You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps
I’ve met more messed-up, weird, freaky, oddball, and flat-out crazy people in my last six months online than I did in my entire ten years working at the S&M Slip n’ Slide Factory for the Criminally Insane in Hoboken, New Jersey — just across the street from the Klingon Language University.
It’s strange. Everyone I know who is successful online is crazy. Every one of them is unconventional. Many have A.D.D., and some have mood disorders. Most are wacky and have a dark — if not deviant — sense of humor. The crazier these people are, the better they seem to do online. I’ve come to accept it. I’ve come to revel in it.
I dig weirdoes. And in fact, I’ve realized I’m one of them. Sure, I’m a middle-class white guy, but I’m totally unconventional and scatterbrained and I have a ton of stupidly out-there ideas. I have a history of panic attacks. I think disgusting things are funny (search on YouTube for “Kermit 2 girls 1 cup reaction,” but only if there are no kids or your boss around. SIDE-SPLITTINGLY hilarious to me). I expose way, way too much of my thoughts and emotions online. I’m a geek. I enjoy Star Trek. I can’t hear the name of baseball player “Albert Pujols” (pronounced “poo holes”) without giggling like a little girl.
Face it: I’m a freak.
Which is actually a good segue, because I got it into my head to write this post when my two favorite oddballs, Pace and Kyeli of Freak Revolution, released their Freak Revolution Manifesto yesterday.
Now, in case you haven’t heard about it, the Manifesto is all about changing the world. (The full version, “changing the fucking world,” was probably trademarked by Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz. Naomi actually tried to trademark “fuck” in and of itself, but the trademark office told her that it was public domain. Then she was all like, “But I invented it, fucker.” Still no dice.)
I got an advance copy of the Manifesto last week, read it, and really dug it.
So, having done that, I wanted to say something.
You listening?
I want to say it to everyone out there who considers themselves mainstream. And what I’m going to say, I say as a reformed quasi-mainstreamer, because I’m a white heterosexual middle class religiously unremarkable man living in America. You live that way and the mainstream has its way with you. Much like going to prison and being indoctrinated by the Aryan Brotherhood and the Black Nationals (or both; I’ll just say that I’m good at reframing and that membership has its advantages), when you grow up in the middle of this country’s social strata, you get sucked into it even if you’re a weirdo at your core.
So as someone who knows the mainstream perspective, I want to say this: Listen to these freaks. Read them. Think hard. And change the world.
See, I have to admit something. I’m a really tolerant guy. I have friends of all races, religions, creeds, Hatfields or McCoys. I’m cool with gays, punks, goths, whatever. I dig what they’re about and I’m totally behind them. But…
…but…
… but I’ll admit that deep down, I used to pretty much just expect them to be weird.
And weirdoes, while entertaining, aren’t people you take seriously.
I’m not proud of this. I blame Beverly Hills 90210 and American Express commercials. Those things teach you that mainstream is the way things are supposed to be. You can tolerate the fringes, but that’s not where sense and logic are to be found. That’s not where leadership or governance lies. That’s not where good ideas lie in wait to be discovered.
You meet a lesbian bisexual witch tattooed and blue-haired half-transsexual couple and you think, I like these people. I can hang with these people. These people have some interesting ideas.
But from that 90210 perspective, you don’t, on a deep-deep level, truly expect to learn from them. You don’t expect to hear a set of ideas, laid out so perfectly and sensibly, from people so far from the norm. The top of your head likes the idea of a revolution of freaks, but the bottom part kind of thinks subconsciously that it’ll be about waving anarchist flags while listening to Joy Division.
Dammit, I’m not proud of what my conditioning has made me think. But I’m saying it here and now because plenty of you reading this consider yourself mainstream and while you may be tolerant of the weirdoes around you, you may not truly give full air time to their ideas. You may not realize that you’re a weirdo, too.
My name is Johnny B. Truant. I’m a straight white guy living in the middle of America with my wife and 2.5 kids.
My name is Johnny B. Truant, and I’m a freak.
