For the past year, I’ve been traveling around the country, telling people about Chris Guillebeau. (Seriously. You can see it here, starting at 2:48 in.)

One reason is that his story—of building a platform from zero to massive, of pursuing “impossible” goals like visiting every country in the world by age 35—never fails to inspire audiences. In a time when life can look rather grim around the edges, let alone when we stare into the deep, black heart of it—we need all the light we can get.

But the other reason I talk about Chris all the time is because his methodology for success is rational and replicable.

Yes, he’s a quick study, but he is also a perpetual student who reads widely and never stops asking questions of people who know things he doesn’t.

Yes, he has what is probably a natural facility with words, but he still parks his ass in a chair (or the floor of some foreign airport) and plunks out 1,500 of them per day. Every single day.

Or, as he summed it up himself in his first book, remarkable achievements are a result of these four prerequisites:

1. You Must Be Open to New Ideas
2. You Must Be Dissatisfied with the Status Quo
3. You Must Be Willing to Take Personal Responsibility
4. You Must Be Willing to Work Hard

So while Chris has built a fairly unconventional life for himself, filled with international travel, digital entrepreneurship, and rapid iteration, he has done so as much though old standbys like integrity and effort as he has entrepreneurial risk-taking and a 21st-Century attitude toward change.

His new book, The $100 Startup, takes a similarly old-plus-new approach to building a business. It’s Chris’s philosophy that the most rewarding work takes work, and that it should be done for personal fulfillment as much as for financial freedom. The 100 or so businesses used as case studies in the book reinforce this philosophy—each of these microbusinesses employs five or fewer employees (many are solopreneurs), and most are designed to stay that way.*

This is not, in other words, a book about building a massive, franchised empire from a single taco stand, nor designing killer iOS apps that get bought by Facebook for a billion dollars: it’s about helping you to come up with a solid idea at the intersection of your passion and a customer’s need; each of the tools within helps you tease out the one in relation to the other. There are checklists for evaluating the business-worthiness of your ideas and for prepping a product launch. There are formulas for constructing a marketing offer or creating a self-published work. There are charts that explain the different types of sales methods and that map the difference between passions that are fun for you and passions that will work in the marketplace.

It’s a book filled with incredibly detailed and specific information—nutrient-dense, especially at just over 300 pages—but because it’s so well-written and so liberally studded with inspiring, real-life stories, it’s a truly absorbing read: business book as page-turner.

In fact, if there’s a flaw to The $100 Startup, it’s that the stories, lessons, and tools are woven together so artfully, it’s difficult to treat casually. This is not a self-help book to be consumed in lieu of action, nor is it a reference book to be shelved and consulted via index. It’s meant to be read through from start to finish, preferably while taking copious notes as you go—although as much because the examples and concepts are likely to spark ideas for your own business as to find your way back to useful ideas later.

It is, in Chris’s own words, “a blueprint for change and action”. He’s thinking nothing less than a complete revolution, of people one by one leaving behind what they no longer need to serve themselves and the world and have a great time doing it. If you think that sounds crazy or impossible—especially with seed funds of $100—well, you don’t know Chris Guillebeau: a young man who simply doesn’t accept that things are impossible.

xxx
c

• Buy The $100 Startup on Amazon (and scroll down while you’re there for the great Q&A with Gretchen Rubin)
• Read review of Chris Guillebeau’s first book, The Art of Non-Conformity
• Visit the companion site, $100startup.com

*Size-wise, anyway. There was a minimum condition of $50,000 in net income generated per year, but no cap on the top side, and many of these very small businesses have gone on to become far more profitable. Other conditions required for inclusion in the book were: employee size (1-5, max); a passion-based model; low startup cost; no “special skills” (e.g. dentistry, law, tightrope-walking); and full financial disclosure.

Photos by Tara Wages.

A mostly monthly but certainly occasional round-up of what I’ve been up to and what’s in the hopper. For full credits and details, see this entry.

Colleen of the future (stuff I’ll be doing)

• “Making People Love You Madly” tour for ASMP [May 3: Tucson, AZ; June 7, Seattle, WA] The last two of my “marketing in the postmodern age” talk for the American Society of Media Photographers—oh, how time has flown! This version of my core talk on marketing was customized for commercial photographers, but anyone with a small creative business will come away with plenty of ideas. And, if you’re good at networking, many new contacts from the world of photography!
• World Domination Summit [July 6-8, Portland, OR] I’ll be giving the 50-minute version of “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” (aka “the 50-for-50 talk”) as a workshop at this year’s installment of the world’s most fun conference EVER in Portland. The conference has been sold out for months, but occasionally, some poor soul has to release their ticket and you can jump on it. Follow #WDS2012 and @chrisguillebeau on Twitter for scoop.

