Amsterbeth

2011 Year End Wrap Up: New Vs. True

This year: 

I quit my facebook habit.  In doing so I realized how very precarious the whole social media thread is.  To get it all crashing down, all that has to happen is that everyone simply stop.  I simply stopped. It was really easy.   I don't miss it. It added nothing to my life. In fact, it took away from my life.  I fantasize about everyone in the whole world deciding just to stop. What a fantastically unifying experience that would be. Everyone together just decides to stop.   If everyone stops, there's nothing to compulsively check or respond to.  

All we hear today is how critical "social media strategy" is. But how amazing would it be just for everyone to stop using social media. I predict this will happen in one form or another. No one is doing a good job yet of targeting communications through social.  I still think there is great value in the inbox and that, instead of trying to replace it with social (NEW) , some smart person is going to figure out how to make the inbox better (TRUE). 

I spent more time looking up and out (TRUE) and less time looking down and in (NEW). I will continue to do so.

I moved to a houseboat and surrounded myself  with pure silence, which I crave more and more desperately as my noise sensitivity seems to only increase. (TRUE)

I refurnished my old house and rented it out.  Michael did all the work. (NEW) 

I spent a lot of time reading, watching, and thinking about ballet.   I made a fool of myself by letting nostalgia get the better of me and I dug out an old pair of pointe shoes and put them on. Back in the day, it was second nature to support my dragonfly physique on the tips of my toes. Doing a simple releve today felt like trying to support a concrete house on a foundation of potato chips (NEW). What a terribly unpleasant wake up call.  (TRUE)

I witnessed a lot of friends and colleagues having babies. 

I witnessed a lot of friends and colleagues losing a parent (NEW). I realized this is no longer a freak occurrence and that it will continue to happen every year for the rest of my life.  (TRUE)

I became obsessed with Seth Godin's blog and I read it every single day. The man is a genius and I feel like he is talking directly to me.   (TRUE)

I was profoundly struck by two little sound bytes: Louis CK's hilarious  routine on a late night talk show where he said "Everything is amazing and no one is happy." (NEW)  Also, a factoid on Stephen Fry's "QI" informed us that the the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull  resulted in 150,000 tons of CO2 emitted every day it was spewing. However, as a result of the grounding of airplanes, it prevented the further emission of 2.8 million tons of CO2 that would have been emitted by the planes through the course of regular scheduled flights.  So net, the amount of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere as a result of the eruption was actually reduced.  (TRUE)

As I get older, my resentment and disappointment toward humanity increases (NEW). But in my personal life, I am filled with optimism.   I had mentioned I think in last year's wrap up that we "go through this together."  I feel that even more strongly than ever (TRUE).

I am 42 now which means that I have lived one half of my life as a child and one half as an adult. I won't even be retired yet when I live the next 20 years as an adult. I feel as though I have just been born into my potential as an individual, a friend, a productive and creative person.   I spent most of the last two years feeling like the end of my life was going to be one big contiuum of adulthood.  Decades and Decades of sameness.   

Well of course that is just silly.  Now is the time when we really get to call the shots more than ever before. My optimism comes from a sense of responsibility.  I am in a position to make changes for the good and so are a lot of people my age. To take the risk and know that if it fails it won't be catastrophic.  People said "yes" to me this year and I said "yes" to others.   This is incredibly energizing and we should all say yes to each other more often. 

I wish you a fantastic 2012 (NEW). Let's say YES to each other’s dreams (TRUE). 

 

Comfort Zone

"It's important to push you out of your comfort zone."

People use this buzzword as a convenient way of staying in  their own comfort zone by arbitrarily giving you a new "challenge" that is in some way a divergence from your neatly packaged skill set.  

That's easy to do. "You are good at this. Now go do something else. Start over. Expand. "   Newness for the sake of newness is almost always invigorating. But newness is temporary.  It's not enough standing on its own.  Personal growth achieved by tackling something new is only incremental. 

To me, the comfort zone is a place where you execute within your skill set in an environment or assignment devoid of passion or commitment.  

I have never stayed in my comfort zone for more than 5 minutes. I don't need to be pushed out of it. As soon as I find myself there, it is instant intellectual death in the form of boredom. Call it a character weakness or lack of discipline, but to me there is nothing that brings on the onslaught of productivity paralysis faster than boredom.  

Work must be meaningful. We ask each other "What do you do for  a living?"  not "What do you do for a working?"  If you answer that question with pride and energy, your work is meaningful to you. If you answer it with trepidation, embarrassment , dread, excuses, or apologies, well, you're probably sitting square in the middle of your comfort zone.  What could be more uncomfortable?

Our skillsets should be compiled. If your expertise results in the death of passion, it is your responsibility to answer the "what next?" question yourself.  This requires digging, getting muddy. It requires bravery. We need each others bravery. Your competence and skill set and the soft skills you learned along the way become sort of a metaphor that is transferable to something else-the next thing.   And I bet for most people, the digging reveals the core of who we are--we get to know ourselves in these moments. If we can accept ourselves as who we are, I think that is really empowering: "This is who I am. This is what I have to offer. Bring it on." 

