Call meJeffrey

The last time I went to SXSW was in 2006 and I spoke on a panel with Jake called “Designing for Community with ‘Zero-Advertising’ Brands” which was moderated by Maggie Mason from Adaptive Path. Oddly, a bunch of what I said ended up on this website, which I still think is a little strange.

Anyway, the mistake that was made last time was only spending a couple days there. I feel like I missed out on the “full experience” of being completely immersed in an event that is an important part of the industry I’m in. Not making the same mistake twice, I’m going to be at South By Southwest Interactive this year from March 12-18. I’m also heading down with a pretty awesome cast of characters including Micah Baldwin, Matt Galligan, Heather Capri, Jeremy Tanner, and Andrew Hyde amongst many other from Boulder – as well as some of my skinnyCorp compadres Harper Reed, Dylan Richard and Dustin Hostetler. I’m also pretty stoked to meet up with my friends from online and off, and make some new ones along the way!

OK, self-promotion time. If you’re interested in seeing me speak, I have two events scheduled:

The first is a SX Studio interview at 3:00pm on Saturday, March 14th. I’m being interviewed by TUAW‘s Christina Warren.

The second is a panel at 10am on Sunday, March 15 entitled “Is Spec Work Evil?” which includes myself, David Carson (David Carson Design), Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester), Mike Samson (crowdSPRING) and moderated by Jeff Howe (Wired Magazine).

I plan on attending a large amount of panels and talks, so if you see me around, please say hello! I’ll be the guy with “Jeffrey Kalmikoff” on my badge. If you want to get in touch with me directly, just text “jeffrey” to 50500 to get my contact information and shoot me an email. I’ll have my phone with me at all times, so I’ll do my best to get back with you as quickly as possible. Alternatively, you can DM on Twitter. If you really feel like being a stalker, I’ll be checking in periodically on Brightkite.

Also, you may be able to catch me at any number of BBQ restaurants between panels. As far as I’m concerned, SXSW is what to do while your food is digesting. If you really want to nab some of my time, the lure of a BBQ meal is always a good tactic.

As my friend Justin says… If there is ANYTHING you should take away from the conference, it should be a love handle filled with brisket. Even if you’ve never been to Texas, you’re probably aware that we love 3 things: guns, hating non-Texans and BBQ. I’d consider your trip a failure if you didn’t go home and find dried BBQ sauce in your jacket pocket a week later.

See you in Austin!

I had a “come to Jesus” moment a few nights ago. It wasn’t planned, but I guess that just how these things go. The plan for the night was to leave work, go to my old apartment and pick up the rest of my stuff, then head over to Jake and Shondi’s house to dig on some BBQ’d ribs with our friend Joe who’s in from Chicago. Joe decided to stay up in Copper to ride, and the ribs apparently had gone bad, so the evening’s plans were off. No big deal. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but Micah and I somehow got into a spec work discussion in my office which eventually involved Heather Capri, Grant Blakeman (who actually wrote a totally kick-ass article a while back about why his company doesn’t do free spec work), Andrew Hyde, and two dudes who I can’t remember their names because I’m awesome like that (sorry).

I’m not going to recap the whole discussion because if you’ve ever had one on the topic of spec work, then you already know how it goes. What was important for me about this discussion was that it really helped me sort through my feelings on the topic. The conclusion that I’ve come to, which I suppose I knew before, but that I’m now 100% comfortable with is: I don’t exactly know how I feel about spec work.

This may be disconcerting to the people who I’m sharing a panel with at SXSW, especially because I’m technically supporting the “spec work is evil” side. The truth is, I don’t think spec work is evil, per se. The main reason I’m supporting the “it’s evil” side, is because the panel title presents the topic in black and white, and I am more against than I am for (though I’m not really for it at all, but I’ll get into that). That being the case, I’m officially stating my position of being grey.

I’ve been a professional graphic designer for a decade. I’ve been involved in the nuts-and-bolts of running a company for roughly half of that time. I’m declaring “grey pride” because I can see both sides of the issue. There’s the designer side that says: spec work is unethical, damaging to the relationship between designer and client, and signals the beginning of the end of our industry as we know it; and then there’s the business side that says: spec work is a common sense way to get previously cost-prohibitive work done for a more “reasonable” price and in a way that provides more options. That isn’t to say that I agree with both sides, just that I understand where each side is coming from.

