Jonothan Stribling

Rather than the usual resolution setting on new years eve with a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other, I have done something a little different this year.

I approached my goals for the new year as I would a project or corporate gig. There needed to be clear objectives and clear measures. I asked myself what did I want to achieve for the year? What was important to me? I arrived at four objectives that covered having a loving and rewarding family life, being healthy and vibrant, having a successful career, and having fun.

When I take a look at 2011 it was a pretty good year apart from the natural disasters, riots, financial turpitude, and end of times malaise. Personally I achieved a bunch of goals with the stand out goal being stopping smoking. I have struggled with this for 20 years and this time have broken the back of it. This time I didn’t make any excuses for just having one cigarette, I accepted that I would never be able to smoke again and if that meant that I couldn’t drink as much or associate with some people then that’s what it meant. I have more energy now even with the 8 kilos I have put on.

In the career sector 2011 had some ups and downs. The economy was a tough one for the business I work for and the international economy teetering on massive amounts of debt made the second half of the year challenging. I was given more responsibilities at work taking on responsibilities for operations and product, and have started to build a strong team. In 2012 I will continue to build a strong team and encourage them to be successful and grow revenue, margin, and most importantly make our customers happy.

My approach changed during 2011. It become more measured as considered rather than explosive and forceful, although there were some hiccups when I stopped smoking and my co-workers told me I should put on a nicotine patch to calm the angry dragon. In 2012 I will be calmer and meditate daily. There will be no sweating the small stuff.

Through sheer accident I became involved with a small business importing European car parts. Due to the circumstances the business had been through bad management as was struggling to find its way. We’ve put on a general manager, sold off dead stock, rebranded, launched a new website, and are launching a new consumer website. In 2012 this business will do over $1 million in sales and generate good profit margins.

I had a mixed year social media wise and with sporadic blogging and engagement with social media. I didn’t make enough time to create good content. In 2012 I will write a blog post every day and contribute to zeitgeist rather than passively consume information.

After a tumultuous 2010 for my family where my wife and I realised we had two children under two years of age, 2011 was a definite improvement. I felt that I grew as a father, learning how to be a better parent through being patient and kind rather than a dictator. I 2012 I will be a loving father and spend at least 30 minutes a day with each child. I will also not argue with my wife about trivial matters.

Lastly, 2012 is the year of the dragon in Chinese astrology which promises to be a powerful and unexpected year.

Bring it on!

A small business I provided some advice had launched a website in a space with low competition and high margins, and the results were pretty good for a small investment.  They had knocked up a site, launched some paid search ads, put in some rudimentary processes for managing enquiries, and like the results. The problem was that the site had stopped growing.

What was missing was the kind of consistent maintenance and content creation to engage buyers, rank well in Google, and learn from your mistakes.

I find many people not familiar with the intricacies of online marketing and ecommerce are surprised that making a website successful can be hard work. Even more express dismay when they discover that integrating an online channel into an existing business requires a rethinking of all processes.

This is common in any business small or large. I think some people are sold on the internet fantasy of “build it and they will come” or think that the internet is technical stuff which is best left to the guy who runs the servers.

The fact is that online takes work. Like any business it needs to be planned and the plan needs to be worked.

Customers need to be identified and spoken to, marketing plans drawn up, search experts engaged, if you’re shipping goods fulfillment needs to be sorted out. Most importantly you need to know how you’re going to be successful. What are the metrics you will use to work out if strategy is working and what tactics you need to change?

I don’t mean to make it sound impossible but without a commitment to do the work, make mistakes, and learn, it is almost difficult to make an online channel successful. The secret sauce is not technical, it is an passion for learning. I remember listening to @sammartino, the founder of rentoid.com, talking about how he  launched the website with no web design skills at all. What he had was a hunger to build something and make it successful. As an ex-web developer who can get caught up in technical wizardry, it was a very useful lesson in what really matters.

With passion, energy and a keen eye for solving customer problems, any online business can be successful. I recently helped a neighbour and friend fix her wordpress site she developed almost single-handed to launch her hanging glass vase business. I love this kind of enthusiasm to use the web as a tool to build a business. I’m sure that she will be successful because she understood she needed to put the work in to make it work.

I think there is a place for an ecommerce mentor who helps with strategy, measurement, optimization, and coaching. The future of small to medium business is in embracing online technologies to reduce costs and grow their businesses. They just need to be shown that the skills that made their existing business successful is all they need to make their online business successful.

How can you help someone be successful online?

I was reading about Christine Nixon criticising the 2009 Victorian Bushfire Royal Commission and it struck me that we all have different ideas about leadership.

Nixon had claimed that the Royal Commission was the “worst kind of kangaroo court”. The media, in particular the News Ltd papers had taken a dim view of Nixon having a meal in a pub on Black Saturday, likening her to Emperor Nero, eating while Victoria burned.

Nixon had previously said about leadership on the ABC:

“But I think there’s a line about leadership for me that I think’s really important and it’s not about privilege, it’s not about rank. It’s not about popularity but it is about responsibility.”

