There’s a fantastic community of people out there who get off on helping others overcome their bullshit excuses for complacency. One of the best is Hugh MacLeod, the always genius and often surly cartoonist, author, and blogger behind GapingVoid.

Like me, Hugh once worked in advertising. Unlike me, he’s figured out how to fully commit to his art, no longer straddling between the two worlds.

I woke up yesterday to this message on Twitter. Turns out, Hugh created the above Cube Grenade in my honor. (For the definition of a “Cube Grenade,” click here.) He often does these for private commission, so to say I’m flattered is an understatement.

But the truth is, he’s always giving away his art. He’s one of the few entrepreneurs who fully embrace that you get by giving. And not just philosophically, but in real, financial terms. By giving freely of his work, he’s established his brand. People know him now. And he gets hired to do more of it.

I have much to learn from him.

Sure, it’s easier at cocktail parties. “What do you do for a living?” needs some kind of reply. But once we define ourselves by our career titles, it places a whole set of generalizations on us. Most of them are half truths. And all of them are limiting. 

This was the presentation I gave at the PSFK Conference last month. I talk briefly about how I got into advertising and spent 15 years falsely defining myself as an adguy. Then I introduce a bunch of brave souls who looked inward to make a living being who they are.

Oh man. I’ve been battling a whopper of a digital brief lately. The assignment is nothing special, but it’s one of those “make some banners now and make the idea big enough so we can launch a new campaign from it.” So, you know, no pressure. Yet it’s been a tough nut to crack. And every day, I’m getting my ass kicked by this piece of paper. My team and I think and scribble and think and play online and think some more. Every night around 9ish, our ideas look pretty good. And around 9ish the next morning, they suck. So we start over. I look at the brief for the millionth time. “This brief’s a piece of shit,” one of us says as it’s tossed across the room. I walk around the office for signs of inspiration and leftover meeting food (there isn’t any). I return to my desk. I look at the brief again. Except it doesn’t look like a brief any more. It’s a time bomb. There are wires. So many wires. What do I do? This thing’s gonna blow. I’m frustrated. Stuck. I start the litany of “if onlys” such as “if only we had a bigger budget…if only we had some sound…if only we had a celebrity voice over…” If only I wasn’t such being a whiner. Briefs like this aren’t solved by whiners. They’re solved by MacGyvers. Someone who can look danger in the eye and beat it with nothing but a paper clip, sandpaper and lemon juice. Sometimes, that MacGyver fella has got to be you. Grab your needlenose pliers and save the day.

Not all assignments go smoothly. Some make no sense whatsoever. Frequently, the “figuring it out” part is saved for the creatives. Lucky you. No one knows how it’ll turn out. And yet, through the fate of the cosmos, this enigma of a riddle ended up on your desk. Whining, venting and complaining don’t move the deadline. Who said what we do is easy? Who said it was fair? Who said every assignment would be awesome? We are taxed to find the answer. Somehow. If we value our jobs. We burn the midnight oil. We burn the midday oil. We load up on caffeine and sugar. We fart around on YouTube looking for inspiration. We do what we do till the ideas flow. Then we have the rest of our careers to wonder why we didn’t do it differently.

MacGyver wasn’t a whiner. He got out of every mess looking like a champ. He would have made a good ad guy. Then again, he never had to deal with client bureaucracy, Facebook and impractical banner sizes. Still, I bet he’d make it to the closing credits, looking awesome, as his mullet victoriously flaps in the wind after saving the day, yet again, just in time for the local news.

Brad Mislow drank waaaay too much coffee today.

I became a huge fan of Brandon George today. Brandon is a student at my alma mater, the Creative Circus. He is also a rabid Cleveland Cavaliers fan.

As every Clevelander knows, LeBron James IS the Cavs. But in two and a half months, they may lose him to free agency.  So Brandon started a campaign to keep ‘Bron in Cleveland. It’s called In LeBron We Trust, and it consists of Brandon doing one news-worthy stunt a week for 23 weeks or until the Cavs re-sign him.

Some of my favorites include:

• Dribble a basketball for 23 hours straight
• Get hypnotized into believing he’s LeBron
• Sit inside a bin of Shaq’s used uniforms

Brandon, thank you for being a living, breathing example of what I’ve been preaching for the last six months. And that is:

Don’t be the person out there looking for a job. Be the person doing something interesting.

I hear you’ve got another year at the Creative Circus. I’d be shocked if you weren’t employed well before your graduation date.

Seth Godin and Chris Brogan are two of my favorites. Seth has been around for decades. He writes best-selling business books. He lectures. And everything that comes out of his mouth could be its own TED conference.

