Umar Haque is one of my favorite new business authors.  I found his blog on the HBR list that I follow, and downloaded his short essay Betterness: Economics for Humans onto my Kindle to start reading it.

The essay is short, about 80 pages, and is an ideal read for entrepreneurs and psychology dabblers like me who have been following the Positive Psychology field grow out of Penn.  In the essay, Haque takes the principles of positive psychology and applies them to the economy.  Namely, just as positive psychology recast the paradigm of mental health from therapy to fix mental and emotional problems, into coaching for peak mental and emotional performance, we can also think of world economies as something to be optimized as well.

Umar does a brilliant job to redefine “wealth” as more than stakeholder returns.  He uses the word wealth in reference to higher order returns: emotional growth, social connection, emotional health, job satisfaction, to name a few.  Here’s a post that will elucidate this movement is already happening.

Just like business coaches help executives reach their peak performance, we can also envision economies measuring themselves according to higher-order returns, and performing at their peak instead of half-hearted therapeutic attempts to remedy wage stagnation and widening economic inequality.

“A move away from business towards betterness.”

Umar takes the mission statements of a few growing companies and singles them out as exemplars of growing wealth in human terms: emotional, social, personal, and mental wealth, as well as monetary.  He gives examples of those higher-order returns and challenges corporations and entrepreneurs to begin measuring their success according to the things they want the world to have tomorrow that it lacks today.  It’s a much-needed expansion on how we define “wealth” in human terms.

I carved out a simple writing exercise to help me think about the impact that I want to have on the world, and then how to measure it.  I’ve taken Umar’s lexicon from the book, and applied it to a simple set of questions that can be answered over time to develop a new business, a personal manifesto, or to re-examine how an existing business is measuring their impact and growth in terms of Purpose, Products over Trinkets, and how to create true value chains.

Let me know what you guys think:

1. What kinds of higher-order returns to I want the world to have tomorrow that it doesn’t have today?
2. Which kinds of precise benefits to I want to return, and to whom?
3. How can I measure the human wealth that I create?
4. Specify the Common Wealth with precision and accuracy.

1. Whose wealth will be enhanced?
2. Who will benefit most from what is put back into the economy’s buckets?
3. Who will gain the wealth created?
4. To whose common wealth will I add?
5. How will the created wealth be enjoyed in common, shared amongst the community?
6. How will the wealth created enrich others as well?

I hope this helps.

Austin W. Gunter

But I found this video because Bret Hurt, Founder / CEO of Bazaarvoice, tweeted it out, citing the importance of good company culture encouraging employee productivity.  Bazaarvoice is famous for their culture, so I queued this up and listened to it in my truck while I drove over the weekend.

I was inspired.  Eric Schmidt talked about the potential for connecting people together as a way to foster entrepreneurship and innovation, and how technology like Twitter keeps governments accountable.  He made the point that connecting people is a fundamental good for society, even if it doesn’t seem like a directly profitable enterprise on its face.  It was the encouragement I wanted to hear.

I’m a genetically-inclined connector.  It was awesome to hear the CEO of Google encourage me to continue seeking to connect inspiring people, pointing out that Search didn’t look profitable when Google was started either.  I don’t really want to be Google, but I would like to make a living being Austin W. Gunter, the Connector.

The Voice of a Generation

I think that Occupy Wall Street has been losing steam over the past few weeks.  I’m starting to see fewer articles and less media attention directed towards the various activist communities who call themselves the 99%, many of whom are part of Generation Y.

While I have very strong reservations about being associated with the movement, I find myself unable to deny that I am part of the same generation, and I can see potential in the movement if it fixes what is broken.

When Occupy Wall Street began, I did not see any real goal of the protests.  As a whole they looked directionless and so I didn’t pay much attention.  I had steady work at the time, but since OWS began, I’ve experienced firsthand the layoffs that are common in the Austin Technology industry.  Since then, I’ve been a bit more willing to actually examine the movement to see what I think about it.

I’m not willing to identify with the movement, and one of the big reasons is I see it missing key elements that previous social movements required for their success.

I’ve spoken with several people about the movement this week and I’ve drawn a few conclusions about what is missing from Occupy Wall Street that would allow it to seize the opportunity to accomplish something with the momentum that is gathered.

Note: I’m not commenting on the spirit of the movement, nor am I denying the clear inequality present, the white-collar crimes that have been committed, or the government action that has permitted those crimes.

