hi folks....

Hopefully you've noticed that I have migrated my blog to my new website www.perrygruber.com, which better integrates my journey with my social business intentions. Please, if you're interested in continuing to follow me, link to the link above....uh, just follow that link up there...

Burn your personal brand

These are not my words but they speak so intimately to my heart and where I am professionally and spiritually, I had to share...

"Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations"By John Jay Chapman, Commencement Address to the graduating class at Hobart College, 1900

"When I was asked to make this address I wondered what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And I think I have one thing to say: If you wish to be useful, never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerkship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. Retain the power of speech no matter what other power you may lose. If you can take this course, and in so far as you can take it, you will bless this country. In so far as you depart from this course you become dampers, mutes, and hooded executioners.

"As a practical matter a mere failure to speak out upon occasions where no opinion is asked or expected of you, and when the utterance of an uncalled-for suspicion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in palpable iniquity. Try to raise a voice that will be heard from here to Albany and watch what comes forward to shut off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Russian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend or your father's offering you a place in his office. This is your warning from the secret police. Why, if any of you young gentleman have a mind to make himself heard a mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations and a close enemy of most men who would wish you well.

"I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into the world with their messages, and when they find how deaf the world is, they think they must save their strength and wait. They believe that after a while they will be able to get up on some little eminence from which they can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then I will use my powers for good." Next year comes and with it a strange discovery: The man has lost his horizon of thought. His ambition has evaporated; he has nothing to say. I give you this one rule of conduct: Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time."

It is always now. Now is the plain whereupon enlightened leaders join battle against those ideas that would keep humanity from its ascention: scarcity, lack, fear, separation. I count myself among those leaders. Do you?

Americans are happy and satisfied

I was talking with my roommate today and sharing with her that the majority of Americans are happy and satisfied with their lives. But she didn’t believe me. I was surprised at her disbelief. Do many people presume that the majority of Americans are not happy nor satisfied with their lives? Perhaps many people are like my roommate and believe that the world is getting worse instead of better. But the facts are that the world and humanity, in nearly every measure, are indeed getting better. Don't take my word for it, take Greg Easterbrook's. In 2003 Easterbrook wrote a book about the trends and he wondered why people seem to be feeling worse, when in fact everything is getting better. His book, The Progress Paradox details what he found.

Statistics can be a paradox themselves because they can be used to argue nearly any side of an issue, so one must be careful to tread thougtfully through inferences drawn from them. That said, you may find interesting, as I did, the remarkable results two Gallup Poll surveys reveal about American’s personal satisfaction and happiness. One poll was taken this time in 2007 and the other taken this month. Last year’s poll shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans are… you got it, happy and satisfied. Twelve months later, the same poll taken just a few days ago shows – unsurprisingly – a drop in national happiness and personal life satisfaction among Americans and yet, the results are still extremely high.

The Gallup results are contrary to Easterbrook’s thesis. In Blogcritics Magazine, writer Eric Whelchel, , reviewed The Progress Paradox and got a lot right, in my opinion. Near the end, Whelchel speculates on the apparent dissonance between the Gallup results and Easterbrook’s claims:

"…relying on polls to gauge trends in human happiness is inherently problematic; someone polled one day as being “happy” could have a different outlook on another day, or hell, five minutes after being asked the questions the first time. Easterbrook also sometimes comes across as a dry intellectual by focusing on poll numbers a bit too much. He tends to de-emphasize the impact that daily events (loss of job, birth of child, filing of restraining order) have on a person’s outlook on life in favor of broader and impersonal categories."

Are the Gallup statistics right? Or is it possible that poll’s problems are introducing errors in the results? I don’t know, but my roommate didn’t buy them. How about you?

Do my ideas have a clue?

Can the ideas, the ones I call my own, compete in the marketplace of ideas such that I can earn an income? This is the question, I guess as I leave my six figure salary position to strike out on a new path, a more authentic path for myself. The question is a scary one. I talk of being scared, of fear a lot, because I don't think humans talk about it often enough. It is the bogeyman in the closet that we ignore...while it drives our lives to places we prefer not to go. So I talk about my fear, my being scared as a way to face them, and in facing them they lose their power.

We are standing, as we always do, with one foot in the new and the other in the old. The Cluetrain Manifesto summed up my personal experience of work pretty well (minus the consciousness component which I write about her all the time):

"Life is too short," we say, and it is. Too short for office politics, for busywork and pointless paper chases, for jumping through hoops and covering our asses, for trying to please, to not offend, for constantly struggling to achieve some ever-receding
definition of success. Too short as well for worrying whether we bought the
right suit, the right breakfast cereal, the right laptop computer, the right
brand of underarm deodorant."

There's more to it that had me leave my job to start my company. Much more. For me it's also about leading life authentically as an example to myself and to others. For we all lead, and follow, one another.

And so, I go out to find out if indeed my ideas are worth something, if they can successfully compete. And in doing so, I hope to change the world. Time, that damned illusion, will tell if I'm onto something, or if I'm a fool.