The ideal career path is one where competence is equalled or, better yet, surpassed by passion, commitment, desire, drive, and vision.  And these are things that can't be well explained on a resume or CV. These attributes are not tangible, cannot be measured or quantified. The ROI cannot be immediately measured.  But where would we be without these attributes? They must be cultivated and accommodated--not recklessly, but harnessed toward making a vision come to life. 

It is here where those who push us out of our comfort zone must experience an equal and opposite reaction where necessary.   And if you are being pushed toward newness, envision yourself where you are going to end up when the newness fades. It is a flicker of  incremental growth that flames out as soon as a task or commitment is checked off a list? Or is it the spark that launches a rocket?  Mission accomplished? Or Mission? 

The comfort zone is  the wrong way of looking at things. One must be encouraged  not to leave the comfort zone, but to stay in the passion zone. 

Steve Jobs Didn't Change the World, He Changed Your World

I've been thinking about this since the announcement of his passing and it really bothers me. Steve Jobs didn't change the world. He, and his wonderful i-Stuff offered convenience, beauty, access, and inspiration to the 0.0000000001% of the wealthiest people in the world who could afford to buy his products. I doubt there is a single person reading this post who doesn't fall into that category.

This thought makes me feel slightly like one of those overly earnest parade rainer people. But the outpouring over his death makes me wonder: what do you really have to do to really truly change the world? How many people do you have to affect, or is it enough to affect the elite or the wealthy who get to make all the rules anyway?

I like to think that there are other organizations who are doing more, could do more, have greater, more meaningful impact that doesn't dissipate as soon as the next version of whatever they are doing comes to market.

It makes me feel better to put my emotional investment behind organizations like War Child, the Gates Foundation or Worldreader.org. These organizations are changing the world in a way that you personally won't ever feel in the same way that holding that new shiny thing in your hand makes you feel--unless you get involved. They are changing the world in a way that we all need--not want, but need--more than ever. And if you haven't had the chance to experience the kind of happiness buying an e-reader for an impoverished child can give you, I highly recommend you give it a try, and you can do this through any device you want.

Anyway, I think Steve Jobs' greatest legacy won't be his inventions, but his words. We can aspire for more.

 

Why I Quit Facebook

When Facebook first really started to take shape as a company, several friends of mine from my former employer went to go work for them.  This is how I found out about the site: "Hey, I started a new job at this new site. Check it out and tell me what you think."   So because of this, I was a pretty early adopter.

I didn't really get what it was good for and I sort of ignored it for a while.  But then it started to reach critical mass and everyone I had ever met in my life started to show up and there was a mass flurry of mutual friending.  I got back in touch with people I really liked but had lost touch with over the years.   I accepted a few friend requests from people I only knew in grade school.   At this time people were lamenting the word "friend" and I thought getting annoyed over the semantics of the word was a bit pointless. 

So the next thing that happened, of course, is that my newsfeed became crammed with updates of people I didn't know anymore.  Or became crammed with updates of people I knew pretty well , but who updated too often, or became crammed with "likes" from people who again, I am sure were perfectly nice, but were otherwise not in my daily life at all and never were. I became annoyed seeing the constant repetition of " so and so likes your status update"  when otherwise so and so wasn't in my life at all. I didn't want so and so in my face all the time. 

I decided to preserve my network and didn't unfriend anyone who wasn't an actual friend. I kept everyone. But I did block a lot of people from my newsfeed. My goal was to reclaim quality control over what I was seeing in my feed.   My litmus test was simple: "Does seeing this person's updates make my happy or unhappy?"  Happy, they stayed. Unhappy, they were blocked.   My decision had nothing to do with how well I knew the person or not.  Did their updates make me happy or not happy?

Next I connected my twitter account to my facebook account so that my twitter updates would feed into my facebook updates. But I hardly used twitter simply because I had already friended everyone I wanted to be networked with and didn't want to go through the process again. I also didn't like twitter for all the people I didn't know who could follow me. That felt unsettling and spammy. 

Next I started "liking" the pages of news and other media in an attempt to make my newsfeed an actual newsfeed. That worked ok. 

And so I've been coasting along like this for quite some time, being a vocal fan of this incredible social networking site.  And still, despite my proactiveness in trying to derive happiness from Facebook, it doesn't make me happy. Not for the content, but for the fact that it has become a genuine habit--a bad habit. I check it compulsively, all day long like taking a breath or going for a quick mental stretch. But it doesn't refresh me. It just distracts me and robs me of my abilty to concentrate for more than 5 minutes in a row. But we've all been trained to become multitaskers right? Yeah, that's bullshit. 

I bought an i-pad and the problem became worse. I said a while ago that I want technology to be efficient enought help me spend more time looking up and out, not down and in. The i-pad is incredibly efficent at helping you look down and in all the time.  I want to live in a three dimensional world and I am having trouble getting back there. 

But Facebook's latest redesign has helped me break free. The updates and real time feed send my brain in overdrive.  And it is not that I don't want people seeing every little thing I do on the site. I'm not all that protective of my privacy. The problem is I don't care to see every little thing everyone  else is doing. I literally do not care .I do not want to see a constant feed of someone's playlist on spotify. I feel like I am being forced to invade someone else's privacy, whether they care or not.  I don't want to see it and I am not going to spend anymore time on Facebook trying to block out what it shows me that makes me unhappy. 

