Tyler’s Toolbox

…is something my dad used to say all the time when trying to corral the dispersed Willis children into giving up their “way to busy for family” lives for a few days and making a communal trek somewhere for a very untraditional Christmas. We were usually pretty successful in making this holiday a fun one, but that’s neither here nor there, since I’m not going to be talking about any of that in this post. It’s just a nice story.

Instead, I want to talk about presence as it pertains to recording who you are online. I’m not talking about branding or building reputation here, but rather presence in the most pure expression: participation. As Malcolm Forbes once said, “Presence is more than just being there.”

Just as a sulky family member at Christmas is worse than an absent one–an online friend who seems uninterested in interacting with you unless it benefits them, worse then someone who abstains from hanging out with you on the interwebs.

I love when people create a hub for you to look for interactions with them. Some Examples:

• My friend, Andrew Hyde, lists very clearly on his site most of the things he’s working on (Startup Weekend, VC Wear) and provides a good bio and links to his profiles on different web services. If you spend 20 minutes on his site, I guarentee you’ll find something to strike up a chat with him about next time you see him.
• My friend, Ben Casnocha, has a slightly more “company” version of essentially the same thing. He’s a little more conscious of creating a brand for himself so the site reflects that. At it’s core it’s similar to Andrew’s site, a hub for “all things Ben.” You can find out what he’s thinking about from his blog, find his accounts (twitter, FB, del.icio.us, etc.), even sign up for a newsletter digest he send out (which is very good incidentally).
• New Friend, Amit Gupta, will probably serve as inspiration for me in building this site. He hosted smaller projects on his domain, instead of a separate domain. Talk about centralization! Of course, once projects hit a certain size, it needs to be spun out, but while it’s a baby idea - why not let it live at home?
• This site now has tons of information about me. Not sifted, carefully chosen and cleared information - but rather a bevy of information about who I am and what I do. So does my Facebook profile.

So, if real presence is equal to participation — it only makes sense that your online presence should reflect all your participation. I used to think it was a good idea to create a separate corporate web page that can be separated from my personal page and cleaned of any personality so that I can be sure I’m not making the wrong impression, but likely because of that I ended up making no impression at all.

The alternative is, I can build a hub that is open, inviting, and full of possible talking points that may drive interactions. That’s how I’ve decided to go about it this time around.

I’ve created this as a web hub, and while it’s not complete, tonight I am working on building a Facebook Hub using pages. Since I use Facebook so frequently, it seemed logical to have an aggregation of data like events, groups, stories, etc. using one of FB’s most robust tools. So here’s my page, it should stay up to date with community projects I’m working on and events I’m putting on. Fan me on Facebook if you want infrequent updates about this stuff.

I’ll continue to build out both my Facebook page and this website with as much information as possible, until I’m documenting almost all my online participation, as a way of extending my digital hand to you for what might be the start of a beautiful future.

Just under two months ago I received the news that I, along with 10 of my co-workers, would be laid off. Unlike most I was OK with this as I felt I’d learned an immense amount of knowledge and I had my compensation package to pay rent and bills while I looked for another job. Long story short is I got appendicitis, and later an offer to go back to work for one month. I took it and by the time I had recovered, I was just starting to look for another job. The company offered me a full-time position. No suspense, I took the job. But I’d like to delve into why, and the benefit of working in a challenging environment.Over the 7 months I was at the company pre-layoff I learned an encyclopedias worth of knowledge about sales. I had never held a real sales career, and honestly I found the work dull. Then, relatively early on in my career my manager/mentor was out sick for a few days and I got to delve into the sandbox and close my own accounts. Luckily there was an easy win in there (it certainly wasn’t skill) and I got a taste of what it feels like to sell somebody. It’s an invigorating experience. That taught me the value of sticking through the mundane to get the win, and when I get mad, lazy, bored, or distracted I remember the sale and it refocuses me. I also developed a skill-set, which I refer to as “Bassilisms” in honor of the man who taught me 90% of the skills. I learned that I have a natural aptitude for sales and I refined the first layer of skills.

Now in June, when deciding whether or not to come back I had to weigh many factors: skills I could learn, new experiences I could get, the money I could make, how much I would enjoy my job, etc. I ended up taking the job because I felt as part of a smaller team I would be well positioned to continue refining my skills and that I would have an opportunity to take on new responsibilities if I wanted them. A larger company would have paid me more, but it would have possessed more bureaucracy and would allow me less opportunity to learn new skills. As a 20 year old starting a career and with my goals not lying in working for a larger company, but rather successively smaller ones until I can start my own; I knew learning would be more valuable in the long run then taking the money now.

So the cost benefit of salary versus development has been on my mind a lot as of late and I think the mix is different for everyone. As luck would have it, a former classmate of mine has been tracking his internship in Taiwan via Facebook and eloquently records some interesting thoughts. A lot of them are simple and seem to be common sense, but that’s what most people need reiterated. Everyone knows how to dream, do you know how to systematically go about implementing those dreams? That’s what makes an all-star. Since Facebook is a closed system I will copy some of my favorites here with my reactions below. Alex, you should really write a blog - you have been a compelling writer at least since 2004 (and my guess is longer) and you’re only getting better. Share those thoughts!

“Sitting there with the other two new-guys, it really dawned on me how much you get from the first impression. Quite a cliché statement, that, but none the less true. After hearing about the solitariness, the stress, the long hours, the ‘corporate’ side of law, it was very informative to talk to my mentor, Edison about the nature of his work. I ended up asking him straight up if he liked his job. He sorta grinned at me and rambled off a response about what part of the job makes a difference ect … then he advised me that law isn’t a happy profession, but you can still enjoy it.”

