Smiles: My Reason for Living

What’s a Contract Postal Unit? It sure doesn’t look like a normal post office to me, it’s Saturday, and these boxes need to go in the mail TO-DAY. The thought vanished as quickly as it came, as the tiny Latino woman took hold of the scores of boxes in my hand. She grunted quietly, I wondered ¿Hablas Inglés? No reply.

My pyramid of packages toppled her at first when she went to grab the lower box, this puzzle starts from the top dama. Ok, let me show her with my eyes, as my big browns rolled up to the sky, and slowly down to meet hers. She nodded, grabbed the first of a dozen boxes from the top of the pile, and placed it on the scale. With perfect timing as the first box touched the scale the screen went black, this was going to take awhile I thought, as samba sounds from the telenovela playing on the awkwardly hung flat screen lingered in my ears.

As the minutes passed so did the boxes, slowly, methodically, this contractor was posting box after box. By now her daughter, someone’s daughter, sat behind me tapping her foot, even she was ready for me to leave. And then, right when I was losing all hope, the last box left the counter, and she mouthed 122 dólares. Si, I said quietly handing her my debit card. So she didn’t speak English, but maybe she understood it, this poor lady had to deal with a commercial haul of mail, probably for the first time, and I wanted to thank her, I’ve been on the other end of the counter proverbially many a time.

“Thank you, you did a great job, I appreciate your hard work,” I said slowly the way people talk to non-English speakers when they want them to understand something, and that’s when it happened. Like the most amazing picture of the brilliant sun peeking through post-rain clouds she paused, looked up, and gave me a smile larger than her gaunt face might usually afford. It was beautiful, I tripped my way out of the shop.

Smiles, real and authentic, are like feeling God’s finger touch your forearm. Shockingly gorgeous, like a regal cardinal perching on your windowsill just long enough for you to see her vivid red coat as she spreads her wings and ascends high into the heavens. Smiles are the good to life’s bad, the better of the best, and not always earned, beautifully and serendipitous as it seems, sometimes they just arrive.

Two Hispanic women stood facing the counter, waiting for the CVS clerk to figure out how to activate their phone cards, were they calling family back home? I wondered if they knew about Skype? I glanced at their backs, they were wearing matching sundresses in different colors, I imagined they were the type that could make anything look good, sometimes fashion isn’t brand-oriented, it’s people. After a minute or less the problem was solved, gracias. They turned around, the taller one looked right at me and smiled, I smiled back, they left the store, I looked at the clerk even he was frozen for a moment. The right smile can stop you in your tracks.

I’ve experienced a lot of smiles this past week, just the day after my contract postal unit experience I’m in a big building watching a young minister, does he have a twinkle in his eye tonight? When we have lunch he doesn’t have that twinkle, but man, this guy is happy tonight. I can’t blame him, his fledging church is growing like weeds, and when growth equals stability, a spiritual entrepreneurial thing, we all share a laugh. A smile signifies a risk paid off, a path cut with a machete of ideas in a jungle of very old thinking, we are talking BC people.

Animals smile too. I see my little dog Rufus smile every time I give him a slice of American cheese, he knows how to get what he wants. Smile, sit, act good for a minute, then be bad again by sleeping on Dad’s leather couch. He glances at me as if to question whether that trip to the furniture mart in Atlanta wasn’t actually a mission to buy him a dog bed, sigh, his smiles still get me.

My two eldest dogs smile for a different reason, they made it out of that backyard, that dark nasty yard. They made it out of the tall grass, towering weeds that split at the top like stalks of corn, and from behind that shed, the very shed where their brothers and sisters weren’t so lucky. They survived, rescued no less, so they smile, and they protect what they have now, comfort, stability, I’m sure that yard isn’t ever too far from their hearts. Dogs feel pain too, but smile, maybe they can, in their own canine way identify with perseverance, two barks for yes, one for no, ok?

I soak in parental smiles, collect them actually. Mom in Myrtle Beach, her eyes fixed on the ocean and her hand patting me on the back, literalism is the best approach for teaching me lessons, as she very well knows. She’s waiting to go back, and when she does, you bet I’m doing the trip for another smile.

I watch my dad smile anytime we talk cars, MPG’s prompt them, as do belts, bolts, tires, and differentials. We talk cars like we talk dreams, it’s not what you couldn’t drive now, it’s what would you drive now, there is such a difference, we both smile at the thought of it.