That is a different discussion entirely, and I’ll leave that for another blog post.

Understanding what’s working and what’s not is a way to understand what you or I could do in order to make a movement successful, independent of its ideology.

Occupy Wall Street can be broken down into a basic model made up of simple, generalized, elements.  Each element can then be applied elsewhere.  This sort of deconstruction permits a valid comparison to other similar movements, and then we can separate how effective Occupy Wall Street is actually being from the fervor of its rallying cry, enabling stoic discussion of the topic at hand.

Elements of Occupy Wall Street Today:

• The Circumstances: Widespread unemployment, and perceived absence of opportunity.
• The Narrative: Small resemblance between real life, and the promise of good jobs awaiting all Americans with college degrees. Instead high unemployment and low wage jobs hardly justify the expense of a college education.
• The Victims: Middle and Lower Class Americans.
• The Villain: A group of elites operating criminally, and without consequence, to enrich themselves
• The Emotions: Deeply felt powerlessness, expressed as anger and fear.
• What is at Stake: Strongly held belief in the possibility of a brighter future.  Our hope in the future is at stake.
• The Inspiration: Successful 19th and 20th Century Social Movements (Women’s Suffrage, Mexican and Black American Rights, etc).

Occupy Wall Street is: Masses of individuals following old models of social change with an unfocused desire to make a difference, and a shared belief that powerful forces conspire to prevent the good and the just from prevailing.

Seeing the Occupy Best Buy protest last night demonstrates the absence of those elements.  That was a protest not supported by the rest of Occupy Wall Street, yet it used the Occupy Wall Street name to target middle class consumers, the Americans that it purports to represent.  They didn’t realize who they were protesting.

All this is worth the time and effort to write, because I do believe there are problems, and I do think that something has to change.  All evidence points to a depression if America can’t get its economy straightened out, not to mention the European Union.

Occupy Wall Street has the potential to achieve social change and reform a broken economy.  And while I disagree with many of the core beliefs and the ideology of the movement, I think that it has the potential to evolve into the movement that our country clearly needs, and is obviously crying out for in many ways. What’s more, I think that many of the solutions that we will arrive at are less complicated than we realize.

I believe that an entire generation of young men and women, MY generation, has found itself in a tough situation and that we must be willing to offer solutions.  We didn’t ask for the problem, but we can solve it.

Otherwise, we’re going to be left holding the bag at the end of the day.

The challenges we get to solve are immense, and for the moment I have faith that Occupy Wall Street can be more than just a tantrum thrown by a generation that didn’t realize how much power it could wield.

I believe that while we may not have found a voice to speak with, that we will soon.

Occupy Wall Street will begin to be worthwhile when it:

1. Offers Real Solutions
2. Starts a Dialogue with the Establishment
3. Finds a Leader to Represent a Generation of Americans

I don’t believe that Wall Street is the place to look for answers.  The problem is much bigger than that.  My generation can solve the problems and develop solutions when we look past the obvious villain, and begin the work of creating systemic change and create a country we’re proud to offer to our children someday.

We can hand off a thriving economy and a strong country.  We can be proud of the legacy that we leave.  We can move beyond the nonsense on Wall Street.

We’ve got what it takes to focus our attention.

Hope this helps.

-Austin W. Gunter

The closest relationships of my life have always had a high element of self-disclosure.

But I didn’t realize until college that in the relationships where I was most forthright about all the important things going on in my life, I always had a deeper rapport and a better relationship with the other person.

In 2007, I had a mentor tell me that he was stunned at how forthright with him about my family, or the girl I was dating at the time, and on.  He said that we had been able to have conversations where he had felt comfortable sharing parts of his life that he rarely shared with anyone.  At the time, I knew we frequently had very meaningful dialogues where it seemed as though we were both being mentored and growing.  But it never dawned on me that I was more willing to share my life and the questions that I was asking than he expected me to be.

I assumed everyone was like me in how they shared their lives.

Nope.

This week I wondered how being open as a writer makes me more powerful?  Would a bit of vulnerability in a newsletter increase opens?  Does that create more trust over the long term?

Recently, I had a project where my willingness to NOT self-disclose readily made a big difference in a bad way.  This is an example of where I failed to be vulnerable enough, and it cost me on a project.

In this story, it wasn’t enough to just be vulnerable, I needed to be vulnerable according to the culture of the company.  I found out the hard way that not understanding the company culture in advance will actually prevent me from self-disclosing in the right way with the people I’m working with.  Had I done a bit more research in advance I would have easily known the exact steps to create trust with people inside the company, thus saving me a ton of time and frustration.  Not to mention saving me money as well.