So I quit Facebook.  And after even just two days, it feels really, really good. And I'm not going to be a nazi about it. If someone wants to show me something of course I will go look. Maybe I will still upload my photos there, I'm not sure. But I quit. I've stopped using it.  The people from my past it brought back into my life that I want to keep I still get to keep.  But I won't see their updates unless they tweet them.

I quit. And now I'm going to go sit in my garden  and look up and out.  

 

(P.S. my twitter handle is @bethmassa)

 

The Life Aquatic

It has rained almost every day, all day, for the last two months.  We have had two days of cloudy-but-rainless sky out of the last 60. We used the first one to cut back the overgrown ivy, weeds, bushes and grass by hand.  We used the second to do the same thing again with the new electric lawn equipment we'd purchased that morning.  My house rocks when it is windy. It doesn't rock so much from wake when boaters pass by too fast. This surprises me.  

In the mornings the canal is overcome with algae and it looks neon green like the Chicago River on St. Patrick's Day. 

We have a familiy of swans, 7 babies and two parents, who come up to our house about once every two weeks. I can't help but feed them just a little. The babies are twice as big as your average duck and have gray beaks. The parents have orange beaks and always bookend the babies when they paddle up to our house. 

Around 3:00 the neighborhood ducks take naps, floating on the water with their bills tucked under their wings. 

Raafje, our little black shorthair cat, wants to be outside all day, every day. The two sets of french doors that open into the garden are considered the "danger zone."  She is perfectly happy to hang out with us outside or inside unless we are in the danger zone--which is an area where she may potentially be scooped up and placed inside against her will. You cannot catch Raafje in the danger zone.  She's fast, sleek, nimble and stealth.  The only time we can get her to come in is usually in the middle of the night. We must purposefully abandon her out there for several hours so the fear of her NEVER BEING LET INSIDE EVER AGAIN WHERE THE FOOD IS, momentarily outweighs her residual panther-like inclinations.

Natalia, our Norwegian forest cat,  jumps from the top of the bookshelf or scales the wall from a cat condo and will hide in the crawl space above the kitchen for hours.  She's convinced she can't jump down so we have to assist her with a cat elevator.  She loves the outdoors too and is an expert dragonfly catcher. 

Regen, our shy girl, spends most of the day downstairs, but in the afternoon she comes outside and has her own secret spot where she scales the edge of the house and hangs out in the neighbor's yard. 

Two of our three cats have accidentally gone swimming. Both are fine. 

Someone stole our  hand-made garden table that came with two hand made chairs. 

We discovered the Twiske which is this rather fabulous nature preserve just 15 minutes' bike ride from our house. 

We discovered Mike's gym which is a 10 minute bike ride from our house. It's a boxing gym that allows full use of the cardio and weight machines for 1/4th the monthly rate I was being charged at David Lloyd. 

We discovered Landmarkt (landmarkt.nl) which is like Marqt in Amsterdam but even more local, and in many ways, way better. 

Our Albert Heijn is XL and has hand-held scanners for quick check out. It also does plastic recycling as well as paper and glass (this is not a common occurrence around here). 

We discovered the downside of having fruit trees in your yard. You end up with more fruits than you could ever eat or give away, and you get a lot of flies and fruitflies.

Spiders love flies and fruitflies. We watch our spiders get bigger every day.  I have a terrible fear of spiders that I had to get over immediately. 

I am covered in mosquito bites but I don't mind it. They remind me of my childhood summers. 

I saw a little bird with the most vibrant blue feathers with a yellow stripe. He looked like he came from the Amazon. I tried to take his picture but it didn't turn out very well. 

We came across a Newfoundland Rescue Dog competition while taking a walk in the Twiske. 

Boats and barges cruise by our window every day. The passengers wave and we wave back. Sometimes we wave and they wave back. 

We discovered we had a rose bush when suddenly about a week ago these incredible fuchsia blooms appeared out of nowhere along our walkway.

And people say we'd never see anything exciting when we moved outside of the center of Amsterdam...

_______________________________________

Two pretty profound events happened in short succession of each other almost two years ago that marked an angular turn in my life: My beloved stepfather, who was hugely influential to me and supportive of me, passed away unexpectedly, and I turned 40. 

The occurrence of these two events caused me to take stock: How do I want to live the back half of my life? What kind of person do I want to become? 

I realized that a huge part of who I want to become needs to be woven deeply into where I live. Everything was coming to a head. I have always gravitated toward cities; I love the excitement. I love the access. I love stepping outside my front door and feeling like I'm already somewhere that I'd want to be.  But getting older, my preference for absolute domestic serenity, is starting to scream at me. I guess this is what a maternal clock ticking must sound like to those who have one of those maternal clocky ticky things. 

So I started to write a list. What would my dream house of the future be? It would need to be a free-standing house with no shared walls. It would need to be close to the center of Amsterdam. It would need to be almost silent all of the time. It would need to be on the ground--I wanted more to care for and I wanted green space for my cats. It would need to be very close to water. 

Michael and I started taking little weekend trips to neighboring towns to see if we connected with anything. We didn't. Every little town we looked at sent us speeding back to Amsterdam.

