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A review of the $100 Business Forum (and how architecture affects community)

First, a story

(Which has nothing to do with the $100 Business Forum, but bear with me, because it will.)

I’ll never forget when my family loaded up our VW bus and drove across the SF Bay to move me into the UC Berkeley dorms for the first time.

Because I was a Regents’ Scholar, Cal would have paid full freight if I’d had financial need, but I only qualified for a merit check of something like $500 a year. However, the scholarship gave me something that was even more valuable than the $$ and the free pass into the graduate stacks in the library: a low lottery number for Cal’s impacted dorms.

In fact, I got assigned a room in what was sometimes lovingly, and sometimes enviously called “the country club on the hill,” a former school for the deaf and blind that had only recently been bought by Cal and converted into (very posh) dorms.

My brother, who’d suffered through 2 years of cinderblock living at Brown by this point, took one look at my very sweet suite (2 double bedrooms, huge bathroom, furnished living/dining room, full-sized kitchen [sans fridge, stove or oven]) and exclaimed:

“She gets to have this as a freshman? That is so unfair!”

I just beamed smugly as I shlepped my stereo and clothes into my new abode.

Sweet, yes? But the funny thing was that I spent most of my time in another building a few minutes away, where students lived in more typical dorm accommodations: rooms along a long hallway with a unisex bathroom at one end and a social room at the other.

Why? One word: community.

Architecture affects community

My building, which was made up of self-contained suites, had a much weaker sense of community than the building where everyone bumped into each other on the way to the bathroom, and where if you wanted to watch TV you had to trudge down the hall to the community room.

When people are essentially required to interact, it turns out, they do so much more (and hence build tighter bonds) than when interaction is a choice, or (even more so) requires jumping through hoops.

(I got further validation of how architecture affects social interactions during my senior year, when I was in an honors thesis group with a woman who was researching college student sexuality. Some of the colleges she studied offered no communal meeting place on the dorm floor, which meant the only place for visiting friends to sit down was the hard desk chair, the floor, or the bed.

Can you guess what this led to?

When forced to entertain in your bedroom, on your bed, the entertaining tends to lead in certain directions…

And then colleges complain that students are too sexually active. Right.)

What this has to do with the $100 Business Forum

When I signed up for the May $100 Business Forum, a 28-day internet course facilitated by Chris Guillebeau and Pam Slim, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I had visions of developing a community of fellow “lifestyle entrepreneurs.”

The course, which is half-way through as I write this, has been filled with excellent info for starting and growing a small business. Every day, either Pam or Chris put a specific lesson up on the board, sometimes with an accompanying video or mp3, and usually with a series of steps for participants to think and write about. There are live coaching calls with Pam (worth more than the $100 alone, especially if you’re one of the question-askers!), and we’re invited to share our thoughts in writing on the forum, and to reply to others’ posts.

All of this is great, and I’m getting excellent value for my $100. If you’re looking to build or grow a business, are looking for some group “coaching” with an opportunity to interact a bit with some very savvy coaches who are themselves online business people, you’ll get a lot from this course. I give it four 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

In fact, the only reason I’m not giving the $100 Business Forum a full 5 stars is nothing to do with the course itself — which is outstanding — but with the architecture. In this case it’s not physical buildings, but rather the platform on which the $100 Biz Forum is hosted: Ning.com.

Pam and Chris acknowledged in a video in the first week of the course that Ning has its pros and cons. I don’t know why they decided to go with this platform rather than an actual forum, with threaded comments, but presumably they had good reasons, because these two are sharp cookies, and have built their reputations on the excellent value they offer with their courses and products.

However, I have found it fascinating that Ning’s features (or lack thereof) have affected social interaction of participants of the course, in much the same way that my college dorm affected the social interactions of the residents.

How unthreaded comments are like a sweet suite

Let me be clear: the daily lessons are excellent. My complaints do not take away from the outstanding value the $100 Business Forum offers. I’m very glad I bought this course, and if you could use a little guidance in starting or growing your own business, the $100 Business Forum is a great place to start.

The information that Pam and Chris share is top notch (and the bonus interviews with guests Jonathan Fields and Charlie Gilkey were fantastic, as were Pam’s coaching calls). These two are generous and knowledgeable, and getting a chance to learn from them is worth way more than the $100 I paid.