When I started the project I was working on, from day one, I had a gut feeling that I didn’t understand the culture.  Right then, I should have realized what was going on, gone home that day, and done some research to understand the culture.  To turn the vague feeling that I had into real information.  All I really knew was that the culture didn’t know how to allow my personality to express itself. But instead of doing the work in advance to understand my customers’ needs, I just decided to hold back in order to fit in.

I was willing to do this, but it wasn’t worth it.  Not only did it make me miserable, but everyone knew I was holding back.

I know my personality Type.  My Type is an ENFP.  In a nutshell, that means that I’m an initiator of change, always open to new possibilities, and ready to come up with a new solution.  I tend to be a very expressive personality, and I’m at my best working on fluid projects that allow me to express my creativity.

The thing is, I love figuring out how to fit into new cultures.

You only need to spend a little while asking questions to understand the company culture.

Questions Like:

1. What is the company mission?
   This will tell you not only what the company’s values are, but it can often give you a hint as to
   how the company goes about achieving the goals it sets for itself.
2. What is the dominant personality Type of the company leadership?
   At this particular company, I realized after about 2 months that the company leadership was
   comprised of introverted thinking Types.  As an extraverted feeling type, I would need to
   communicate very differently in order to be heard by the men and women in leadership.
3. What are the top 5 subjects that 75% of the company likes to talk about?
   This organization had a handful of pop-culture and sports topics that everyone generally paid
   close attention to, and could talk about readily.  It was critical for me to know what these
   were in order to build rapport.
4. What subjects are always taboo for the company?
   This will vary.  Normally politics and religion are off-limits, but that’s not always the case.
   Never assume that you know what those things are because what’s taboo in one organization,
   could be water cooler fodder at another.
5. How does the culture react to new ideas and concepts?  Do they resist or reject the novel idea? Or do they acknowledge new ideas and find a way to implement the good ones?
   Some places simply don’t want to hear a new idea, and it’s best to keep them to yourself.

Many of these questions would have saved me some trouble and made my life easier while I was completing work for the organization.  By asking these questions in advance, I could have reduced friction in my interactions at the company, and saved myself some headaches.

By not asking those questions, I missed an opportunity with the company.  By not asking those questions, I didn’t allow my story to tell itself.

I learned that when I hold myself back, people can tell.  Even when they don’t know me very well.

The project team could sense that I was still walking on eggshells after a few months.  And I felt like they never quite knew how to talk to me as a result.  Since I could clearly feel their discomfort, I actually held back more.  Compounding the problem.  By holding back, I believe I made it impossible for the culture to fully accept me.  They didn’t trust what I wasn’t showing them.

The crazy thing was that I found myself working much longer hours than I normally do in order to produce my normal quality of work.  I was trying so hard to manage cultural expectations thatI lost sight of who I know I am.

The crucial element of Trust was missing.  So I’m exploring the possibility that self-disclosure may be an essential part of building trust between two parties.

Not only am I exploring trusting my readers, but I’m also exploring trusting myself.  Trusting that the story I tell does touch people, and does make an impact on the world.

What’s your story?  How has it made a difference for the people in your life?

Will you post a comment and tell us part of your story?

Hope this helps.

-Austin Gunter

Part of the reason that I wasn’t writing on my blog was a lack of confidence in my own ability to generate something useful that my readers would come back to and refer their friends to. This lack of confidence in myself meant that I prioritized doing easier things than building my blog.

In the past few months I’ve started to return to the ways that I want to help people around me grow their lives and their careers.  I’ve gotten very clear about the causes that I am passionate about, and I’m excited about being able to share them.

I’ve come back to the following things in the past several months:

• I am passionate about supporting college students make successful transitions from their undergraduate careers into their professional careers.
• I am also passionate about supporting entrepreneurs succeed in their ventures.
• I get the most out of life when I can support a wide variety of people achieve their goals.

In 2011 my blog will be a great place for people to read about what I’m doing along these lines, and I also have a goal of making it easy to interact with me, using the blog as a jumping off place.

What’s Inspired this:
Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to work with several college students and help them get real world experience, coaching them through the same challenges that I faced.  Some of them have recently started internships, and others are negotiating work in fields that they are passionate about.