A lot of designers who I’ve gotten in conversations with about spec work seem to fuel their passion with information about super-worst-case scenarios and over-indulgent metaphors for why spec work will destroy the universe. I mean no disrespect to the folks responsible for that link, but what I’m seeing is a trend of inadvertently creating an army of designers who hate spec work, but in their own words, aren’t exactly sure why. There’s nothing wrong with being passionate, but sadly the conversations that I’ve had with “for spec” people make me realize that this is a one-sided “war.”

Listening to (and being involved in) both sides of the conversation the other night in my office, I found myself swaying back-and-forth between viewpoints. No one was for spec work, but the question kept being raised, “why is it bad?” Regardless of what the answer was, the issue continued to be based upon ethical and moral standpoints. This was the sticking point for me. Some people may think that ethics and morality is a black-and-white issue. Those people belong to a group I like to call “wrong,” even though I’m fully aware that my idea of “wrong” is based upon my own ethics and morals. Before this turns into a philosophy lecture that I’m inadequate to serve, I’ll get back on track.

The fact is, spec work is becoming more and more common place (though keep in mind that it’s still pretty uncommon – so far). In the past, companies like Threadless have worked hard to make it clear how what we do isn’t spec work. Now, even companies who exist by mirroring our business model have dipped their big toe in the spec pond by partnering with large companies like Quicksilver and requiring the use of name and logos in order to take part in a promotion.

Clearly there’s a segment of the graphic design community who are willing to participate in open-call-style design “competitions” that clearly fall into the “spec work” category. So, is it bad? Again, this is an ethical issue. Each designer has to choose for themselves whether they want to support a company that’s willing to utilize practices that are usually seen as “evil” from within it’s own community. If a company who uses spec work has a community of designers who don’t see a problem with spec work, where’s the problem?

The problem isn’t spec work itself, but the exploitation of the model in an online setting. Without the internet, I honestly don’t believe that the “spec or no spec” discussion would be a hot topic. What makes it a hot topic is how fast the internet can be a catalyst to create a huge shift in the marketplace. Furthermore, the issue isn’t completely that spec work is being used online, but that the exploitation of it has become a niche business in and of itself. There are a good handful of companies responsible for the rise of the spec model as a stand-alone business, but for obvious reasons I’m not going to list them so as to not promote them. However, I will briefly talk about one because I’m speaking on a panel at SXSW assembled by their founders. That company is crowdSPRING.

From a purely business perspective, crowdSPRING is a great business. They have an active, growing user base; they have a growing number of projects that are posted on a regular basis; and they probably make money. Companies like crowdSPRING have successfully found a niche that pair inexperienced designers with D-level companies. Personally, I don’t see a problem with this. Beginning graphic designers need to cut their teeth somewhere, and there are tons of companies out there whose businesses aren’t dependent on how good their design is, as critiqued by the design community at large. What I do have a problem with is the lack of ownership of their actions – and this isn’t relegated only to crowdSPRING. On more than a few occasions, the founders of crowdSPRING have dodged the “why do you think what you’re doing is OK?” question by citing Threadless as parallel to them.

Of course I realize this is probably a more personal issue than a fundamental problem with the type of business that they’re doing, but I think it’s an important example. Anyone who is going to take their spec-work-based business and put it side-by-side with Threadless and not see the difference may be in trouble as far as fully understanding the nuances of the topic at hand. For us, it’s cool, because we are 100% aware of where we stand and what we’re doing. Much like Keanu Reeves in the movie Speed, I have enough confidence in what I do that I don’t mind being thrown under the bus to try to defuse the message of a madman.

The problem with crowdSPRING and all other project-based “design contest” companies out there is this: While clients may think they know what they want, they rarely have any idea of what they really need, and that’s usually punctuated with having terrible taste. Companies like crowdSPRING fool these potential clients into thinking this isn’t the case. Sure, this is based upon opinion, but it’s also based upon experience. The fact is, not knowing what you really need isn’t a crime, and it’s OK to have bad taste. Good businesses are run by people who are fully aware of their strengths and their weaknesses. Great businesses are run by people who are willing to have their weaknesses pointed out to them and not get offended by it. Truthfully, none of this really matters for your “mom and pop flower shop” that’s just looking to get something to put on a sign.

