A faithful friend is a sturdy shelter; he who finds one finds a treasure. A faithful friend is beyond price, no sum can balance his worth. A faithful friend is a life-saving remedy, such as he who fears God finds; for he who fears God behaves accordingly, and his friend will be like himself.

Sirach 6:14-17

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Leo Babuta just wrote a wonderful post on Zen Habits called “The Best Goal Is No Goal.” In it he says:

[W]ake up and do what you’re passionate about. For me, that’s usually blogging, but it can be writing a novel or an ebook or my next book or creating a course to help others or connecting with incredible people or spending time with my wife or playing with my kids. There’s no limit, because I’m free. In the end, I usually end up achieving more than if I had goals, because I’m always doing something I’m excited about. But whether I achieve or not isn’t the point at all: all that matters is that I’m doing what I love, always. I end up in places that are wonderful, surprising, great. I just didn’t know I would get there when I started.

It sounded similar to a conversation I’d had with a friend, in which I said:

Try not to worry about What You’re Doing With Your Life. What you ARE doing right now is massive and not everybody can do it. Appreciate that you’re lucky enough to be able to do this right now. Do it and make the most of it. The next phase of life will come along, but this is where you are now. Maybe this phase doesn’t show you the next step, but it’s still pretty cool the way it is. That’s what I try to tell myself, anyway. I have so many blessings, and while there are some that I’d like to see ahead of me, I have to trust that this feels right because it IS right, and the next door will open at the right time.

Except that, while I might sound all smart and together, you may have noticed, as I have, that it’s an awful lot easier to give advice than to really live it, and an awful lot easier to say you’re doing something, than to do it every day. Also, it’s a lot easier to talk in generalities, as I was, than in specifics, as Leo goes on to do in his post.

Sitting still and just being. Appreciating. Going through the day without a to-do list and listening to what your brain and heart are telling you.

Being without goals is in itself a worthy goal. For Leo, for my wonderful friend, but most of all, for me.

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I can’t stand Davidoff Cool Water cologne.

It’s got nothing to do with whether or not it actually smells bad. Not really. To me, it smells like a kid who sat in front of me in high school who was mean to my friends. He’s probably grown up to be perfectly nice. People tend to. But I still hate that smell.

Then there’s some other cologne. Abercrombie & Fitch Woods, I think. It isn’t that it smells very good. I don’t think it really does. But it has… nicer memories.

Anyway.

I had some conversations this week about smells. There are some you love, some you hate, and some that just mean a lot. Smells are memories, and they’ve got such strong emotions attached to them.

That’s been making me think about the things you choose to smell like. I realized that you could chart out your life by the scents you wore. It’s a personality history in little bottles.

Here’s mine, as much as I can remember. The theory works pretty well for me.

Love’s Baby Soft (I think there was a law decreeing it My First Perfume)
Coty Vanilla Fields (…for years)
Elizabeth Arden Sunflowers
Clinique Happy (…and years)
Carolina Herrera
Vera Wang
Marc Jacobs
Thierry Mugler Angel (…and years)

…and lately, I’ve been switching among Burberry Brit or Jo Malone Vintage Gardenia in the summer, and Burberry London or Jo Malone Nutmeg & Ginger in the winter. But mostly the Vintage Gardenia.

I’m going to look a lot more carefully at people’s dressers and sink vanities, now.

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The phlebotomist who waxed lyrical about Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, and went positively into raptures about the possibility of getting her own copy for Christmas.

The historian who finds out what people centuries ago snacked on, or what kind of shoelaces they wore, or what kind of curse words they used.

The pet-store clerk who spent 10 minutes lecturing on Labrador puppies, flushable cat litter, and how to help a shedding gecko peel off its skin, all while demonstrating the latter with infinite care.

The trainer who never loses an opportunity to educate people about healthier choices.

My coworkers, who make – and laugh at – puns in interventional cardiology terminology.

The chemical engineer who, while cooking an amazing meal, who will describe the viscosity of a sauce both in terms of its taste and in terms of its molecular structure.

I love these people. I need these people. The world needs these people.