I’ve been grateful for the process.  Through it, I recognized my own struggles after graduating from college.  I got the right support from people who mentored and coached me through some challenging growth periods.  If I hadn’t had this support, I would not be where I am today.

Based on what I’ve learned since graduating, working at Tech Ranch Austin alongside more than 50 entrepreneurs, I’ve gained insight about what it takes to transition from college into meaningful work, and I’ll be sharing it here.

Next Steps:
To start, I’m going to present at RISE University when it makes its stop at the University of Texas on March 5th on how to transition from college to startup without losing your mind.

I’m also going to expand the circle of college students that I’m working with.  By the end of 2011 I’d like to have a group of college students who are working at exciting internships and startups, preparing themselves to be entrepreneurs.

I’m excited and challenged about what I’m declaring here.  It’s all possible, and it’s all important.

Ask the Penguin why the Open-Source economy will save us all

Yesterday Tom Kane walked in the door, and today I have an e-mail from him with an essay titled Coase’s Penguin (For a TED talk, among others on this topic, click on Tom’s name).  For those of you who don’t know that Linux’s log is a Penguin, it is.  What Linux did to computing was beat Microsoft at their own game (creating an operating system), and it was done by millions of programmers all over the world contributing a bit of programming for free.  These programmers represent 3-4x the computing power of Microsoft.  Another example of how open source dominates previous models is Wikipedia vs. Encarta (Google them to figure out who is the reigning champion).

Here’s the point.  Allowing people all over the globe to volunteer on a project means that the project will receive more hours than a project with a small team of salaried workers.  It means there will be relentless innovation and improvement.  It means that everyone will have access to the same relentlessly improving information.  And it means that this information is free.  I’m not talking about Linux anymore.  I’m talking about a sea-change in our economy.  I’m saying that decentralized individuals are creating more efficient software / hardware than even the giants like Microsoft can.

This is very important when I think about the work we’re doing at Tech Ranch.  Kevin will be able to cite some very specific sources to describe why lowering the barriers to entrepreneurship is so important, in the days to come.  For now, this post serves as a way for me to gather my thoughts on why opening the model of entrepreneurship is so vitally important, especially for my fellow recent-graduates for whom the job market is being unkind.

What I see this meaning to us is nothing short of a re-education of how we are to think about working for the rest of our lives away from a 9 to 5 existence, and into a much more organic work environment of loose, opportunistic coalitions of “freelancers” coming together to take down a project that has an interesting dollar amount associated with it.  The group will form ad-hoc, delegate responsibility, act quickly, and once the objective is completed the group will most likely disband as the individuals go in search of other opportunities.  Seth Godin had it right.  The economy is getting Tribal
.

This loose organization is very important because it assures individuals that suddenly have the power to do something revolutionary: something that heretofore only the privileged have had the power to do.  This open-source model gives you and I the power to say, No.  No to our boss.  He doesn’t exist anymore.  No to pain-in-the-ass clients.  No to an employer relocating our family.  No to the alarm clock even.  You and I get to say no, because our participation was voluntary to begin with.  The economy is becoming open-source, and there is too much work to go around for any of us to be doing things that we hate.

Liberation say to to the things we hate means the freedom to say YES to the things we love.  Our lives, and the world will be better for it.  Just ask the Penguin.

So do yourself (and the rest of us) a favor.  Ask what you said “NO” to recently.

I hope this helps.

Be on the lookout for shoppers demanding a discount

[NOTE: This knowledge comes from the retail game, but the concept applies to technology entrepreneurship because the strategies people use when they shop at Best Buy will mirror the strategy they use when they shop for your product or service.]

Let’s say you’re selling your consulting services, and are faced with one Transactional shopper and one Relational customer.  Notice that I am calling one a shopper and the other a customer.

The Relational customer views today’s sale as the first in a long series of transactions.  By taking care of this person’s needs, he will grow to trust you and come back repeatedly.  This is because his greatest fear is making the wrong choice (we’ll compare this to the Transactional fear in a moment), and therefore he is looking for someone with expertise in whom to place his trust. This is why the Relational customer is your best customer.  He assumes you are the expert.  Moreover, he wants to pay you to be the expert, so he doesn’t have to be.  He’d rather pay you to have it off his mind.  Once you establish your expertise (read: your monetary value), Relational customers become repeat customers.

