Signal to Noise

Check out this bit that Sheryl post on her Facebook (regarding the recent addition of a Unified Communications category to AllTop), and then read my story that follows, as it’s very similar:

The other day I had a discussion going on twitter. The discussion sort of detoured and something came up about how we can’t expect people who are celebrities to engage us. My response, though directed toward that topic was really a bigger answer and one that I live daily.

Many people live their lives accepting life as a social hierarchy. They don’t ask questions and don’t have expectations. I’m not like that. I live daily attempting to live in the here and now and engage my larger community. Instead of just accepting life as it is, accepting that people won’t engage me I always ask the question, “Why not?” “Why aren’t I worthy of engagement?” Why should I just expect my opinion or my thoughts are not important enough for someone to pay attention to them?

I have a good example of why my perspective is valid.

Today Ken sent me a message and said Unified-Communications is on Alltop. Why does that matter? Well, not to toot my own horn, but I sent Guy Kawasaki a note on twitter and asked him why it wasn’t there. We proceeded to send messages back and forth ending in email and me researching links for Unified-Communications for them to put on Alltop.

The answer then to my why not question is simple. “Indeed! Why not?”

Sometimes it feels like stretching upward and outward into the social status quo may feel like beating your head against the wall. I know this primarily because I’m a salesperson as well as a consultant. I do have to find customers, after all. This is why I spent 2 1/2 hours at a council meeting tonight trying to get a misguided city I.T. appropriations ordinance overturned in my 60,000-person town tonight instead of watching the Browns get spanked on Monday Night Football, which I’d much rather do.

Needless to say, like the Browns trying to cope with the superior Philadelphia Eagles, I went to this meeting expecting my pleading to fail, but hoping I could convince enough people of the silliness of the proposed ordinance that maybe, just maybe, I might have a chance of getting the vote to fail.

Well, it’s 17 to 3 Eagles in the second quarter, and as I’ve just arrived home from the council meeting, put my kids to bad, and cracked open a Miller Lite, I’m feeling like the Browns.  I got my butt kicked tonight. The measure passed by 3 votes.  I only got one Nay vote I wasn’t expecting.  So I lost and lost hard.

But it doesn’t always have to be like that.  And I was encouraged by Sheryl’s post, because it reminded me that I had a very similar experience a few years ago.

I had just been laid off from a very cushy job as an I.T. manager for a construction firm, and I was pretty upset about it. Long before I’d ever entertained the notion of surviving (forget about thriving) as a consultant, I’d been a full-time I.T. manager, and the job meant almost everything to me. I loved the company, the people, and the work.  It was devastating to me when I lost my job.

A few weeks prior to being terminated, I’d been looking for books to help me with a VoIP project I was working on for the company. I turned immediately to O’Reilly Media, whose epic masterpiece Sendmail was probably the only reason I was able to succeed in the I.T. field back when I lived in Detroit.  O’Reilly didn’t have a book about Voice over IP, so I thought to myself, who can I e-mail to find out when O’Reilly’s VoIP book would be published?  Who better than the publisher himself?

At the time, Tim O’Reilly was an absolute icon. Perhaps more of a rebel than now, Tim O’Reilly was the freewheeling open-source fanatic that I knew I could count on to publish just the right VoIP book, and I was certain he had one up his sleeve.  So, while still employed with the excavating contractor (the fifth-largest in the country), I e-mailed Tim a quick note to ask him when such a book would be forthcoming.

A week went by, then another week. And I thought, bah, the guy’s busy. I understand.

Lo and behold, one day prior to my termination, I get an e-mail in my inbox from Tim referring me to one of his networking editors. They informed me that they hadn’t identified an author as of yet to write the O’Reilly VoIP book.  Me being an English hack (I spent many hours writing poetry and short fiction instead of attending chemsitry class in high school), I volunteered myself to write the book, expecting Tim and Mike Loukides, the editor, to turn me down almost immediately.

But that’s precisely the opposite of what happened. Not only did I get a contract to write the book, but it provided me with much-needed income during my time of unemployment and the extremely difficult divorce that followed. The book went on to be the most successful book of its subject (aside from O’Reilly’s Asterisk-specific book, which came out about a year later), but I also got a second book contract and began to roll with a whole new group of folks. My first book, Switching to VoIP, had its seventh printing two weeks ago.

My status as an honest-to-goodness thought leader was secured, despite my periodically goofy thought patterns (ask anybody who reads this blog regularly, LAWL), and I was able to transition that thought leadership status into a consulting business, of which I recently purchased the sole stake.

The point of this story is that, if I wouldn’t have the mustard seed portion of faith required to e-mail Tim O’Reilly when I was an absolute NOBODY, I would’ve missed out on an awful lot. Today, I get to say I know folks like Ken Camp, Jeff Pulver, Alec Saunders, and Andy Abramson. I get to run my consulting business with an authority and gravitas I would’ve never thought was possible for a poor kid from inner-city Detroit. I started to actually see some of my dreams come true. I could do it.

And then, I realized, I could suddenly do a whole lot more.

So when Sheryl wrote about how she reached across a genuinely invisible social barrier to reach Guy Kawasaki, and got something positive out of the interchange, I totally, totally, totally get where she is coming from. She made a connection that perhaps she didn’t expect to yield much, yet it yielded something very positive indeed.  That’s my story as well.

And you should take this to heart. No matter where you’re at: if you want it, it’s a matter of going out and getting it.

Having the balls. Believing you’re more than what you appear to others to be.

Make those connections. If you’re in a council meeting expecting your business opportunity to be pummeled by a bunch of uninformed politicians, GO ANYWAY.  If you’re the Browns and you’re competing for last place with the dregs of the AFC, go anyway.  Be bold.

People will eventually appreciate it.