Lost in Translation

I didn’t mean my last post to impugn Pam or Charlie. I think they’re great people and I went to great lengths to make sure my readers (all two of them) knew that. Like I said in the last post, I believe very strongly that Pam and Charlie are trustworthy and respectable people who won’t abuse the list of addresses they’ve collected. It’s just that their sign-up form was what brought the topic to hand. I apologize if I led anyone to believe that Pam and Charlie are less than trustworthy or that I have less than complete respect for them.

1. Today I signed up for Pam Slim and Charlie Gilkey‘s free teleclass, “Thinking Big, Acting Small”. It’s a promo for their Lift-Off Retreat for small business owners, and since I know (at least, know of) and respect both Pam and Charlie, I signed up.

---

2. Lots of people, including Holly, use a company called AWeber to manage their email mailing lists. It’s fast, full-featured, and reliable, and I see no reason not to use it, assuming that you can afford the monthly fee. (Right at the moment they’re running a promotion that gives you the first month for $1, cancel anytime – and I’m not getting anything for telling you that, by the way.) It automates most of the work for you. All you have to do is set up the list with their system and then send out emails, and they deal with the rest. They’ll even give you a form that you can put on your website; when people fill the form out, they get added to your mailing list. Easy, no work, as my friend Mickey is wont to say.

AWeber also does a good job of keeping track of who’s signed up for your mailing lists and when they signed up – and you can make as many lists as you want, and put the subscribers from one list into another list, such that you can have superlists and sublists and huge varieties of functionality regarding how readers get their information from you.

---

3. Perhaps you can see where I’m going with this.

Since AWeber does a good job of handling subscriber lists, it makes a certain degree of sense to use their services in other areas where you want to keep track of who’s signed up for something you’re offering. In this case, Pam and Charlie decided that an AWeber list would be a good way to keep track of the people who have signed up for their free class. When you fill out the sign-up form on their website, you’re taken through to AWeber, which puts you on the compassion09 subscription list and sends you a confirmation email, and then, once you’ve confirmed, another email with details for the class.

This is all well and good.

Except that nowhere on their page about the class, or in either the confirmation email or the details email, do Pam and Charlie tell you that what you’re really doing is signing up for a mailing list. It’s all about signing up for the teleclass. To most people, that means “give me the details, let me attend, then disappear”. If Pam and Charlie start sending follow-up emails, they’re going to come as a surprise. The only reason I knew about it was because I have experience with AWeber and because I’ve been burned by signing up for teleclasses when they were just an excuse to get me on an email marketing list.

I did a quick poll on Twitter: “Show of hands: if someone gives you their email address, is it cool to sign them up for an email list w/o saying that’s what you’re doing?” The universal response was “absolutely not”. I tend to agree. It’s neither honest nor ethical to place someone on a mailing list without their knowledge or consent. That’s what spammers do.

I don’t know what Pam and Charlie are going to do with the email addresses they’ve collected. I really want it to be true that their intent really, truly is to just use them to send out information about the call and then destroy the list when they’re finished, because I trust them. But I’ve been burned before by people I thought I trusted, and since they’re using a mailing list to collect the information, and given that AWeber had a security leak a few weeks ago, it really behooves them – and anyone else using a mailing list as a back-end for teleclass/ebook/etc. sign-up – to put a disclaimer on their page: “By filling this out, you’re signing up for a mailing list. Don’t worry, it’s just how we’re keeping track of who’s signed up for the class. As soon as the class is over, the mailing list goes away.” If you think people aren’t going to sign up if they see it’s a mailing list, find another way to do the sign-ups. Honesty is the only way here, guys, and omission is just as big a lie as commission in this case.

Reposted from Twitter:

For the last decade and a half I’ve been dealing with depression. This is not news to anyone who knows me well, but it informs pretty much everything that I do. Even when I’m cheerful I feel like I have a bowling ball in the pit of my stomach. It’s easier to deal with some days than others. For the last few months it’s been almost intolerable. The only things keeping me going are @copygeniusgirl, certain friends, and the knowledge that if I just let go I’d let my son and @copygeniusgirl down. Some days that’s only barely enough, and even on the good days I’m still mired in despair.

“Cheer up” does nothing; neither does “just get over it.” It’s amazingly hard to live with this, especially when I don’t have any kind of treatment for it. Twitter and blogging are my only outlets and lately they haven’t been doing as well at letting me out. I really don’t know what can be done to fix my depression or the pretty much constant emotional (and occasionally physical) pain I’m in because of it. Maybe nothing can. But —

I just wanted to say that out loud, here in the open where everyone can hear it. I’m tired of repressing my feelings for the sake of not offending. For the sake of maybe, possibly, losing readers/friends/clients/whatever because I’m not upbeat. I haven’t talked about it out of fear. And I’m tired of fear, of being MORE miserable because I can’t TALK about being depressed.