Where it does matter is when companies who “know better” (I put that in quotes because I’m aware this is an arguable topic all by itself) and who can afford professional design work and will still choose to participate in a “contest” for work simply because it’s cheap. Now, will this create the depression amongst the design industry? Does this devalue design work as a whole? I don’t know. I’m not an economist, and that level of nerdery is not in my skill set. I do know that the names of the companies participating on these sites get more recognizable everyday, and that can’t lead to anything positive for the design community for as fast as it’s happening.

Consider this: if Hollywood started allowing anyone to use their web cam to audition for any role from the comfort of their homes, there’d likely be the same backlash in the acting community as there is with designers and the current set of spec-work project sites. What’s most interesting about considering Hollywood, is that it’s an industry built on spec work. That said, is Hollywood evil?

As an aspiring actor or actress, one is expected to audition for their roles. They spend unpaid time preparing to compete for a role by learning specific lines and actions that they’ll do in front of a casting director who will decide which person’s portrayal best fit within their vision of the part. Is this spec work? Sure it is. Is it evil? I don’t know… maybe – but who’s to say? The reality is that it’s grey area, and it’d only be an issue if someone made it one. Each actor or actress is fully aware of the risks involved in spending their time preparing to audition knowing full well the possibility of not landing the part. Again, awareness equals grey area. Hollywood would not exist without this grey area.

Before this gets taken out of context in order for someone else to show support of spec work, let me be clear: I’m conveying the importance that grey area has in any industry, not trying to push the idea that spec work is OK.

During one particular part of the conversation that we all had the other night, one of the people said “people will die” in the context of what will happen if the graphic design industry collapses from spec work. My immediate response was “no one is going to die from spec work,” which he quickly agreed and said that it was a joke. Only, for some people – they’re not kidding. For the people on the far left of this subject, extreme examples aren’t uncommon.

Oddly, there tends to be an incredible lack of reality when talking to some designers about spec. As mentioned above, this likely has to do with the lack of useful information (and the abundance of extreme examples) that would allow someone to formulate a rational opinion on the subject. Sure, someone could be completely rational in exploring the subject independently and still end up as a flag waiving spec hater, but I haven’t found this to be the norm.

What bums me out the most about this sort of information, is that if there was a “war”, the designers would be losing it because of this minority of extremists. It’s silly to have hard line stance on a topic without fully understanding the other side’s point of view. The perception of the “other side” is that the people who run businesses that employ the use of spec work to complete projects are “evil.” You’ll hear arguments like “they post a project where a hundred designers submit work with the intention of paying only one person and screwing over ninety-nine.” The last bit is where we go off the deep end.

Let’s suspend our moral and ethical feelings about spec work to take a peek into what I feel is probably the most common scenario: A business owner submits a project to one of the spec-work-based project sites out there. They have $500 and they’re looking to create a logo. They get 100 submissions, choose one and pay the “winner” $500. I don’t think I’m the only designer in the world who feels that the business owner’s satisfaction comes from finding the one design they like and paying for it, and not “screwing over” the 99 designers they didn’t choose. Do sadistic people exist? Sure. Do some of them run businesses? Probably.

I think that a lot of the anger that’s coming from the design community is a little misguided. There’s nothing wrong with feeling passionate about potential rapid changes to their industry, but I feel that their energy would be better served in trying to educate the average person about the realities of the issue, and not simply pidgeon-holing every user as a monster.

I realize I haven’t even scratched the surface of the issue, and that’s OK. There’s no way I’d choose to get so involved in this issue that I’d spell out what’s fully happening on both sides. What I’m hoping you will take away from this is an understanding that it’s normal to be confused, and it’s OK to not be sure of where you stand. The only thing that’s not OK to do is take a side without (1) fully understanding your position, in your own words, and (2) fully understanding the other side’s position and motivation.

So does this mean that I’m OK with spec work? Absolutely not. Just because I see and understand both sides of the issues, doesn’t change the fact that my personal opinion is that spec work is a bad practice, especially when it’s packaged nicely as an internet business.

I am a realist, however, so I don’t discount the fact that if spec work does change the industry, but in a way that turns out to be more positive for designers than originally thought, I may change my point of view. We’ll see, but I’m not counting on it.

Ultimately, I’d like people to understand that this really is a personal issue for each person involved. If the spec topic is treated like a war, it’ll never be won on either side. To reiterate the example of the Threadless clone dabbling in spec work – if they’re OK with pushing it, and there’s designers OK with taking on a project like that – where’s the problem?