So think on this for a minute:
Kyeli and Pace’s tagline (I’m switching their order because much like McCartney to Lennon, I imagine Kyeli gets tired of always being second) is that “Normal people won’t change the world. We will.” So now you’re imagining crowed of slow-moving people with black eyeliner and you’re hearing Ian Curtis singing that love will tear us apart. But that’s dismissive. And it doesn’t really stop to think about the fact that this internet culture is full of weirdoes. Founded by freaks. Run every day by people outside of the mainstream.
Who first embraced the internet? Geeks. Programmers. Hackers. People who couldn’t find a niche in their outside world, so they found it online. If you live in Duluth, you’re not going to find a terribly thriving punk rock community. But online? It’s a snap. The internet helps the freaks come together. It helps the outsiders find a group that they can be inside.
In other words, whether you realize it or not, the very fact that you’re here means that a hell of a lot of you are freaks. You think you’re in the mainstream, but you’re not.
So who will change the world for the better? You will. The freaks will. It won’t be the people who are content. It will be the people who don’t fit, who are discontent, who aren’t entrenched in the current paradigm.
Look, I don’t know if the world can be changed. Look up philosophers Hobbes and Locke, and then come back here and finish this sentence because I don’t know which one of those guys I agree with.
But what I know is that the Freak Revolution Manifesto is really, really interesting. It’s a thinker. If you open your mind to learning from people who weren’t placed into a teaching position by an institution, you’ll walk away scratching your head. You’ll start to think, “Wow, that is the problem with the modern world.”
So you should go and get it. Read it. It’s free; you have nothing to lose.
Except for your current way of thinking, that is.
Why I’m exactly like Morpheus (How to turn your life totally backward in six months)
Filed under: Inspiration & motivation, Life of Johnny, Online biz
It’s weird. I have this hypothetical scenario in my head. I know it’s hypothetical because it involves Doc Brown from Back to the Future.
I imagine going back in time six months, to the end of March of this year. And the future me eschews all of the warnings about interacting with past selves, lest I cause a temporal paradox or become my own grandfather or something, and instead goes right up to the past me and says:
“Six months from now, you won’t be doing any of the work you’re doing now. Your job as you know it will cease to exist. Your professional image and brand as you know it will cease to exist. You will no longer be billing any of the clients you work with now — that same group that, never wavering, you have steadily and reliably billed over $6000 per month and who you have come to rely upon.
“Instead, six months forward, you’ll be working for and with all new people, in a totally different business, doing work totally differently, and moving very quickly in a totally different direction.”
And past me would be like, “What new business are you talking about?”
And future me would be like, “Oh, it doesn’t exist yet. You build it now, and six months forward it’ll be all you do and will replace your current income.”
And the past me would wave a dismissive hand and be like, “Get the fuck outta here.”
Because, you see, this scenario is what a normal person in a normal situation would call, “Quitting your job.” I was an independent contractor from the beginning, so I don’t really have a job to quit. But 100% client turnover is basically the same thing. Out with the old, in with the new.
So this is my “I’m quitting my job” post.
So hey, boss, shove it. Except that the boss is me, so there shall be no shoving — of it, or of anything else.
What has transpired this year has all been very strange, looking back now.
See, ever since my wife had our son, she’s really only worked kind of on and off. For five years now, I have, for all intents and purposes, been the sole (or at least primary, by a long shot) breadwinner for this household. I have never had a steady paycheck from an employer, so each month I’ve had to scrape to make it all happen. I must bill those clients, collectively, right around $6000. I don’t do that, we suffer. And all the while, I’ve also been fighting the real estate monster. I had to borrow some here and there, but I basically relied on steady work from that client base to keep this family afloat.
And today, all of those old stalwart clients are gone. As of next month, I will bill none of them. It’s actually scary to think about.
It was around six months ago that I finally cracked the figurative seal on the copy of Online Business School that I’d gotten for Christmas (ALMOST as much fun as a video game or new Transformers) and started this thing I’m doing now.