The world needs people who care passionately about things. People who light up like Christmas at the chance to talk in detail about the things they care about. Crazy things. Silly things. Obscure things, ridiculously complex things, recklessly dangerous, utterly mundane, seemingly unimportant things. The world needs people who throw their hearts into what they do.

The world needs geeks.

Otherwise, how would the rest of us learn?

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Yet another of my ventures is the cookie business that the fabulous Kerrin and I have created.

Two Smart Cookies have been baking for about three years (through apartments and condos and houses and bedrest and twin toddlers) and it’s as much fun as ever. We’ve done weddings, showers, birthdays, long-distance surprises, thank-you gifts, teacher gifts, housewarmings, barbecues, holidays – anything you can think of where a cookie would be appropriate.

And really, is a cookie ever NOT appropriate?

Bikinis to baby carriages, Lightning McQueen to Yo Gabba Gabba – we’ve done it all.

So check out pictures of some of our projects at http://twosmartcookies.shutterfly.com (yes, they taste as good as they look) and when you need a sweet treat for people you love, you just let me know.

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This article called “Can You Put a Value on Virtual Relationship” ranks the worth of your online relationships thusly, in order of decreasing importance:

• email contacts
• blog subscribers
• LinkedIn contacts
• Facebook friends
• Google Buzz contacts
• Twitter followers

I would like to respectfully submit that this is utter garbage. For several reasons.

First, because nobody has ever given a hoot about Google Buzz.

Second, because Facebook interactions are more personal, and therefore much more important, than LinkedIn ones.

But third and mostly, because I take massive issue with the concept of “virtual relationships”. There are no “virtual relationships”. There are relationships - and there are stronger and weaker ones. I have a weak one with someone I see occasionally and I have a stronger one with someone I know casually and I have a much stronger one with a dear friend. But their strength or weakness has nothing to do with where I see them occasionally, or where we have our long and deep conversations. They might be through a computer or they might be at a picnic table. Who cares? The setting isn’t what determines their strength, or their “value”.

And, while I’m at it, I really dislike the idea of “valuing” relationships. Relationships aren’t houses in Monopoly. They’re people. And in my definition, people you care about. Not ones that you’re mentally tagging with a price gun.

Am I off base here? Do you think about people this way? Do you think about your online interactions this way?

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After Jon’s acoustic show was so great that he was invited back, it felt like a good weekend to share links to other musicians I know. Give them a listen for something new – it’s an eclectic bunch!

• For the hipsters, the “glam-infused” “punk-pop” Schocholautte
• For the groovy ones, the “progressive psychedelic” Electric Sorcery
• For the ones who miss “real rock”, the 70s-80s-90s covers of Rock Box

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It’s my eight-year blogiversary! (No, I’m not sure if that’s a word either.)

I’ve been writing here for eight years. That’s pretty amazing.

That whole time, I’ve had people like you reading and talking back. Now that is truly amazing.

Thank you so much for the honor. Here’s to eight more. Who knows where we’ll go?

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Tiger Woods is a rotten role model. And not because he’s an adulterous bastard. (He is. But if you’ve been getting relationship guidance from celebrities’ lives, I can’t help you. ) I mean because he had created a professional persona around his lifelong dedication – but now he seems to be saying he has a sex addiction.

There is not much that will annoy me faster than people who medicalize their ethical failings, or otherwise push their own performance off on something ostensibly outside their control.

And worse, it’s not just a few individuals who do this – it’s become a societal phenomenon.

Kids who do poorly in school get to take their tests with twice the time in a private room. For all I know, they probably get spa music piped in and grapes fed to them. Then, after school, they go play a sport where they all get a trophy even if they lose every game.

My goodness, of course they grow up to think poor performance isn’t their fault and to expect always to be able to find blame. How would they know any different?

Now yes, of course, there are real medical conditions. But this isn’t what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is that sometimes you lose and sometimes you fail. And these are not doomsday scenarios to protect against at all costs. It’s learning. It’s life.

Competition and discipline are not the bad things that our society is making them into. Excusing your performance is not a default response.

Moreover, it’s a terrible shame that kids aren’t getting the full pride of a job well done. If they’re always praised no matter what, it loses its meaning. Kids are not stupid. They know when they’re being given a line, and they know when something’s genuine.