However, I have to admit it’s been more challenging than I expected to develop the community I was hoping for, due to the simple fact that comments are not threaded.

What does this mean? It means that responses to any given topic or topic reply are scattered all over the site.

It means that if your reply to a topic shows up on page 1, my reply to your reply may not appear until page 6. Or 15. Or 21.

It means that if you want to follow a topic thread, you have to spend hours searching through hundreds of posts to find any responses.

It means that if someone responds to you, unless you search every page of every topic, you may never know.

It’s a lot like living in a self-contained suite at the “country club dorm on the hill” rather than a “bathroom down the hall” dorm: rubbing elbows with other residents requires a lot more work.

If I had unlimited time to spend on the $100 Business Forum, this would be less of a problem (though still annoying). But of course, like most people taking the course, I don’t have unlimited time. And it’s just enough of a hassle to find specific posts and replies that I’m not participating as much as I would have liked.

Accepting responsibility… but still whining a bit

Ultimately, I take full responsibility for this: I’m the one choosing not to spend my time wading through unthreaded posts. But if I had my druthers, the $100 Business Forum would be hosted on a venue that made things easier.

Yes, you can set your email filters to notify you of replies to any particular topic or reply, but the notification emails just tell you that So-and-So replied to Such-and-Such topic, not what is in the reply, nor whether they replied to you, so you have to click through to read it. Eye-rollingly annoying.

(Not to mention the fact that with notifications on, your daily $100 Biz Forum emails will spiral into double or triple digits very quickly. Yikes!)

Does all of this mean that a $100 Business Forum participant can’t still build a community? No, absolutely not! I’ve made a few connections that I’m really excited about. It just requires jumping through more hoops, and spending more time, than I expected. (Imagine: there are 150 participants in this course, plus Chris and Pam, and everyone is encouraged to post and reply to others’ posts every day. Even if there were threaded comments, that’s a lot of reading, and without a way to efficiently follow threads it’s kind of overhwelming.)

Chris and Pam suggest spending 20 minutes a day on the Forum. With the vast number of responses to each daily lesson (plus the community bulletin board posts, which are also not threaded), 20 minutes barely scratches the surface, and unfortunately there’s no good way to skim in order to find the messages that might be of most interest. (At least none that I’ve discovered. Perhaps someone whose neurons fire in a way more compatible with the Ning system would have better luck. Anyone?)

Again, the Ning platform is really my only complaint in what is a well thought-out, thorough and excellently presented online course for anyone interested in starting or growing a small business (especially an online one).

Lessons learned: the human laziness factor

The $100 Business Forum was the first Unconventional Guides purchase that I made. Chris and Pam clearly put a lot of time and effort into creating a very valuable course. I’m glad I signed up and I’m getting a ton out of it. However, the frustrating non-threaded-comments interface has reminded me of some interesting aspects of human nature.

The upshot: water flows downhill. People are pretty much the same: unless there’s a good reason to do otherwise, we’ll almost always take the path of least resistance. If you want people to behave in a certain way, you need systems that make it easy for them to do so (and not easy for them to not do so.) As I design products, courses, websites, and my life, this is something to think about!

Make things hard for people, even just a little bit, and you may lose them. Make things easy for people (easy to find what they want, easy to get a solution to their problem, easy to pay you), however, and you’re way ahead of the game.

Comments?

PS – Serendipity: right after publishing this post an email landed in my box from web marketing expert, Katherine Andes, with a variation on the same theme.

[Update 5/26/10: I found a personal note and a 100% refund from Chris in my email box this morning. Totally unexpected, and the refund was totally unnecessary, as I feel like I’m getting HUGE value from the $100 Biz Forum, despite my frustrations with Ning. But a clear example of his excellent customer service, and why I’ll be a Chris Guillebeau fan for life. Thank you Chris!]

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*Disclosure: If you buy a product or course through any of the links in this post, I’ll get some affiliate income, and will be forever grateful. If you don’t buy at all, or you buy through another link, I’ll never know, so don’t lose sleep over it.

