Ready to Work Two Jobs?

I often encounter folks who've opted, or been forced, to freelance.

A great many share something in common: they don't want to work two jobs.

Unfortunately, that's what you have to do to succeed.

Because it ain't easy to cultivate "1,000 true fans." Else, we'd all do it.

Editor Kevin Kelly first expressed the idea a decade ago:

You can define a "true fan" as anyone willing to send you $100 a year for your product. Provided your cost of goods is low, a freelancer can get by comfortably with only 1,000 true fans.

And the money need not arrive in lump sums; it can trickle in (fans can subscribe, say, at the price of $8.34 a month for 12 months).

However you're paid, the bar to success is low, Kelly says.

"To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans."

Besides keeping costs low, the challenge freelancers face is difficult enough to put most of them off.

To succeed, you have to cultivate 1,000 solid relationships―both financial ones (no one else can profit from your work) and professional ones (fans must like and trust you).

It's easy to attract 1,000 or more fair-weather fans (just ask Paul Reubens). But you need 1,000 diehards.

And, although digital platforms that enable relationships with diehards abound, nurturing those relationships could kill you.

"The truth is that cultivating a thousand true fans is time consuming, sometimes nerve racking, and not for everyone," Kelly says.

"Done well it can become another full-time job."

The Art of the Real

In the face of historically low approval ratings, President Trump mounted a puzzling charade on Monday.

He opened a Cabinet meeting to the media and filled the hour with a ham-fisted celebration of unearned and imaginary achievements in jobs creation, crime reduction, and national security.

His pathetically amateurish attempt at PR backfired.

Little wonder.

Forget fake: constituents―and customers―want real.

Nine of 10, in fact, told Bonfire Marketing they value real over every other brand attribute.

Customers today back brands they perceive to be honest, and shy from those they don't, says Andrew Reid, author of The Authenticity Handbook. "Authenticity is now a business imperative," Reid says.

I urge President Trump and his handlers to read my whitepaper, Path of Persuasion: Winning Customers in the Age of Suspicion.

It's an Oldy, but Goodly.

Grammar Police

Those who can, do; those who can't, teach;

those who can't teach, police grammar on the Internet.

― Ruadhán J. McElroy

Two psycholinguistics at the University of Michigan have proven the judgmental behavior of grammar policemen reflects a bigger issue: they're annoying people all round.

Tests of 83 subjects revealed a correlation between crabbing about typos and grammatical slips and three of the "Big 5" personality traits.

People who spot and judge others harshly for sloppy typing and grammar, the study showed, are dogmatic, antagonistic, and introverted.

"This is the first study to show that the personality traits of listeners/readers have an effect on the interpretation of language," says lead researcher Julie Boland.

Land of the Living

The basest of all things is to be afraid.

― William Faulkner

When he accepted the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature―the same year Russia exploded its first atom bomb―William Faulkner asked writers to put aside physical fear and choose life over death.

"There are no longer problems of the spirit," Faulkner said. "There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing, because only that is worth writing about."

Until the writer rediscovers "the old verities and truths of the heart," Faulkner said, he "will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man."

Last week―while terror reigned in London, Paris, Melbourne, Kabul and Tehran―Bob Dylan delivered his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, a biblio-memoir seven times longer than Faulkner's address.

Where Faulkner was brief, Dylan rambles, Kerouac-style.

But one chord sounds the same.

Midway through, Dylan describes reading All Quiet on the Western Front as a schoolboy:

"This is a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals. You're stuck in a nightmare. Sucked up into a mysterious whirlpool of death and pain. You're defending yourself from elimination. You're being wiped off the face of the map."

Dylan found the novel's depiction of war exhausting. "I put this book down and closed it up. I never wanted to read another war novel again, and I never did."

He discovered the "old verities and truths of the heart" instead in an adventure tale, The Odyssey, where the hero determinedly chooses life over death.

Dylan describes Odysseus' visit with Achilles in the underworld. Odysseus is shocked to hear the condemned warrior say, "I traded a long life full of peace and contentment for a short one full of honor and glory. I just died, that's all. There was no honor. No immortality."

Were he able, Achilles says, he'd return to the world, even if that meant he'd be some farmer's slave. "Whatever his struggles of life were," Dylan says, "they were preferable to being here in this dead place. That's what songs are too. Our songs are alive in the land of the living."

Songs may not be literature in the same sense novels are, Dylan says, but they come from the same neck of the woods, a country where physical fear is so base it's forgotten.

Or as the evangelist John said, "There is no fear in love."

The D Word

Q. What's the fastest way to stampede a herd of exhibitors?

A. Use the "D word."

Drayage.

Its mere mention thrusts otherwise serene folks into fits of apoplexy, turning lambs into lions and Jekylls into Hydes.

"Arbitrary and greedy," they gasp. "A complete scam."

Drayage is the price a tradeshow decorator charges exhibitors to move materials from the convention center's loading dock to the exhibit space on the show floor. Charged by the "hundred weight," it increases as the weight of an exhibit does.

Exhibitors loathe the pricing scheme, wondering where it originated and why it's perpetuated.

You can blame J.W. Midgley.

Midgely was a railroad engineer in the 19th century. He's the man who instituted the "hundred weight."

The word "drayage" comes from the maritime industry, and denotes the transport of goods over a short distance, often as part of a long-distance move (for example, a pickup of goods by truck from a seaport and their delivery to an inland warehouse).

The word's also used to denote the price of the transportation.

Drayage originally meant "to transport by a sideless cart", or dray. These carts, pulled by dray horses, were used to move goods short distances (short because of the physical limitations of the dray horse). Over time, the dray horse was replaced by the delivery truck.

Pricing the service by hundred weight is a scheme that allowed operators of the various modes of transport (ships, trains, carts, etc.) to charge uniformly and treat all users fairly (farmers, for example, paid no more than ranchers, miners, or loggers to have their goods hauled). It also allowed for easy verification of the charges.

J. W. Midgley, although disavowing that he originated the practice, took credit for making the hundred weight a national standard for charging for freight hauling.

Midgley wanted to help harmonize hauling. And that's a good thing, because harmony breeds efficiency.

Runaway drayage has certainly altered the tradeshow industry, causing, most notably, exhibitors' flight to fabric. (I remember a time when US tradeshows were chock full of hardwall).

The industry players point fingers whenever runaway drayage gets mentioned. Exhibitors scapegoat decorators. Decorators scapegoat organizers. Organizers scapegoat convention centers. Everybody scapegoats labor.

But nobody scapegoats J.W. Midgley.

It's high time they did.

It's also time to put drayage into context:

• A woman once asked Picasso to sketch her on a piece of paper. The artist complied, and handed her the sketch. “That will cost you $10,000.” The woman was astounded. “Isn't $10,000 a lot for only five minutes work?" Picasso replied, “The sketch may have taken five minutes, but the learning took 30 years."
  
  
• Hospitals typically charge you $20 for an aspirin. That's because they "cost shift" constantly. They couldn't function if they didn't charge insured patients $20 for an aspirin, because their beds are filled by poor, uninsured patients, as well.
  

• Starbucks charges $3 for a small latte, but a whole pound of Arabica coffee beans costs only $1.50. When you buy a latte, you're also paying for labor, store rent, furniture, and college tuition for 4,000 employees. The beans comprise only 20% of the price.

Exhibitors, sure, you may want to squeeze runaway drayage.

But remember: when you clamp down on one side of a balloon, the other side just gets bigger.