I think that claiming leadership is about responsibility and then criticising the Royal Commission which said that “elements of the leadership provided on 7 February were wanting” is a little transparent. Delegating or abdicating authority in a crisis is not responsible and it is poor leadership.

Nixon made a point of talking about leadership during her time as Police Commissioner and appears to be trying to resurrect her career and create some controversy to sell some copies of her book. She strikes me as being the worst kind of hypocrite. It would be better if she wrote about what she learnt about leadership throughout the Royal Commission and how she realised that true leadership was about stepping up and helping other people feel like leaders. Or whatever she realised but isn’t saying.

So what is leadership really?

For me, it is an over-used corporate weasel word. Leadership group. Team Leader. Senior Leader. Leading edge. Leading the way. Bullshit most of it. Leadership is about showing grit in tough times and inspiring others to show the same grit and be leaders themselves. The leaders who have inspired me have motivated me to act against my better judgement and avoid reflecting on any perceived short comings,  they have shown me that I have within myself the capacity to lead and inspire others.

Is that what Christine Nixon was doing when she left her deputies in charge at the emergency Response Centre on 7 Feb 2009? Perhaps that is exactly what she intended. The shame is that it didn’t work. According to the Royal Commission report, there was no one really in charge. The situation called for someone to show a way forward in a difficult situation and in that Christine Nixon failed. Having a quick Chicken Schnitzel dinner sent the wrong message and was not the right thing to do.

One of my favourite quotes about leadership is from George W. Bush:

“I have a different vision of leadership. A leadership is someone who brings people together.”

Or perhaps a better quote from Michel Foucault is:

“The strategic adversary is fascism… the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”

For me, leadership is about acting and enabling others to act without threats or violence.

Image Credit

I was talking to a mate the other day and he told me about his idea of leverage.

Osca is a

Like many people, I am constantly connected to the cultural world via various interfaces like the laptop, smartphone, iPad, tv, or even the radio.

No matter the time, I can always get my fill of tech news, world news, cats playing the piano, mindless friend updates, photos from a distant holiday, or emails from work colleagues.

It is a life lived online. The binary public / private has been shattered by Facebook, Twitter, and Google. What previously happened in the quietetude of your own home may have been known only to family and close friends, and discoverable only to snoops and cops. Now a whole life can be tracked and mapped online. Everything is public, known and discoverable.

This can be a curse.

It is ironic that being connected can mean you’re distracted, obsessed, and not really engaged with the folks around you.

My wife pointed out that I am often distracted by devices when I should be listening or engaging with my children. They talk to me, demand my attention with adorable tantrums, ask me questions, or just be cute and I am checking my Twitter feed.

Being social is making me bad company.

Post-internet culture is a pervasive always connected, always engaging, always anxious culture. Much like an ADHD kid we’re always looking for how life can be interpreted or understood through the veil of social media.

Updating a status is now an extension of the psyche, it is a mode of communication like the voice, so consciously or unconsciously major life events are not reflected upon, they are expressed and expressed and expressed. Rather than thinking, “How do I feel about this?” the connected kids think “OMG I am so gonna tell everyone on facey about this”.

And the veil becomes more entrenched.

One of the keys to happiness is what Buddhists and psychologists call mindfulness.

It refers to having a state of calm awareness of the world in the present moment where every thought, emotion, feeling, or urge is acknowledged in a non-judgemental way. Without mindfulness enlightenment is a distant and anxious dream.

It could be argued that being constantly connected increases mindfulness. After all, you are connected to the great unconscious comprised of a gazillion internet users doing their stuff online. You are like Batman observing Gotta City from the rooftop of a skyscraper, silent, alert, wedded to the present moment absolutely and completely.

Or perhaps not.

In 2011 I will be practicing mindfulness and engaging more with those around me, and this demands that the smart-phone be put down, the laptop closed, and the cable turned off.

Before I had children, I didn’t realise how much downtime I had. Life was a celebration of the simple pleasures like reading, writing, doodling, dreaming, cooking, and the odd spot of sloth.

Now any downtime between work, bathtime, playtime, and feeding time is spent staring vacantly at the wall mouth half open with some drool dribbling down my chin in a catatonic state of disbelief.

Or that’s how it seems.

How could I have wasted all that time?

But maybe it wasn’t wasted. Creativity can be fostered through work but also demands quiet reflection. A walk through the bush can be a catalyst for a new project, a new idea, a new view of the world. The time I spent not working on something was a preparation for now.

The time I spent procrastinating is another matter.

But as the song says, je ne regrette rien.

Downtime is important, and with children even more so. It allows for the creative, emotional, and physical energies to be reenergised through doing nothing other than being, just being.

Blogging offers me the same kind of respite. It is a release from the constant demands of work, family, and ambition.

Sitting in front of the fire tapping away at the post while the babies sleep is refreshing and wonderful. And when they wake I can play.

Fatherhood is good preparation for launching an online business. The problem is that a job, infants and new websites do not play nicely together.