You can probably expect more out of me here now that I’ve gotten that out of the way. And to everyone who commented and backed me up – thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

My beloved Macbook stopped working this evening. It was working fine – I stepped away to get clean sheets out of the dryer, while one of the cats walked over the keyboard in my absence – and when I came back, the screen was black and the Caps Lock key was lit and wouldn’t toggle off. I couldn’t do anything but hold the Power button until the computer powered down.

Now it won’t power back up at all. No noise, no fans, no nothin’. I’ve tried resetting the PMU/SMC (remove battery/power, hold Power button 5 seconds, replace and start up), starting without the battery, starting without the power supply… nothing seems to work.

I’m going to let it sit overnight, but I’ll be honest: I’m not hopeful. If you have any advice, I’d love to hear it; otherwise I’m going to have to salvage the hard drive and – I guess – start hoping for a new one for Christmas.

Pam Slim, the author of Escape from Cubicle Nation, has a new article up on Open Forum: How to Choose a Business to Start. It’s well-written and speaks to my condition. I highly recommend it!

1. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

It’s not just for grade-schoolers anymore. College students – and beyond – ask that of each other, or of themselves, and it’s only half a joke. What do I want to do when I grow up?

The problem is twofold: first, we don’t seem to have figured out when we’re supposed to have grown up; and second, in our mid-twenties, we still don’t know what we want to do. Having lots of options is a great thing. Indecision, well, not so much.

2. “You’re not living up to your potential.”

I’ve read three blog posts in as many days about what Hugh MacLeod calls the Gray Zone, in which you’re “NOT fully alive– when you’re just bum­bling along, half-awake, sleep­wal­king through life”. This is contrasted to the Red Zone, in which you’re “crea­ting something, making art, making love, watching the sun set, wha­te­ver. When all your synap­ses are firing.”

The other blogs didn’t look at it quite the same way. Their Red Zone was succeeding at what you wanted to do; their Gray Zone (Justine even calls it a “gray area”, but the similarity is, I’m sure, accidental) was not succeeding because you didn’t try. (Let’s call the third, trying and not succeeding, the Black Zone, just for sake of reference.) And both of them had similar things to say about the Gray Zone: that it’s comfortable (it is), and that it’s self-perpetuating, because we can sit in the Gray Zone and say “I’d be in the Red Zone if only I applied myself and lived up to my potential.” It lets us say “I’m a winner in waiting”. Because we’ve convinced ourselves that we could be winners if we just tried, we don’t have to try. The potential is good enough.

3. Sum, Ergo Sum.

That’s Latin. (I studied Latin for six years in middle and high school, and for three more in college.) It means “I am, therefore I am.” It also means “just saying ‘I want to be’ or ‘I could be’ isn’t enough”.

It’s easy to underestimate the power that simple declarations can give us. We’re taught from an early age that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me”, but the unfortunate converse of that is that we learn that “simple” words can never help us either. It feels right to say that just saying something doesn’t make it so. But it does.

A declaration – I am – is a line in the sand. It’s a demarcation: you have separated yourself from the Gray Zone and “want to be” and “could be”. You might say “I am an artist”, or “I am an accountant”; regardless of what you are, saying that that is what you are gives you the ability to put the force of faith behind it.

Nobody can say that you are not but you.

If you aren’t familiar with it, the Pareto Principle is simple: 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In the context of productivity, that can be read to mean that 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort. The thrust of the idea – which has been a productivity darling for a while now – is that you should pare down to the 20% of the effort that’s generating 80% of the results. Sure, you lose 20% of your results, but you gain back 80% of your day.

Here’s the problem with the Pareto Principle: it’s missing a key statement, one it shares (or ought to) with Hofstadter’s Law. “80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes, even when you account for the Pareto Principle.”

In other words, let’s say that it’s true that 20% of your work produces 80% of your results. So you cut out the 80% of the work that’s only producing 20% of the results. Now the earlier 20% is now 100%, and the earlier 80% is also 100%. But doesn’t the Pareto Principle still apply? 20% of that 100% effort produces 80% of those 100% results.

As a wise woman once said, “it’s turtles all the way down.”

Today’s my 30th birthday. New decade, new rules, new me. (Well, new version of me. I’m not throwing everything out.) New blog, too; I’ve decided to purge the archives and start fresh. Pardon the dust – it’s still under construction.

In this kind of post, this is the point where I’d usually say “wish me luck!”. But since I’m moving into the future, instead, I’ll say Luck? Where we’re going, we don’t need luck!

(Title gag courtesy greyseer.)