This works because the Relational customer considers time spent comparing prices part of the purchase price. That means he’s not interested in getting the lowest price.  He’s interested in not buying the wrong thing.  He isn’t going to slam you with endless negotiations to lower your rate $10/month because that’s a waste of his time.  He wants to trust you, and pay you what you’re worth.  He’s got better things to do with his time than haggle (Sorry Ramit) for a slight discount.

Transactional shoppers, on the other hand, are thinking about this transaction only.  We all get in Transactional mode from time to time, like comparing the prices of gasoline.  That’s because we know that it’s all basically the same product.  It makes our cars run, and so we’re willing to drive to the station across the street to save five cents a gallon, and we aren’t concerned with developing a relationship with Shell or Texaco.  The Transactional shopper operates this way to buy everything from gas to bulk coffee to your consulting services.  He loves shopping for the lowest price as much as LeBron James likes playing basketball.  And he couldn’t care less about developing a relationship with you.  Remember this distinguishing characteristic and don’t be afraid of “offending someone” and demanding your rates.  The Transactional shopper wants to negotiate below your established rate so he can get a deal.

The biggest fear of the Transactional shopper is paying more than he absolutely has to. Therefore, he will spend his free time to investigate for months in advance.  By the time the Transactional shopper gets to you, he has talked to five competing service providers and is trying to start a bidding war as if you are a car salesman.  Don’t let him.  Securing his business isn’t worth the discount.  The Transactional shopper will remain noisy and troublesome, all the while paying you less money than you are worth.  In terms of the 80/20 Rule, transactional shoppers make up about 80% of your stress, and about 20% of your revenue, because they rarely spend money until they’ve gotten a deal.

Meta-Lessons from this.  Your ideal (Relational) customer doesn’t care about price nearly as much as he cares about buying the right thing.  He knows that he needs your services; he knows that there are risks, and he wants to trust you to do a great job over the long term.  He’s developing a relationship.

The Transactional shopper (less than ideal) is the person who responds only to SALE prices.  He will hound you without remorse for a discount.  A transactional shopper has the potential to take up more of your time only to pay you less money than you’re worth.

The Relational customer knows instinctively that a super low sale price is probably too good to be true.  Since they are afraid of buying the wrong thing, an abnormally low price begs the question, “what’s wrong with this guy that he has to give his stuff away?”

This is good for you.  It means that you can focus your energies, like Ramit keeps saying, on serving the right customers, and let the wrong customers fall by the wayside.  Focusing on cultivating good relationships with clients means that you get to do the work that you’re good at, for an appropriate rate.  Don’t worry about hanging onto the people who never seem to be satisfied.  Just tell them one of your competitors is having a one-time sale that you can’t match.  They’ll be out the door and take their unreasonable demands with them.

I hope this helps.

The beauty of iPhones makes Steve Job's Calligraphy classes evident

The answer is probably.  I’m pretty sure that I missed out this year, especially given the panels by such Thought Leaders as Gary V and Ramit Sethi, not to mention missing any opportunity of carousing with Jonas and Kevin.

Why am I not at SXSW this weekend?  What’s the real reason?

The real reason is that I don’t own an iPhone, and everybody knows that you have to have an iPhone to attend SXSW.    I’m only partly kidding.

There are two SXSW parties that I’m a factor at.  Both are Piryx parties, and since Jonas is the COO of Piryx in addition to Tech Ranch Founder, I get to show up and be counted.

But in actuality, my lack of an iPhone is causing problems.  Keeping me out of South By is just one of them.  As much loyalty as I have to my Sony Walkman phone (I know, right), I’ve begun to realize that working with a bunch of techie entrepreneurs makes not having a smart phone a liability.  I owe my phone some loyalty.  The camera broke, it doesn’t record video clips anymore, and it hasn’t worked as a walkman since it survived being run over by my Silverado.  I’m blown away the thing hasn’t left me by this point.

This isn’t the 1980s, but status symbols are alive and well.  If your gadgets don’t show how geeky you are, you’re out.  From the CTAN investor who publicly mocked my phone at a Door 64 meetup, to the girl who asked me to text her my phone number only to stop and ask if I, “could text on my phone,” I’ve gotten the hint.  I hear you world.  It’s time for the iPhone.

Now the question is how practical I should be about getting the dang thing.  Fortunately, my last 2 year phone contract just expired, so when I’m ready to go buy the phone, AT&T (or Verizon) will take the brunt of the iPhone’s cost.  At this point, I have 2 questions that will determine when I pick up the phone.