The best thing to do for both sides is to get fully educated. Spend some time researching it. Spend some time talking to people on both sides. Read about the extreme examples. Read about the ones that may-or-may-not be spec depending on how you look at it. Get informed and make up your own mind about it. Sure it’s easier to only discuss this topic with people who have the same point of view as you have, but it’s also somewhat useless. Like anything – if you really care about it, take the time to see all the angles. Besides, how’s that old saying go? Keep your friends close…

I wrote this mostly on a flight from San Francisco to Denver, heading back home after speaking on a panel about “Mature Social Networks” with Heather Champ, Director of Community for Flickr, at the User Generated Content Expo (UGCX) in San Jose, California. After I got off stage, someone complimented me on how natural I seemed talking to a group, and how they wished they had the same confidence. While I took the polite route and said I appreciated the compliment and thanked them for coming, I wish I would have said something different.

This is my fourth conference season that I’m heading into, routinely making the first part of the year the busiest as far as balancing time between actual work and being present at conferences. After four years, I’m just now getting comfortable with the idea of standing up in front of people and speaking my mind. It’s bizarre to me that I receive praise after I speak because mostly I just feel like I babble, curse too much, and over-tangent myself into forgetting what I was originally talking about. Some of you may be naturals at public speaking – congratulations, you’re abnormal. For the rest of us, speaking takes nerve-wracking practice in order to avoid making a total ass of ourselves in front of our peers and contemporaries.

On zero-to-ten scale rating my speaking ability where “zero” is my first time speaking, and “ten” is Jason Fried, I’d put myself comfortably at a “six.” It’s taken four years and a lot of embarrassing myself to begin to feel comfortable – and I’m still pretty nervous to speak by myself (though I’m hoping to get over that by accepting some solo speeches for later this year). I’ve only spoken by myself once and I almost passed out in the middle of a 30 minute talk – anyone present at FOWD 2008 in NYC can confirm this (the fun begins around 00:09:30).

Pro-tip: Drink water, talk slowly, eat before-hand, and remember to breathe. Trust me on this one.

So, how why did I even get into this whole speaking racket to begin with? As Threadless grew and started getting more attention as a company, we learned an interesting and unexpected lesson: if you build it, they will come – with questions. Perhaps they teach you this in business school, or maybe those smarter than me would have assumed it and taken courses public speaking to prepare.

We had no idea invitations to speak would start rolling in. We were a group of dudes having fun and building a business safe within the confines of our tiny office – without an audience. It began by being invited to talk locally – be on a small panel, talk to a class. As our company grew, so did the expectation that we’d get up in front of larger and larger audiences to speak about the company, the community, and our ideas and experiences in regard to putting it all together.

There exists the expectation that if you’re a founder, executive or pretty much anyone in the spotlight that you’ll be able to represent your company on a stage of some sort. I’ve come to understand that it’s not an unreasonable expectation. When you’ve achieved a bit of success, people want to hear about it. In order to maintain a healthy community of movers-and-shakers, these stories need to be told. They remind us that that success isn’t something you’re born with (even if you’re born with opportunity), but it’s a result of hard work, immense focus, and an ongoing ambitious wager with yourself that says “I bet I’m going to get more out of this than I put in.”

There’s a saying that probably makes every teacher I know cringe that goes “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” It’s one of those immature jabs aimed at the throat of your middle-school art teacher if you want to see his forehead turn bright red under his hair plugs. The saying has popped back into my brain lately, not for what it says – but for what it doesn’t say. The irony is that the unspoken part is the truer statement: “those who can (and therefore do), also teach – only usually in some form of public speaking”. Panels, lectures, keynotes, fireside chats, interviews – you name it.

The question is: are you able to teach?

The answer is yes. Even if you think it’s no, it’s still yes. What I’ve learned in the past 4 years is that the moral of the story is far more important than how well the story is told. Don’t get me wrong, being a sucky speaker is no fun for anyone (including the speaker), but sucking is temporary. Speaking is like everything else – the more you do it, the better you become.

I’m not a great speaker, but I’m getting better. I at least appear natural. I wish I could go back and talk to the dude who paid me the compliment after the panel in San Jose. Instead of simply thanking him, I’d like to have said: don’t deny people the inspiration from your story by being too concerned about how well you can tell it.