Chris’s expertise is rooted in new technologies. To everyone who reads him, it would appear the man never sleeps. He’s always writing, traveling, speaking, or exploring new mediums to spread the word. There are 25 hours in his day, 8 days in his week. The man is insane – in the most amazing way.

They both have recent posts that inspired me. Actually, they always write posts that inspire me. But these two in particular speak to the different and sometimes opposing forces at work within me.

Seth’s Winning On The Uphill is the perfect Animal mentality. In a nutshell, he says that it takes a lot of discipline to challenge yourself when life is all peaches and cream. The law of inertia dictates that you will stay in your comfort zone. But when you’re challenged by a job loss or career change, it can feel like you’re running uphill, against the wind, with lead weights strapped to your ankles. These are the moments, he says, to embrace. It’s when we learn the lessons for whatever’s next.

Contrast that with While The Iron Is Hot, Chris Brogan’s recent post about gettin’ while the gettin’s good. To Chris, it’s all about channeling your energy. It’s not a slow burn for him. He’s stoking the fire. Adding fuel and wood and more fuel and more wood.  As he says:

The choice I’ve made is to strike while the iron is hot. I’m working now because we’re seeing results. I’m working now because I’m at the top of my game…I’m working now so that I can choose my own jobs in years to come.

Please Feed The Animals and Lemonade are experiencing both of these phenomenons right now. We’re running uphill, trying to find a way to build a business while staying true to our mission of getting unemployed people energized about their careers again — all without charging them a fee. Simultaneously, we’re riding the wave of good will and energy, given’ her all she’s got, knocking on all the doors of opportunity that are being created by Lemonade.

On the one hand, it’s the most challenging period of a relatively young venture. On the other hand, opportunities abound, and the momentum must be pushed.

Where are you in this world of opposites? Is there a seemingly impossible challenge in front of you that begs to be overcome? Or do you have a head of steam that you can push even further?

Or is it both?

My position on crowdsourcing is so on-the-fence that a stiff breeze in one direction or the other would send me toppling to either side.

On the one hand, it’s a brilliant way to engage fans/consumers/friends with your brand. Instead of pushing an internally generated idea, you invite participation in shaping its course. There are great examples this kind of thing, like this poster for Adidas and this site from HP. In fact, much of PFTA has been crowdsourced. The new logo, the guest posts, even Lemonade — these things would be impossible without the crowd (you) engaging with the brand (PFTA). In these instances, crowdsourcing = co-creation. Everyone is on board for the shot to be a part of something bigger.

So from that perspective, I should have no issues whatsoever.

On the other hand, I’m hanging on to my old (guard?) belief that a day’s work deserves a day’s wages. For every co-created group project, there are even more crowdsourcing contests, like Crispin’s much-criticized design competition for Brammo, and entire sites dedicated to getting creatives to compete for projects like Crowdspring and Zooppa. The argument against them is that if you really value creativity, writers and artists and designers (and any other skill there’s a demand for) won’t give away their talents for nothing.

Not to mention, this approach to crowdsourcing tends to generate what most advertising and design professionals consider terrible ideas.

I bring this debate to the table because over the past couple of months, I’ve received several requests from companies wanting to leverage PFTA’s talent pool. The reason I haven’t shared these requests with you is because they came with no promise of payment. The people who approached me said, “let’s use your talent and when we win the assignment we’ll reimburse them for their time.”

I don’t know about you, but I can’t just spend 15 minutes writing headlines and expect something great. Depending on the project, it could take days or weeks to do something that meets my own standards. So the opportunity cost of committing to a project without any reasonable assurance of reimbursement is just too high for me.

I haven’t broached crowdsourcing with you until now because I was acting like a den mother, trying to shield you from unfair labor practices. But I’m realizing now that it could just be me. I may have mistakenly projected my own reservations onto you. And since we’re all part of this community, I wanted to open(source) this for discussion.

So here’s my question: Would you be open to working on crowsourced projects? Is there a middle-ground you’d consider…say, half your rate until your idea is bought, then more after? What if you could bid on work before committing to doing it? Or say the client didn’t own the rights to your work unless they bought it…would the prospect of maintaining your own intellectual property be of value to you?

Or is there some crowdsourcing model (current or in your own brain) that would make participation more attractive to you?

I see how valuable crowdsourcing can be for creative expression, and especially for clients. But I also see how it can be used to demean what we have all chosen to do for a living. As James McMurtry wrote in the great song “Where’s Johnny”:

He saw both sides of everything and found he could not move.