Colleen of the Past (what I have done for you lately)

• TEDxConcordiaUPortland [Portland, OR; March 31] I was beyond thrilled, honored, and yes, terrified to be presenting at this conference whose theme is “Becoming Extraordinary.” I mean, pressure much? But Michelle Jones, my friend and TEDx organizer (and 50-for-50 supporter) extraordinaire, had faith in me, so I screwed my courage to the sticking place and also, actually rehearsed. A lot. I’m pretty happy with the results, which you can watch above, or by clicking through to YouTube.
• 3x3x365 :: I don’t really do guest posts, but when my wonderful and, briefly, exhausted friend Amy McCracken called out for help, I was able to hide my eagerness to tell a story on my favorite-est blog in the cloak of selflessness.
• The Strictly Business Blog :: I’ve continued to write for my wonderful clients, the ASMP, on a variety of marketing and productivity-related topics. Recent contributions include a love note to Evernote and managing expectations with your very own Twitter policy.
• Savor & Serve Blog :: To celebrate a full year of her re-branded blog, the gorgeous and talented Jennifer Louden invited a group of her friends to share how they’d savored and/or served this past year. I was thrilled to participate, mostly because this year, I finally managed to do some service! It’s a lovely, sweet, and breezy roundup.

Colleen of the Present (stuff I do, rain or shine)

• communicatrix | focuses :: My (usually) monthly newsletter devoted to the ways and means of becoming a better clearer communicator (plus a few special treats I post nowhere else). Free!
• Act Smart! is my monthly column about marketing for LA Casting. Nominally for actors, there’s a ton of good info in there for any creative business person. Browse the archives, here.
• Internet flotsam :: I am currently rather disenchanted with the Internet. Also, busy. But I continue to waste far too much time over on Facebook, who, speaking of which, have not yet ruined Instagram.

xxx
c

It seems like every 10 or 20 years, there’s one breakthrough book in the personal development category.

The chronological first of the How-Do-I-Get-There-From-Here? books to help me find my way was Barbara Sher’s Wishcraft. It’s gentle and playful in tone, yet still filled with the kind of useful tools and practical exercises that make a Virgo’s heart go pitter-pat.*

Next in the all-star lineup was the first I came to, Julia Cameron’s legendary Artist’s Way. Its language is a bit soft and dreamy around the edges, but structurally, the book is rock-solid. After finishing The Artist’s Way, one friend of mine followed a long-dormant dream of becoming a singer-songwriter; I finally left copywriting behind and embraced the terrifying-to-me path of acting.

Which brings us to today, and to Danielle LaPorte’s sweeping, energizing entry in the canon, The Fire Starter Sessions.

Like her predecessors, Danielle’s exercises for excavating your true self are rooted in real-life experience, emerging over time from hundreds of sessions with actual clients. Full disclosure: I attended an early Fire Starter workshop in Los Angeles, and have been a friend and admirer of the Fiery One and her spark ever since.  Further, fuller-than-full disclosure: I am reasonably sure that Danielle may count “witch” alongside other credentials on her impressive resume. She has an uncanny knack for sussing out fuzzy and/or difficult truths that training alone can’t account for.

That said, the worksheets and exercises in TFSS should prove enormously valuable in uncovering your own true self. Her core discovery tool alone (“The Burning Questions”, of course!) will shine considerable light on your key truths, but please don’t skip ahead: the book is designed to lead you through a process, and step-skippers will miss out on valuable anchoring ideas and frameworks.

While the central focus of the book is pretty clearly self-discovery, Danielle also has an excellent grasp of marketing and promotion, especially where they intersect with personal branding, and a keen sense of what stops many of us from making money (hint: usually, prior issues around money). The Fire Starter Sessions is definitely not a business book, but as with Wishcraft, the lessons you learn about how you engage with people, places, and money will impact your work life as well as your personal and spiritual lives.

Finally, if it’s not already obvious, like Sher and Cameron before her, Danielle LaPorte writes for a specific type of creative mind: searching and open, especially to the connection between mind, body, and spirit. While she is absolutely down-to-earth—her language is lively and colloquial and her practical, real-world experience abounds—as the subtitle suggests, her attitude towards change is at least as soulful as it is practical. If pressed, I’d probably describe it as woowoo-friendly, with an edge. Which is far from a bad thing, but is a very particular thing. A quick read of her enormously popular blog or a sample chapter should immediately determine if this book speaks to you.

If it does, you’re in for a real treat: The Fire Starter Sessions contains Danielle’s best wisdom on creating the life you truly desire. It’s comprehensive, wide-ranging, and packed with valuable stuff for the journey.

xxx
c

UPDATE 4/25/12, 10:50am: There’s going to be some kind of a Twitter party going on tonight at 6pm PT. 10 cents for every tweet marked with the hashtag #FireSS goes to WriteGirl, nonprofit beneficiary of The 50-for-50 Project. Go! Tweet!

