the show on the road…
As I've worked on my happiness project, I've been struck by the paradoxes I keep confronting. One of my Secrets of Adulthood is "The opposite of a great truth is also true" - and I've certainly found that to be true in the area of happiness. I try to embrace these contradictions:
1. Accept myself, but expect more of myself. This tension is at the core of any happiness project.
2. Take myself less seriously--and take myself more seriously.
3. Push myself to use my time efficiently, yet also make time to play, to wander, to read at whim, to fail.
4. Strive to be emotionally self-sufficient so I can connect better with other people. Only recently have I begun to understand the importance of this idea.
5. Keep an empty shelf, and keep a junk drawer.
6. Think about myself so I can forget myself.
7. Remember that control and mastery are key elements of happiness; and so are novelty and challenge.
8. Work can be play, and play can be work. As George Orwell observed, "But what is work and what is not work? Is it work to dig, to carpenter, to plant trees, to fell trees, to ride, to fish, to hunt, to feed chickens, to play the piano, to take photographs, to build a house, to cook, to sew, to trim hats, to mend motor bicycles? All of these things are work to somebody, and all of them are play to somebody."
9. The days are long, but the years are short. (Watch the video here.)
Often, the search for happiness means embracing both sides of the paradox.
Take, for example, number one above. W. H. Auden articulates beautifully this tension: "Between the ages of 20 and 40 we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity."
What are the accidental limitations, and what the necessary limitations? The first, and most important of my Twelve Personal Commandments is to Be Gretchen, and this question is one of the most significant to consider.
* One of my very favorite resolutions is to Kiss more, hug more, touch more, and Benedict Carey wrote a fascinating piece in the New York Times about the importance of touch: Evidence that little touches do mean so much.
* It's Word-of-Mouth Day, when I gently encourage (or, you might think, pester) you to spread the word about the Happiness Project. You might:
-- Forward the link to someone you think would be interested
-- Link to a post on Twitter (follow me @gretchenrubin)
-- Sign up for my free monthly newsletter (about 39,000 people get it)
-- Buy the book
-- Join the 2010 Happiness Challenge to make 2010 a happier year
-- Put a link to the blog in your Facebook status update
-- Watch the one-minute book video
Thanks! I really appreciate any help. Word of mouth is the BEST.
Eric Puchner finds them even among "very gifted writers":
The Great Gatsby is an inspired title, one for the ages, but it wasn’t Fitzgerald’s idea. He wanted to call the novel Trimalchio in West Egg, which sounds like something Dr. Seuss might have dreamed up for The Playboy Channel. An early version of Portnoy’s Complaint was called A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis. At various times, Catch-22 was called Catch-18, Catch-11, Catch-14, and Catch-17. And some classic novels have stood the test of time, despite having terrible titles. (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, for example, never fails to make me giggle.)
In short, there seems to be very little correlation between producing something brilliant and the ability to come up with a half-decent name for it.
Perhaps it’s a different skill set entirely. I sometimes think there should be professional titlers: Just as we wouldn’t ask a carpenter to tar the roof of our house, we shouldn’t expect writers to work outside their métier. But even if the perfect title is destined to elude us, I do think it’s possible to identify a bad one—even, I think, to lay out some basic ground rules for what to steer clear of. So, based on years of teaching, I’ve compiled the following list of Titles to Avoid.
Continued here. The Second Pass flags the upcoming Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year. (Last year's winner: The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais.)
Leonardo DiCaprio is moving from one thriller, the recently released Shutter Island, to another, the upcoming Aaron Guzikowski-scripted drama Prisoners. The film has been making the rounds for a while — at one point Antoine Fuqua was set to direct, but has since moved on. According to Deadline Hollywood, the film follows “a small-town carpenter who takes matters into his own hands when is daughter and her friend are kidnapped.”
It is very much Mystic River meets Taken, as DH’s Mike Fleming points out. And for DiCaprio, the whole thing will come down to who is directing. He’s worked with top talent lately, the likes of Christopher Nolan, Sam Mendes and Martin Scorsese, so there’s no doubt that he will be looking for another name before he steps onto the set of this film. According to Fleming, DiCaprio will likely make another movie first.
If we remember correctly, this project at one time had both Christian Bale and Mark Wahlberg attached to it. Going back further, this project was once rumored to be on the desk of Brian Singer, who wanted to direct. That was somewhere in the neighborhood of early 2009. Considering the history, this is one project I will believe when I see it. Or at the very least, when it starts shooting.
That's your standard European cabinet hinge, which is in widespread usage throughout the world. It's a great little piece of hardware, easy to install and adjustable so you can get that door to hang and open/close just right. They cost an absurd $13 each at Home Depot, but you can get them at your local hardware store for a few bucks.
I, however, get them at the bargain price of $0, from a different source: The streets of Manhattan. People here throw out cabinetry all the time, particularly Ikea stuff, with the hinges intact. (Ikea uses Hettich hinges, good-quality German-made stuff.) Every time I pass an abandoned cabinet on the sidewalk I note the location, and I'm back there 30 minutes later with my screw gun, shamelessly stripping it of hinges like some kind of homeless carpenter. Most of them open 110 degrees, but you've really hit the jackpot when you find the bulky ones that open 165 degrees, because they're "zero protrusion," meaning you can install them on cabinets with a pull-out drawer or shelf on slides and they won't bump into the door edge.
In any case, there have been plenty of times when I've returned to a discarded cabinetry site too late; I round the corner and get that sinking feeling when I see the cabinet with the doors already off, empty gaping cup holes where the hinges used to be.
It's for that reason I wish I had one of these Screwpop tools. It's just a simple keychain/bottle opener, but it's also got a reversible Phillips/Flathead screwdriver, and even a 1/4" hex driver.
Would I really take the time to manually unscrew a cabinet hinge on the sidewalk? Heck yeah, particularly for one of those 165-degree jammies. I've currently got around $60 worth of free hinges (see below) and I've already incorporated $20 worth into projects. I'm not Donald Trump's son and I ain't proud; so if it's free, it's me.
Slate continues to follow its secret tagline of "Contrarianism is almost as good as actual wisdom," asserting it's "not so bad" for cars to run on software making them out of our control. Fun faux Slate headline guessing game below.
Is there any easier job than writing for Slate? Despite every outlet on Earth following our "Beige Bites Back" charge, blaming loss of driver interaction and knowledge for Toyota's problems, Slate predictably does the opposite. Rather than refute their obvious stories we're going to share ten plausible Slate headlines I created with my friend Dan and let you guess which one's real:
[Slate]