At the time, my motivations for starting a new venture were fear and desperation. I was tired of the real estate sinkhole and wanted in the worst way to get out. I figured that my only viable solution was to earn a supplementary income. So I started listening to OBS and got in touch with Naomi and started doing my thing, and doing it hard.
And get this.
Six months later, I still don’t have a supplementary income. But… oh thank Jesus… I do have an income.
See? See how that all fell into place, how it all worked out? This is why fear is good. Without the fear, I don’t start a new business. Without the business, I’m earning right around $0.00 today. And $0.00 doesn’t go as far as it used to, let me tell you.
Let me get all cosmic on you. Ready?
DISCLAIMER: If you’re into rock-solid Johnny and don’t want to watch me get all woo-woo on you, you should click over to the Can I Have a Go? video now. If you stay, you agree to sit cross-legged and barefoot on a hemp throw rug with me while drinking tea and smoking from a seven-foot hookah.
Dude. Things really do happen for a reason.
Dude. Things really do work out for the best in the end, if you keep the faith.
Truth.
I’ve spent a lot of the last 12 months afraid, worried, sometimes nearly panicked. In the middle of something like that, it is nearly impossible to convince yourself that this is all part of a process that will ultimately serve you. When the property tax bills come due and you owe $5000 that you don’t have, it’s not easy. When you have to suck up your pride and borrow money, it’s not easy. When you look forward and can’t possibly imagine how you’ll ever get out short of letting the whole house of cards collapse on you, it’s not easy.
But you have to do it. You have to hang tough, just like NKOTB told you back in the 80s. And what must happen will happen.
See, eventually you start to see through the smoke and mirrors. There’s only so many times that a terrible situation can crop up and yet ends up working out before it starts to feel like that boy who cried “Wolf!” It starts to feel like a bunch of empty threats, put there to either steer you in one direction or to see if you’ll flinch.
Life gives you a little kick in the nuts the first time and you panic. But then it works out all right.
The next time it happens, you panic. But again, it works out all right.
The next time you freak out some, but it’s less severe. And it works out all right again.
I’ve had like two hundred of those. And now when I get them I’m like, “Hey, dumbass! Maybe this one will work out all right.”
And I find myself thinking of that speech that Morpheus gives in the second Matrix movie. The one where he’s all shirtless with his bald head and has like USB ports all over his body and screams all loud and shit and is like, “I stand before you unafraid because after two hundred years, I remember what matters most: WE ARE STILL HERE!”
I’m totally like Morpheus. Planet overrun by sentient machines, two hundred years of underground oppression, shirtless and covered with data ports. But after two hundred tenants who won’t pay their rent and two hundred late client payments and two hundred bogus $400 citations from the city for not mowing grass that was actually mowed, I AM STILL HERE!
It doesn’t matter what has happened to you in the past. The ups, the down, the setbacks. YOU ARE STILL HERE!
If you’ve been beaten up and spit out, I’m betting that even if you think you’ve been hit hard, not many of you are near death, without family or friends, or living in a box. No, YOU ARE STILL HERE!
It’s amazing to me, what life will throw at you. And it’s amazing, if you can step back and look at it from above, what intricate and perfect design it all has. The best things in my life would not exist without the worst things in my life. Everything has had a lesson. Everything has served a purpose, has steered me in a sometimes-hard-but-ultimately-correct direction. And no matter how beat up I have felt, I am still standing. I am still here.
So keep that faith. What a difference six months makes.
Recording of the Charlie Gilkey and JBT jam session
A month or so ago, Charlie Glikey from Productive Flourishing and I figured out that despite knowing all of the same people and running in the same online circles, we had never so much as crossed paths except for that time I broke into his house and started throwing aluminum trash cans at his refrigerator.
So I sent him a message on Twitter and he responded and then we’re suddenly on this long-ass Skype call and Charlie and I both have this disease where neither of us can shut up and so we ended up talking for like an hour about how each of us got started and what the lessons were that we’d take from those initial steps, looking back today. When we were done, Charlie had started to sound like Darth Vader to me because Skype does that after around 45 minutes, but we also thought that we had run through a pretty good primer of some “what we learned the first time through” that would probably help people who were just today getting started.
