Hi! I have writer’s block.

March 26, 2010 By

So let’s be clear that this is not really a blog post. At all.

I have lots of drafts of blog posts (I was going to hyperbolize and say “more than I can count,” but since WordPress counts them for me, that would be totally untrue).

I have a series planned on how to do teleclasses, everything from figuring out how to call a conference line to delivering the edited audio file. I know this would be useful to lots of people. Plus it would allow me to look quite expert-ish.

I have lots of WordPress plugins to describe and review, ones I use daily and recommend. Should be easy, right?

I’ve got several questions-from-the-mailbag posts partway written. So yeah, even that trick of “pretend you’re writing to one person who asked you a question you can totally answer” isn’t working. Because if writing a blog post that actually is a direct answer to one person’s specific question won’t do it, what will?

I’ve even got some hey-I’m-a-real-person quirky-moment post ideas, like my recipe for pancakes, funny things my kids said, and observations on caring for a diabetic cat.

Yet I am sitting here writing about not being able to write those things. I might as well be clutching my fevered brow while dramatically flinging my other arm wide and uttering a profound lament about the precariousness of the human condition.

Plus I have a lingering cold that is proving hard to get rid of. Sniff.

No lesson here. No tidy wrap-up. No provocative “your turn” questions. Just some words in a blank white space, and then clicking a blue button called “publish.”

And then I think I will go eat some cake.

Happy writer’s block, everyone!

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Help save my diabetic cat and send my kids to college!

September 21, 2009 By

Hi, everybody.

I just liquidated my kids’ college savings accounts to pay for treatment for my diabetic cat.

RockyintheDryer

Figure 1: Rocky the Diabetic Cat (he's relaxing in a cozy warm heap of newly-dried laundry...in the dryer. I didn't say he was smart, just diabetic.

Of my two cats, Rocky is my least favorite. He’s kinda thick-headed and has never learned that he’s not allowed to jump on the table. He doesn’t sit on my lap and purr like Jackson, the “good” cat. He’s got an unnatural lust for appliances (as shown in Figure 1. He also likes to climb into the dishwasher when it’s warm and dry. I told you it was unnatural!).

But those are not good enough reasons for me to just let him starve to death because he can’t metabolize his food properly.

I may have made lots of dumb mistakes in my life, but I am not a cat murderer. Sheesh.

This is one of those scenarios that is so crazy that I couldn’t possibly have made it up. It sounds like a classic sob-story scam, even to me (I’m laughing, thinking about all the spam emails I’ve gotten featuring poor orphans and the like).

But every word is true.

So I invite you to laugh along with me, at least until I get to the part where I shamelessly flog this sob-story so that you’ll buy my stuff*.

(*Oh wait, I’m already doing it. Flog flog flog!)

September: Budget crisis as usual

September was already shaping up to be a lean month, finance-wise, here at Casa del Cholbi (yeah, we sometimes do call it that, after a margarita or two). Now, I’ve had plenty of months where the last week or 10 days is a don’t-use-the-debit-card zone, and the family bank account is down to chump change until The Professor’s paycheck arrives on the first day of the next month. But September was looking like it would be worse than the “normal finanancial crisis” scenario.

(Do I see a pattern here? Yes, thank you Dance of Shiva, I do indeed. And the unraveling of it includes writing this post.)

But I still felt optimistic. If not for September, then for October.

Just when things were going so well!

Possibly because of delusion and denial, sure. But also possibly because, for the first time in eight years, I now have time to work on my business at something approaching full capacity. Because both of my Genius Children are now old enough to be in school, full-time. For free.

And I am having so much fun creating and planning and internetworking with fabulous people. I’ve created two new service packages (WordPress Installation and AWeber Tune-Up, $39 each), planned a wacky teleclass called The Gentle Art of Making Money with your WordPress Blog in partnership with my new pal Meredith Curtin, introduced my Web Coach Open Office Hours, started revamping my personal/business Cholbi.com website, gotten more active on Twitter (sorry Facebook and LinkedIn, maybe later), and lots more. Trust me, you’ll be hearing more about these New and Exciting Products and Services here on the blog.

Lots of thinking and planning and also lots of doing. Truly inspired doing.

So, even if we squeaked through September by the proverbial skin of our teeth, October was bound to be better. Bound to be!

But then stuff started happening.

The plot thickens!

  • The Professor is taking a mandatory 9.23% pay cut, because he’s an employee of the Great State of California, which is, apparently, having a bit of a budget crisis of its own.
  • We had to have a huge amount of weed-abatement done. This is mandatory every fire season, and it’s a good thing (trust me, I’ve experienced California’s fire season up-close and personal, but that’s another post). It was, however, more expensive than I’d planned for. Much, much more.
  • My therapist’s office called and surprise! I owe them for several visits, because they “misunderestimated” the number of sessions my insurance company would cover.
  • Rocky, our younger (and frankly, stupider) cat, was diagnosed with diabetes. My cat, unlike myself and my children, does not have health insurance. So far, his diagnosis and treatment has cost about $600.
ChristmasCats

Figure 2: Help my kitty see another Christmas!

