Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

Moving out of your comfort zone - part 4

Earlier this year, I wrote an article about moving out of your comfort zone in which I said that this action can produce rewards beyond your expectations. This pastel drawing is a result of this kind of adventure. It is just one of many of Gretchen's drawings now on display in her new online gallery at gretchenstlawrencestudio.com

Gretchen decided to redefine herself as an artist after years as a high tech program manager and she has been successfully establishing a distinctive style and a following in just a few short months.

In the process, she had to overcome all sorts of self-imposed barriers to becoming a professional artist. She was helped to a large degree by the fact that she works with a group of supportive artists and paints with them on a weekly basis. Working in a community of aligned people eases the stress of moving out of your comfort zone.

Recent changes in technology have lowered the bar to launching a career in almost every area. You can now create and publish your work on the Internet for less than it costs to subscribe to a major newspaper.

You can create professional looking websites and keep them updated for a few dollars a month. This opens the door to new opportunities for professionals in their mid-forties who see career roadblocks looming in their future.

Think of it this way: You have been accumulating business experience for many years on somebody else's nickel. Isn't it time you turned this hard won experience to your advantage and used it to secure a livelihood that gives you great satisfaction and which you can control?

As a self-employed businessman or artisan you may make far less money than you did as a high-flying big city executive, but you gain something priceless: control of your own time.

There is so much that you gain in this transformation that it would fill a book. You can check out the articles I've written in the micro business category to get a taste of what is in store when you move out of your comfort zone and take control of your future by creating a business of your own.

You may not choose to become an artisan, but the path to success in any new field often starts with training or apprenticeship. In October, I wrote my first article about late-life artists who are transforming life experience into art. I noted that many of these mid and late-life artists were launched into a new career by taking a course taught by a professional artist.

I have continued to follow these artists and see that a number of them are producing an increasing volume of excellent work and are developing viable careers. It takes hard work, but they say it is extremely rewarding and would not consider reverting to their previous occupations. 

You have the same opportunity and it all starts when you decide to move out of your comfort zone. When you decide to make your move, you will find that there are people who are willing to assist you

Be careful what you measure...

Occasionally, I write something worth revisiting. At this time of year when we look at our accomplishments and prepare to make resolutions, it might be helpful to consider what accomplishments we measure. This was originally written in June 2004, but is still applicable today.

---

Seth Godin has written an excellent post, The Curse of Great Expectations, which may bring you to a screeching halt in your headlong pursuit of perfection.

His opening line, I can benchmark everything now and his conclusion, The problem with benchmarking is that nothing but continuous improvement (except maybe spectacular results) satisfies very much really got me thinking. It is a true statement, but it depends very much on what you are measuring.

First of all, a benchmark is a standard by which something can be measured or judged. Measuring performance in the physical universe, whether it is miles run, wealth accumulated, or performance ranking in sports or work, shows how you are doing with regard to earlier efforts by yourself of others.

If you judge your worth by how well you perform physical activity, you will be confronted with the inexcapable fact that the peak of physical activity comes early in life and is long gone by the time you attain judgement.

If you judge your worth by your financial success, you put yourself in a terrible trap, because the occupations that pay the most money do not always provide a sense of self-worth. The decisions you make can diminish you spiritually and degrade you beyond belief.

If you judge your life by the number of friends you have and the people you have helping, you may obtain a better picture of your true worth.

This is a benchmark of your connections to society and is also a measure of your level of contribution to the betterment of civilization. Note that I said "have" and "helping". This is a dynamic measure of worth, not an archive of memories.

I think if you measure your life by your ability to contribute to others, you will find that you can achieve continuous improvement over a very long period of time.

As always, I welcome your thoughts on this topic.

   

Seth Godin has written an excellent post, The Curse of Great Expectations, which may bring you to a screeching halt in your headlong pursuit of perfection.

His opening line, I can benchmark everything now and his conclusion, The problem with benchmarking is that nothing but continuous improvement (except maybe spectacular results) satisfies very much really got me thinking. It is a true statement, but it depends very much on what you are measuring.

First of all, a benchmark is a standard by which something can be measured or judged. Measuring performance in the physical universe, whether it is miles run, wealth accumulated, or performance ranking in sports or work, shows how you are doing with regard to earlier efforts by yourself of others.