Here it is. It was only a matter of time. The “Seven Things” meme. For a while I thought that I had dodged it completely, seeing how it’s been cycling through my friends and acquaintances for some time now. To be honest, I was a little worried about getting tagged. I felt that finding seven things that most people don’t know about me to write about would be difficult; specifically because I’m an open book about everything in my life – plus I have the tendency to be a story-teller (read: I talk a lot). I’ve decided to not worry about what people may or may not know, and just go with what has helped define who I am in one way or another. I was tagged for this by my co-worker, Dylan Richard, an uber-talented engineer working in our Chicago office. Dylan is an amazing dude. If you don’t know him, you should be jealous of those who do.

On with the show…

1. On two different occasions, School District 21 in Buffalo Grove, Illinois ripped off my architectural designs.
Occasion one: I’m not sure why, but growing up, I had always wanted to be an architect. It probably started with my obsessions with Legos and Lincoln Logs and grew from there. As a kid, it was not uncommon for me to draw pictures of building, real and imaginary. When I was in 5th or 6th grade, my elementary school announced that they were going to be putting an addition onto the school to expand the library on the second floor as well as the space directly underneath it.

While the details are a bit hazy 18 years later, for some reason they asked all the students to draw pictures of what they thought the addition would look like when it was finished. Most kids broke out markers and crayons. I broke out a mechanical pencil and a scale. (Side note: if you called an architectural scale by the wrong name, my high school drafting teacher used to say, “THIS is a scale – I’M the ruler.”) I worked on this drawing for a while – long enough for my family to become familiar with it – and then I turned it in. Over the summer the addition was built, and to our surprise (especially my mom’s) the addition looked exactly like what I had drawn. Coincidence? I think not!

Occasion two: The summer before my senior year, I moved from my Dad’s house back to my Mom’s house and switched high schools back to the school district that I went through elementary and middle school. I was well on my way in my architectural studies, having twice completed the “Atelier” program at the University of Illinois in Champagne/Urbana, and taken a ton of classes for hand drafting, CAD, model building, etc. Because I had moved so far ahead, my aforementioned drafting teacher let me come up with my own projects to work on in class.

One of these projects was the redesign of the football field’s press-box that sat atop of the bleachers. The concept didn’t come out of thin air, all of the students knew the old, rickety press-box would be replaced come spring of 1997. After a few weeks I completed my project and turned it in. They started work on the pressbox in the spring, and by the end of the school year what sat high above the bleachers was my drawing incarnate. When I approached my drafting teacher about it, he got pissed at me for asking. It was an odd, yet curious reaction. Granted, he was an odd, yet curious dude.

2. A teacher from my middle school hit me with a car.
On a summer day between 7th and 8th grade I was riding my bike on a residential street with a bunch of my friends. A car approached us from behind and started honking. We waived it around, but it slowly got closer and closer to us. When it was close enough for us to see the driver’s face, we realized it was a teacher at our middle school named Mr. Sailor, a guy who had a reputation for being a crotchety old bastard. Think Dick Cheney teaching 8th grade science.

I’m pretty sure he thought he was being funny by creeping up on us – accelerating towards us, slowing down, honking, repeat. I was unluckily towards the back of the group, and during one of Mr. Sailor’s hilarious accelerations, I got freaked out, reflexively hit the brake on my bike, and he crashed into me. Keep in mind this all happened at pretty low speeds, but I was a 13-year old on a bike and he was in a car. He stopped his car after his bumper hit my back tire hard enough to throw me off balance and I crashed. As I lay on the ground, tangled in my bike, he gets out of his car and says “that’s what happens when you ride in the middle of the road,” and then drives away.

I had one of those “I need to go home RIGHT NOW” panic moments and hopped back on my bike and rode home as fast as I could through people’s yards, too scared to ride in the street. When I got home I realized that my leg and hands were bleeding and my neck hurt really bad. My mom was at work, so a friend called 911, then my mom. An ambulance came to my house along with a police officer. I was treated for my minor scrapes and told the police officer what happened, and he went to find Mr. Sailor. I’m not clear on the exact details, but I do know the police couldn’t find him for 3 days. I also know that the school knew that this happened and didn’t fire him. My neck injury was bad enough that I had to spend part of the summer in a soft neck-brace.

While I didn’t have him as a teacher (the school made sure of that) I did have to see Mr. Sailor every day for an entire school year in the hallways. Awkward.

