A while back I wrote about Birchbox and how much I loved what they were doing. My wife treats the day that her Birchbox arrives like a holiday. A few months ago when the company launched Birchbox Man, my wife signed me up for it. It was nine parts curiosity and one part self indulgence.
A few days ago the first shipment arrived. I happened to be out of town, and finally got around to opening it on Monday. The Birchbox Man box is $20 per month, which is twice as much as the women’s version.
Here’s how it went:
As usual, Birchbox did a great job with the packaging. The box opened like a drawer and had a card on the top that told me about everything I was about to gaze upon.
The contents of my Birchbox Man were as follows:
Of all the items in the box, the thing I liked most was the cologne. The popcorn was not a hit (and I love popcorn). The playing cards were nice, but not sure how much use I will get out of those. The shampoo I will end up giving away, and I already use a product called the Cooling Fix that came in my wife’s Birchbox a long time ago for shave gel. I will still try this one, but I love the other one.
I guess I was a bit disappointed by the contents of the Man box. It costs twice as much (as I said above), and I don’t feel like I got twice the value. I will probably give it another month because I trust the people at Birchbox to deliver based on our history with them, but if it’s not significantly better that will be it.
We have been taught to stand around and wait to be picked. We stand and wait to be picked for the kickball team. We apply to college and hope we are picked. We look for that perfect job and hope we are picked.
Instead of waiting around to be picked, pick yourself. Go and do the thing that you want to do rather than thinking you need some special stamp of approval from someone else.
I had coffee with a guy yesterday who has been out of school for two years and not had a job yet that he really enjoys. He is interested in building a company in another country at some point in the future and is seeking a new job now to get the training he needs for the future. In the course of our discussion he started to tell me about an idea he had for helping small businesses grow and scale. As he told me about his idea, he got more and more excited. I said at some point “I think you should just go do that now. You don’t need another job. You need to do the thing you care most about. If that doesn’t work, you can always get a job somewhere.”
I hope he takes my advice.
The big idea I took away from my day in NY was simply to keep asking this question over and over and over.
If there are reasons why you are not doing the thing you think you should be, you need to be willing to get to the root of it. Make a list of the reasons you think you can’t do it and work to eliminate them one by one. Then comes the hard part.
Zig Ziglar has the obligating question, which goes something like: If we get rid of the obstacles you have identified, are you willing to make the decision? If you have ever bought a car, you know how this goes. ”If I can get this in your price range, are you ready to buy the car today?” It forces you to say “yes” to something or admit that you aren’t really serious about it.
Into the breach…
“How long have you been following Seth?”
The question seemed innocuous enough, and yet it really rubbed me the wrong way. I was asked this while sitting outside after the event. I don’t consider myself a “follower” of Seth Godin. He is someone that I pay attention to, listen to, and certainly respect. Follow? No. I can’t, and it would do me no good anyway.
The people that make a real difference are those that borrow from the past but chart their own course into the future. One of the central themes of the questions being asked throughout the day was “What’s the magic formula where I will wake up and be someone different than I am right now?” The tough answer to hear was, of course, that there is no genie’s lamp to rub. We all get to figure this stuff out for ourselves because we are all different.
It made me think that Twitter needs a new verb to replace Follow. Following implies that I will go where you have already gone. We don’t need more of that. I like Listen as a verb. I will Listen to what you say and then figure out what it means for me.
“We spend most of our time focused on the product. The focus should be on the harder work of connection.”
As a builder of products, this is one that I have a hard time with. It’s hard for me to imagine that the connection is more important than the product itself. If you connect a bunch of people, but the product stinks, that’s a problem.
We all know the best products don’t always win however. If obscurity is the real enemy, then connection is as or more important than the product. Not sure I am convinced of it yet.
“The enemy is obscurity, not piracy.”
This was a quote I wrote down about half way through the day. In an era where we can read any book ever written or listen to any song ever recorded, whether or not I can copy the material is of almost no concern. The much larger issue is will I care enough to listen to you or read your writing in the first place.
The question is: Will anyone miss you if you are gone?