But Amstelveen was nice. It was close enough. There were plenty of free standing houses. And it had a nice little vibe I could relate to. Every house in Amstelveen that met my requirements would laugh in the face of my budget.  So, I resolved myself to the fact that I couldn't afford what I wanted. Maybe weekends in a small farm house in France would be a nice option to ponder.

So we went to northwest France and looked at small farm houses.  Turns out small farm houses in France are WAY farther away from Amsterdam than, say, Purmerend.   There was no denying that ironically claustrophobic feeling that left me rather breathless wasn't going to go away if we moved anywhere out of the city.   

I woke up one day, as I often do, with a stream of fully formed thoughts presented like the morning newspaper on a doorstep: what would you be willing to give up to get everything else you wanted in this dream house?  

I decided size could be compromised. Even the quality of the house.  It had never occurred to me to look under my budget. And literally the minute that I did, I looked on funda.nl, the Dutch real estate web site that obsesses me, and there she was--the perfect house--there was Hexenketel the Houseboat looking back at me with soft doe eyes.  How could it not have occurred to me this whole time that a houseboat was a great opportunity to build the lifestyle I long for?

 Nope. No. No. No. Too good to be true. I may have been mesmerized by the images on that real estate listing for a second, but the savage housing market in Amsterdam had hardened me. There is no way that a house which was 30 square meters bigger than my current home  with all those hand made features, an atelier, a sauna, six fruit trees, and a separate office, was on the market for a lot less than what I paid for my city pad without something being catastrophically wrong with it. Still, we decided, just out of curiosity, to take a look. 

Michael and I drove out to the house, which lay just on the northwest corner of the A10, the main bypass around Amsterdam.  The current owners were out doing some painting touch ups on the atelier.

Oh dear...the house was 10 times better looking in real life than it was in the pictures on the website. And the owners were nice...so very nice. And the street has nothing on either side of it but water. And the street looks exactly like the street of houseboats just one block away from my home in Seattle. And my stepfather would have really loved this place. And this house is pretty much the culmination of everything that I am and want a be, or want to be again: a person who lives on water, who wants a house that brings the outside in, and has a place that will always need to be taken care of.  Amsterdam who? 

We went back to our house on the Overtoom. I love this house. I love its location. I love looking across the balcony into the neighbor's living rooms. I love the history of it.  I was overwhelmed by the idea of moving--the process, all the work.  But I couldn't stop thinking about Hexenketel. Here was a house that was offering everything I wanted and more. Now I had to ask myself, "Do you really want what you thought you wanted?"  I couldn't stop asking Michael what he thought, what he wanted.  

An interlude. People always ask me, "What about Michael? What does he want?"  The truth of it is, he a low maintenance guy, and I'm, well, not so low maintenance. Michael has this great ability to tune out minor annoyances, where I do just the opposite--I can do nothing by hyperfocus on them. I can only hope and trust that Michael is happy to go long for the ride as I cave in to my cyclical restlessness. He knows me well enough to know that each move gets us closer to my elusive contentment. Maybe I'll never totally get there, but we do have adventures along the way. 

After about our 5th visit to the houseboat I finally said to Michael, "We'd be stupid not to buy this place."  He said, stoically, "Well, then we must buy it." 

And that we did.   

 

Moby and Me

Life is jam-packed at the moment.  We're moving. We need to find renters for two houses. Work is a mad rush to complete projects before the end of the fiscal year.  The entire summer is planned out with business trips and travel to see family and friends. None of this anything to complain about. It all just feels very scheduled, controlled, and way too adult. 

Last night, we had very wonderful friends over to the house. It was Michael's birthday.  I poured them prosecco and served them little chocolates, strawberries, cheeses, cakes, and hummus on endive leaves. The sun visited upon us just long enough before we had to walk up the street to go see Moby. 

I've been to a lot of Moby concerts--everything from arena events to intimate DJ sets in small clubs.  I've even met him a few times and probably reviewed one or two of his albums.  Last night, my friends and I, pouring forth with conversation and good cheer, stepped into the Melkweg and as soon as Moby came on stage with a full band armed with electronic instruments (save for his bongos), I was washed over in emotion. Next is the [sentimentalit-]E indeed. 

Michael wore his "moby" hat. It's 20 years old. I think we got it through mail order after the first time we saw him--which happened to be in Indianapolis, Indiana in the middle of a food court in a mall after hours.  It was a showcase set with Vapour Space, the Aphex Twin, and Orbital (and who said the Midwest has no underground? :-).  On the front is a stitched rendition of the little cartoon character self-portrait Moby used to draw of himself. 

"Twenty years ago" seemed to be the theme of the night. Moby talked about how he wanted to move to Amsterdam the first time he ever visited it 20 years ago. My friends and I all toasted each other because we felt the same but actually DID move.  He said that New York would have been a better place if the Dutch had never sold it. And then he dedicated "In My Heart" to all the old-school ravers. I felt like he was talking just to our little tribe at that moment. I realized in that instant how I could mark large chapters of my life by his music, how good so much of his music is, and how I'd never really realized how prominent is was because I guess he only "belonged" to the ravers for such a short period of time before he started selling his music for TV commercials.  A guy's gotta eat.  Now he eats in a castle somewhere in California.  But I'm not cynical. Quite the opposite. I couldn't remove the dopey smile from my face. Michael and I held hands the entire concert. Pass me the insulin. 

