Category: Personal

Vicarious Road Trip

I’m barely 40 pages into Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live and I’m already feeling jealous. Not of his talent for comic writing, though he has plenty of that. I’m feeling strangely jealous that I’ve never been able to go on a solo road trip with 600 CDs like he’s doing. You see, I’ve never had a driver’s licence. 99% of the time, it’s no big deal at all. Well, more like 80% of the time. When my wife and I do occasionally need to drive, we either rent a car or borrow my Dad’s or her Mum’s, and Brooke does the driving. I know she resents it a bit (okay, maybe a lot), but at this stage I really think it might be too late for me to learn.

I did know how, once. Just like every other kid, I signed up for the driver education classes at my high school and did perfectly well. Except for one thing. It was probably at my very last lesson when my driving instructor advised me not to book my test appointment until I practiced my parallel parking. A lot. At this point in the story, my memory gets a bit foggy (this is, after all, now more than 25 years ago). I did NOT practice my parallel parking. In fact, I got a bit annoyed with his advice. And when it came down to it, I guess I just didn’t care enough. All of my friends were getting licences, and some of them were even buying cars. I was happy, like Iggy, to be the Passenger. Until now.

It’s not that Klosterman has made me crave the experience of actually driving thousands of miles. The physical and mental effort of keeping the car safely between the lines and away from the cars in front and behind strikes me as exhausting. But there’s just something about the particular kind of solitude with musical accompaniment a “road trip” offers that a bus journey with an iPod just can’t match.

Even if I were to practice my parallel parking, after all this time, and successfully obtain my driving licence, I doubt very much whether I’d be able to take off on my own with a trunk full of music. I suspect that there would be some marital payback which would involve me doing every single bit of driving for the next ten years, and beyond. And as a much older new driver, I could never build up the self-confidence that would let me roll down the window and rest one arm on the doorframe. Instead of the freedom that I have in mind, more likely I’d be squinting at highway exit signs, nervously changing lanes and trying not to fall asleep behind the wheel.

If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll get back to my vicarious road trip now. At least when I start to get sleepy, I can just put the book down and go to bed.

SXSW 2008: Social Networking Indeed

I’m here in Austin for my eighth consecutive South by Southwest Interactive conference. I’ve come to look at this week as an essential creative reboot each year. The weather in Toronto combined with the months of near darkness always leave me drained in inspiration. And then I come to Texas and spend a week with a few thousand of my closest friends.

I didn’t plan well this year. And work got crazy. And I foolishly solicited SXSW filmmakers to send me screeners. So the leadup to this year’s conference was a flurry of late nights and trying to compile a super-calendar of Interactive, Film and Music events. Now that I’m here, it’s clear that I just can’t do it all.

In fact, my normal “shy extravert” personality has taken a hit and I am finding myself cocooning in my hotel room, which is unusual for me. I think part of it might be that I’m a bit nervous about trying to meet new people (ie. Film people). On the one hand, I’m a lazy man and don’t mind hanging around with my old Interactive tribe. But I feel like I might be missing an opportunity to learn something new and talk about another of my favourite things with like-minded people. But I’m also afraid of being embraced by the Film people and then missing out on all the stuff I’ve come to love about the Interactive conference. This conflict over different social choices as well as scheduling options has left me even more paralyzed than usual. And I don’t like feeling like this.

I’m hoping that staying a few days extra to see free Music day shows and hang around with my Austin pals will sort me out. I’ll post an update in a few days.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Tara Hunt is someone thinking creatively about marketing and other business topics, and what I appreciate about her is that she isn’t afraid to relate the world of business to the world of the personal. I loved her recent blog entry Happiness as Core to Your Business Model because it again effortlessly aligns the goals of individuals with the goals of business. She relates the four elements of happiness as defined by the American Psychological Association (autonomy, competence, relatedness, and self-esteem) to the three core concepts of Web 2.0. (openness, collaboration and community). I think it makes sense. I think everyone would like to work at a place where the business goal was to bring happiness to others.

In fact, I may have taken my last job for that reason. I felt good about selling wine because of the experiences I was offering. Family gatherings, social events, parties; all are places where people feel connected to each other and where the pleasure of enjoying our product would enhance (in most cases) people’s good feelings. Of course, I don’t think my employers thought about this directly, but it was a positive that 95% of the people who worked for us were wine lovers (in one or two cases, perhaps a little too enthusiastic in their appreciation) and one of the perks of the job was meeting people at events and enjoying our products at our own company parties.

The barriers, of course, were competence and self-esteem. The world of wine can still seem stuffy and class-conscious and there are enough wine snobs around to make even the most eager student feel stupid. I think this is why so many wine web communities sprouted around the same time. WineLog and Cork’d are great ways to share your drinking experiences with others, and Gary Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library TV video blog makes learning about wine fun.