Are you smiling in public, around family, friends, and pets? You should be. Gone are all your material possessions sans the clothes on your back, you stand helpless in a parking lot far away from your comfort zone, what weapons do you have in your battle to get home to safety? Here is a hint, scowling won’t get you far. We always have smiles, they are universally available in our personality repertoire, yet we so rarely decide to fire them off. What are we so afraid of? Can we just smile for the heck of it? Apparently not, just ask Congress, a group that is caught frowning more than a New Yorker that just missed the N train.

Smiles on occasion come in pairs, stuffed like a turkey with irony. In college the smile on the face of my financial aid advisor during an exit interview spoke of sadness, you’re 22 years old here’s $32,000 to pay back, we train leaders here, aren’t you ready lead? Just like the counselor’s smile came another a year later, when friends laughed at my idea to import intimate clothing from India to pay for graduate school. It worked, I chuckled my way through a masters degree on the magic carpet ride made of intimates from another land. Funny, but it worked, the mother of innovation is…

We hold on to the smiles of those gone and past with special reverence, if we can just hold onto that image for a lifetime, we will be better for it.

Grandma dancing around the kitchen with me after my SAT score arrived, acceptable enough for some college, any really, to accept this late bloomer. We laughed, we danced, and that smile of hers on that day is so very close to my heart, 14 years later, I can still feel that moment of elation, all in a smile. The very thought of sharing one more smile with my grandmother waters my eyes more than the gardens of my green thumb neighbor are doused with on a steamy summer day.

Or Jenny Dixon at college, we’d walk around campus talking about how we were battling for the worst reputation on campus, a partner in fodder. She smiled, and I smiled, God forgives, she’s gone but not forgotten, her smile and approving nods still linger all these years later. Surely she’d be proving those naysayers wrong right now, a flower that never fully was able to blossom withered far too early that night in Columbus.

My first roommate in graduate school, his mother by our sides, feeding us, setting up the blinds, telling us we were going to do big things one day, that smile, the encouragement, we all celebrated it. Even if we thought we knew better, we really needed every emotional push she had to offer, may she rest in peace knowing her son is as successful as she said he’d be, despite enormous winds depressing his sails, his boat still floats. She’d be so proud.

Or an artistic football player from high school, angry for reasons that were hard to discover, always nice to me, always welcoming, always treating me as an equal. His smile sits with me, gone too soon Greg.

A welcome smile tells us we are accepted in the foreign place we risked our sense of security to visit.

An approving smile tells us that our volunteering is time worth more than money multiplied into inspiration for others.

A thankful smile offers the notion that we are doing something for someone that can’t do for themselves in some fashion, we smile back in hopes of preserving the moment, even just for another few seconds. Who feels better the giver or the recipient? The answer might surprise you.

If smiles are such an important part of our lives, how do we ensure there are enough to sustain us? The answer is not within my grasp, but a good idea might be to start by being thankful for those smiles of the past.

Intuition

I love a drive. Winding roads, mountainous heights, sea spray from the ocean, bring ‘em on. Driving for me is an action that mirrors a meditative process, as I drive, aimlessly have you, across random country roads, mountain valleys, highways, and oceanside thruways my mind moves from idea to idea, with a cadence often assisted by whatever music happens to come humming from the speakers in my car. There’s just one problem, the damn rearview mirror.

For the life of me I can’t get this mirror to stay in place so the traffic behind me is visible. Screwdrivers, keys, and even fingernails have entered the small screw that affixes the mirror to the assembly that holds it flush with the roof of the vehicle with no luck. Without a proper tool to fix the mirror, I went with something else, something much more powerful.

For reasons only Subaru can explain, when the rearview mirror is pushed up higher than need be, it’ll eventually settle into the right place with the assistance of the bumps in the road the vehicle negotiates as it twists and turns on your average roadway. In other words, via intuition the mirror can be adjusted to fall into place right when you need it most. Intuition literally fixed the mirror issue, but also speaks to a much greater principle of leading a prosperous life.

The other day I watched a biographer on TV speaking of Kurt Cobain’s death. The gentleman explained that prior to the OD/suicide of the famed Nirvana singer and 90’s icon, there was an eerily similar episode in Rome, where Mr. Cobain did virtually the same thing as what eventually killed him, but only ended up in the hospital. Without getting into the average life trajectory of those that are addicted to drugs, it’s fair to say that most of the people that cared about Kurt Cobain had been forewarned, his life was on very thin ice. Not long after his brush with death, after exiting rehab, he succeeded in what he had failed at months earlier, surely many close to Cobain were wondering if they had already known his fate before it occurred.