How the worst mistakes and crises are sometimes your greatest gifts

Dispatch from the EBK

In today’s Empire Building Kit* email (day 41 of 365), Chris Guillebeau shares a horror story from his upcoming book (Penguin, September 2010). Some years ago, when Chris was working as a volunteer in Sierra Leone, he was also running an online business back home. One night, while checking email via his flaky satellite connection, he discovered that his fulfillment center had gone out of business.

Not only would no more orders be shipped, but it turned out orders hadn’t been shipped in three weeks!

With a lot of help from his brother back home, Chris managed to figure out a solution to this crisis. I won’t go into details here, but the important part is that this admittedly pretty awful experience had some pretty amazing results:

  • It forced him to think creatively to solve the problem
  • He emerged with a new sense of confidence that he could handle any problem that came his way.

In his own words, he learned “that you can come back from anything.”

Lessons from the music and performance world

Reading Chris’s EBK email reminded me of a “crisis” of my own, that, while admittedly a lot smaller in the scheme of things, had a big impact on my outlook.

In 2005 I started singing jazz, and for several quarters I was enrolled in an amazing jazz vocal solo class at a nearby community college. Our final exam was a public performance in a local bar, where we’d each get to sing two songs.

At one of these finals, as the pianist played an intro, I realized I couldn’t “hear” my starting note. I panicked, and did what you’re never supposed to do: I asked to start over.

Okay, that was embarrassing, but that wasn’t the really bad part.

Because I was so nervous, and I was so afraid of not being able to hear my note the second time, I asked the pianist if he could just play my starting note for me before launching into the intro. He played a note as requested, and I gripped that note in my brain like it was a life rope. I would not blow it this time.

But when I launched into the song, I could tell something was wrong. I knew that what I was singing didn’t sound right, but I couldn’t quite figure out what to do about it! I knew I’d sung the note he fed me, but I also knew it sounded wrong.

I was on a train headed right over a cliff.

Don’t let them see you sweat

Since I didn’t know what to do, though, I just kept right on going, all the way through the song. I was cringing internally, but outwardly smiling.

True to typical jazz standard form, I sang through the song, then the rhythm section played solos before I came back in at the top. The break while the band was soloing was enough to get me centered again, so when I did come back in, I was on the right note this time. (Thank God!)

After that song was over, I went into my second song, and this time I nailed it. Nobody would have know that I’d screwed up the first song so badly.

Still, when I got offstage and sat down with my then-boyfriend, I was so horrified and humiliated at my performance of the first song that I burst into tears. How would I ever live it down?

(Later, the piano player came over to apologize: turns out he’d fed me the wrong note! Though as the bass player [and a mentor of mine] said, it was still my fault; as the singer, it’s my job to listen to the introduction and sing from that, rather than from the note I was holding in my head. And he was right.)

When the initial trauma and humiliation calmed down a bit, though, I realized that this train wreck of a performance was probably the best thing that could have happened at that particular stage of my singing life. Why?

  • It showed me that even when the worst thing happens onstage, lightning doesn’t strike.
  • I learned that even if I mess up, I can go on to give a great performance on the next song (which is a pretty important skill to learn as a performer, since, as the bumper stickers say, shit happens!)

These two big lessons proved to be crucial in my development as a performer. If the idea of messing up paralyzes you, you’re never going to take risks, and never going to get very far. But if you know you’re going to screw up at some point, and you know you can recover from it, suddenly you’ve got total freedom to try anything!

The moral of the story

So many times when we want to try something new and big and scary, we let the fear of something going wrong stop us from even trying. But the thing is, bad stuff does happen, and if you let your fears stop you from going after your dreams, bad stuff still might happen, but you won’t be any closer to what you really want.

My unsolicited advice (to myself as well): just fasten your seat belt and brace yourself for the ride. Whatever slings and arrows life throws at you will probably result in some amazing lessons (and possibly a good story or two).

Now get out there and follow your evolving Bliss!

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*The Empire Building Kit is a 365-day course for people who want to launch or grow a very small business. It’s filled with video interviews with entrepreneurs with all kinds of unconventional “lifestyle businesses,” PDF case studies of several more, and video tips from Chris Guillebeau from The Art of Nonconformity. It will be available for sale tomorrow, May 18, for 24 hours only.