3. I have the words “drug free” tattooed on the back of my legs.
I was straightedge pretty much all through high school, and throughout my exhausting three semesters of college. I got my first straightedge tattoo when I was 15. It says “SXE” on my right hip, and it’s done with the skill level of someone who would tattoo a 15-year old. A few months later, I upped the ante with “XXX” tattooed on my left hip – same “artist”. When I was 17, I got “X Straightedge X” tattooed across the upper part of my left arm (which is thankfully now covered with something much nicer). All of these tattoos told the world that I was committed to being drug and alcohol free, and were all strategically placed so that my parents couldn’t see them while I was wearing regular clothes.

When I went away to college, I started getting heavily tattooed on my arms by Aaron Coleman in Phoenix. As anyone with a lot of work done can tell you: each one leads to the next. Mix that with being 18 years old and you potentially have a recipe for disaster. I don’t recall the exact day it happened, but I imagine I was sitting in my dorm room, listening to Earth Crisis “Gomorrah’s Season Ends” and came up with the brilliant idea of getting the word “drug” tattooed down my left leg, and “free” tattooed down my right. Hilariously, this was before I got into graphic design, so I opened Microsoft Publisher on my computer and designed the tattoo in the toughest looking font the system had to offer. I then printed it out as large as my 8-1/2″ x 11″ ink-jet could handle in a format that I’ve since learned is called “left justified.”

Pro-tip: When your tattoo artist laughs at you when you bring him or her a tattoo idea, maybe think it through for a few moments more.

The best part of this story is that the tattoos gained me the nickname “rug ree” because when I wore shorts, as you tend to do when you’re in college in Arizona, the “d” and the “f” would get covered. Awesome.

4. I’ve DJ’d at clubs and raves all over the country.
There was a point in my life where I really strived to be the next Sashweedvanoakendyk. At the end of the 1990s and into the early 2000s, I lived in an a giant apartment with my closest friends, two of whom taught me how to DJ, and the other who would dance like he really meant it whenever you were behind the decks. We were a solid crew. We also lived right above another apartment full of DJs, so suffice to say – noise wasn’t an issue at all. Living with two fairly established DJs did get me introduced to promoters and afforded me the opportunity to play out very, very early on in my “career.” This gave me the confidence to stand up in front of a lot of people and play records (yes, records – not CDs) for hours.

The most people I played in front of was probably a little over a thousand in San Diego at a huge multi-stage outdoor party called “The Movement” on the UCSD campus. Being much more established than me, my roommate played the main stage to easily double that number. I played raves and clubs all over the midwest as well. I never did get to play anywhere east of Chicago, but I would have loved to play at one of those East-coast 3-day mega-raves.

My relationship as a DJ with promoters helped when I started getting into graphic design. Being a designer and a DJ really gives you a ton of leverage to do both. I literally began my career as a graphic designer designing huge rave flyers, and one of the smartest things I ever did early on was tell promoters “if you let me DJ at your party, I’ll do your flyer for free.” This lead to me getting paid for both. One of those promoters, who at the time was a very close friend, left Chicago and moved to DC to go work for a dance music station called “The Move” on XM (channel 80). I not only briefly had a DJ residency on that channel, but I got to design the station’s identity. XM80 was dropped from the lineup in the Sirius/XM merger, so you can no longer see my logo on XM radios. I quit playing raves as my design career started to take off, and eventually stopped DJing altogether because…

5. I have no colon.
In 2001, a few weeks after 9/11, I got the stomach flu – and I got it good. After 4 weeks of dry heaving for seemingly no reason, passing considerable amounts of blood every time I visited the little boys room, and losing a ton of weight, I got the bright idea of seeing a doctor. I can’t imagine how I must have looked when I entered my internist’s office. Incredibly skinny, incredibly pale and incredibly weak. She sent me into the hospital for some emergency tests (her office is in the hospital), and within 2 hours I was admitted. After a night’s worth of testing, I was informed that I didn’t have the world’s worst case of the stomach flu – I had ulcerative colitis. I left the hospital just shy of 4 weeks later.

On a mixture of medicines and incredibly strong painkillers, I spent the next 4 years literally at war with my immune system. There were short periods of time where everything would be seemingly normal, and I could try to resume some semblance of a normal life. Going out with friends, going to parties, being social. Without fail, the bottom would drop out and I’d have to return to my life as a hermit, high as a kite on hyrdocodone, making sure to be no more than a few steps away from a bathroom at all times. Between 2001-2005 I was hospitalized almost 15 times, sometimes for malnutrition, sometimes because I was losing so much blood that I’d need transfusions. The 14th floor of the Feinberg Pavillion at Northwestern Memorial Hospital became like a second home.