If you judge your worth by how well you perform physical activity, you will be confronted with the inexcapable fact that the peak of physical activity comes early in life and is long gone by the time you attain judgement.

If you judge your worth by your financial success, you put yourself in a terrible trap, because the occupations that pay the most money do not always provide a sense of self-worth. The decisions you make can diminish you spiritually and degrade you beyond belief.

If you judge your life by the number of friends you have and the people you have helping, you may obtain a better picture of your true worth.

This is a benchmark of your connections to society and is also a measure of your level of contribution to the betterment of civilization. Note that I said "have" and "helping". This is a dynamic measure of worth, not an archive of memories.

I think if you measure your life by your ability to contribute to others, you will find that you can achieve continuous improvement over a very long period of time.

As always, I welcome your thoughts on this topic.

The joys of small town Christmas shopping

Gretchen and I set out this morning with the idea of getting in some last minute Christmas shopping. Initially, we had considered driving to one of the nearby cities where large department stores and malls abound, but then we started thinking, what if we did all of our shopping in Floyd?

We first visited the Jacksonville Center where the Co-op Retail shop displays work from 80 local artists. I am continually delighted by the number of beautiful items I discover in this shop that make exquisite gifts.

While we were there, we visited the artisan studios and watched McCabe Coolidge make pottery with a studio full of onlookers. Linda Osborne's jewelry and Sarah McCarthy's pottery are very popular with visitors, as are George Lipson's Green Label Organic T-Shirts and David Hedge's photographs.

Next, we visited the Cafe Del Sol and enjoyed espresso drinks and caught up on the latest news from proprietor Sally Walker. While we were there, I bought Cafe Del Sol gift certificates because they always seem to come in the right sizes and colors.

We were taken across Locust Street by our friend Dennis Ross and were introduced to a bookstore that we had never visited before. It's called  NoteBooks - Arts-Music-Ideas and carries new and used books, art supplies and music supplies. Of course, this being a small town, we had already met Avis McCutchan, the owner, at a number of civic functions and we felt right at home.

Our next stop was the Bell Gallery and Garden, where we were warmly welcomed by Bill and Joanne Bell who reminded us that we were their first customers when they opened the store earlier this year. The Bell Gallery and Garden is the kind of success story that every town needs. Beautifully decorated with extraordinary attention to every detail, this gallery is a must-see destination for every visitor to Floyd.

With prices ranging from a few dollars to more than several thousand dollars, there is something here for every budget. We managed to find a buttery-soft leather purse to add to our collection of Christmas presents.

Just down the road from the Bell Gallery is The Meadows, a casual clothing store carries select casual clothing for discriminating tastes. I had already visited it earlier in the week and found several gifts that were just what I needed.

A few more stops and we were ready to head home. We had done all of our shopping and visiting in a one mile radius and we had greeted many of our friends who were doing the same. We drove up the Blue Ridge Parkway to our end of Floyd County and enjoyed brilliant blue skies and vistas that extend for miles in all directions.

With the gas money and time we saved by not going to the nearest city, I feel we came out ahead financially as well as emotionally. Our small town Christmas shopping trip will linger as a pleasant memory for a long time.

One of the most rewarding aspects of shopping in Floyd is that many of the articles we purchase are made by our artisan friends!

Giving someone a Christmas gift that is made by an artisan we know and admire makes the entire process of gift-giving more spiritually satisfying.

Beyond Books - the future of self-publishing?

What if you could give away your ideas and still derive income from them?  What if this unconventional form of distribution could expose readers to your books who would otherwise never see them?

I am not quite there yet, but I think that day is fast coming, due to the power of context-sensitive advertising.

I was busy building an online book reader when I discovered that Google has already provided this service and my book is available on it now through the power of Google Book Search.  If you go to that site and enter "advice for whistleblowers", you will see this:

Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day - Page 82 by David St Lawrence Whistleblowers are people who tell it like it is, even if they suspect that they will lose their jobs and be attacked by people they consider to be friends. ... Full view - Table of Contents - About this book

You can scroll through the table of contents or to search the book using the "Search in this book window" for hot topics like "nepotism" and "why your manager lies".

You can amuse yourself by entering these unlikely search terms: sex, interviews, fear, integrity, seduced, seduction, and job satisfaction. You will be amazed at what you will find.

If you bookmark this site, you have an instant desktop reference to use in everyday work situations.

