Our Baby!

Sometimes, a baby is born who simply demands that you get out of the way before said baby steps on some part of you and makes you cry.

Then, after the baby has tromped through the house and gone outside by making a baby-shaped hole in the wall, you cry.

Julia and I celebrated our baby's first walk outside, admiring the hole in the wall, at about 9:30 last night.

Here is our first baby picture.

I don't buy into it

There are about half a billion experts in social media actively seeking clients today. Both of the folks who are regular users of social media and are not actively seeking to tout their expertise and monetize it are, as you can only imagine, somewhat overwhelmed by the onslaught of marketing material from all of those who are.

I enjoy listening to the occasional webinar done by one expert or another, purely for the entertainment value. Yes, I glean a shiny idea or two from those webinars, so don't let me convince you that I think I am above learning from the experiences.

Because I am not doing anything to make money from what I write here--I don't even have Google ads on my blog--I can freely and without any compunction of conscience poke fun at those who are planning to make a six-figure income this week from the internet.

There are some problems with the logic exhibited by the marketers of classes aimed at those same folks, they of the six-figure-income-this-week expectation.

If their program is so astonishingly powerful, why do they spend time trying to get my measly 47 bucks? Why not just run their systems, many of which are automated according to the marketing hype, and just keep swapping out the full bags of cash with empty ones to continue catching the flow of inbound money?

Remember this if nothing else sticks today: the only group which, as a whole, made money during any gold rush you might name were those who were selling goods and services to the miners/prospectors.

I'll bet there were merchants during the Crusades who followed along and sold goods to the heroes off on an adventure.

Today's equivalent in the internet world is the group who is offering to teach you, for only 47 or 97 or 749 dollars, how you, too, can grow wealthy while blowing your vuvuzela in support of your favorite World Cup team.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, criticize. Those who can market don't need to do much of anything, as there will always be someone who is willing to bet 47 bucks that the hypemeister can make them rich.

Fundamental disconnect: our needs vs our institutions

Yesterday, I watched a TED presentation by Rory Sutherland. He is an ad man from Great Britain, but more to the point of this presentation, he is an innovative thinker who doesn't allow the obvious to escape him even when it is hidden behind the assumptions of all the large institutional entities in the world.

What I love about hearing him, other than his great sense of humor, is how cleanly he presents these obvious facts. When he does so, it becomes almost impossible to imagine how the government or the national charitable group could possibly have been blind to it.

Of course, they are blind to such things for the same reason we are sometimes blind to aspects of our own lives which our friends can see clearly. Yet, when they try to help us, we deflect and deny. There is no resistance stronger than the resistance to changes in our own story, the one we have lovingly crafted of our own lives. Stress and tension are the signs which warn us that the story doesn't fit with the facts. If you are feeling stressed out, consider how you may need to allow your story's arc to gradually bend toward the one which everyone else has communally agreed to.

In the case of the institution, it sees every problem as, first, being large enough to require their action. Then it chooses, always, the 30lb sledge hammer as the tool for the job. As you will hear from Rory, small changes made for little or no cost can be hugely effective where the large, expensive answer failed. But institutions don't exist for that reason! Their raison d'être is to spend all the resources at their disposal. Inexpensive, innovative answers are not on their radar.

Please watch and listen to Rory. You will have a great time!

Technology: amazing, empowering, and driving us into the shallows

Just a couple of minutes ago, I tried to open Twitter to check out a tweet someone had linked to in Google Buzz. Instead of the Twitter UI, I saw the Fail Whale. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the whale is the centerpiece of a graphic which Twitter displays when it is suffering any kind of outage or over-capacity situation.

(Here is an interview with Yiying Lu, the person who designed the graphic as an "I'm sorry I can't come to your event" card, the image named "Lifting a Dreamer")

The whale has become iconic enough that some are offering artistic riffs. Check out Swiss designer David Pache's homage.

There's even a fan club.

Lots and lots of people have discovered that Twitter allows for all manner of fast, short bursts of communication, and does so while also supporting serendipitous connections among the people who are connected to the messenger.

Facebook is similarly supportive of the new connections people make as a result of both knowing a third person, or having a passion for the same music or cause.

Not surprisingly, given the half a billion people who have Facebook accounts, an entire niche industry has sprung up which offers expertise in marketing to those people.

We all see that technology, in this case the technology of social media, is amazing. Just yesterday, I became acquainted with someone 1800 miles away and had a short exchange of ideas which helped her cope with a technical issue, so her problem was solved by someone she did not know existed one minute prior, that person being more than halfway across the country, and it cost her nothing. There is great power in this kind of communications capability.

Conversely, it can be disempowering for those of the old paradigm where knowledge was delivered by the elite. Now, direct connections between those with the expertise and those needing it can happen almost instantaneously. Disintermediation, thy name is social media.

There is, as there always is, another side to the story. In this case, it is the impact on our ability to think deeply, to ponder at a level which requires a quiet space and an uninterrupted span of time. Nothing about Twitter is supportive of uninterrupted time! It is all about speed, instant judgment, and audacity.

Similarly, Facebook can suck one in and not allow an exit until lots of friends have been touched. My daughter, a college student, was wise to simply stay out of Facebook altogether the last two weeks of her semester. She even announced she was doing it, thus increasing her liklihood of compliance.

In our day-to-day lives, are we missing out on life's richness which is right in front of our noses in order to invest hours in a virtual world? Are we no longer able to be in touch with the softest voice, the one inside ourselves, because we are too busy, a sense only aggravated by the pervasive invasion of social media?

It is ironic that the very idea of being driven to shallow thinking is discussed at great length in recent days by some very thoughtful and smart people whose thoughts are published--or links to them are--via the very social media tools which may be wreaking havoc with our ability to think deep thoughts.