• Buy The Fire Starter Sessions on Amazon
• Buy The Fire Starter Sessions for Kindle on Amazon

Book design by Maria Elias. Author photo by Sherri Koop.

*One stellar example? The woowoo-friendly version of that time-tested accountability wonder from the business world, the master mind group. Scher calls hers “Success Team”, and if you’ve been put off by Napoleon Hill’s early-20th-Century, male-centric prose, it might be the thing that finally saves you.

There are all kinds of myths surrounding the arts, especially where they intersect with commerce. Myths about working when the muse strikes, as opposed to working to increase the odds that she will. Myths about success (“It’s a mysterious mystery come by mysteriously…plus Twitter!”). Enough myths about money to keep the stick-shaking brigade busy for a thousand billing cycles.

But after almost 30 years of circulation in the worlds of copywriting, performance, and design, I believe the most pernicious myth of all is that artists cannot learn to be good business people. Because we absolutely can if: (a) we’re willing to make what may be some uncomfortable changes to our outlook and operating style; and (b) we find the right conduit for the information on how to do it.

When you’re ready to embrace that first condition, Design Is a Job brilliantly provides the how-to. Written by Mule Design principal and co-founder Mike Monteiro, it contains a no-bullsh*t framework for building a successful creative business, covering everything from what design is (hint: not decoration) to how to keep your pipeline full of the kind of jobs you actually look forward to working on (hint: it does not involve cold calling, begging, or excessive retweeting). Networking, contracts, presenting, and management—it’s all in here, in a compulsively readable 130 pages. Because no one knows better than Mike Monteiro that the real secret to getting the job done is doing the job, not reading about it.

While it is specifically written for designers, like The Elements of Content Strategy, a similarly outstanding entry in A Book Apart’s series of “brief books for people who design websites,” it is absolutely civilian-friendly.* If you’re a creative artist who needs to get paid for your creative artistry, there’s something here for you—writers, illustrators, and yes, even you, my lovely actors. You may have to put on your translator headphones here and there, but I guarantee that if you do, you will come away with invaluable insight in how to be less of a goofy creative and more of a goofy creative who gets paid.

Few things are more wonderful than being paid to do work you’d do for free—and few things will grind you down to a grim nub of misery faster than failing to treat that work as a job. Design Is a Job clearly, simply, and often hilariously outlines the steps for actually making a profit doing the work you love.

xxx
c

*UPDATE: And lo, A Book Apart feels similarly about the synergy between these two books: you can buy them in a bundle!

• Buy Design Is a Job at A Book Apart
• View Mike Monteiro’s much-lauded Creative Mornings talk, “F*ck You, Pay me” on Vimeo [obviously, contains swears!]
• Read the Mule Design weblog on design as a job

Book design by Jason Santa Maria.  Author photo by Ryan Carver.

I began this series because I was having trouble beginning. (If that ain’t the sound of one hand clapping, I don’t know what is.)

I thought that if I kept things small, I could keep things going—I could keep beginning, every day. And damned if it didn’t work, until about two-thirds of the way through, when my well-meaning, deeply toxic brain started off-gassing “should”s.

You should end it with a BIG finish—something grand and profound to wrap it all up with majesty. And symmetry! Or maybe irony!

You should compile these into a book, create a Tumblr blog, buy a URL, start a mailing list. 

You should have a plan. You should have HAD a plan. Or gotten a plan. You should have figured out some way to keep it going, to monetize it, to Grow the Brand.

And you know what? It’s possible. It’s possible that I should have done many things, and it’s definitely possible that I could have done them. What I needed to do when I began this, though, was to begin. And then to keep on beginning, right through to the end. (At which point, of course, I am free to keep beginning.)

So at the end of this beginning, I tell myself this: You looked up at the trees, and saw them a different way. You slowed down, you fixed your gaze on thing after tiny thing, and saw their stories. And that is enough.

I am starting to think endings only seem big, and also that they only seem like endings. And, in the same way, that small things only seem tiny. There is so much there; there is the whole world in that one tiny thing, if you want to see it. Each tiny thing, a door into the whole, wide world.

And the only thing you should do, in the end, is know that you always, in any moment, have the chance to begin again.

xxx
c

This is Day 21 of a 21-day series. For more scoop on the who/what/why, go here.

While I’ve been away from it quite a bit this past year, Los Angeles averages 186 days of sunshine per year.

On the other hand, my second-favorite city, “the People’s Republic of Portland”, gets a measly 68 days of sunshine per year.

This is as much of a reason to visit as any: never, ever do I appreciate a ray of sunlight the way I do when I’m in Portland. (And never, ever do I move as quickly or with as much purpose to capture it on camera.)