The only upside to this situation is that I amassed an incredibly impressive DVD collection, and the only thing I could do that brought me any amount of satisfaction was work. Both are still going strong.

In late 2004, I started a new infused drug called Remicade, which was one of the first drugs to treat the disease, and not just the symptoms. For a few months I had my life back completely. It was awesome. When my UC flared again, it did so with a vengeance. To say that I was fed up with being sick, would have been the understatement of the millennium. I literally hit my rock bottom, and I made the decision that I knew was an option, but never thought it would be something I’d elect to do. I decided to have my colon removed.

I went to meet with the surgeon, and we set a date for the first of 2 surgeries. The first surgery would be the total colectomy and creation of a J-pouch. The 2nd surgery would be 8-12 weeks later, depending on how I was healing, to “take down” the temporary colostomy I had to have while I was healing inside. My first surgery was April 5, 2005 and my second surgery was June 10th, 2005.

This was easily the best decision I’ve ever made. While having frankenguts isn’t the most normal thing, it’s normal enough for me, and it’s better than being dead. It also gave me unique opportunity to send my friends and family new, clean colostomy bags filled with candy as a thank you for being supportive (almost no one thought that was funny except me). Plus I can say that I have no colon – how many people do you know that can say that?

6. My cat’s name is Murder.
There isn’t really a great story behind this one. I just thought it would be an awesome name for a cat.

7. I can’t watch Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. Ever.
It’s funny how memories screw with your perception of time. I just looked at wikipedia to see when Thriller came out and it said 1983. This means I would have been 4, so I’m now realizing that my memory of my dad somehow getting a copy of The Making Of Thriller documentary had to have happend a good two years later. Either way, here’s the story…

For whatever reason, my parents thought it would be a good idea to sit the whole family down to watch the Making of Thriller documentary together. To give them the benefit of the doubt, they probably hadn’t seen it before, knew we all loved Michael Jackson, and didn’t realize they were about to scar their child for life. The “making of” part was innocuous enough, but once they started putting makeup on Michael, I started to get scared. I made it to the actual video, and that’s when shit went bananas. I can’t say for sure what happened, but I do remember trying to leave the room, and to be fair to my parents, I’ll just say that I remember being told to come back and sit with the family. I don’t remember who said it or why, exactly. All I know is that the part when Michael sees the moon, hunches over and turns back to the girl and says “GO AWAY!” with those yellow eyes and teeth, I about crapped my pants.

In all seriousness, I’m getting cold sweats typing this. It’s so messed up.

By the time the video made it to the zombie dance, I was more scared than I’ve ever been in my whole life, even to this day. I went to bed that night and insisted on leaving the door open and all of the lights on. My mom always put on the radio for me at night to help me fall asleep, and that night was no different. Unfortunately, to add injury to injury, right about the same time that this happened, one of the most popular songs on the radio was Maxwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me”. It’s a creepy enough song for a 5-year old with the music alone, but Michael Jackson sang the hook!

For what seemed like months, I slept with the lights on, refused to close the door when I went to the bathroom, couldn’t bathe without someone in the room, or be in any part of the house that wasn’t drenched in light. I was also terrified to go near windows at night.

Still to this day I can’t watch the video. I can barely hear the song. A couple years ago I decided that I was being irrational and resolved to take my fear head on. I loaded up the video on YouTube (during the day) and started watching it. I hit the “GO AWAY!” part and literally had a panic attack. I’m almost 30 years old, and if I’m flipping through the channels and land on VH1 “I Love the 80′s” and happen to catch a tiny glimpse of that video, I sleep with the lights on and shower with the curtain open. It’s so bad that I get anxious watching the parts of Edward Scissorhands that include Vincent Price. The oddest part is that I absolutely LOVE horror movies. I can watch them by myself at night and then go directly to bed – no problem. I even helped start a horror movie club! At some point I should probably see a therapist about all of this.

So, that’s all folks! Meme complete. However, this is where I break the rules. I’m not going to pass this on to anyone, because everyone I know who I would tag has either done it, or has been tagged to do it and has chosen not to. I’m in the middle of writing a couple different posts, and wanted something to write in the meantime, so I chose to take this on. If anyone WANTS to do this, email me at jeffrey [at] skinnycorp [dot] com, and I’ll tag you, but I don’t want to force it upon anyone.