I suspect this won’t be the last time I approach this topic with y’all. So with this post, I’m starting a crowdsourcing category.

Discuss.

“Don’t be the person looking for a job. Be the person doing something interesting.”

That was a quote from our interview with Lisa Hickey, who has not-so-quietly reinvented herself from a traditional advertising creative director into the self-made queen of social media strategy.

Point is, you can smell a job seeker from a mile away. Job seekers rattle their cup, begging for interviews. And “hire me please” is no way to get hired.

The second you look for a job, you instantly place yourself in a position of need. But as soon you replace resume-sending with doing something people are genuinely interested in, you grab the power back.

Like Josh Kobrin, who spent a fruitless year looking for work, and didn’t get hired until he built a tree house worth talking about.

Or Lawson Clarke, who lost his job, became the Male Copywriter, and hasn’t stopped freelancing since.

Or Geoff Vreeken, who is turning his portfolio site into a fund raising opportunity for Vancouver’s homeless population.

Or Chris Kahle, who Tweeted his way into Crispin.

If you take nothing else away from Please Feed The Animals, let it be this: Do something worth talking about, and jobs will come to you.

Next Thursday, October 1st, in NYC, The Feast Conference will gather the minds that are making the world a better place. From their web site:

Our secret sauce lies in a healthy combination of passion, creativity, and entrepreneurship to shift the way things are done. “The Feast” brings together the world’s leading creative entrepreneurs, revolutionaries, radicals, doers and thinkers to inspire more action, share best practices, and create valuable connections that will change the world.

They will also be showing the Lemonade trailer, so I’m doubly bummed I won’t be able to attend. It’s for a good reason,  though. We’ll actually be doing one last shoot day to fill in a few of the holes we found while editing. That said, I may try to attend the workshops on Friday. So if you’re in NYC next Friday, let’s connect.

If you are reading this blog, you hardly need to be told that advertising, and those of us who practice it, took a real body blow in this recession. And the people I know who have been bloodied seem to have one of three reactions to it.

1. A few people who use it as inspiration or fuel to strike out on their own and do something they’ve always wanted to (See: Lemonade).
2. A few people love the agency game so much that they resolve they will be advertising survivors.
3. And then there’s a whole bunch of people, by far the biggest group, who would like to do their own thing, or just try something a little different, but feel they can’t afford to change for some reason or another. They need the income to pay off the boat. Or support the habit. Or the kids. Or the kids and the habit.

Or it’s not the income at all — it’s the health insurance.

My suspicion is that if it weren’t for health insurance, a lot more people would be willing to risk doing their own thing. Because, as I pointed out to Erik some time ago, when you really do a risk assessment, sometimes (and particularly when the economy is bad) staying in a job can actually be a bigger risk than striking out on your own. It ties all of your revenue up in one source, and if that one source goes south, so do you. Whereas, when you strike out on your own, necessity sharpens your resourcefulness. You find ways to make the income you need.

But the health insurance. That’s a whole different story. And I’m very sympathetic. I have been fortunate in this recession — I made a career change a year ago when I left my old agency, and I now teach and consult, with the teaching paying part of what I need and providing health insurance and the consulting providing the rest. But there was a time, in the economic downturn of the early 90s, when I was laid off. My wife was 6 months pregnant at the time, we couldn’t move for a variety of reasons, and there were no jobs in Cleveland. So I freelanced, and COBRA benefits covered our maternity care. And I did pretty well, financially speaking. But a week after our son was born, the COBRA benefits expired, and maintaining our health insurance would have cost us more than our mortgage payment. Literally two times more. I remember thinking at the time, “You know, if it wasn’t for the health insurance, I could stick with this freelance thing. I like the schedule. I like the independence. And with a new baby in the house, it’d be nice to be around more.” But baby care is not cheap. So I took a job.

Times are different now. Yes, credit is tight, but the the shift toward a marketplace of ideas and the technology available to people has made it generally more possible for anybody, anywhere to be an entrepreneur. You see that in the economic data, where small business is still the fastest growing segment of the economy. So just imagine the explosion of entrepreneurialism we might see if healthcare ceased to be a concern for people.

I’m not sure if our Senators and Congressmen have taken into account what kind of effect a surge like that might have on pulling us out of this downturn, but I am sure that the growl of the collective Animals on the matter could get some attention. And I am sure that this is not about Reds or Blues. It’s more personal than that. It’s about you and what kind of life you want to live. So let them know. If you would take the plunge if you knew you and your family had health coverage, let them know that. Tell them to get off the dime and get it done. And tell them there are a lot of you, waiting to pull the economy up.