1. What new features will Apple inevitably roll out in June for the next generation of the phone?
2. Will the iPhone finally loose its bonds to AT&T and will I have the option to join the far superior Verizon network when I upgrade to the iPhone?

The first question is kinda geeky, I understand.  But if the new version of the iPhone upgrades to 4g speed, that’s surely worth waiting for.  Apple tends to roll out new and necessary features with each iteration, so it’s something to always consider when buying their stuff.

The second question is pretty important.  The AT&T network can really suck wind at times, and the biggest complaint I hear from iPhone users is the spotty data coverage.  Even Steve Jobs gripes about it.   If I’m going to take the plunge, sell out, and buy into the tech hype, I’d better have a decent wireless network so next year at South by Southwest, I can judge all the people who show up with cell phones that look like this one:

Phone: Post Chevy Silverado run-in

I told Yoko that I can't text her my number from my "rotary" phone

I only sorta hope this helps…

When Cristi Jakubic writes something, everyone around the Ranch pays attention. This goes double for me. Few others have the experience she does in the trenches of marketing. Cristi speaks from this experience, having earned her stripes on the Silicon Valley Battlefields.

Y'all come on by, ya hear?

She is one of the people that I try to get as much free advice from as possible when she has a moment between consulting entrepreneurs. That’s why I was blown away that she wrote a blog about reasons not to blog (please suspend your sense of irony for the moment). I was surprised because I had never questioned blogging as integral to a good marketing campaign in the 21st century. But since Cristi raised the question, you all should take note.

I’m going to attempt to address Cristi’s argument, and offer my own flipside to many of her arguments. I’m doing this because (spoiler alert) I think blogging is hugely important in the long term for each of your start-ups.

To Cristi’s first point, “Blogging may not be my calling.”

Yes. I agree. I have no doubt that most people aren’t called to blog in the same way that Che was called to run around in the jungles of Cuba, or the way that Henry Ford was called to revolutionize the world’s understanding of manufacturing. Some people are called to share ideas, and blogging is a great tool to facilitate that. And I also think that blogging is mostly a great tool to create a relationship with your customer. It’s a means to your ends of successful entrepreneurship (your calling). If you write engaging content that people come back to regularly, they will ultimately feel like they know you. Just like a celebrity, as a blogger, you earn fans who read your blog and “know” you well enough to trust you at your word, whether they’ve ever met you or not. This trust means sales for your company.

To her second point, “I like to create value for my customers and let them speak to my record.”

Nobody can argue with the person who lets their results speak for themselves. And this makes blogging less attractive because it’s such a long-term investment and the value it creates is very hard to quantify. I’m pretty sure even The Google hasn’t come up with analytics for blog posts => sales closed. I still believe that effective blogging drives traffic to your site, and makes you more credible. A good blog actually gives your customers one more way to tell other people about you. I love sending the tweet that says, “Hey, check out this awesome blog I found!”

To Cristi’s final point, “Although I have passion and energy about launching my venture, blogging seems like bragging.”

I think Cristi makes another good point here that blogging isn’t about bragging. Blogging is about providing value for free to your customers. Blogs that brag are blogs that aren’t read. Blogs that give it away for free get people coming back over and over, developing that long-term relationship and trust that I mentioned in the previous paragraph. I was doing a bit of social media work with a local start-up in the wireless industry, Movero, and I remember telling them that their blog needs to provide lots of free content for their readers about wireless devices. Apple releases a new iPhone, Android stops sucking, anything in that area, they need to talk about it. People love coming to one place for the latest info, and that’s not bragging, that’s sharing.

That said, let me share with you that Tech Ranch RULES. You should come start your venture with us. Cristi will make your marketing sing.

Ok, that’s out of my system.

—Bottom Line—

Blogging is writing. Writing is painful. Hemingway once said, “Writing is easy…You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.” Cristi is right again. If you find blogging painful, you’re just like the rest of us. And I take that one step further and say that if something is painful, and you find yourself resisting on Facebook, or Twitter, or TechRanchAustin.com, you’re not alone, and consider how the more painful something is the more necessary it is to pursuing your calling. I think writing is absolutely necessary, and I would encourage you to deny the pain any power, and simply do it in spite of the pain. We are entrepreneurs, after all.

In conclusion, I’m challenging Cristi to come up with a blog explaining 3 ways that blogging is absolutely crucial to the marketing of a start-up by next week. If she write this, I’ll write a blog post of her choosing.

I hope this helps.