For a while after I arrive, the appreciation bleeds over into other areas, too: coffee tastes blacker; inside seems cozier; time spent with friends feels more buoying. The strongness of these sensations tapers off after a week or two, and my pansy-frail constitution begins to wilt under the relentless pressure of gray skies and mud underfoot.

Still, even when I am days—or hours, or weeks—from my crazy, California desert, along will come a slice of sunshine, a spray of crazy-colored buds, an elfin patch of moss, to give me a wee smile.

Good cheer, they whisper, and don’t forget to thank the rain.

xxx
c

This is Day 20 of a 21-day series. For more scoop on the who/what/why, go here.

It doesn’t take all that long to tie up a packet of teas with a nice piece of string. But doing it 640 times takes a long, long time.

Yet that is what the fine organizers of the conference I’m attending did. Along with a number of other small things I can’t disclose, lest I ruin the surprise.

But that today’s conference will be extraordinary? That’s no surprise. No surprise at all.

I cannot think of a better way of tying up March.

xxx
c

UPDATE: Of course, I discover after the fact that my friend, Jolie, is the tie-er of delightfully tiny ribbons. Among other small and wonderful things. Of course.

This is Day 19 of a 21-day series. For more scoop on the who/what/why, go here.

Do you remember what the world looked like when you were four years old?

How tall everything was, and how mysterious? How grownups navigated these mysterious things with astonishing agility—driving cars, getting on and off buses at the right stops, counting change, ordering food. And how they seemed to just know, without anyone having to show them (much less show them again and again, as you needed to learn things like shoelaces and chopsticks and bedtime).

When you spied something with a sign on it, with letters or instructions, you clung to it: it was a hint, a clue, some foothold in this bewildering world you would never, ever master. You’d whisper the word to yourself if you could, working out the letters, testing.

You do master it, of course, or at least some of it: adding up numbers and signing your name and cooking a hamburger. Other parts remain always a little out of reach, the domain of SuperGrownups who know how to navigate the rapids of change, or can manage to remember that the blues, too, will pass.

Perhaps that’s what’s so comforting about coming across one of those old signs in the wild now, when you are tall enough to reach for the handle from the top. I learned this, you think. At some point, I will learn the rest of it.

And you whisper to yourself as your fingers curl around the dented brass bar.

PULL.

xxx
c

This is Day 18 of a 21-day series. For more scoop on the who/what/why, go here.

It is not,
as it turns out,
that hard to take a half-decent picture.

What’s hard
is taking 4,000 horrible pictures
first. What’s hard is
standing in the middle of the street
like a stupid tourist hick
taking two, three, seventeen horrible pictures
while people stare at you
with your doofus camera
and your zero credentials
acting (as if)
this is something
you do every day
because it is so much fun.

What’s hard
is going home
and sifting through
the ten, twelve, ninety horrible shots,
and trying to suss out which are really horrible
and which are just bad
and which are…okay?
and which are slightly better than okay
and which of those remaining two
is better because they look exactly the same
almost.

And what’s really really hard,
as it turns out,
is not taking the picture
at all
but putting it out there
for people to see
and judge
and form assumptions
about your talent
and your character
and your level of denial
and to not just do it once
but to do it the four thousand times
(at least)
that you have to be bad
before you can start
being halfway decent.

But taking a half-decent picture?
Is not that hard
as it turns out.

xxx
c

This is Day 17 of a 21-day series. For more scoop on the who/what/why, go here.

To earn its keep on my cooktop, a tea kettle must do three things:

1. Be as easy to de-scale as it is to fill. This rules out those ridiculous kettles with only a spout.
2. Be easy to pour. All of those “helpful” kettles whose handles wobble? OUT. Double-ditto for those ones that leverage gravity so that tilting to pour releases the cap on the spout.
3. Alert me to the doneness of water. What the hell’s up with those whistle-free tea kettles? I mean, the non-electric ones? At least with those, you can’t burn the house down. A little “ding” is fine under those circumstances.

Were you to view my own tea kettle—13 years mine, like the apartment—you would see it is missing the half-functional, half-decorative knob atop the cover. This is because when it broke, a mere year after I bought it, and I wrote off for a new one, the company informed me there was no way to obtain a replacement. Planned obsolescence, just like its higher-end cousins. Shameful.

I drink a lot of tea—just ask my dentist—so I have searched high and low for a kettle that meets these criteria, at any (reasonable) price. No luck, so same old kettle. So I’ve just had to use a pliers around de-scaling time, and adopt a wabi-sabi attitude about the rest of it.

Still, when such a small thing to fix is the first thing a company jettisons? Shameful.

xxx
c

This is Day 16 of a 21-day series. For more scoop on the who/what/why, go here.