So thanks, Moby. Thanks for the joy you brought us when dance music broke our world open 20 years ago. Thanks for the music I listen to at the gym. Thanks for the techno ballads, the ambient CD, and that famous punk rock misstep album.  You made us happy. You left us satisfied.  You've given us a lot.  And last night, we caught up to the whale. 

 

Spoon Fed: A Letter to the New Editor of Bon Appetit

Dear Bon Appetit,

 I'm so deeply disappointed with the redesign of this magazine, Bon Appetit, that I have had in my home my entire adult life. It's not really even a redesign, is it? It's just a lazy amalgamation of every other contemporary lifestyle magazine from Esquire to O.

I used to love bypassing the table of contents, letting the recipes and food photography capture my eye. Now all of that is lost in a wash of iconography, dumbing down, and desperately cute content ("Text After Marriage" --could this self-congratulatory quip be any less appetizing?).

 The former Bon Appetit had an obvious point of view and appealed to any slice or cross section of demographic who had a common interest in food. Now, you're trying to play all sides through content and advertising: cosmetics, cars, Botox. Looking through previous issues, all that was still there, but now I find in this recent issue no visual distinction among any of it. 

Mr. Rapoport explains in his editor's letter that "We don't want to just tell you what to cook--we want to tell you how to cook it, and why to cook it, now."   Isn't a recipe indeed instructions on how to cook something?  I don't recall at any time in the former magazine where there was just a blank page save for the words "Carbonara Sauce."   For your readers who are perfectly happy figuring out the "why" all on their own, you should have given them fair warning that your new lifestyle magazine was going to try impose lifestyle on those who already have it. 

 "How to Drink Like an Italian." Didn't I read that article in GQ last month? Oh wait, this GQ, just the food edition.

 You've betrayed your loyal readers with this redesign. You've put too much mass in this medium. The kitchen is supposed to be a retreat from the inescapable media bombardments of our daily lives. The former magazine was a door to that retreat. You've stripped the magazine of its distinction and elegance. We need more of these things now, not less.

 You've made the magazine completely indistinguishable. This new Bon Appetit is the New Coke. Change it back.

With respect and optimism,

Beth Massa

A former reader who will now use the future pages of your magazine as starter fuel for my barbeque. 

 

Chapter Eight: We're This Close

(I dedicate this blog entry to Michael, Paul, Janneke, Saskia, Theo and especially to Gonnie, who gave me the permission I always had all along. I thank the WorldReader.org Virtual Flash Mob participants for donating their energy, time, and money to our grand failed experiment).

I've been on some sort of mental hiatus regarding this story. I haven't been able to just sit down and write this blog entry. I feel vulnerable because once you put it out there, there is no going back. My ambition is nothing smaller than to totally change the world. My contribution will be no bigger than anyone else's, which is the core of the vision.

I've also waited to write this final chapter because it felt instinctively correct to do so. Yesterday, I saw a banner ad for the WWF where you can SMS-donate $1 and a list of sponsors would match the donation. It was easy. It was fast. It could be even better. And it gave me the indication it's time to return to this blog.

This is the final chapter that I can write by myself. The rest, I hope and I dream, we will write together.

There are a lot of charitable organizations that are using the web and social media to bring people together based on their common compassions. So why haven't these sites changed the world in a hugely significant way? I believe it is for the following reasons:

• The transactional moment needs to be easy and fast to replicate.
• There needs to be a powerful, impactful, and genuine feedback loop.
• There needs to be a way to bring people together through emotional investment in a permanent and real way through their common interests.
• The model needs to change. People need to donate through an organization, not to an organization so that they know exactly where their money is being spent and see, feel, and experience the benefits of that spend (i.e. donate to build a particular school in a particular community, rather than donating into an opaque and enormous pool of funding for education).

 

I'll recap the last couple of chapters.

I. A year ago, my husband and I took a trip to Thailand. It was my first trip to southeast Asia and the first time I had any real-life exposure to third-world living. I noticed how very little money it would require to make a huge difference in the lives of so many people, their animals, and their environment. I imagined the radiant and cascading benefit of helping one community or cause at a time.

II. Later in the year, I supported a friend of mine who was running a marathon. I became acutely aware of how many other events or activities occurred as a result of the marathon: first aid stations, band performances, food vendors, corporate sponsor booths, etc.

III. An idea came to me: Wouldn't it be great to start a business where you could get the attention of large groups of people who are assembling for one reason (concerts, conventions, sporting events), and ask them to make donations for another particular cause. It would be done in real time. The cause would be specific (again, not donating to an organization but through an organization), the individual investment low, the collective impact high. The result would be immediate, affordable, momentous, unifying, gratifying. A real impact. A real and lasting connection.

IV. I was participating in a training at our office to facilitate creative thinking and brainstorming sessions. I shared my idea as I have just described with the group, and we used it to go through the creative facilitation exercise. Together we came up with the idea of a "Virtual Flash Mob."

What if we could rally a "flash mob" online--so that thousands of people would "gather" at a single "location" at a single instant to raise money for a single cause--like a library for one particular school in Ghana.