So we decided to schedule a second call and to record it. That’s below.
Here are some bullet points of what we covered:
- How for most people, you could literally get started TODAY, FOR ZERO DOLLARS
- Why it’s a bad idea to wait until you have the perfect concept before beginning
- The fact that Charlie was possibly drunk
- Why “just getting started” is the most important thing
- Although you can get started for free, why it’s a mistake to keep the “free” mindset as you progress
- How to speed your progress through finding and forming relationships (a.k.a. that thing you know more dryly as “networking”)
- The fact that Charlie’s southern accent intensifies when he’s drunk, like possibly on this call
Yours to enjoy, free of charge and so forth. Do us a favor, huh? Let Charlie and I know if you’d like more like this, or if we’re just spending too much time drunk on the phone. Or both.
Screw SEO
I’m typing this post with one hand because I’m wielding a pair of nunchucks with the other to keep search engine optimization ninja Michael Martine at bay. I was like, “You know what, Michael? Screw SEO!” And then he started doing that thing where you run up the wall and do a backflip while pitching throwing stars at me, and I knew I’d hit a hot button.
This SEO question has been a topic of interest with me recently — after the fifth or sixth person in a row that I’ve coached in a row asked me about search optimization, and how to lick the engines’ nuts so that they keep knocking on your door.
I always give these people my pat, Cracker Jack answer to that question:
1. I know some stuff about search engines and how to optimize for them, but
2. Really, Michael Martine is the best SEO guy I know if you’d like to increase your search engine ranking by like a billion percent, and he’s so into it that if you even think about not optimizing properly, he’ll do backflips and use kitanas and shit, or
3. At the very least, do yourself a favor and pick up Naomi Dunford’s SEO School because it’s written for normal people and is easily the most accessible guide to this complex subject that I’ve ever seen, but actually
4. Fuck it, SEO sucks.
Which is totally the wrong answer, and totally makes people hang up the phone, get on a plane, fly to Cleveland, rent a car, drive an hour to my house, and then start doing ninja flips off my walls. And it’s also actually (in a not-even-sarcastic manner) REALLY the wrong answer for a whole lot of people. Like, probably for the majority of people trying to do business online.
But for me? For people like me, for whom “personality” is a big part of their value proposition? Yeah, not so much.
I used to try with SEO. Really. I even got this plugin for my humor blog called “SEO Slugs.” Now, it turned out that the plugin actually has NOTHING to do with slugs (okay, almost nothing), but instead takes little words out of the name of your post when it makes the permalink to that post. So basically, a post called “I suck and am lame” becomes www.yourdomain.com/suck-lame instead of i-suck-and-am-lame. The idea is to increase your SEO appeal by taking those nonsense words out and leaving only vital keywords for Google to masturbate over. All it really did for me, though, was to make my links more hilarious.
So the sales motivation piece I wrote called Stop being afraid of selling, you pussy became
stop-afraid-selling-pussy.
And more notoriously, my post This goat is your goat, this goat is my goat became
goat-goat-goat-goat.
Which was totally, totally optimized for people searching for goats (or multiple goats) but which brought me EXACTLY ZERO NEW CLIENTS, whereas the selling-pussy post attracted only pimps.
Search engine traffic has never converted well for me, which really isn’t a shock. For one, ranking is hard in itself. It’s nearly impossible to optimize for humor, and I’d end up drawing well only for “webelos” and “testicles.” It didn’t matter how descriptive I made my tags; it was and remains nearly impossible to encapsulate “what I’m about” in a handful of keywords . So I gave up. I know, I know… today, I could, in theory, start optimizing again for “Wordpress blogs” and “technology consulting” or whatever. But I remain given up.
And here’s why.
SEO is great if you’re selling something that is easily describable, that is essentially the same from any seller, that people know they need, and that they know how to put into a search. If you’re looking for widgets, you Google “widgets” and pick the first listing that doesn’t look like it’s operated by crackheads. But let’s see how people like me fare on those tests.