Now, how do I begin to apply some of these concepts to the new world of accounting I find myself in? 😉

Super Bah!

I’m a little disappointed that I missed what sounds like the most exciting Super Bowl game in ages. I was delighted to hear about the Giants upset of the Patriots, but I’m sorry to say I missed every single minute of the game. We’d arranged to pick up Brooke’s mum at the airport around 4:30 yesterday. She was coming back from a two-week cruise in Hawaii, and we’d heard she’d been a bit sick with a cold for the past week. But when she got off the plane, it was clear this was more serious than a cold. She told us she hadn’t slept or eaten much in two days and that she’d been coughing up stuff earlier in the week. So we took her directly to Emergency and by the time we got home at 10:30, the game was over.

The doctor told us she’s got pneumonia, but she’s doing better already. A good night’s sleep was the first thing she needed. But instead of her staying with us for just one night and then driving home to Collingwood, it looks like we’re hosting a sick houseguest for the next few days.

There’ll be another Super Bowl next year, I hear, but it still would have been great to see such a competitive game. How was the halftime show? Did I miss any wardrobe malfunctions?

Transparency, Not Spin

I’ve been doing some career soul-searching again lately. Even though I’ve been at my current job less than six months, I’m becoming restless and bored. It was definitely time for a change when I decided to take this position, and I’m certainly not complaining about the compensation or benefits. It’s just that I’m not sure I feel right for the job. Strangely, I feel both too stupid and too smart for what I’m doing. Too stupid because I know little about the world of accounting and “professional services,” and too smart because I feel my job function is too narrow and leaves me waiting for other people’s input far too much of the time.

As I look back over my resume’s alarming zigs and zags, I have to ask myself why I’ve kept moving around. It’s not like I’ve been on any kind of direct career “path,” with each move taking me closer to some working nirvana. Some jobs I took for money, some for love, but all felt constricting sooner or later. I often joke (half-seriously) that I’m a profoundly lazy man. But I think I’m just bored by my opportunities. Pardon the boasting, but I was once considered a “gifted” student. I skipped a grade and would have skipped another had my parents allowed it. I was a good student in university who gave up the idea of grad school for teachers’ college. When no job opportunities came my way there, I took the first well-paying job that came my way, in social work. But I panicked about being on a very limiting career path and jumped ship to work in, gasp, retail sales. The money was great, the prospects dismal. Then a brief sojourn as a web designer, until the first dot.com bubble burst. Back to sales. Then back to web design for a wine importing firm. Lots of freedom there, and I learned a lot about marketing. But again, a very limited career path. And working in a highly regulated market was tough, as was working for a small business. So now, a jump to a huge corporate firm, to be a “writer” and a “web producer.”

It sounded very promising six months ago. A great opportunity with a large company. Great salary and benefits. But I feel lost most days. My workmates are nice but almost pathologically unsocial. My work function is very constrained, and there’s very little of the web involved in it. The corporate culture is extremely risk-averse, and though I was ostensibly hired for my crackerjack writing skills, most of my personality has to be ironed out of my writing so that it will match the corporate (non) style and avoid lawsuits.

I read about some of the people I know from South by Southwest starting up companies and I’m jealous. I try to convince myself I’m not really lazy, just unchallenged. But my “gifted” past seems so long ago now, and I worry that I can’t learn any new tricks. I’m a collaborator and a strategic thinker, and I’m trapped in a cubicle by myself working on details.

Lately, I’ve been a bit of a voyeur among the public relations (PR) blog crowd. A few months ago, I attended the Talk is Cheap unconference, where I learned how PR firms are embracing the web and doing some truly innovative things. I think I’ve become infatuated. I’m somewhat encouraged when I read that people come to the field of public relations from all kinds of places, including some of the places I’ve been. I think what I truly want is to work for a nimble company, one that can react quickly and intelligently to what’s happening in the world. I realize that I’ve never really worked for a place that could be described that way. I also realize that I need to work somewhere where I can speak my mind, and where I don’t have to learn the org chart to get my job done.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be writing so openly on my blog about this, but only the people that really matter to me will read this anyway. I’ve learned a lot about myself and about what I’m good at over the course of my admittedly scattered work life. And I’ve learned from a lot of people, some of whom I’ve never met, about what work can be and how to get the best out of myself. I’m sorry that this entry seems a bit self-pitying. But I encourage you, if you’ve read this far, to engage with me on some of this stuff. What makes your job great, or rotten? Do we expect too much of our careers, in terms of fulfillment, or opportunity?

On Wednesday night this week, I’ll be attending an offline gathering for PR folks interested in social media. I hope to find out more about the field and see if I might not be able to find a place within it. One thing that blogging has taught me, and that the social media PR people are saying is that honesty and transparency are more valuable than spin. So if I get into any conversations, whether after one beer or three, it’s going to be all about the authenticity. It’s the one constant that my resume has no room to include.