In the meantime, my book, Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day, is available as a free download until further notice. This is the complete book in PDF format.

I am offering this data as a public service to all who are in danger of receiving a termination as a corporate Christmas present.

It is, after all, the end of another quarter and companies jettison employees at this time in hopes of surviving. I hope you are not in that unhappy situation, but if you know of someone who is, send them a link to this article.

Then and Now

A few years ago we began to tire of endless daily meetings, high density living conditions, and 2 hour commutes and decided to leave Silicon Valley and head East, me hoping to begin a post corporate career as a writer/woodworker and Gretchen to continue her corporate career as
a telecommuting Senior Project Manager.
For us, the party was definitely over.

We held our final yard sale, and disposed of car, furniture and exercise equipment. Then we took one last look down our long street of tiny houses with tiny yards and drove across America to a new future.

We settled in an idyllic lakeside community called Lake Monticello, a few miles away from Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.

We enjoyed the peace and quiet after San Jose, but decided after a few years that we weren't cut out for the idyllic life in a gated community.

I fed the deer, which was against the rules, and worked in my workshop at all hours of the day and night, which was also against the rules. I wanted to build a bigger workshop, but that would have also been against...well, you get the idea.

Nice neighbors, friendly kids, but a development that started as a rustic retirement dream was morphing into a neatly groomed suburban bedroom community like the ones you find outside almost every city of any size.

Except for the size of the yards, it was beginning to feel like our old neighborhood shown in the second picture above.

We decided we were done with bedroom communities and we went exploring to find a place with plenty of landscape and industrial strength high speed Internet connections. We found what we wanted in Southwest Virginia.

This is not everyone's cup of tea, which is fortunate, as this unique and colorful county would otherwise be overrun with new settlers. This particular area has great scenery, lots of local talent but only a handful of job openings, so it is wise to bring your own business, preferably one that brings money into the county from the world outside.

This is an ideal place to live if you do business over the Internet. If you are a writer, or a CEO of a virtual corporation, or a knowledge worker, you have instant access to everywhere and you can watch cows while you have morning coffee on your deck.

If you are up to the rigors of country living, you can have the best of both worlds. You have daily access at the local coffee shops to people with fresh ideas and lots of business savvy, while through the Internet you stay connected to your old business partners and clients.

Country living means wells and septic fields and emergency generators and woodpiles and all sorts of things you do not concern yourself with when you live in a city. You keep your pets inside at night so they don't get eaten by coyotes.

It also gets dark at night as there are no street lamps and your nearest neighbor may be a mile away. This shot was taken just after sundown and I captured the moon and the last rays of the day.

The beauty and the isolation are acquired tastes and not for everyone. Some new settlers stay only a few months and find they miss the press of humanity and the all-night deli's. We find the quiet space around us gives us more time for creating.

We found this to be kind of community where there are a lot of  opportunities to serve the community in some capacity plus there is ready access to professional training in the arts.

We have seen new settlers dive immediately into service work such as rescuing animals from being put down or joining Amateur Radio Emergency Services. Gretchen and I became involved in the arts and in the local library association.

Many of the people we know have farms and a job or a career as an artisan. These are not gentlemen farmers as they raise food for their families, but manage to be contractors or musicians or painters as well, or potters, or woodworkers, or even teachers. It is not unusual to meet someone who has four jobs, so you soon get the idea that this is an area where personal industry is recognized and rewarded.

The net result for us is that we are probably working longer at more challenging tasks than when we were "employed" but we have more freedom and more opportunity for self-expression than ever before.

This last may be a result of the fact that when you are surrounded by self-employed and self-motivated people, there is this tremendous synergy which results in you getting inspired to explore new ideas and new business opportunities every day.

We do not yet have a significant base of industry for economic development of the conventional kind, but we may be reaching the tipping point as far as having enough talent in the area to achieve critical mass for a creative economy, which is the business of making money from ideas.

The Linksys Wireless-G Range Expander is still a product catastrophe

If you did not read my earlier article  on this botched product, you should take the time to read it now, because Linksys has not significantly improved the product experience in the last 12 months, even though they have changed from version 1 to version 3.

As Jarrod Lewis noted yesterday: "I have had more signal boost using tinfoil and a drinking straw than with the Linksys expander."