At its core, this vision is a social one. There is a flat $1 donation per donor. If you need more money, you cannot ask for more money, you must ask for more people. The donations all happen at a single instant at a designated time, rather than just being protracted indefinitely until a monetary goal is reached. This results in the following:

1. To prove the hypothesis that people who are donating only $1 at a time, over and over, will donate a higher percentage of their income in the long term.
   
   
2. The $1 donation flat cap makes it fun and exciting. This isn’t just about the recipient. This is a tool for people to feel good about themselves, to see the impact of their donation, and to realize on a deeply personal level how little money it requires to make an enormous difference. People will feel empowered in a world where the problems we face can be overwhelming.
   
   
3. It works on large and small scales. High school bands can use this method to raise funds for that trip to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Individuals can raise money if they need help building a playground in the neighborhood park or cleaning up a lake.
   
   
4. It inspires people to start a cause knowing how they can raise money for it. Let’s go save that colony of gorillas right now!
   
   
5. It results at a minimum in the democratization of charitable giving, and at a maximum, the total redistribution of wealth globally. This approach will result in visibility that reveals how much one dollar can buy in certain parts of the world and how little the dollar can buy in others. This is not intended to place judgment or say that one cause is more worthy than another. It’s intended to empower people, give them choices, and give them permission to care only about what they care about without feeling guilty or overwhelmed.
   
   
6. The personal satisfaction resulting from the immediate feedback loop will turn consumerism inside itself. Why do we buy what we don't need? We buy what we don't need because it bring us happiness, albeit fleeting. What if we collectively buy what other people, places, animals, or environments need? I predict that purchase will offer a much more sustained happiness.
   
   
7. If you have donated to an organization that has misappropriated the funds, you’ve only given them a dollar. If 10,000 people donated $1 to a negligent organization, 10,000 will voice their displeasure publically. Conversely, if a recipient with the best intentions just sort of screws up, you've only given them a dollar. It gives the recipients the permission to be transparent, to learn, to share, and to ask for more money so they can try again. And by extension, the most well-organized, most well-thought-out appeals for donations should naturally rise to the top. These organizations can be identified by donor reviews and ratings.
   
   
8. This approach will offer a public barometer to the causes that populations care about the most. This in turn will make these causes newsworthy, generate even more attention to the cause, and create a self-sustaining loop which in turn should increase contributions. The dollar gives voice and vote.
   
   
9. Provides a feedback loop. Some sites such as Causes are doing this to a certain extent with comments postings, donation-and-contributor counters. I believe we can make this feedback loop a much more rich experience and would result in an actual and genuine connection between contributors and recipients. They key is not to make people feel like they are competing or being rewarded for donating the most on an individual level. The key is to enable people to come together through a donation cap to achieve a common goal.

 

THE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT:

1. Create a mobile application that makes browse, flash alerts, and transactional moment really compelling, instant and easy. While joining a real-time event is fun (either virtually or in real life), not everyone can make the date. So, for example, using their $20 per month allotment, a user could scroll through a mobile app or go online and choose the donation events they want to participate in, in the near future. At the instant of the event, their $1 automatically is donated all at once. The immediacy of this approach also opens itself up for gaming principles such as unlocking badges. We could also create virtual rooms or worlds where people could "gather" and "meet" each other before the moment of donation, or in any event where large numbers of people are gathered for a single purpose—a sporting event, rock concert, or business convention. Imagine: A specific charitable organization would be selected by any variety of methods, and the audience, crowd, etc would rally at a single moment and donate their $1 to the event. The money would be flashed on a screen, maybe a video would be streamed in from the recipients… (honestly, wouldn’t that be so cool?? ).
2. Integrating banks, savings accounts, and interest rates. Through the platform, people could commit to donating, say, $20 per month. This money would be transferred out of a checking or savings account into a special account. Every month, the user clicks through to the charities of their choice, still donating only $1 to each. At any time, the user can withdraw or transfer their money for personal use. The $20 is just a pledge. However, whatever money is in the account draws interest. This interest must be used for donations. It also makes it much easier for people to report charitable giving to the IRS.
3. Internet and international banking. See above. The percentage of Europeans who have credit cards is low vs. the U.S. Most Europeans use debit and internet banking transactions. If we enable the automatic transfer of funds (per point #2), we’d be able to engage millions more people than a site that just accepted American credit cards. We could do this through SMS or 1-Click technology such as what Amazon.com offers.

 

CLOUD, the WEBSITE and MOBILE APPS

The cloud is in the perfect position to handle the “peak and trough” balance loads necessary for the "event" approach to charitble donations.

Mobile apps could be developed where people could donate anytime anywhere.

Maybe there could even be charitable events popping up through XBOX Live and Kinect. People could donate with their XBOX Points.

The website would need to incorporate and utilize the best of similarities technology that exists today. I see several sites such as Jumo that attempt to do this. I haven't seen any sites yet that do it excellently. I want to create discovery and community around common compassionate interests. The investment in what you care about exists over the long term. You discuss with other like-minded people who your recipients could better use the funds.

 

CHALLENGES:

Q. How does this site and mobile app pay for itself?
A. I have no idea.

Q. How are security measures taken into consideration? How do we prevent a terror group from disguising itself as an animal rescue organization?
A. I have no idea.