This is almost word for word my feeling for my sales job. Any job that requires full attention to detail to win a small percentage of battles is usually boring. In law, most commas are going to be in the right place but miss the one wrong placement in the 100 page document and it’s a million dollar mistake. If you program NASA satellites, a missing comma could blow up a MGS satellite. In sales a 10% increase in method could double your sales, or more. Not the same stakes, but the same lesson — being able to take pride in the big win and value your own consistent effort is an important skill to master.

“It’s not enough for an attorney to be satisfactory, anything less would be malpractice. Rather, a good attorney must spot future problems that could arise, as well.”

Alex goes on to tell a story which I won’t repeat, as he gives an example of a poor choice made by an attorney at a law firm, and I’m not sure about the implied confidentiality of Facebook (it is a closed system). Probably far enough removed, but better safe than sorry. The message is a simple one, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” (Ben Franklin), but it’s one worth repeating. In sales you could waste months chasing a customer before realizing you never asked if they could afford it. Low and behold, they can’t. When you “eat what you kill” that inefficiency hurts. If you prepare completely and actively look for problems, they become a lot more manageable. Paraphrasing Alex’s summation of this experience, If you’re lost in a snow storm it’s nice to have your ass covered, but wouldn’t it have been better to have gotten a map and not deal with frostbitten toes?

Note, posted updated quotes July 10, RP’ed to RSS. Original written July 6th.

Ahh what a wonderful morning, woke up today feeling like I’d finally gotten some sleep, and had a great couple of posts to start off the morning with. Following the trackline is a comment I left on Ben’s Blog.

Post Trackline: Ben’s Blog > Wandering Stan / McInblog > Thought on Holiday Parties; Involver; and SNS.

I like Stan’s viewpoint on the issue. We’ve all experienced that phenomenon but everyone focuses on why/how it happens, not how something supercedes the reaction. I think it’s rooted alot in our evolution - the ability to focus on a singular objective has been extremely important in our history.

We all have to much information to absorb, and until the singularity is upon us and we turn in robots, we have to figure out ways to seperate relavent/interesting information from garbage.

How do we choose what’s important to listen to? How do we emulate that selection process given all the information of the web?

There are people making strides in this, and I agree that your social network is the best choice I see out there now. Take one of my favorite sns sites www.involver.com - they use tags to connect people with events they’d enjoy. Far more often though I look at the events my friends are attending and discover through that. The reason social-networking is so effective, is because it’s so intuitive. Being “good” at using a search engine to find what you want requires learning how to search… it’s not intuitive. social networking sites have done a good job of emulating a common practice. I can call/sms/email my friends and ask them what thier doing, or I can log on to involver and see the next event (or the event i’d probably like the most, or the event nearest me, etc) for all my friends.

Social Networking is a really easy way for non-techies to sort information, and I think because of that it’s an integral part of where the web is headed. The goal needs to be to figure out a way to attach serious meaning to social networks. Social networking for social networking sake - to get the most friends, as if life was a zero sum game, is soooo 3 years ago. So let’s use sns as a platform, not a solution - and make it work in a long-tail environment.

Ben Casnocha recently had a post that made me break out the thinking cap. I traveled through western europe for a long trip as part of a gap year. Due to Katrina I ended up cutting the trip short to go help and then for personal reasons I decided to end my gap year early and resume studies at a local college. However my time traveling gave me some unique perspectives on who I am. I picked up habits that in America seem odd. From terms of speech to eating habits I shamelessly stole the elements I liked of other cultures I was exposed to. My core values didn’t change, but some superficial elements did. Since coming back I’ve been asked probably a dozen times if I was another Nationality. This did not happen before I left, so clearly my behavior now sets me outside the norm and makes me seem less American to an observer. So the idea I formed after reading Ben’s Post (it’s a must read; eloquent, succint, and a bit humorous) asked me if it’s possible that I’m less American. By integrating other cultures into yourself, do you lose your own culture?

This goes into the “Americanism” meme that I’ve been following since the q1 Junto (here, here, and here)

There are two angles here. I think America is more tolerant of differences in it’s population, therefore I think it’s easier to enjoy other cultures and maintain your American identity. For example first generation immigrants often still retain a significant amount of their parents original culture, yet they are considered American (at least to me). Therefore I think residing in America gives you more room to play with.

What if you lived in China? India? France? Russia? Brazil? Kenya? The Netherlands? Those cultures may not play as well with others as America does. I’m not Chinese, Indian, French, Brazilian, Kenyan, or Dutch so I can’t pretend to know. My theory is that these cultures have less internal differences and are therefore less likely to appreciate diversity of actions. My guess is the degree of freedom to integrate other cultures into your own while remaining yourself has much to do with the average internal differences (more difference, more tolerance of changing actions/habits to mirror another group) and also the society’s openness to accepting immigrants and new culture (for example I think France would have a harder time then The Netherlands).

The problem with the above two paragraphs is that it’s looking for approval from other citizens, there is an argument to be made for the idea that you are whatever you claim to be. I’m not going to make that argument right now, but it is a valid counter-point.

Ben made a statement in his article that he felt both more American AND more worldly. I think traveling opens up your perception or humanity, because you can percieve how different you are from the people around you you feel more American and long for home. Your also able to enjoy new foods, sights and sounds - which the vast majority of your peers will not experience and as such you feel more worldly then those who have yet to do it.

However while I do think you keep your main cultural identity while you travel, I don’t think you come home the same. The experience changes you, and it does so in a tangible way. When a person lives somewhere abroad for an extended period of time (I don’t know how long this takes, 10 years, 20, 30?) you begin to really integrate the two cultures completely and you begin to lose your identity as a American and instead become a mix between the two.

I would love to have comments from those born and or living in other countries. Please comment, or fwd this on to people who may enjoy it.