If you go on Amazon.com and see the price cuts on these WRE54G Range Expanders (from $99.99 to $41.25) you might be tempted to buy. What you don't know is that these are the old Version 1 models which have no ethernet connector and cannot be upgraded.

Supposedly, there is now a version 3 out which handles some of the problems but Linksys' lack of documentation and the difficulty in setup still makes it a real challenge.

Linksys should have bitten the bullet and regained credibility by issuing a recall for version 1 with a free replacement with the latest version. They may yet have time to do so, but I doubt they will consider it.

A significant problem for Vonage users is that this latest Linksys expander is incompatible with the firmware running on Vonage controlled routers. If it comes to choosing between Vonage and this range expander, the choice is obvious to me, at least. This product has no future unless it is compatible with Vonage.

Unless you are a computer expert and have 4-6 hours to spend toying with  the equipment and waiting on the phone to talk to a service rep, you should consider using longer antennas on your wireless router for now.

For more firsthand information, read these customer reviews on Amazon.com.

My suggestion? Wait until version 4 comes out and let someone else buy it first. The product concept is brilliant, but the execution is a disaster. By the time they get it right, the competition may have cornered the market. This is a textbook case of what happens when a product team cuts corners to meet a release date.

Once again: Before you buy anything more complicated than food from the grocery store, Google "product name and model" and "problems". It will save you from this foolishness.

Online Camera Ripoffs Continue

[We welcome PajamasMedia visitors!]

Before you buy a camera online...please read this post

On the internet, you can't tell that the highly-advertised camera store you are talking to is an empty storefront with a bunch of hustlers on phones.

Almost every month I get emails from someone who has been lured by low prices and a slick website into spending several thousand dollars on a grey market camera with defective parts.

The websites look terrific and the prices are unbelievable, but you may be buying your high-end camera from a place that looks like this. (From the company name, you probably thought it was somewhere in Maine!)

You will save yourself thousands of dollars and untold aggravation if you take these simple precautions:

1 Google (camera store name) plus problems or ripoffs or scams. Read all of the comments.

2 Check out this amazing collection of Brooklyn Camera Store images by Don Wiss. See if your camera store is included in the collection of images.

3 Decide whether you feel comfortable buying a $3500 camera from a rundown storefront operation. The image shown above is a current address of a major online camera store. Can you imagine calling them to complain that your camera arrived broken and had parts missing? (The sound you hear in the background is somebody snickering.)

I have been writing for more a year about the amazing scams perpetrated by the Brooklyn camera shop known as Royal Camera, City Camera, Tcscamera.com, and bananaboatcamera.com , but too many people write me AFTER they have been ripped off. I feel like I am shoveling against the tide.

I have also missed covering another up and coming scamera store by the name of Prestige Camera (aka: A&M Photo World, Regal Camera, Broadway Photo, Preferred Photo, more..] whose activities are described in some  shocking pricegrabber.com ratings.

The most unbelievable part of this situation is that Prestige Camera has been with PriceGrabber since 7/29/2005 even though their scorecard on the PriceGrabber site shows that 90% of their reviews are negative!  How does this happen?

There are so many of these fly-by-night operations popping up every month that it is hard to keep the list current. I feel that it is time to use the power of the blogosphere to spread the word faster than these businesses can proliferate.

I am considering creating a site to aggregate comments about online camera stores that bait and switch, sell grey market merchandise that has no warranty, and ship counterfeit merchandise. I will probably call it badcamerastore.com

Meanwhile, for those of you who would like to know more about the infamous Brooklyn camera stores, please read on.

Outside legal channels, camera enthusiasts have been building a case against Brooklyn dealers for years. A great hero of the movement is Don Wiss, 56, a self-described "Woodstock baby" who wears frameless glasses and flannel shirts.

From his home in Park Slope, Mr. Wiss promotes gluten-free eating and car-free transportation. For fun, he tracks addresses associated with online camera dealers, rides his Dutch Batavus bicycle (with fenders, chain casing and adjustable handlebars) to those addresses, takes photographs and posts the images on his Web site.

"I'm trying to be neutral," Mr. Wiss said, "just publicize it so people can make their own decision."

His Web page is a gallery of shuttered warehouses, mailbox stores and apartment buildings. The address, at donwiss.com/pictures/BrooklynStores/, is well known among serious camera consumers. He also has a site called Manhattan Stores which seems to contain pictures of legitimate camera stores as well as the more colorful fly-by-night operations.