Q. How do people submit requests for donations and how exactly does that process work?
A. That still needs to be figured out.

Q. Exactly what does this incredible, life-altering feedback loop look like? Do donors need to submit videos? Write a blog?
A. Sure, and probably other things as well. Any ideas?

So how do we pull this off? How can we afford it? What sort of United Nations of the Best in the Business do we need to make sure this site uses the best of what is already out there to change the world? What sort of financial models can we bring to the $1 donation cap (i.e. maybe it makes sense for more specialized, expensive charities where you can have a $5 donation that would require fewer people to achieve the financial goal).

There are a lot of questions to be answered, but we’re this close. A lot of innovation in order pipeline, transactional options, and UX to be applied. It needs to be informed, forewarned, and troubleshooted by experts in the business of charitable giving. It's requires some complex thinking from smart and passionate people to deliver something simple, delightful, and life altering. This idea needs to be championed, adopted, shared, thought about, discussed, challenged, tested, made better, and realized.

Go.

 

Chapter Seven: 10K: 10K: 10M

The Virtual Flash Mob Experiment

I knew David Risher when he was the vice president of marketing at Amazon in the mid-late '90s. I remember the last company all-hands meeting he attended. He stood up on stage while the company's CEO, Jeff Bezos, commented on his departure, his voice cracking with emotion.  If David knew me, it would only be because there is a folder reserved in his huge brain crammed with scraps of paper etched or scribbled with names and faces of hundreds or thousands of people he would have casually encountered through work. 

I emailed him to explain who I was, how I knew him, and what I wanted to do for his organization, Worldreader.org, which donates and delivers Kindle e-readers to areas in developing nations where children have scarce access to books.  I told him I was incredibly inspired by the organization and saw it as a perfect fit for the virtual flash mob concept.

He graciously wrote me back within a few hours and gave me the go-ahead to use Worldreader.org to try out this idea.  He put me in touch with Susan Moody, the organization's communications director. 

Worldreader.org was the perfect pilot organization because:

• It has an immediate impact. You know exactly how your money is being spent and who it is going to.
• It's a trusted organization set up by people I trusted and admired
• The organization was deep into the all-important feedback loop.  I would feel the impact of my donation through their efforts. They keep a great blog. 

I got my group at work together and we laid out the goals and  ground rules to set up our virtual flash mob:

Our Goal: To raise $10,000 in 10 minutes by recruiting 10,000 people to donate $1 each. 

• We could devote no extra resources or money to the project
• We could build nothing. Not even by ourselves. We could only use what was currently available, and available for free
• We were going to launch the project in six weeks. 

We spent a long time figuring out how we were going to disseminate the communication through free social-media efforts. It was really hard for us to restrain our thinking and not go off on some brainstorming tangent about building applications, paying for ads, etc.

To arrive at a simple idea often requires quite a lot of complex and disciplined thinking. 

STEP ONE:
We decided as a first step to set up a virtual flash mob Facebook group  page and recruit ambassadors. The ambassadors would be people who were close to each of us--people in our short-list circle who would participate because they supported us as individuals. In turn, these ambassadors would recruit more ambassadors in the same spirit of support.   We knew that the principles to this idea were no different than any other online communication: in order to be effective your message must be targeted, relevant, and come from a trustworthy source. 

We chose December 7 as the date for the virtual flash mob. On that date, all the ambassadors would be at their virtual posts using Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter to announce that the virtual flash mob was occurring and for everyone to go donate their dollar at that moment. 

STEP TWO:
I wrote an announcement message and sent it through email to five trusted friends who were pretty different from each other for any variety of reasons.  I let the email sit for a while and then emailed them again to ask them what their reaction was. Were they inspired by the idea? Did they trust it? Did they think it was a scam? Did it feel spammy?  All five of them gave me the exact same response: that they thought the idea was cool and they were excited to participate in it because it came from a trusted friend, it's a great idea, and it only costs $1. 

STEP THREE:
For a month, I pretty much spammed my social network on a daily basis promoting the event.  I wanted to see if broad distribution of the message would build momentum or dilute the whole idea. 

I sent out an invite through a Facebook private message to a large number of close friends and trusted colleagues asking them to be ambassadors. I was surprised by the response, or lack there of. I got quite a lot of enthusiastic response from friends and acquaintances in the UK and the east coast of the U.S.  I heard almost nothing from my network on the west coast. This was especially surprising since the majority of my contacts on the west coast are affiliated with Amazon.com in one way or another.  The Kindle e-reader is an Amazon.com product. 

I asked a few very trusted friends what their response was to the Facebook message. Some of them were confused by it. Others remarked that they hadn't read it yet but intended to, even though the message clearly had a time stamp on it.  These responses were totally opposite to the responses from people who received the message through email. 

Lesson #1: The email inbox still has tremendous value and perhaps is more valuable than social media outlets when relaying important information with a time stamp. Also, email addresses aren't as accessible as social media inboxes, and therefore messages sent to email inboxes may hold higher value to the recipient.

Lesson #2: It was really hard to write a brief message about an organization few had heard of, explain what the new donation concept was, and how it was to be conducted, while also trying to inspire people to get informed and excited about the cause in general. 