In the early 2000′s, I worked as a senior print designer at a small street-level marketing company. I had a creative director whose catch-phrase was always “work smarter, not harder.” This made a lot of sense to me at the time because I hated my job. Like most people who hate their jobs, the trick is to spend as little time as possible to complete your tasks. “Work smarter, not harder” is the type of advice you get from someone who knows what hardships lay ahead. Someone who knows how to play “the game”. Someone who also hates their job.

I hated hating my job. Being simultaneously satisfied and dissatisfied with each task is a stressful way to go through each day. When I was laid off in May of 2002 thanks to post-9/11 frozen marketing budgets, I vowed to never again hate doing what I love doing. Instead of getting my resume together in hopes of trading an unsatisfying 40-hours-per-week for a crappy paycheck, I resolved to be happy. Working makes me happy. Working hard makes me happy. And you know what? Whoever thinks that smart and hard are opposites is an idiot.

The other day I got the newest issue of INC in the mail. On the cover was a familiar face – Markus Frind. Markus is the founder of Plenty Of Fish, the largest free online dating site in the US. I met him a few years ago when we spoke at the same conference at Stanford. At the time he had over 5 million registered users and was the sole developer, which is still the case only now his user base has grown and he’s hired a couple customer service people. I remember feeling a little put off by Markus’ blase attitude about work when he spoke. In fact, I got the feeling that he had a distinctly detached attitude about his success. After reading the INC article I know not much has changed.

The INC cover boasts that “Markus works one hour a day and makes $10 million a year.” This statement follows a trend that has been making me uneasy for a good long while now. It appears that it’s no longer noteworthy to simply be successful – you have to achieve it with as little effort as possible. Why is hard work no longer news? From the four-day workweek to the four-hour workweek, there recently exists the idea that it’s possible to achieve just as much (if not more) while cutting back on time spent actually working.

My confusion with these concepts is two-fold: (1) if you love what you’re doing, why would you want to do it less? (2) If you don’t love what you’re doing, why not do something else? I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m not the type of person who is out with friends having a great time and thinks “wow, what I need is to do this less. Much, much less.”

Admittedly, I’m not well versed in some of the examples I’ve given. Tim Ferriss’ book (The Four-Hour Workweek) may truly be a work of genius, but I’ll never know. As long as it’s about working as little as possible and delegating everything downward, I’ll continue to have zero interest. I have gone through his website a little, and I actually talked to him on the phone last year. (On a total side note, I made a point of keeping him on the phone for as long as possible and successfully burned a little over 1/8 of his workweek.) What became very clear to me is that there are two distinct types of entrepreneurs: hustlers and lifestylers.

Lifestylers work as a means to an end. These are the type of people who leave their phone in their hotel room when they go down to the pool. These are the people who don’t check their email at 3am when they get up to use the bathroom. I’m going to assume that Tim Ferriss is a lifestyler. His website has images of people getting massaged, going skiing, slow dancing and flexing biceps. The cover of his book is a silhouette of a hammock between two palm trees. “Escape 9-5, live anwhere, and join the new rich.” Sounds pretty dull. Plus, nouveau riche isn’t a label I’d want to tag myself with.

Me? I’m a hustler (aww, yeah!). I escape 9-5 by working 8 to 8. I work weekends. When I’m not working, I’m thinking about work. Sound bad? Maybe we have different ideas of what work is. Work has no negative connotations to me. It’s equally rewarding as it is inspiring; equally exciting as it is relaxing. I always have my eye on the prize: making things better all the time for our company, for our community and for our customers. It’s not that I have no life, hustlers are expert life-multitaskers. They recognize that ideas or opportunities can arise at any time, and they’re always prepared. Ever seen Gary Vaynerchuk speak or watch WLTV? Hustler. Ever notice how Marc Ecko always has 100 things going on at a time? Hustler. Hustlers work smarter and harder.

The problem I’m finding with the glorification of “look how little they do and how much they’ve made” is this new-wave-work-ethic sets unrealistic expectations to up-and-comers. Being an entrepreneur isn’t easy. Being a successful entrepreneur is even less easy. If it was, everyone would be doing it. Building a business takes time, strength, struggle, persistence and patience. The key ingredient to all of this is fun. Work is fun. Don’t think so? Do something else. None of this is conducive to “less”.

Ultimately, my point isn’t to try to convince that between hustlers and lifestylers, one is better than the other. You have to be yourself, and you may be more comfortable being one or the other – or neither. It just doesn’t make sense to me that someone can find something they love to do, and then consciously choose to do it less.