So. Several unexpected (or underbudgeted) expenses, one lower-than-expected paycheck, and all maxed-out credit cards later, I turned to our only remaining savings: The kids’ college funds.

I’m frantically rationalizing to myself: “There’s lots of time left until they’re college-bound. Surely we can make it up. Also, they’re geniuses, so they’ll get scholarships, right? And maybe they’ll become Internet millionaires out of high school and won’t want to go to college in the first place!”

Still, it was a hard thing to do. And there aren’t any more savings to draw from. No offshore tax shelters (at least, not yet, bwa-ha-ha!). And looming debt. Did I mention the debt? No? Well, trust me, it’s looming.

This looks like a good spot for a subheading, but I can’t think of anything witty

I could easily get freaked out about all of this. And I do, from time to time. I’d like to say that I’m being all positive-minded and confident and trusting-the-universe about it…and sometimes that’s true, but not always. Not by a long shot.

Mostly I just do what I need to do, right now. I try my best (and sometimes my best just isn’t good enough) to focus on the one thing I really really want to do in this moment. Whether that’s writing a blog post, tweeting about my upcoming class, giving Rocky his insulin shot (it’s much easier than it sounds — he doesn’t even feel it), installing WordPress for someone, figuring out how much I can actually spend on groceries this week, or reading a mystery novel to escape it all for awhile (most recently, I really enjoyed Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — a real page-turner. And yes, that’s a shameless Amazon affiliate link).

I remember that I am not a cat murderer. And that lots of regular people who haven’t done anything wrong are also facing financial problems, and that I can still be proud of my business ideas even if they fail, because I am working and learning and experimenting and being the real me.

Thanks for reading.

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Money for nothing, special vampire edition

August 28, 2009 By

Do you think it’s wrong to get paid for doing nothing?

If you immediately said yes, you have a choice:

  1. You can quit reading this post now, and go back to your regularly scheduled life of trading time (or skills, or hard work, or yes, even knowledge) for money. Good luck with that. I hope you’re able to retire someday.
  2. Or you can keep reading and run the risk of changing your mind. It’s OK to argue with me (in your head or in the comments) if you want to have a reasonable adult-type discussion. It could even be fun.

Hi, people who stayed!

Lemme tell you a little secret. I myself would have answered this question with a “probably yes” until earlier this week when Johnny B. Truant once again blew my mind in this post about believing in the value you provide.

(You should totally go read that post. I mean it. Do it now. I’ll wait. Oh, and remember that Johnny swears. Beautifully.)

Are you back? ‘Kay. Johnny is right on when he talks about the value of knowledge and the right to charge appropriately for it.

And I’m going to go one step further and suggest that it’s even OK to make money for doing nothing.

Everyone who just thought of Dire Straits? Congratulations, you’re as old as I am.

(I could use some chicks for free, actually. I’m thinking of raising some chickens so we can have fresh healthy eggs from our own backyard. But then I’d need a chicken coop, because we have foxes and coyotes and bobcats here. Hmmm.)

Back to the “money for nothing” discussion.

My goodness, what kind of greedy immoral person thinks they should be able to just get handed free money?

For starters, everyone who’s ever invested in the stock market… and that includes you “I’m buying and holding mutual funds for my IRA portfolio” folks. But that’s not the main point of this particular rant.

I’m mainly talking about anyone who’s ever created any form of intellectual property, ever. Like stories, for instance. Or music. Or movies, or software. Or teleclasses. Or ebooks.

All of these pieces of “content” can be digitally duplicated with a marginal cost (additional cost for each copy) of exactly zero.

Of course it costs money to print a book, or burn and ship a disc. But that’s merely the container for the intellectual property, not the intellectual property itself. And in our online world, there are more and more “information products” that don’t have a tangible, physical existence at all, and that’s where I’m headed.

If you think that the price of a book (or an ebook) is a reflection of the work the author put into it, I’d suggest you reconsider. Because that would mean, among other things:

  • Nothing that resulted from hard work could ever be freely given away
  • Bestseller status would automatically mean those authors worked harder than other, non-bestselling authors
  • Once an author dies, you shouldn’t have to pay for their stuff anymore; it should be free
  • The higher the number of copies sold, the lower the price should be (reflecting a fixed amount of work that went into writing and production)

But we all know that someone can write and launch an ebook, and then essentially keep selling copies forever, while doing exactly zero additional work. Slap it up on a website and have an autoresponder deliver the link, and that’s it.

Why should this person keep receiving profits from doing no additional work?

Well, first, why not? That only seems wrong if you actually believe that the only way to earn money is hard work. See stock market reference, above. The people who cash the dividend checks are not doing the work.

Second, a more substantive guess at an answer: Because as a buyer, I’m not paying for the work the author did to write the book. I’m paying for the experience of reading it.

Yes, it’s true that I might “learn something.” That might even be the point of my experience. But it doesn’t have to be.