Brad Smith - Appalachian folk artist

Brad Smith's distinctive hand-carved roosters provide humorous social commentary as well as decoration. Brad's roosters are becoming a favorite gift item in Floyd because you can always find one that suits the personality of the recipient.

His roosters range from this cheeful cheerleader dedicated to starting off the day with a rousing crow at the crack of dawn to jailbird roosters and colorful fops who would not look out of place in the most refined salons in a big city.

In his craft fair display to the right, you see a one-legged rooster with a crutch surrounded by a group of roosters which include a patriot rooster and a colorful dandy with a multicolored tail and fanciful stockings. Click on the images to see the details.

Brad is an Appalachian folk artist who works in both greenwood carving and drawing. He has established his own techniques in the process. In the image below, you see him forming parts with a draw knife at a bench he designed and built.

His professional background includes building log homes specializing in hand-hewn log techniques. He is well known for his hand-made woodcraft and his drawings can be found in galleries and restaurants in Virginia and North Carolina.

He is also one of the instructors at the Jacksonville Center, and will be teaching ladder-back chair making and old time whittling during 2007.

A Sense of Purpose

In this post-corporate phase of my life, I have more time and opportunity to observe people closely and I see more people with a clear sense of purpose than I ever noticed when I was working in the fast lane of corporate affairs.

In retrospect, it seems as if I and my contemporaries were so busy meeting deadlines and generating reports that life goals and a sense of purpose were luxuries that we constantly pushed off to some undefined future moment. Paying bills and making mortgage payments occupied so much of our off-duty waking hours that we never seemed to deal with the bigger issues of life.

It seemed like we went from the near-poverty of a student's life, to overnight wealth as a valued corporate employee, and eventually to over-extended life as a highly-paid manager living from paycheck to paycheck.

Our purposes seemed to be confined to getting a product launched or getting a new release out and the satisfaction was exceedingly transient. In too many cases, the end of a project came to mean layoffs or reassignment. There was little that offered long term satisfaction.

Post-corporate life as a micro-business owner is entrepreneurship in its purest form. Whether we choose to become an artisan, a free-lance photographer, or operate a pool cleaning service, we are making choices every day that have lasting effects on our future.

There is a constant balancing of long range goals and short term needs to pay the rent, but the choices are ours to make and each decision opens the door to a different future.

We stop judging projects by corporate standards and look first at the effects that our projects will have on others and on our own lives. I see this in so many of the businesses that are being developed in Floyd by people with long experience in commercial enterprises in the major cities of the US.

They put a worthwhile purpose first and try to make money following that purpose, instead of doing whatever it takes to make money and hoping that this doesn't lead them into a moral dilemma.

From what I see, their purposes tend to be more aligned with personal and family growth instead of meeting an abstract corporate goal like greater market share at any cost.

Has anyone else noticed this?

By the way, I know of many bloggers who are corporate employees and they seem determined to hold a course toward a higher purpose, but their efforts are dependent on their continued employment and the vagaries of upper management decisions. Becoming a cog in a corporate system means you pay more than lip service to corporate goals. If the company sells products that slowly poison customers, it doesn't matter how nice you are, you are part of the activity and will eventually bear the consequences. If the company is ethical and helps the environment, you are in a better place.

Gretchen's Hammer

I have such a thing about hard, shiny tools that Gretchen has to drag me away from the tool displays in places like Lowes and Home Depot. When I saw this hammer at the recent Winterfest Arts and Crafts event at the Jacksonville Center, I was instantly hooked.

Gretchen wasn't with me and the combination of a well-made hammer and the marlinspike knotwork was too much to resist. I just had to have this one-of-a-kind tool, so I purchased the hammer from Tom Barnhart and he gave me a jute bag to take it home in.

When I showed Gretchen the hammer and saw her eyes light up, I suddenly realized that she would make better use of it than I would and the hammer would be kept and cherished as an "inside the house" tool. I presented it to her with only  the slightest quiver of regret and she has been happily using it ever since.

Tom Barnhart of River House Designs in Christiansburg is a practitioner of nautical knotting which has a long and colorful history. He learned this skill while in the US Navy back when knot work was a required skill. His display at Winterfest had many examples of beautiful knotwork. Here is his card for those of you who would like to see more of his work.