Intuition is mistakenly defined often as innate sense, like having a gut feeling, when more times than not intuition is a learned trait from experience. Just as my vehicle bumped and knocked the mirror down over and over again that it became abundantly clear to place the mirror higher to start so it lands right on place, there are many life experiences where intuition can solve problems without the issues that come with reason. Reason makes you question both sides of something, good and bad, what if this doesn’t work out, what if it does? What will Dad think of my popsicle business, what will Mom think of me dropping out of the PhD program? Reason becomes more powerful with every question, and often can push you into a state of shock, frozen to do nothing, as not to disappoint anyone.

Intuition tells you that more than likely something is going to happen, you and your soul know it, so it’s best to go about setting things in place for when that thing, whatever it is, eventually happens. Setting your own rearview mirror to the right place with the help of intuition, as to let it clearly showcase your past, might just help inform your success in the future.

Bootstrapping-A Merry-Go-Round of Futility & My African Pig Farm Experiment

Frankly, I’m surprised, that when asked more entrepreneurs don’t mention capital as their biggest key to success. When asked about keys to succeeding as a risk-taking business builder they, entrepreneurs, often answer with words like perseverance, will, fight, creativity, but not capital. Let’s be clear, without capital, lots of it, your big idea is going nowhere fast.

Traveling on a Treadmill

For the better part of seven years I’ve started, managed, and closed businesses, lots of them. I’ve worked in the physical space on startups (coworking, coffee, tea, Vietnamese subs, seriously), and online (marketing, search engines, PR, publishing, ghostwriting) without much luck. Donald Trump never knocked on my door to hand over a big check, just as INC Magazine never ranked any of my companies on their coveted fastest growing list. Rather, I just kept breaking even at best, all in the name of growth.

For nearly a third of my life I thought, just keep working, just keep plowing away at these ideas, and at some point, someone, presumably fate reincarnated, will hand you a big check for your efforts. One day making a living will be child’s play, because this business is what I love to do. Then reality set in.

Did you know that 86% of wage earners in Africa live on less than $2 a day according to the UN? Are these people bad? Unworthy of a good living? No, you say, just not educated? Could you afford tuition on $2 a day? Life isn’t fair, and one of the most humbling ways of discovering the truth in this cliché is to look at global poverty in relation to human existence. They’ve never had the capital to change their lives for the better, and getting that capital is extremely hard, so until Bono gets there to raise some money, they make close to nothing, and live like it.

Back to entrepreneurship, it’s not that you can’t start a business with nothing, and build up something sustaining. In fact, many small businesses exist entirely to sustain the owner. As in, Bill Smith owns a hot dog stand, he works alone, and his profits are enough to pay his bills. This is very possible with nothing, or next to nothing, as Mr. Smith can use a credit card, or sell some stuff around the house, buy a cart for the cost of a new sofa, get some hot dogs, and work his butt off until his sweat equity turns into cash. What’s nearly impossible is Mr. Smith growing his one stand into a regional or national chain without capital. Not just a little capital, but a lot of capital.

Most entrepreneurs don’t want to just be self sustaining, though that is step one, rather they want to build something larger than themselves, and that is where the lack of capital kills so many businesses.

The Desire For More

Many make the false assumption that entrepreneurs want to build large businesses out of sheer greed. This often is not the case, as me, and most of my fellow entrepreneurs care more about creating jobs, opening up new markets, helping to create something out of nothing, for us, it’s magic. The desire for more is so great, ironically, it often fuels the lack of profits in many businesses, as they, like I have for so long, strive for growth.

Without hard money in the millions more than likely, it’s tough to weather the storms that so inevitably occur during business building times. It’s not like money is easy to make, so whatever the industry, this is what I’ve seen across sectors and economies, having sufficient capital on hand is the only true way to avoid failure.

When the mortgage crisis emerged, and banks started dropping like tears at a funeral, there was only one reason for the phenomena, lack of capital. Sure the banks, or the owners of the banks, made risky bets, sure they bought financial products Warren Buffett couldn’t properly explain, but at the end of the day, what plagued them was lack of capital. They simply didn’t have enough money to keep the troubled boat afloat.

While my goals are much more modest than the average green-eyed banker, I too felt the jellyfish like sting of being undercapitalized. Yet my desire for growth trumped my improvised situation, my desire for something larger than myself almost consumed myself, as humans we error.

Pigs in Africa

A few years ago, when my company dripped money instead of bled it, a client visited Africa on a charity mission, and bought some pigs. Thanks to the internet he emailed me pictures of the pigs and farm from his tent, literally, and told me about the sustainability of pig farming. People, with the help of us foreigners, could breed, and eventually sell these pigs for a handsome profit, and then breed more, and sell more, which would help them greatly increase their chances of surviving. This, for all the greenwashing out there, is a damn good definition of sustainability.