People are still paying for books of fiction (maybe not so much in e-format, but still). I recently paid good American money to purchase tangible copies of all four books in a certain vampire series, for instance.

(Okay, it was Twilight. I admit it. And although I have giant problems with some aspects of the books, I still enjoyed the experience I had reading them. I like SpaghettiOs, too. Happy now?)

Rooted in integrity

Do I resent Stephenie Meyer for making money from my purchase? Hell no. Neither do I resent the authors of the various info products I’ve bought.

In fact, I think info products seem like a pretty great way to make some money, while helping people and staying true to my small-business tree roots.

Soon, I’ll be launching some paid products. (I’ve already added two new services, WordPress Installations and AWeber Tune-Ups, but those are both old-school trading-skills-for-money gigs, so they don’t fit the “info product” definition I’m working with here.)

I’m now choosing to believe it’s OK to make money from the kind of product I can sell over and over again with very little (or even zero) additional effort. I know that I will in fact put hard work into creating them, and that they will in fact provide value… for My Right People. And all others? Need not apply.

And you can choose to believe the same thing about your work. Will you?

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Happy Independence Day!

July 3, 2009 By

Tomorrow is the day that we Americans traditionally celebrate our independence by setting off explosives and drinking too much beer.

I prefer a kinder, gentler celebration, myself. I also like to think about the many meanings of “independence” and how they’re showing up in my life. July 4 is a nice sort-of-halfway point between the hoopla of New Year’s resolutions and the end-of-year taking-stock that can happen on Thanksgiving. So with 2009 half-over, here are my reflections on independence.

Independence as growing up

For instance, as children grow, they are supposed to develop a healthy independence from their parents. I see it in my own children.

(I’m not talking about them getting their own apartments quite yet — they’re still in elementary school! But every little step, like my son’s first sleepover and my daughter’s first Girl Scout meeting, is both a joy and a miniature heartbreak. Parents, you know what I’m talking about.)

I see it even in families with adult children (I’m at a family reunion this holiday weekend, reconnecting with people I haven’t seen in awhile, watching how families grow and change, mostly for the better).

The key word is healthy. Healthy independence is possible even in close-knit, loving families, of course. It doesn’t have to involve rejection or renunciation. But sometimes those things happen anyway. And then in the dance of family drama, sometimes the breach is healed, and sometimes not. A generous dose of time sometimes helps.

The push and pull between the families we’re born into (our parents, siblings, cousins, etc.) and the families we choose (lovers, spouses, children, close friends) can bring out the best and worst in us. My challenge is to let it bring out the best while remaining conscious and intentional. I guess that’s a challenge for all of us, actually.

Independence from worry

That leads to the subject of emotional health in general. For me, this whole year has been a journey to independence of an emotional and psychological kind. Which, paradoxically, has involved a greater reliance on friends, family, colleagues, and others for certain kinds of healthy support. There’s that word again. Hmm.

And there’s been a lot of questioning on my part about what I deserve. Do I deserve success? Do I deserve sadness? Do I deserve to be treated in certain ways or not in other ways? And I think I’m getting ready to be tired of that talk.

Know why? I do not want to live in a world where everyone gets what they deserve. In that world, there would be no unfair advantages or cheating to get ahead, but there would also be no such things as forgiveness and generosity.

So my challenge here is to stop thinking I do or don’t deserve something, and start thinking about what I really want, and what I’m willing to do to get it. Want to join me? Leave a comment here and let’s start a discussion.

Independence from The Man

But the third kind of independence is the one that actually looms largest for me this year, and I know it’s important for many of you too. I’m talking about financial independence, starting with independence from having to have a job.

I was asked recently if my son’s entry into kindergarten this fall (see parental joy and heartbreak, above) would free me up to finally get a real job, and I was frankly horrified.

The idea of spending any amount of time, let alone eight hours a day, in service to someone else’s goals, with no ability to make more money than my employer deems appropriate, and no job security? Laughable.

I fully realize that writing that sentence, in public view on the internet, makes me unemployable. And I say, bring it on. I positively relish being unemployable. Because honestly? I suck at being an employee. The views I just expressed have come from eight years of not having a day job, and growing into the idea that I’m a real, live business owner. And I think it would be really difficult (impossible, really) to un-grow that perspective. To stop wondering, “Is there a better way to do this?” and go back to “How do I fill my time until 5pm?” That sounds like death to me.

Which means I’ll embrace my independence from the complacency and false security of “having a real job” until I’m down to my last nickel.

Naomi Dunford is changing the world by helping 1000 people quit their jobs this year. I don’t qualify because I don’t have a job to quit, but I’d sure love to help her with that goal by pointing . If you like the idea of quitting your job, you may want to read the article she wrote last fall called Why We’re Broke and How to Fix It, which is a clarion call to declaring independence from the soul-sucking corporate machine.

Happy Independence Day, America. Happy Independence, my fellow small-business owners. May you get not what you deserve but what you truly want.
–Wendy Cholbi, your friendly neighborhood swim-goggle-wearing technology-to-English translator

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