remarkable communication

Things to Do Before You Get Famous

Last year, internationally celebrated violinist Joshua Bell tried an experiment. He took his violin (a Stradivarius built in 1713, worth about $3.5 million) into the Washington, D.C. Metro and played for about 45 minutes.

If you want to get cheap seats to hear Joshua Bell perform, expect to pay at least $100.

So who stopped to listen to him play Bach and Schubert? Nearly no one. Thousands of people marched past, avoiding Bell's eye so they wouldn't feel guilty about failing to throw a quarter or two into his case. (He made a little over $32 for the day.)

Music did not soothe the savage breast. Music failed to even register in the savage breast.

What Joshua Bell has to do with your success »

The Complete Flake's Guide to Getting Things Done

Are you smart and motivated and passionate, and have lots of cool things you'd like to get done, but somehow when it comes to doing them, you just . . . don't?

Are you great at ideas but lousy at execution? Talk a good game but don't get any results? Spend a lot of time thinking about where you want to go, but not much time actually moving your ass down the road that would take you there?

You, my friend, are a flake. Congratulations. We are a worldwide force. If we could all get ourselves moving in the same direction, we would change the world. However, that will never happen.

Most of us are creative and smart. We're often very funny and really pretty charming. We get things quicker than a lot of people do.

What we lack is . . . more »

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Email Marketing: How Not to Be a Dirty Rotten Spammer

By Sonia Simone

Do you remember when you were a kid and crossed the street without looking? Remember how mad your mom got? Even if you were within your legal rights and crossing in a crosswalk, it just takes one oncoming car that doesn't see you and you're flatter than Wile E. Coyote.

The "official" definition of spam is unsolicited bulk email with a commercial and/or malicious intent. The U.S. 2004 CAN-SPAM law makes it illegal to send commercial email with a misleading header, without a postal address, without a way to unsubscribe, or if the addresses were harvested in various nefarious ways.

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Flickr Creative Commons image by uberculture

Are You Ready for Your Audition?

By Sonia Simone

When I was about 20, through a series of complete flukes, I got a job working as a costume assistant for the U.S. tour of a small Russian ballet company. This was before Glasnost, Russians were exotic creatures in those days. We had the FBI come and ask us questions, it was all very interesting.

I didn't know anything about dealing with costumes, but my friend K who got me the job did. We were traveling with the ballet company across 21 U.S. cities in 10 weeks. As it turned out, we didn't have any of the union waivers we needed to actually work on costumes, so mostly we screwed around and chased boys and drank too much.

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Flickr Creative Commons image by Andrew_Baron

How to Get Your Employees to Sink Your Business

By Sonia Simone

A certain business guru has written a book about how to terrorize your employees. He's promoting it with glee, chortling about the idiocy of "nice" bosses and the importance of bullying employees into following your orders without question.

I've worked for some variation on this guy a couple of times. Any effort at conversation about alternatives is seen as naivete or, worst of all sins, wimpiness. What these guys did before Tim Allen invented that annoying whuffing caveman sound, I don't know.

(Not that they're always guys. This is an equal opportunity for stupidity.)

These are the bosses who see the workplace as (keep reading »)

Social Media Workshop: The Imaginary Friends Who Live in Your Typewriter

By Sonia Simone

"Imaginary friends who live in my typewriter" is my friend Gavin's term for people he knows from online. I met Gavin on The WELL and he's a classic example of the friends I've made in online communities--smart, accomplished, and interesting.

The WELL has a long tradition of supplementing online community with offline get-togethers. That might be why it's known for the amazing depth of connections that were made there.

Yes, there were exceptions, but for the most part, people who were delightful online like Mr. Jalopy and Howard Rheingold were also delightful offline. Each realm showed you stuff you wouldn't have seen from the other. Online community was a way to get to know someone in a different way. It didn't replace face-to-face relationship, it deepened it. (keep reading »)