I invested some money in the pig farming endeavor, as it sounded like a safe bet. I believe it was $300.

Just today I received an email from a woman in Tanzania expressing internet in pig farming, it was the third I’ve received this week. Amazingly, the little experiment two years ago worked for those pig farmers, and somehow, someone found out I invested in the venture, and now they all email me for, unbelievably, capital.

Life goes full circle; people you meet that are meaningless to you now, might hold the key to your livelihood in the future. I write this blog post about the utter failures I’ve had at business for lack of capital, while receiving emails from well-meaning aspiring pig farmers asking for capital. The irony is not lost on me, and here’s hoping it won’t be lost on you either.

Check out more about the pig farm investment, and what happened over there by clicking HERE.

The King of the Internet: A Fool

If he could just stand on his tippy toes a little higher he’d be six foot, then surely people would take him serious. If his tie was more colorful than the department store brand, people would see him as their leader. If his name was in the newspaper, then they’d know he was for real. Welcome to the internet, where any idiot with a laptop and WiFi can claim greatness.

I spend a lot of time online, ok, too much time online. I write for clients online, research their competitors online, and sometimes when I get real lucky, run a social media contest, you guessed it, online. I’m online all the time. I’m a machine.

There are no real words to describe the type of person you become when you spend more time online each day than you spend off. Hermit, that’s too Notre Dame hunched mascoty, introvert, not when you spend half your day on social networks. How about human, human of the new millennia, where commerce and markets spend days evolving online in ways that allow even those with great disadvantages a shot at exploiting them, and if lucky, hacking out a living in the process. Back to the insecure narcissist. I know him well.

I used to think, no, care, what people thought of me online. I used to buy into the online reputation myths, that if you are Googled (fair warning it gets ugly for me real quick) you must present a list of accounts for your searchers to find. You must take that picture, you know the one, tanned at the beach, looking like you never do in real life, and stick it online where everyone can see it. You must write interesting stuff about your character, 2011 gen Y translation, swag. You must, in other words, create a lie.

How actual societal reputation works- you do X, Y, Z over the course of fifteen years, people that watch your evolution judge you on both X, Y, Z, and your maturation process, and come to a collective whisper about who you are. The coach that won 278 games and got kicked out of a few for fighting with the opposing players is known as a legend and not a derelict, just ask Ohio State fans about Woody Hayes.

Unfortunately the internet, her bounty has filled my cup of livelihood for near a decade, is easily manipulated. I should know, this is what I do for a living. I manipulate results in Google, create so-called brands on Facebook, and hammer away at creating persona for anyone with a PayPal account. The internet does not present an accurate, hell, a real picture at all of a person, yet it’s our collective default. How do you use that rice cooker? Google it! How many miles is it to Beijing from Toronto? MapQuest knows. Unfortunately people aren’t rice cookers or 747’s, their motion-filled, flawed to the bone, human beings. Their active agents of self interest, not exactly categorizable to the dismay of Myers Briggs. People are fluid, rich with enough layers even LulzSec can’t hack them. Nobody can categorize the depths of humans, but God.

So excuse my lack of exuberance at the ever-growing flock of anointers of superiority on the web, of those that talk of humility while an unnerving odor of hypocrisy lines their every breath. Distrust those so-called experts they’d say, and by the way we have some exciting news about our expert new wham-oh service coming next week. Their wicks aren’t easily defused.

Give me a heartwarming, giving person, one that truly offers value to this world, and I’ll show you someone that doesn’t even have a Facebook account. Show me a person in Africa feeding the poorest of the poor, and they won’t seek to post pictures of the children on the net for anything but to get them more food. Show me a humble heart, and you won’t find so much of a wisp of reputation management around their names. They are who they are, for better or worse, and they leave their judgment day for the afterlife.

A great irony that seemingly goes unnoticed by the showoffs, is that nobody was listening to begin with. Their great stage wasn’t built on a solid foundation, in fact, when analyzed beyond their own figments; there is no stage at all. If only a few had internet access, if only a couple had a blog or a video-enhanced website, maybe they’d have a chance at being known for anything other than self indulgence. That’s the internet for you, her sweet revenge on those that seek the light, she makes it  free to anyone that wants to bask in it, and thus incredibly difficult to find a place away from the gazillion others trying to get some shine, maybe it’s only possible if standing on your tippy toes.