Don't consider this my attempt to bemoan change. Not at all--I embrace it. I enjoy Facebook for the information and sense of community, for the chance to be more part of friends' lives than I was before Facebook. I heart Twitter for its requirement for terse speech. It's great fun cooking up a witty response and keeping it under 140 characters.

Change is simply another word for life. Without it, there is no life. Still, as conscious beings, it is a responsibility we share to seek change which leads us to greater and richer places, even as we must acknowledge that we don't know what the heck we are doing in that regard.

Needing a break

In that odd way I am able to make sense of the world, I have decided, since I felt this morning as if things were getting a bit overwhelming and the to-do list a bit longer than I prefer, to join a 30-day blog challenge.

There is even a theory which backs my decision. Well, more a cliché, but still, it goes like this: If you want something done, assign it to the busiest person available.

It is rarely the case that I get this sense of overwhelm because I have gotten pretty good at saying "No" often enough that it never gets to this point.

Right now, though, with my wife's book approaching its emergence into the world, there are lots of tasks and meetings and decisions which cannot be put off. So, those get the prime spots on the calendar.

Right behind those commitments are all the items related to my job search. This includes the fun parts--interviewing, talking to people in order to get an interview, networking with folks so as to broaden the number of people I know who are aware of me and my skills--and the not-as-fun parts, like spending time scanning the internet for possibilities and dealing with the sheer volume of rejections which are so prevelant in an economy which has created an environment where there may be 100, 200, 500 or more applicants for any of the jobs I am seeking.

The net result is a pretty busy Rick. Then, I heard about this challenge this morning from my long-distance buddy Martha Giffen. Aw, what the heck. I'm in.

For me, "needing a break" has been translated into, "take a break and write something; you know you want to."

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

It seems that the amount of time, energy, and typing I devote to Facebook, Twitter, and OPB (other people's blogs) has impacted the amount of words emerging here.

Thank goodness there is no guarantee of a particular level of service here at good old Hamguin's.

To both of you who read what I write here, my apologies. That's not to say I will pretend to get better at regularly posting, only that I regret serving you less often than you might like.

Springtime, always a stop-and-start-and-stop process in the high plains, is stopped at the moment. We had snow a few days ago, and my lovely North-Carolina-native wife has only now ceased grousing about it. Since, we have had rain and temps in the 40's and 50's.

In Denver, Spring means 70's and impossibly deep-blue skies which go on forever. We're planning to see just that tomorrow or Monday. Maybe both days. Today, though, is supposed to be more wet and chilly weather.

We are now in the sprint stage of the runup to the release of Julia's new book, "Choosing Easy World." It has been a lengthy process, but in only 10 more weeks, the book will be out. It is a big deal, and not just for the Hamrick family. If ever the planet has needed the message Easy World reminds us of, now is the time.

I encourage you to help us get the word out. You can buy the book now at Amazon.com, and pre-publication purchases count toward the all-important best-seller statistics for the first week after publication. In other words, buy now, get the book in August, and help make it a hit.

If you do decide to buy, keep your receipt from Amazon. Julia is going to offer a bonus to those who preorder. I'll be sure to talk about the details here as they become available.

Looking forward, next week, to sharing lunch with long-time internet buddy Lynilu and her peeps. It is great fun to meet folks face-to-face for the first time who you feel like you have known for a long while. Pictures to follow.

It feels to me as if my long trip through the world of the underutilized may be coming to a conclusion. As much as I try to put a happy face on it, it is not easy to look for a job for a really long time and not find one. It is educational, self-revelatory, humbling, and a big reminder of the importance of persistence, but it is not easy.

I don't have any particular reason to believe the trip is almost over, just a feeling I have.

We'll see.

Be afraid...be very afraid

In my meanderings around the interwebs, I have run across many folks who are pitching products. In today's post, I am focusing more on the products which are of the intellectual-property type than the ShamWows of the internet.

What has struck me is the regularity with which these products offer to provide the buyer with control of their [insert product pitch point here].

We're not talking about greater influence or a stronger sense of being in charge, but TOTAL CONTROL. The pitch may focus on your life, your job, your relationship, your financial wellbeing...you get the idea.

When one digs a little below the surface, these marketing techniques are reflective of what many of us are experiencing: a fear that we are not in control, that we are lost in the turmoil which is today's world.

Marketing is an art or science (you can get opinions, and strong ones, both directions) which taps into the group psyche in order to find the "buy now" button which enough people have activated within themselves to allow a marketing campaign to more than pay back its cost thanks to its success in finding buyers. It really is that simple: if the folks selling us stuff can come up with a marketing campaign which yields more income than it costs to run, we will see it. And, we will see it replicated with astonishing speed as it is taken up as a best-practice technique by other marketers.

The widespread use today of the appeal to a universal desire for control is only one micron from the appeal which a recently booted administration used for a long time to maintain their power base: making all of us afraid.

The difference is in the more-palatable nature of addressing a need one layer above the simple survival instinct which a fear-based campaign seeks to invoke.

So, we are targeted, again and again, with sales pitches which seek to calm our underlying fears by guaranteeing something supposedly at an intellectual level even as it takes advantage of the fear.

I'm not doing anything more today than noting this as an observation which may help you better frame how to view the loud clanging of those seeking to have you write them a check so they can, finally, give you back control of your lives.

Bottom line: control is an illusion. It is a hugely attractive one, but it is an illusion. Paying someone who claims to be able to make the illusion a reality in your life is a little like betting you can beat a gambling propensity by moving to Las Vegas. It could work, but you have to wonder if the odds are in your favor.