I have been working on a little project called Braggler, which is a community site for hagglers, tightwads, and perpetual savers. Having become involved after the site had been semi-launched with the old partners, I quickly made a list of what needed to be done to make the site useful. The original founder and I agreed on priorities and got excited.

This was gonna be great.

And then my wife had a baby. The work stopped. With two babies under two in the house by the time I could do some work on the site after work and babies I was so tired I could hardly keep my eyes open.

How am I ever going to get any work done?

I realised that it was no longer possible to come home from work, have dinner and a conversation with my wife and work until past midnight. With a continual interrupted sleep I don’t have the energy to make a 100% contribution to what I am doing then I would rather not do it.

The answer is to make small continual efforts towards fixing the site and be able to be a good manager and leader at work, a good husband and father, and a good builder of web businesses.

The might not be entirely consistent with Gary Vaynerchuk’s concept of crushing it, but with a busy life I need to crush it in multiple ways, and being a good father is one of the most important jobs I have right now.

Get along to Braggler and tell me how you think it’s coming along.

Posted using the magic of the mobile Internet

I am a sucker for sentimentality. Like Clint Eastwood, the stuff that gets to me is the stuff that matters, the non-trivial, the stuff that comes from the heart, the stuff I am passionate about.

Simon, my brother-in-law was reading a post I wrote on fabricatedbacon.com about fatherhood and he looked at me with a tear in his eye and said, “You made me cry you bastard. This is much better than all that negative stuff.” He was referring to fucktard, a blog I started out of anger at Stephen Conroy’s Internet filter policies.

Simon’s comments rang true. I started jonstribling.info as a professional type blog where I posted stuff about ecommerce, the Internet, stuff related to my profession. It was intended to let me own my personal brand online just as I told people they needed to do in my work. I think it has been successful in one sense but the problem is that it is completely inauthentic. The singular focus on one topic reduces me to being a mindless commentator, like mashable, rather than a fleshy human with random fits of humour, genius and bile.

The stuff that matters to me is what difference I make in the lives of others, the lessons I learn, the lessons I help others learn, the fights I avoid rather than the fights I start, the joy of seeing something grow that I have started or helped to start, the sound of the Kookaburras on a cold frosty morning, the view from my deck over the city as the sun sets, the faces of my family as they sleep soundly, the love in my wife’s eyes.  It is about creating something rather than complaining about something or destroying something. It is about rising above the stormy seas of life, work and commuting to create something great.

If I look at my life so far, i have built a career, started a beautiful family and had a lot of good ideas. The good ideas are written on the white-board in my study and few of them have seen the light of day because I haven’t been authentic. I haven’t focusing on the creation, on the passion, on the dream. Rather, I have been bearing witness to how life can be pretty busy sometimes, particularly with a long commute, a demanding job and a young child (now I have two young children). Reflecting on this whilst watching Master Chef is not getting things done or ticking off the great ideas on my white-board. It is sitting on the couch being a lazy arse. The combination of the TV and the couch has robbed many a good idea from being breathed into life with a bit of hard work, passion and focus.

So, very soon the design of this blog will change to reflect the change in focus, the change to something authentic that is about my real brand and what matters to me.

Photo credit: Sean Lamb

One of the hardest things to do is get a project, a blog, a business or a wacky plan started when you have a job and a life.

I have fallen in to the trap of creating great plans in my mind and then finding something else to do.

Like watching So You Think You Can Dance, Lost or Mad Men.

Or perhaps the footy game or cricket game just demands watching.

Or there might be a drink at a nice bar with some friends calling your name.

If you have dreams of being a player and work in a job every day then sometimes the nice things need to take a break so you can stop procrastinating and build on those dreams.

I am still working on building mine but here’s what I have learnt so far.

Make a routine of doing stuff

Routine used to sound so, well, routine to me, so boring. I wanted spontaneity, colour, laughter. The idea of a routine was enough to make me quit my job and hitch-hike up the east coast with a beautiful girl from London. But that is for another post.

Now I realise that a good workable routine can help create the space to have all the fun stuff whilst feeling good that I have met my commitments.

To get a routine started write down all your projects in different areas for the next 12 months. Then write down all your free time including time you currently devote to TV, mindless Internet meandering and lying around doing nothing.

For example I have free time whilst commuting, after dinner during the week and Sunday afternoon. This means that every week I can write two blog posts and spend four hours working on my super secret plan for being financially independent.

Don’t be scared

Starting out can be a scary prospect sometimes, chiefly because of irrational fears like “what if I don’t finish”, “what if I fail?” and “what if I am kidding myself?”.

The real question should really be “how much of a dickhead will I feel if I don’t do anything and continue being a lazy arse?”
Fear of failure is actually fear of being successful.

Turn off all distractions

If you’re like me, then you have 16 different things happening at a time including, twitter, facebook, that interesting article, that funny YouTube video, that cartoon I should laugh at, some technical documentation, a email from my wife, an sms from a mate and oh yes what I was meant to do doing.

Turn it all off!

It won’t hurt a bit and you might get something done.

The real answer to getting it done, is just getting it done, or as Gary Vaynerchuk commands, hustle.