So yes, it really bothers me that this rush to hide and excuse failure is not only the way of the world, but that it’s now being fed by Tiger Woods, who should know more than most people what dedication and hard work actually are.

Based on a conversation with Alanna, whose Twitter I would look up, except that, obviously, I can’t.

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Today we have an accidental guest blog from Karen.

“Accidental” in that she wrote me an email and I’m swiping it. With permission of course.

But seriously. Girl can write. It fits five categories at once. AND she gave links. She blogs better in one email than I have after eight years!

Hey lady,

I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention to it, but there’s this thing that’s been going on that made me think of you, being the social networking/new media guru.

Basically, this week, Kevin Smith (yeah, the Clerks guy) got removed from a Southwest Airlines flight because the staff assumed he was too large to fit in one seat and the flight was too full to afford him a second seat. In reality, he did fit in one seat, but that’s kind of incidental. They embarrassed him in front of a planeload of people and inconvenienced the heck out of him, and in the course of the story unfolding, he met another regular SWA flyer who was a person of size and had been treated poorly, and basically deduced that SWA treats people of size poorly as a practice.

What made me think of you was Smith’s response. As the incident unfolded, he Twittered about it. Afterwards, he blogged about it. He then recorded an episode of his podcast about it as a central place to tell his side of the story (as opposed to going on a bunch of talk shows). And then when a lot of audience who were not Kevin Smith fans, just regular people, wanted to know about it but were unwilling to listen to a 90-minute podcast about it because they are used to digesting short Internet videos, not long audio broadcasts, he made a series of YouTube videos – partially to satisfy that need, and partially because he couldn’t leave to go on talk shows because paparazzi had surrounded his house. Dissatisfied with Southwest’s response, Smith resolved in the videos that he was “not too fat to fly, but too fat to fly Southwest” and would refrain from using them, explaining he viewed them as a luxury he could no longer afford; a luxury not for the rich minority, but for the thin minority. He also released a shorter followup podcast with the woman he met who had been mistreated by SWA.

Whatever you think of him or the situation or whether or not he might be blowing the situation out of proportion or just loving to hear himself talk about himself (I don’t think he does; he keeps saying, essentially, “I don’t want to keep talking about this, it’s embarrassing to have to keep talking about how fat I am, but the story of the injustices made by SWA needs to be told”), I think it’s interesting how much social media influenced the WAY his reaction was brought to the public.

It amuses me that this occurred to me on the first day of your Social Networking Lent Blackout 2010. I guess it’s really true that you won’t be able to avoid this stuff much longer.

Seriously, I should pay her. If I was getting paid for this, anyway.

I also read about this, after her email, on the Upgrade blog, which mentioned Southwest’s own blog response. My reaction at first blush is similar to both Karen‘s and Mark‘s. Yes, obviously Southwest handled the live situation very badly. But looking at their crisis-comms response, they seem to have addressed it as adeptly as they could have from a social-media perspective. They talked to him personally and updated the interested public a couple of times, briefly and conversationally.

Whether that was enough for the fans, I don’t know (but I doubt).

Whether they would have done the same if he wasn’t famous, I don’t know (but I doubt).

But I agree most of all with Karen’s final sentence. This kind of situation is only going to become more common.

(Yes, partly I’m referring to the ever-widening (heh) crisis of obesity. But check out Jamie Oliver’s TED speech for more on that. How I love that man.)

The sea change that our culture has undergone in the last 15 years is, very simply, this: we can all now broadcast at will.

So I can reach just as many people as Kevin Smith or Southwest Airlines or the Queen of England, if (very big “if) what I have to say is worth their attention. That is the main point.

The secondary point, relevant here, is that complaints are often more interesting than success stories. This is not news to anyone in retail.

The reason this kind of situation is going to become the norm becomes obvious when you consider those two points together. Complaints don’t go into a box anymore or into a neatly typed letter. They go public at the same time that they go to the recipient of the complaint. We don’t need the Nightly News Problem Solvers. We can do it ourselves.

And companies will continue to get burned until they realize this, and shift their QA and customer service resources accordingly.

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