If you buy the EBK, every day you’ll receive an email from Chris, with one thing to do toward creating your own empire. Some days it’s a business principle to think about; some days it’s a video to watch or an audio recording to listen to (a few days ago there was a special bonus recording with “Career Renegade” Jonathan Fields).

For a more in-depth review, see my post on the first month of the EBK. Upshot: I was super-anxious about sinking so much money into something when I didn’t really know what I was getting, but I’m awfully glad I did. I’ll share more as my “year of empire-building” proceeds.

Note: If you buy The Empire Building Kit or any Unconventional Guides product from any of the links here, I’ll get some affiliate income, and will be forever grateful. If you don’t buy at all, or you buy through another link, I’ll never know, so don’t lose sleep over it.

Headstands, Training Wheels and the Quest for Ever-Elusive Balance

Funny: although I have crazy fear of doing a headstand in the middle of the room, I can float my legs up no problem when I’m near a wall.

It’s psychological, of course, but that wall also serves a useful purpose: just knowing the wall is there to catch me lets me push further into an unknown space — the space of total balance.

The thing is, unless you’re perfectly vertical, headstand is a lot of work. Your arms really need to press into the floor to keep the full weight of your body up in the air. It’s tiring!

When you’re in balance, though, it feels effortless. Free. Like you’re floating. You could stay in headstand this way forever.

Training wheels

Remember learning to ride a bike with training wheels? My training wheels were always slightly off-kilter, so my bike (purple, from Sears, with streamers coming out of the handlebars) leaned either a bit to the left, or a bit to the right. Very uncomfortable. But oh, the stomach-churning panic when I first tried to ride the damned thing after the training wheels came off!

Getting to balance is scary.

Learning where perfect balance is — how far to launch your legs up without toppling over onto your back; how to make those two wheels go fast enough to keep the bike vertical and the skin on your knees intact — takes practice. It’s a learning curve, which for some people is easy and natural, but for others (like me with headstand), not so much.

Those of us in that second group might fall a bunch of times before we hit that sweet spot.

Which is where training wheels can help. For headstand, that might be a wall, or someone to spot you, or hell, just a big ol’ pile of pillows.

Some yoga teachers insist that headstand learners should start out in the middle of the room, the very first time they try, so that they never get psychologically dependent on the wall (like me!) There’s merit to that philosophy.

I, however, tend to be a gentler soul. If using some kind of “crutch” or “training wheels” helps you find that balance point and feel it in your body without hurting yourself in the process, I say more power to you!

This is not just about headstands and bicycles, of course

You may have figured out, 250-some odd words into this post, that the principles here don’t just apply to yoga, or riding a two-wheeler. Whatever your big goal is, when you’re in total balance, everything feels easy. Everything flows.

It’s getting to the balance that’s the challenge.

Where are you still looking for that balance point? Is there something big you want to accomplish, but fear of toppling over is holding you back?

Or are you struggling with something, working really hard at it and feeling like you’re not getting anywhere?

If so, maybe some training wheels are in order. Along with permission to use them. (That part’s key.)

Balance is the ever-elusive goal in every area of my life. Ever-elusive because the only constant is change, and since I’m always changing, what constitutes balance for me is always changing.

Right now the big area I’m focusing on is balance in my work and money spaces. I’ve been making huge changes, and since I’m tired of crashing my proverbial bike and scraping my proverbial knees, I’m making no qualms about the fact that I’m attaching some training wheels to get me going!

Here are some of my training wheels these days:

• Chris Guillebeau’s The Empire Building Kit and other Unconventional Guides

• Chris Guillebeau and Pam Slim’s $100 Business Forum (also an Unconventional Guides product)

• Johnny B. Truant and Lee Stranahan’s Question the Rules

• Dave Navarro’s The Launch Coach Library and workshops

• Naomi Dunford’s Marketing School

They’re making the transition from three-wheeler (my existing business life) to two-wheeler (my ideal vision of my business life) a lot more stable.

Specifics?

I’ve already written a preliminary review of the Empire Building Kit (preliminary only because the EBK is a year-long kit, and I’ve only been doing it about a month), and as I dig further into the other wheels of training, I’ll give you my honest opinion. (Or opinions, plural, because I’m not always of one mind.)

…And back to headstand

Because I feel a lack of closure if I don’t come full circle.

Cool thing: I have now experienced perfect balance in headstand a few times.

Near a wall, of course. (Which I have no plans to abandon anytime soon.)

You may be the Torpedoes-Be-Damned, Learn To Do Headstand In The Middle Of The Room type, but I, for one, am grateful for training wheels!

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And yes, in case you’re wondering, those links in the bullet list are affiliate links. [With the exception of Naomi’s Marketing School, because I couldn’t find an IttyBiz affiliate program. Anyone?]

That means if you click through and end up buying something, I’ll make some money, and you’ll be helping to support me in my quest to create a sustainable life doing what I love. How cool is that?

Just one of the many tools I’m learning from my Business Training Wheels.

I’ll provide a more detailed review of each of these products later, but suffice it to say that I think they are all good products. I only sign up as an affiliate for products I can honestly recommend without feeling all queasy and gross about it. Just sayin’.

Will they be the right products for you? That I can’t say. But I will share a lot more details about each of them in the weeks to come, so watch this space.

The First Month of Building My Empire: Empire Building Kit Review

So in my goal to follow my evolving Bliss(es) and create the life I really, really want, I’ve spent a lot of time and energy looking for models and inspiration. Who’s already out there living their dreams, and how did they get there?

It’s a bit overwhelming, really, because once you start looking, a metric ton of experts and phenoms start crawling out of the woodwork, usually hawking their own magic must-buy-it-now-before-the-price-quadruples key to “multiple streams of income,” happiness and “total fulfillment.”

(Seriously. That’s verbatim from [at least] one of these so-called experts.)

Whom to trust? Who’s got the goods that will really help me, in my unique situation, and who’s just trying to squeeze me for my hard-earned cash? (Okay, I know they all want my cash, but some really do offer value in exchange for it.)

After some months of intensive research, I’ve hand-picked a number of teachers to cast my lot with (in addition to the countless others whose free blog posts and newsletters I read), so consider this post the start of an ongoing review.

Teacher #1: Chris Guillebeau

My first inspiration in this journey was Chris Guillebeau of The Art of Nonconformity. His free downloads, A Brief Guide to World Domination and 279 Days to Overnight Success are top notch in content, prose, and design (which, as a smart, literate artist-type, I really appreciate!), and I resonate with his generosity of spirit, and his un-sales-pitchy approach to marketing.

Most of all, Chris is doing exactly what I want to do: living the life he wants, doing what he loves, and making a living at it.

Not freelancing, not exchanging his time for money. No, Chris has figured out the convergence between what he loves to do, and what other people are willing to pay money for.

Clever monkey.

I’m one of the people willing to pay for products that Chris puts out. Why? Because he earned my trust with his free downloads, his blog posts, and the personality and values that come across in his work.

Plus, of course, the very fact that he’s doing it speaks volumes for his credibility.

First off, I dove right in and signed up for Chris’s $100 Business Forum, which he co-facilitates with Pam Slim of Escape from Cubicle Nation. However, this 28-day online group of 150 fledgling entrepreneurs doesn’t start until May 10, so I have no reviews of it yet. Watch for those later in the month.

Though I was sorely tempted by several of Chris’s Unconventional Guides, in my first trip through the Unconventional Guides store I reined in my covetousness and limited my purchase to this one $100 “product.” I kept a tight grip on my credit card. I would be strong. I could wait until after the $100 Business Forum before deciding on any future purchases.

Ha.

Famous last words.

The Empire Building Kit

Wouldn’t you know it, savvy Chris is continually in the process of creating cool, new products, and when he announced his Empire-Building Kit, a 365-day course for building your “empire” in one year by doing one thing every day, I knew I’d been well and thoroughly hooked.

It didn’t help my pocketbook that Chris is very good at building pre-launch excitement: he teased his mailing list for weeks with details about the upcoming launch, tied it with an epic train trip across the country on (believe it or not) The Empire Builder, then opened it up at special pricing for 24 hours only. (Are you taking notes on this launch? I was!)

Naturally, I couldn’t resist. And not only that, but I confess I sprang for the top-of-the-line “Hail Caesar” version, which cost (if memory serves) almost twice the price of the the middle, “Alexander the Great” version, and about four times more than I was consciously budgeting.* Yikes!

As if that weren’t enough, I’d forgotten that the Unconventional Guides shopping cart has a sneaky tendency to offer cross-sells — special combo-offer packages at special prices if you BUY NOW.

Damn!

Yes, I didn’t call Chris a clever monkey for nothing. I have much to learn from you, Master.

I’ll admit I couldn’t resist the package deal of two guides I’d been wanting, Art + Money and Working for Yourself, especially when combined with a special report, Marketing School, by none other than Naomi Dunford of Itty Biz.

(In case you haven’t heard of Naomi, she’s pretty much a god in the world of marketing and making a living as an online small business.)

Final damage: $449 for the EBK (gasp!) less 10% “secret discount,” plus $97 combo offer = $501.10.

Ouch!

That represents a big chunk of change to me right now, when money’s tight and business much slower than I’d like.

However, the goal is that these purchases will help my pocketbook, and my happiness, in the long run.

So what’s the verdict?

Well, I’m only 27 days into the EBK, so I can’t give a complete review, but so far I can say it’s pretty damn awesome.

What’s in it?

  • 6 lengthy video interviews with folks who’ve built successful (but achievable-seeming) “lifestyle businesses,” discussing their route to success, mistakes along the way, etc.
  • Transcripts of same.
  • 18 PDF case studies of other “lifestyle business” owners, with a variety of businesses ranging from a dog trainer to a guy who hosts murder mystery parties.
  • 9 short videos on very useful online business tips, from finding prospects, to crossells and upsells, “tools I use,” and more.
  • a 43-step product launch checklist
  • an interview with The Launch Coach, Dave Navarro (another teacher whose courses I’ll be reviewing in a future post)

(Note: I believe some of these items are only included in the “Hail Caesar” version, but am not sure which ones, since the EBK sales page was taken down after the initial 24-hour launch.)

Upshot: You get detailed financial information of 15+ other emperors. From Chris: “We asked everyone how much money they make and how they make it. This touches on a taboo subject (talking about money specifically) that everyone is interested in but few people address directly.”

That’s not all, though. One of the cool elements of the EBK, and one of the reasons I decided to invest in it, is that every day I get an EBK email from Chris. That’s 365 days of emails.

I’ll admit that at first I was a tad disappointed that the emails don’t always have a specific tip or actual step to do toward building my empire; sometimes it’s just a reminder of the message in yesterday’s email, or a wrap-up of the ideas covered in the previous week.

That said, I think the most important thing about the daily email concept is simply that it keeps me focused on my goals. In a way it doesn’t actually matter what’s in the email.

Don’t get me wrong — many of the emails are awesome; several have had exactly the concept or idea that I needed right then to move me forward in my thinking. Chris has clearly put a lot of thought into them, and I find many of them very worthwhile.

However, perhaps the greater value is just in the daily reminder, the daily validation that yes, I am going after this, and I have someone walking next to me on the journey for the entire year.

In addition, precisely because the EBK is set up as a year-long course, I’m not finding myself succumbing to the usual overwhelm that enormous projects like this normally stir up. I don’t feel anxious to watch every single video and read every single transcript and case study RIGHT NOW, because I know they’ll be “assigned” one by one over the course of the next several months.

Whew. What a frickin’ relief!

Seriously, this is huge. In the past couple of months I have amassed an e-library of countless e-books, special reports, mp3s and videos, and it’s doubtful whether I’ll ever manage to get through all of them.

But the EBK? I know I’ll get through it, because I’m on a year-long journey, and I’ll be assigned each of these modules eventually.

Deadlines are magical things.

Rating so far: 4 7/8 stars out of 5

(And not 5 stars only because the marketing led me to expect an actual step to do in each and every email.)

It’s early days yet, so this rating could change, but suffice it to say I highly recommend the EBK to anyone who has a dream of creating a sustainable business and “empire” of their own.

The EBK will be re-launched on May 18 for 24 hours only. I’m not sure when and if it will be on the shelves again after that, so if you’re serious about living your creative life and need some inspiration, motivation, and a partner on the journey, mark your calendar to check it out.

Full disclosure: if you use one of the links on my site to click through and buy any of Chris’s Unconventional Guide products, I will earn affiliate income. But I believe in his products and stand by them. If you buy them and don’t like them, feel free to complain to me.

And then ask for your money back from Chris, because he offers a 100% satisfaction guarantee.

But I seriously doubt you’ll feel the need to do that.

Wrap up

This post got long, so I’ll hold off on my review of Art + Money for another time. I haven’t finished it anyway. But just 13 pages in, it’s already changed my outlook in a dramatic, and positive way. And that alone is worth $39.

If you’ve gotten any of Chris’s other guides, I’d love to hear what you think.

Now it’s back to empire-building.

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*Why did I spring for the Caesar version? Mostly because it’s the only version that contains behind-the-scenes views of Chris’s entire business model, something I really, really wanted to see.

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Day 1 of Building My Empire

A New Vision

So a couple of months ago I encountered a blogger who gave me a vision of living the life of my dreams, a life in which I spend 95% of my time (egad, can I even say that?) doing things I actually want to do.

Sound crazy? Maybe so, but Chris Guillebeau is doing it, and reading his A Brief Guide to World Domination and 279 Days to Overnight Success introduced me to others (in a virtual way) who are doing it as well.

If they can do it, why not me?

Now the truth is, I’ve been making a living from my art, working from home, for almost all of my working life. You’d think I have it made!

However, not being a natural entrepreneur, and not having been aware of any role models to follow, I created the only kind of business I knew how, the only way I knew how, and the fact is that although yes, I make my living from my art, I spend a teeny, tiny fraction of my time actually creating art.

There’s something wrong with this picture.

Plus the fact that I work really, really hard, and seriously make barely enough to get by, after all is said and done.

Yes, I live in an expensive part of the world, so I’d probaby make more than enough to get by if I lived in Moab, Utah, but I want to make more than enough to get by wherever the hell I live!

And although artists are heavily programmed to feel that there’s something wrong with making money, I have finally decided once and for all to hell with that idea!

The Universe Lets Me Have It

So. Back to a couple of months ago. Money was tight. I mean, “I don’ t know how I’m going to pay the mortgage” tight. I was horribly stressed. The man I thought was my life partner decided he couldn’t deal with my stress and moved out, leaving me in even more desperate financial straits, and I found myself suddenly alone.

It felt like my world was falling down around me.

Ain’t that just the way the Universe deals the cards when it’s hella fed up with you not taking the Right Actions it’s been telling you to take all along, because you’ve been so stuck in following the same damn okay-but-not-really-working-the-way-you-want-but-not-bad-enough-to-bust-out path, even though it’s not what you really want, but you’re so damned STUCK that you can’t even imagine that there’s an outside of the box in order to think there?

When you’re that stuck, the Universe gives up on nudges and hints and whispers and just hits you over the head with a big ‘ol 2×4.

That would be me.

In other words, I was in a state of precarious preparedness to fall – to leap – off the ladder I’d built and climbed.

So when I stumbled upon Chris Guillebeau’s The Art of Nonconformity blog (ironically enough, forwarded to me by the aforementioned ex-bf), and close on the heels of that I discovered Havi Brooks’ (and Selma the Duck’s) The Fluent Self, something inside me snapped.

Instead of wishing things were different (and feeling powerless to do anything about it), I committed to figuring out how to make them different. I committed to really going for the life I want.

This blog, of course, is part of what has (so far) come out of that commitment, so it’s an effect of that commitment. But it’s cause as well as effect: writing regularly (I aim for daily, but am working on being gentle with myself when it’s less than that, especially times like right now, when I’m on the road on a teaching gig with no laptop, iphone or [covetcovetcovet] ipad) has been a powerful tool in helping me to keep that commitment.

Because anyone who’s ever tried to do something different, something unconventional, something creative, knows how damned hard it can be to stick with it through the throes of daily life in a world that is largely hostile to the different, unconventional and creative.

Seeking and Investing in Outside Help

One of the things I’ve decided, as part of my commitment to really go after the life I want, is to find as many good teachers and models as I can, and invest in myself with my time, and where it feels appropriate, also with my money. This thing is really important to me, and investing in me and it only makes sense.

However, resources are scarce, and I have debt to pay down for the first time in my life, so making the decision to spend money on anything that isn’t absolutely necessary for daily living is hard. I feel guilty. I feel wasteful.