“Many freelancers think that they are entrepreneurs, but they are freelancers. If the first person you hire to do the real work is yourself, you are a freelancer not an entrepreneur.”
I have to confess that this one stung a bit. It’s something I am guilty of all the time. If I can do the work, I usually do. It’s easier to hire me than to find someone like me to do the work and give up some of the revenue.
The implications for this view of the universe are significant. The tendency when you are getting going on your own is to do everything yourself. It’s cheaper (short term) and there is a bit of mystical attraction to it. ”Look, I can do it all!” However, I think the point Godin was trying to make in drawing the distinction is that you have to be willing to jump out of the nitty gritty as soon as possible to focus on the bigger picture.
I don’t think he was being critical of freelancers. If you are successful, it can be a great way to enjoy a lifestyle very different from the average Joe. His point was that being a freelancer does not make you an entrepreneur in the classic sense of the word.
Are you freelancing or building something bigger than yourself?
I had the opportunity to spend last Wednesday with Seth Godin. Seth is a guy that I think has a great story, and is someone whom I hold in high esteem.
The format for the day was simple. Seth gave a bit of a speech at the beginning on how he sees the world, and then opened up a five hour Q&A session about anything that the audience wanted to discuss.
The topics were widely varying, from how to be productive every day, to publishing (as you might expect) to the state of the Internet as a revolution.
Over the next week or so, I will be sharing some of the best moments for me from the event and how I think they apply to the road ahead.
A few days ago I got a welcome surprise in my mailbox: A copy of the new Chris Guillebeau book The $100 Startup : Reinvent The Way You Make A Living, Do What You Love and Create A New Future.
If you are not familiar with Chris, he runs one of my favorite web properties, The Art of Non-Conformity. The reason I say it was a surprise is that I had not ordered it, though I have ordered other things from Chris in the past. So, thank you to whomever found it in their good graces to ship me a copy!
Chris is a guy who practices what he preaches, running his empire from the road while attempting to visit all 193 countries before April of next year. He is currently just ten shy of the goal. He also runs the Travel Hacking Cartel, a property dedicated to helping subscribers travel the world for as little as possible by making the most profitable use of miles and other promos. He is, in short, a man who wears many hats.
All of those hats, however, have a common theme: Live life on your own terms and don’t settle for ordinary.
His new book is jam-packed with great examples of people who started their own businesses either out of necessity (losing a job) or out of a desire to no longer live beholden to someone else’s view of the universe. What I like about the book is that it’s not just a collection of anecdotes about strangers, but also has a lot of practical tips and hints for assisting the new small business to get up and running.
Furthermore, there is a focus on creating value and making money, not just “finding your passion and following it” as other books in this genre tend to do. As he says, businesses exist to make a profit. It’s not just about what you are passionate about, but rather the intersection of passion with value creation, a concept he calls convergence.
I recommend this book if you are looking for that kick in the backside to get moving on doing your own thing. Chris has done it all and bought the T-shirt. I wrote down four or five ideas for things I am going to look into in the near future as I was reading. Even if you don’t buy the book, you owe it to yourself to start listening to Chris. He will challenge you to do your best work.
I recently got a friendly reminder from an application I use extensively on my computer called Growl. If you own a Mac, you probably use Growl as well. It is a great notification engine that lots of other applications use to send messages to the user from background services.
The reminder was about the fact that I needed to update the application, something I have not done since I updated to the latest Mac OSX. The reminder was nothing new, and it happens all the time for various applications. What was new for Growl, however, was that the update was only available through the Apple App Store for Mac.
It’s a subtle shift, and seemingly unimportant. The App Store makes it easier. The App Store means it’s been reviewed. Those are all good things. Right? Furthermore, most apps are still available through the previous distribution channel of downloading a DMG. For now.
What are we giving up for the convenience of having all applications distributed through the App Store? Apple now has control over application distribution in the same way they have control over content distribution for other forms of media on their other devices. We have already seen that Apple is not afraid to block apps that violate either their sense of propriety or business relationships that they value highly (remember Skype and Google Voice?)
I like to have full control over my PC. I also really like the Mac OSX operating system. Is it possible that at some point in the very near future that those two ideals will be incompatible?