1. Easily describable
As far as the stuff I charge for, I set up websites, build custom stuff, teach technology, and so forth. Okay, not too hard to describe if you leave it at that. I’d argue that “what I offer” has a lot to do with my humor and personality as well, which is harder to describe… but let’s give criterion #1 the benefit of the doubt and move on.
2. Essentially the same from any seller
This is where it falls apart. You can’t turn around today without finding another post about how the internet is getting more intimate and how people are starting to become jaded with its often-faceless nature. If the internet-as-small-towns model is on the rise, the seller matters in the way Sam the Butcher mattered on The Brady Bunch. I’m not like most technology guys. And think how hard this one is to meet for life coaches, for instance. You don’t buy life coaching undifferentiated and off-the-shelf the way you buy toilet paper… although if you use my guy, it’s definitely as squeezably soft.
3. People know they need it
My readers and clients don’t tell me that they came to me because they needed to know X or needed Y service and that I provided it adequately. They say they came to me because they were referred by a friend, or they read me on IttyBiz or another site they trust. They tell me that I make things easy to understand, or made them laugh. All of this goes into a decision to read my stuff or to work with me. But do people know they need these things? Not always. And to borrow from my example in #2, I wouldn’t have know that “Life coach with an English accent who will sometimes tell you to hang on while he calls his dog a cunt” was a criterion, but apparently that kind of thing is important to me in a life coach.
4. Easy to put into a search
If the qualities that make you compelling to your readers and customers are hard to put into a few words, people will never think to search for them or will not know how to do so. Try Googling my criterion for a life coach above. Google doesn’t see that phrase often and, honestly, doesn’t know quite what to do with it. I mean, maybe you’ll get Tim if you run that search, but I’ll bet it’s more likely that you get sites like ZooPorn.com.
I’m not saying SEO is worthless for people like me and Tim. I know that Tim does optimize (although I don’t know his results; he may just attract “webelos” and “testicles” traffic), but I know it’s not the whole picture. I know that his best contacts come from referrals, which have little or no ties to the search engines.
Now, me? I could, probably, get a bit of mileage by optimizing for a few terms that describe the concrete nature of what I do, but I’m too lazy to try. That stuff bores me, and I think my time is better spent making new relationships, culling referrals, writing more often for sites whose audiences are likely to contain my kinds of people. I think I’ll do best by nurturing relationships with the folks I’ve already met and worked with online.
I could optimize for “Wordpress setup” and get a handful of undifferentiated traffic. Half would be offended by the way I write. Half would find me unprofessional. And half would not understand how half + half + half in a percentages situation even makes sense.
Or I could keep doing what I’m doing. I could keep meeting more people and networking, just being my proactive, gregarious self, and watch those six degrees of separation shrink. Like how I met my latest partner in crime Chris Johnson, who I’m already starting to do some great new stuff with. I don’t know Chris due to random internet traffic. I know him through a series of very qualified and solid online friendships. If you start back when I first joined Twitter almost a year ago and knew nobody, the chain goes Havi Brooks > Naomi Dunford > Clay Collins > Michael Martine > Chris.
(Now, there’s actually another, much shorter route that it turns out I could have taken to Chris, but I’ll tell that story a bit later. It’s an interesting one.)
Point is, that connection — as well as any one of a dozen others that today is about to sprout something really, really, really cool and beneficial for me and my buddies — came not through the engines, but through good old-fashioned networking. You meet people. You meet their people. You look for mutual benefit until you find it, and you repeat.
So yeah, you shouldn’t maybe be as blase about SEO as I am. Maybe you should use it. Probably you should use it — especially if you’re in a widget kind of field. But while you’re doing so, remember that whether you’re a dog trainer or a quilter or a fish thrower or an irreverent life coach, you’re missing out on some very seriously good stuff if all you’re doing is relying on Google.
So get out there and shake some virtual hands.
By the way, has anyone seen Michael? I’ll bet he’s in my attic again. Damn. These nunchucks are going to be virtually worthless up there.