Ah, don’t you love those voices?

I’ve also made decisions in the past to invest money on things – things for my business – that I was sure would pay me back… and didn’t. Bad decisions, I see now, but they seemed like good ideas at the time. And in fact, the only way to know for sure was to try them. So now, every time I even think of investing in myself – especially on something that is somewhat abstract and hard to measure in terms of ROI – it scares the bejeezus out of me.

But, having said that, I also have to confess that when I look back at my past “bad” money decisions, pretty much every one of them was an investment in a business that I no longer want to run in the way it’s currently structured!! I am burned out being the Chief Cook and Bottle Washer, and I want to spend my time doing the special things I’m really good at and love to do, not the things that half the planet could do (and many of them better than I!)

In other words, if I’m honest with myself, many, if not all of those previous investments were made in an attempt to outrun poverty, rather than in an attempt to create something I’m completely passionate about.

Not to get all “woo woo” on you, but I think the Universe knows this, and responds accordingly.

But getting back to where I started (and yes, this post does have a point). One of the investments I decided oh-so-scarily to make was in a class, a $100 Business Forum, an online group of kick-ass people (led by Chris Guillebeau and Pam Slim),who want to create independence through freelancing or a small business. I’ll be working with Chris and Pam, and 149 of my peers who will be creating their own projects. The Forum starts in May, and I’ll write about my experiences with it here. I’m excited and hopeful that, with 151 other people to help me refine my ideas, I will emerge from those 28 days with a clearer vision of my direction and some concrete steps to take to help get me there.

Meanwhile, Chris Guillebeau just yesterday launched a brand new addition to his Unconventional Guides, the Empire Building Kit. From the first announcement that it was in the works, I knew this was a kit I would want: 365 days of emails, videos, case studies, and all sorts of other goodies, to help me build my empire!

When it was finally released (for only 24 hours at first, with a second release down the road), I had to struggle with the “you can’t afford that” and “you should put that money toward your debt” and “don’t even think of making another stupid money mistake!” voices in my head. Being more expensive than the $100 Business Forum, the EBK was that much harder to justify. Especially because I wasn’t looking at the basic Emperor version – no – I wanted to get a peak into the inner workings of my blog superhero Chris’s business, and in order to get that I would have to spring for the top-of-the-line Alexander the Great version!

Yikes!

It scares me even to put it out in public that I spent so much money. But the fact is, everything I’ve read of Chris’s has been not just well-written, but incredibly well thought-out, impeccably organized and designed, and of immense value. Starting with his twice-weekly posts on his blog, and his free downloads. The man has earned my trust, and he’s a living model of the kind of empire I want to build, so I have high expectations that the EBK will do what it promises, and help me build my empire.

So far I’ve received two emails (one today and one yesterday) and have looked at a couple of the overview PDFs in the EBK. First reaction? Overwhelm! I’m immensely grateful to Chris for writing repeated reminders not to get overwhelmed. Reminders that Rome was not built in a day, and there are 364 days to go in a year of EBK materials and steps.

Deep breath.

Anyone who has known me for any length of time knows that when I discover a Bliss, something I’m passionate about, I dive in head-first. This is just who I am, and I’ve come to recognize it and embrace it. I’ve also come to recognize the urgency that goes along with my M.O: I desperately, desperately want to be good/successful at the thing, right now.

Of course, life just doesn’t work that way. Whether you’re talking about learning to dance, or do calligraphy, or sing jazz, or write well, or build an empire, it takes time, and lots and lots of baby steps, one after another.

This is precisely why I decided to gamble on the EBK. I know my M.O.; just last week I sank into a state of deep funk and overwhelm, feeling like I’d never succeed at building the kind of business and life that I want. Thankfully, I am aware enough to know that the overwhelm will work itself out if I just take things one step at a time. And when building an empire, having some guidance along the way is just a phenomenally great plan.

So here I go. I’m now officially building my empire. Whether it’s a massive success or a gigantic flop, or (worst to imagine of all) a pathetic fizzle, I commit  to write about it here. I’m excited, I’m nervous, and hella scared.

Wish me luck.

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Any other Empire Builders out there? Let’s talk! Tell me your story!

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