SET UP FOR FAILURE
So here's the thing: I knew we weren't going to get anywhere near 10,000 people to donate $1 to Worldreader. Sure, there was a "magical thinking" part of my brain whispering that this could be one of those crazy stories where it just takes off and changes the world over night.  The goal was hugely ambitious and the rational and realistic part of my brain (as pea-sized as it is) knew we were going to fail to reach it. But I wanted to see in what ways it would fail. I wanted to learn and I wanted to see if I would be surprised. 

 On the day of the flash mob, the donations started filing in. It was a steady stream, but hardly a flood.  I thought we would get a couple hundred donations. I think we got about a hundred. But the surprising thing was that all those people who remained silent on the west coast were the first to donate, and the majority of the donations came through them. The people in the UK and the east coast who were active in the message dissemination phase were not active at all when it came time for the moment of donation. Even some of those who were heavily involved in the ambassador recruiting didn't donate until 1-2 days after the flash mob was officially over. 

Here are more lessons:

Lesson #3: You are not the only one asking people for money. It is extremely difficult to rise above the din of proverbial bells and buckets, especially during December. 

Lesson #4. It is really hard to break out of your social circle, no matter how big it is.  This I think was the most critical lesson learned from this experiment. I could see the names of most of the people who donated (they were asked to donate directly to the Worldreader.org donation page and could choose whether or not to post their names publicly).  Most of the people who donated where in my closest inner circle of friends and colleagues. They were doing this to support me, rather than support the cause just for the sake of the cause.  

The biggest eye opener seems ridiculously self-evident now that I have seen it in play. But no matter how many people you have in your circle, we really only meet each other through a pretty fixed set of means: through family, school, work, hobbies/sports, and friends.  

Lesson #5:  "It's all about 'the me.'" During the time we were promoting and announcing the impending flash mob, there was another campaign going around where people were changing their Facebook pictures to a cartoon in remembrance of child abuse awareness. We were asking people to donate just $1, which would create an immediate impact on  kids you could see through Worldreader, but I wasn't able to catch the social media fire the way the child-abuse awareness campaign did.  

If you are asking people to buy into something that they otherwise would not contemplate in their every day lives, you must give them a way to express themselves.  The child abuse awareness gimmick  wasn't really about awareness on an individual level, it was about people getting excited to show off their favorite cartoon.   Maybe it is easier to raise awareness than it is to raise money.  Gaming, badging, and some sort of personal reward must be included if you want to get people invested in something they otherwise wouldn't-- save for pure altruism. 

Lesson #6: Know your technical challenges. We were asking people to donate $1 through the Causes facebook application, but it only accepted a minimum of $10 donations. So we had to send messages urgently rerouting people directly to the Worldreader.org donation page. There was only the option to pay through credit card, so a few people got calls from their credit card companies as a $1 purchase sets off a fraud alert. 

Lesson #7: Timing is everything. I received feedback from a number of people that they just wanted to "do it already."  Maybe you don't need a month to get the word out. Maybe all you need is a day. 

Lesson #8: All other lessons learned apply here.  Ease of use. Relevance. Personalization. Trust.  Convenience. Fascination. All of this comes into play in an instance like this. It is no different than any other online pursuit. 

Lesson #9: Pulling off a campaign like this is a lot of hard work. Even without building anything, setting this up was a full time job for a number of weeks. It wasn't a walk in the park. 

And how does this story end?  Everyone who participated in the flash mob participated in this: 

 

 Next Post: I'll explain the concept in detail of the virtual flash mob and how a dedicated site could revolutionize charitable donations in a way that I hope  would have a monumental impact. 

(If you would like to join the journey toward democratizing charitable donations, please go to my Facebook page and "like" it. Thanks!)

I Was the Groupie that Got Lucky

 

When people ask how my husband, Michael, and I met, I always explain he was in a cover band in college and I was the groupie that got lucky.  He doesn't approve of this explanation, but he's too slow on the draw to intercept my response.

Great music was exploding in the early '90s and Michael's band covered all of it.  It was an important moment for those of us who lived in Bloomington, Indiana, too far away from any of the major cities where the bands we loved were touring.  For that reason, Michael's band was loved and hated in our college town and its surroundings. For a few years, Situation Grey were really, really popular and/or notorious, depending on which camp you stood in. 

 

Well, enough with nostalgia, it's time to embarrass my beloved! It looks like one of their first audio engineers has uploaded some old performances from around 1991-92. I can tell this montage is spliced between two shows at the Vogue in Indianapolis because I recognize the different haircuts. 1991, Michael was sporting the "diagonal forward" and in 1992 his featured coif was "the Danzig."

Of course, being the bassist, Michael is not in the film that much, but around minute 3:30 you can start to see him. He is always on the left side of the stage from the viewer's perspective, rockin' that Peavey DynaBass like there's no tomorrow!

The sounds quality isn't that great because it's a board recording. But we're really here just to get a glimpse of our life exactly 20 years ago.

 You can see Michael pretty well on the left starting around 3:30 minutes.

 

Oh yes...the infamous "Anything Anything" video.

 

 

And it appears there is also this:

 

 

And for a grand finale: