Unless you're one of those people.

Look, I'll admit that there is certainly some value to WordPress if you're running a blog. Or if you started with a blog and expanded into any of the things that have been properly added on as plugins that fully (and properly) extend the WordPress functionality with additional codebases, like WooCommerce. But all too many SMB sites that I come across are using WordPress because they were sold it as the best tool around and have come almost to the point of zealous belief in that misguided notion.

In this article, let me address three common myths around WordPress for development and marketing use.

Myth #1: WordPress is a top-tier offering.

Somewhere along the way, many marketers and web designers (and even some developers) began thinking that WordPress running almost half of all websites and somewhere between 60 to 80 percent of all CMS sites made it a good platform. Let's be clear: good and most used are not always synonymous. Frankly, WordPress is pretty good as a blog-only site tool, or a headless blog CMS paired with other tools in a well-engineered stack, but beyond that it's not good at all, its jury rigged (more on this in a moment).

The WordPress codebase has always been problematic. Consider, or research if you're unaware, the historic (and still current) issues with heavy database queries, slow page building and loading, improper semantic HTML, over-scoped (global) variables, lack of any modularity, and... I'm tired of listing, frankly, and we haven't even scratched the surface. Many of the core structural issues date back a quarter of a century to the b2 blogging tool from which WordPress was forked.

In 2026, Hostinger published statistics for WordPress that claimed the average desktop loading time for an average WordPress site was 2.5 seconds, and 13.25 seconds on mobile. Contextualize that for a moment: over 13 seconds to load a site on mobile. Goodbye time-on-page goals and hello bounce rate nightmares! But those load times aren't always created by bad blog implementation, it's from all of the other utter shit people are trying to do and pass off as acceptable.

All-in-all, WordPress makes for a fine blogging system with a simple homepage, but anything more than that and the technical debt begins to pile up. Remember the jury-rigging claim? Within WordPress, everything is treated as a blog post... your posts, pages, menus, attachments, navigation; all of this is stored as if it's a blog post. So, excuse me when I say that WordPress is great for a simple blog, but if you're using it for virtually anything else, you might as well be the type of person who uses a hammer on screws, or a hair dryer in a cardboard box to bake a cake. I've heard it rationalized, in a way, as not being different than having to deconstruct these elements for database storage or JSON serialization, but that's nonsense. In the latter examples, the structures are purpose-built abstractions that use custom elements (functions, storage tables, schemas, etc.) whereas WordPress forces everything into the existing elements for blog posts.

Top tier offering? No. t's a one-trick pony that's good at being jury-rigged. Don't ask a pony to perform like a donkey or a horse.

Myth #2: WordPress is good for custom development.

You know those marketing firms or development agencies that do everything in WordPress? Yeah, you do. You may even work for one. They hype WordPress as a great development platform, when it’s anything but. To see why, I only need to point back to the everything-as-a-post approach mentioned above. But the issues go even deeper than that when considering WordPress extensibility through plugins or custom app development. Consider the two broad types of plugins that people build: true feature‑extension plugins and surface‑level wrapper plugins.

The first type uses real developmental best practices. They come with their own organized codebase, functioning services, internal APIs, and integrate with WordPress through well‑engineered hooks. In this approach, an actual tool is being built — WordPress is just the front‑end for exposing functionality to end users. The tool could continue to work perfectly well if paired with another system or given its own UI and admin elements. But this type of development is rare save for one exception: third party tools that are made to work with a number of systems and one of them happens to be WordPress. These aren't WordPress-specific developments, they're fully third-party tools that happen to work with WordPress. This is how it should be.

Then there’s the other, much larger, category of plugins— the type most of you are shipping or using, if we’re being honest. These surface‑level plugins are just sloppy procedural code crammed into functions.php and packaged as if they’re legitimate plugins. The worst offenders go beyond the realm of plugins and are pretending to be full web applications built on WordPress while secretly relying on nothing but custom taxonomies to deliver their “features.” Nothing says competent developer like forcing a content‑labeling system to impersonate a database schema, after all, amiright?

In fact, I recently dealt with a situation where the original website developer for a roughly $20M SMB had to be brough back in to clarify how to execute a fairly simple process. The client was upset with me, the firm I was representing, and even their previously contracted firms for essentially being so stupid as to not know how to execute the task. As it turns out, the feature we needed was a few lines of commented out code in the functions.php file with no in-code comments, no documentation, no plugin wrapper, and no UI surfacing. That led to a few "fun" conversations, and frankly, I still wasn't able to break the "WordPress is our tech stack" incoherent nonsense that had been instilled in them as a core level belief. You can lead a horse to water...

Real developers work on WordPress and many of its plugins, sure! But if you're using WordPress as a framework for building mission-critical business apps beyond the CMS without a separate codebase and proper APIs and hooks, we need to question your competency.

Myth #3: WordPress is the marketer's toolkit.

Having taught undergraduate digital marketing for over a decade now and having been involved in several agencies during that time, I'm likely the least apologetic about this claim: only bad marketers view WordPress as their tool of choice, or as an entire toolkit. Harsh, maybe, but marketers hyping up their WordPress skills screams red flag to me for a number of reasons. It'd be like saying a wrench set is your entire toolkit for building a shed or repairing a car.

First, and let's recap here: WordPress is a simple blogging tool. Yes, it's been morphed and cajoled over time to do practically everything imaginable for a website, but as I've emphatically proclaimed in this piece, that's not its purpose in theory or real code. Many tools are taken beyond their intended purpose—hell, one of the top income-generating specialties in my professional career has been application mockup in Excel—but in those cases, the tool can well enough handle the task by having the correct structures in place for other reasons, or eventually growing in scope (with further development) to include the user-invented use case.

While Automattic signaled years ago that they wanted WordPress to become the "operating system" of the web, they haven't put in the development work to adopt even the most commonly extended use cases of WordPress. The internal architecture is still poor, the code is still hard coded for posts only, and for marketers... even simple requirements like meta-tags aren't accessible without a third-party plugin. I just can't take a marketer seriously if their entire exposure to site management, SEO, advertising, social integrations, newsletters etc. all centers around the rather make-shift WordPress ecosystem. They're getting derivative tools provided for them as participants in a common ecosystem, but without the full knowledge of what's happening, including best practices, in the vast majority of the discipline.

Why trash WordPress?

Trashing WordPress isn't my intent. My intent is to clearly assert that in many use cases that WordPress is considered a reasonable platform, the opposite is true. This over-exuberance is certainly good for WordPress and Automattic, and they've seemed to embrace it, but only in a half-assed manner. The question is: why haven't they graciously accepted that gift in the form of coding effort instead of merely in words? Why not in active development for extensibility, for proper data schemas, for updated core libraries?

WordPress agencies promote about their deep understanding of WordPress, and how to develop for it. They tout it as a turnkey solve-all for clients. In reality, it's not. The agency is puffing up a third-party tool to erase their own weakness... that they only know how to do one thing, how to work with one tool. The reality that I wish their clients, and other agencies, would see is that they're essentially using Duplo blocks to try to build a Technic set. While Duplo is fun, it's for building a certain thing at a certain level, and you need to move to another type of Lego set to go outside of that scope. One can certainly use WordPress to build a facsimile of a web stack, just as I can use Excel to build app mockups, but the mockup or facsimile will never be as small, fast, lean, clean, or mean. Your conversions, bounce rate, following, and all other relevant metrics will suffer in one way or another. Ultimately, they'll prevent you from optimizing revenue, and therefore your return on investment will be less than potential.

Use WordPress if you like it, certainly. To run a blog. As a part of your larger web stack.

Counterintuitive? Maybe. But it will work.

Deplatforming is exactly what it sounds like: removing your brand from social media platforms. Not all of them, but more than you might otherwise suspect. It can take nerves of steel to walk into a meeting with your operations, finance, and technology counterparts and tell them you want to remove the brand from some positive-ROI platforms, but the result can be an astounding net positive.

By removing your brand from platforms where you are experiencing a negative ROI, mere breakeven, or even a minimally positive ROI, you can spend more resources on the highest ROI platforms. In addition to the gains from focusing only on your historically best platforms, costs will be reduced by streamlining the social marketing process. Instead of trying to appeal to inconsistent algorithm results across half a dozen platforms, consider going all-in on just one or two platforms, and reducing the complexity of your strategies to only focus on the surefire hits.

Your targets are inevitably active on multiple networks.

Of course, there was a reason we used to be “all over the place,” and that was because our targets were there… and over there… and also way over there! So, we willingly accepted the lower ROI strategies and platforms and fought against even the most hostile algorithms for the sake of awareness. Remember, however, that we judge the success of a social network by market penetration and not by market share.  Why?  Because platforms are not mutually exclusive, and your targets are almost inevitably active on multiple networks.  Yes, there will be exceptions, but as I tell my undergrad marketing students, “We don’t worry about the exceptions.”

Your target doesn't need to be reached everywhere they are.

When you’re laying out your plans for the upcoming year, quarter, month, or even week, consider what it would look like to initially reduce focus on anything but your most stellar social strategies, and only on one or two networks. How would doing so shift your time, labor, skill, production, and other operational needs? Use the results of this to begin making the case to deplatform and go all-in with a more focused approach, knowing that your target doesn’t need to be reached everywhere they are, and they’re bound to be in multiple places… so pick just one or two, deactivate the rest, and go for it!

The release of that album feels like an eternity ago.

Since then, I moved into online training development, then into crypto, then refreshed an entire portion of the degree program I teach in at university.  The COVID-19 pandemic came and went, along with a recession, and several market bubbles.  Six years ago might as well be sixteen years ago.

But while I was in crypto, I created a podcast to keep up with my most utilized blockchain.  I got to know the major players: developers, executives, network partners, major investors, and more.  It, despite being partly defined as a marketing professional, was my only personal YouTube channel to ever be monetized successfully.

As crypto went into its next dark age starting in late 2021 and interest in public blockchains waned in favor of artificial intelligence, I knew it was time to move on.  My successful social channel was drying up and dead in the water.  For several years, I’d formed plans to evolve it into an entire content network catering to digital natives.  And now, that’s happening.

The TZO Network is, proudly, a going concern again. 

And its first intellectual property, TZO Soundscapes, is a music-oriented venture to provide people with the sound environments they need, want, and crave as they go throughout their day and from experience to experience.  From upbeat and energizing music to keep the workday flowing, to white noise for rest, meditation, and sleep, TZO Soundscapes is building a catalog of mood-driven audio (and video).  Maybe it will even take on a tech component one day and help seed adaptive music generation based on real-time biometric observation.

For now, the first album is a holiday-themed album of background noise.  The focus is on Halloween and the heavy-hitting hard rock and industrial rock instrumental tracks comprise an album titled “The Evil Carnival”.  It’s available on YouTube Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, and more.

One day, I may get around to creating another album under the Onjin Projekt moniker, but for now, my attention is on TZO Soundscapes and building a large library of environmental, background, and ambient sounds to offer people the best collection of mood-driven soundscapes.

So much for “Card payments only, no cash accepted.”  Some businesses had to shut down.

A former student and occasional freelancer, Sixto, reached out to me and let me know that the casino he works for as an I.T. Service Tech was down for several hours and operations from gaming to culinary and even hotel support services were all interrupted.

Not much is going to change.

The company responsible, CrowdStrike, only saw their stock fall 11% after the attack, and weekend trading is holding steady.  They’ll recover.

Most people who are uninvolved in technology professionally think that Microsoft was the problem's source because CrowdStrike’s errant code only impacted Microsoft Windows devices and not macOS or Linux.

More than half the Fortune 500 use CrowdStrike's services on their Windows-powered devices.

But this post isn’t even about this software event as it won’t matter to you, the reader, well after the event has taken place.  In a world where the event itself will barely be remembered in a few weeks, I’d like to point out for my mental health (and yours, of course) how blissfully ignorant I was of the situation.  And how great I feel about it.

I was on vacation when this happened. One of those good "working" vacations, too.  Nobody expected me to be anywhere, and I had minimal tasks to complete, so I went “on call” and enjoyed some beach time in my own proverbial backyard.  It wasn’t until Sixto reached out that I knew anything had transpired.  The whole thing was somewhat disorienting, because I was out of the loop, yet it was simultaneously blissful.

During my vacation, I noticed how unhappy I was checking what little social media I still engaged with.  A bit of anonymous Reddit posting had kept me happy after being intentionally self-doxxed for almost my entire 25-plus year history on the web dating back to the mid-1990s. Between Reddit, Twitter (now X), and a little Facebook creeping back in, I felt pretty lousy any time I’d find myself opening those apps on my phone and doom scrolling.  Not to mention Instagram and YouTube Shorts sending me down spirals and rabbit holes of pointless video viewing for hours at a time.

It is personal this time, not professional.

As a marketing professor and mid-career businessperson who has historically been deeply involved with social media, it feels a little odd to hear my inner dialog switch to that of someone thinking about turning it all off.  A temporary luddite if you will.  But, I don’t plan on walking away from social media professionally, just personally.  Only for the sake of amplifying my voice via actions and outcomes rather than in the arena of popular anonymous opinion, which I’m bound to lose as I’m not nearly as subconsciously depraved or psychologically repressed as many of my socially-successful fellow human beings. I also don’t care for the populist and regressive drivel from self-appointed edgelords that counts as interesting content these days. Shutting it off might be a relief.  Especially since I don't crave anonymity as others seem to... I'm okay being known, and being authentically me.

I could write more of these blog posts and improve my writing, which has certainly declined in quality and effectiveness over the years.  I could work on the endless amounts of content I’ve been wanting to create since before YouTube or any other social content creation even existed (over 20 years ago).  I could build the elements of the world I want to see and not have to keep up with how many people liked my last post or if I converted anyone to my way of thinking.

The only way, beyond mass indoctrination, to win the hearts and minds of humanity on a vision for a greater tomorrow is through action.  Through being a living example that spreads a new understanding and approach into the world via others.  And I can’t do that—I can’t be that—if I’m playing a losing game of keeping my popularity up against the con men who will say anything to complete their next grift, the youth who will sell their minds and bodies to the algorithm for approval, and the organized disinformation and psyops brigades all serving their gross agendas.

Vision above pleas for attention.

Disconnecting from the hive doesn’t have to be a luddite move after all.  The disconnection isn't complete and absolute, and it isn’t merely about disconnecting from addictive content or toxic anonymous “communities”.  It’s about the larger vision.  As stated in other posts, I’ve been reducing my number of possessions, but increasing their quality… nicer work equipment, sleeker power tools for home, a nicer car packed with features, but all of these things now constitute the virtual entirety of my possessions. This has helped me build my world and take control of my own environment.

Taking control of one's environment isn't only about possessions, it's also about the content you consume.  I have curated my video streaming services so that I watch what I want—educational lectures and documentaries in case you’re curious—and less of what others recommend or want me to watch for proverbial water-cooler talk.  I subscribe not only to an on-demand music streaming service like everyone else these days, but also streaming radio services that specialize in music that I feel improves my performance, happiness, and well-being.  Can I point out that I’ve even started creating my own streaming radio stations through the TZO Network? I’ve been running ambient, classical, and lo-fi stations for several months now… even though I’m the only listener at present, and that's okay.

For you, these things may not work.  Maybe you need heavy metal music, action-packed movies, and violent video games to feel whole.  Or maybe it’s country music, sports, and lake fishing that make you complete. 

Whatever it is, we’re heading into a world where we must set our own course based on our own vision.  We need to build our own environments without isolating or retrenching into echo chambers.  This is a new task of society, and one that I’m willing to take on first before any of my peers or colleagues.  To succeed in building your own individualized world without removing yourself completely from the larger shared society is a challenge that upcoming generations will first struggle through, and then later master for the benefit of those who will follow them.

My future awaits, excuse me while I build it.

All it takes is disconnecting for good in both senses of the phrase. Disconnecting can mean a more-than-temporary reprieve so that time is freed up and the well-known negatives of social media are avoided. But it can also imply the positive outcomes that can be achieved—for self, family, and society—by directing energy spent on ego-fueled impersonal actions into a healthier pursuit of living new experiences, creating deeper connections, and even creating things (or content) of value and utility for oneself or for others.

Not everyone needs to disconnect in this way. Social media should still thrive and be a place for people to relax, unwind, communicate, and do all the other things it enables, including mindless consumption. But for some of us, we just don't gain any fulfillment or recharge from that. Our role in social media is to inject mindfulness as a demonstration of the outcomes we want to see in the world. That's the direction I'll be going, and I hope that my work can reach others doing the same and help us build meaningful and mutually beneficial connections.

# # #

Empty Spaces 

The drive to “Death Clean” while having no intent on dying anytime soon came from an interest in minimalism and its ability to influence the mind.  Whereas nature can calm and even heal, the straight lines and unnatural landscapes of humanity can improve thought, mood, capability, and even impact affluence.  Admittedly, clean human design is more a result of wealth than an outcome of it, but the street does run in both directions, albeit with a disparate number of lanes in each direction. 

Only recently have I cleared enough possessions to create empty space.  Having open space in dresser drawers, closets, and the like is a new experience.  The feeling was sublime, but spoiled by my first follow-up thought, “Now I’ll have a place to put new stuff!” 

That is not to say it was easy. I struggled to significantly pare down my library of books.  As an information enthusiast the struggle was not foreign to me, but rather exasperating due to frequency of recurrence.  I tried everything to stay focused and committed to paring down my library, taking frequent mental breaks to recharge. That's when I realized I was lying to myself.  This was not about protecting information or even sentimentality towards my books. It was a hoarding instinct to address the fear, “What if I never come across this information again?” 

Our Grandparents were Depression Kids 

Everyone does this to some degree and with something or another. For me it's books and small mementos. For some, the excess collection of stuff may manifest in collection vast quantities of franchise memorabilia (like action figures, prop replicas, etc.), for others, a drive towards having excessive possessions manifests as an excessively decorated house full of country comforts.   

We all exhibit hoarding behaviors, even if we are not actual hoarders. But why? 

I remember my grandmother and her depression-era peers. Whatever item was needed at any moment, they seemed to have… and often a spare.  Extra foil in the cupboard, extra tape in the desk, and a pantry (cleanly) stocked of dry goods and non-perishable items. Let us not forget the one easily found peppermint, butterscotch, or cinnamon hard candy found—upon demand—in a purse or pocket.   The generations that lived through the Great Depression of the 20th century preached and practiced the importance of being prepared, self-sufficient, and intolerant of waste.  

In a changing world that saw ever-increasing abundance, they accumulated things and we—their children and grandchildren—clung readily to their gospel of materialism.  Sure, we lost most of our self-sufficiency. The logistics of abundance required such a sacrifice. We subsequent generations compensated with even more preparation and storage.  

What the Great Depression generations viewed as being extremely well prepared with a fully stock home, we viewed as a normal healthy environment. We became convinced that houses would always get bigger, and we’d always need more stuff to fill those larger houses. Modernity would demand it! We viewed their abundance as our baseline. 

We Instinctively Push Towards Hoarding 

Current generations look back and wonder how they, the Great Depression generations, got by with so little.  Even in our modern electronic world with promises of digitizing the analog into a microscopic ether, the shift to less physical stuff seems to be curtailed.  We became accustomed to having more. More vinyl records, VHS cassettes, game cartridges, and CDs.  More clothes, and more closet space to hold them. More food in our larger pantries leading to more spacious cars for ourselves that now require more space due to more stored calories. We achieved more in every way imaginable, for good and bad, by standing on their shoulders. 

It is ironic that in the past a household could contain one dinner plate and two pairs of pants for each person. Now, because we need more of these and other goods, our quality of life suffers. We often have multiple collections of place settings and dishware, yet we often do not wash our dishes every day, leading to a full, dirty, and smelly sink. Yet we’ve accumulated more clothing, like jeans, and insist that everything is washed after each wear, with or without considering necessity. Therefore, our laundry baskets overflow and press our schedule despite the century-old conveniences of the electric washer and dryer. 

We got more simply for the sake of more. We listened to their warnings of preparedness, but in our short-sightedness, we compared our own quantity of possessions to what they had at their peak.  We looked at the plenty that resulted in a social and technological recovery from two world wars and a depression sandwiched directly in-between.  

Hoarding Has Been Normalized 

In addition to my library, I also purged and organized my personal hygiene possessions in my bathroom.  Get this: I owned almost 20 bars of soap, completely unused and unopened.  Some of the soap has been stored for 15 years, while some is less than a year old. A valid question would be why I added more to the collection without using or freeing myself of the existing collection. 

And this problem repeats itself in every aspect of private property: my pantry is an unorganized mess with out-of-date goods mixed with new fresh goods; my toolbox is blocked by storage totes filled with tools that simply need to be returned to the toolbox they’re blocking; my computer is an over-spec'd beast that’s too complex to maintain easily and reduces my return on investment. Did I mention I recently got a shed and it is quite literally filled with nothing but items that are intended for disposal? 

You can still look around in 2024 and see ample examples of hoarding from the COVID pandemic era in 2020. Maybe you have an irrational quantity of paper plates in the pantry, or your friend has a long-empty fishtank collecting dust in the garage… just in case. 

Hoarding has been normalized, and not just because of the hoarding craze fueled by political instability, global pandemics, and supply shortages of the 2020s. This problem reaches back all the way to the 1950s in a post-WWII world of plenty.

How to Address the Problem 

I will not leave you with mere awareness of this problem.  Instead, I will part with this bit of information: knowing your actual use of an item is the key to determining what you need (and how much) and what you do not need.  Find the items that are causing clutter, out of place, or present in too high a quantity, and then determine how much of that thing you need or want. 

While counting both the nearly 20 bars of soap addressed earlier and the almost equal amount of liquid soap bottles I have not yet mentioned, I quickly calculated that I would not need to buy any new soap for three-to-five years, give or take. This tells me I can either make space available to have that much on hand, or that I will have to pare down the quantity of this possession. As someone who obviously likes buying new soaps, I pared them down to a supply of less than one year. 

But wait! What if there were a need to stockpile years' worth of soap, or emergency rations, or clothes, or any other possession?  Sadly, if I need that much soap, chances are something is majorly wrong with the world, and we are screwed.  And the practicality of storing that much of everything to prevent a “we’re screwed” scenario is unlikely, despite some hoarders and doomsday preppers trying their best.   

It is not that we should eschew preparing. Afterall, someone must think about the worst-case scenarios and plan accordingly, but that’s not me with soap, or you with 200 collectible stuffed animals, or our mutual neighbor with eight different coolers in his garage. 

If you are worried about nuclear fallout, build a bunker and stock it with a decade or two of food.  That is fine, and let me be unavoidably blunt here, most of us would die in the event of nuclear war, maybe even the bunker owners caught unaware.  But do not fill all your kitchen cabinets with years' worth of MREs or stash ugly boxes of survivalist gear throughout your home. That is just as unsightly and concerning as the behavior of actual hoarders.  Be reasonable, think of your needs and wants, and do not deceive yourself. Keeping 16 boxes of shop towels handy is not going to save your home in a flood, and saving every trinket ever given to you does not show how much you care. 

Time to Act 

I hope this post has freed you to let things go and keep only what brings maximum utility, value, and happiness. Donate old books and clothes, scan your documents into the cloud, empty the stored boxes of junk from your attic, and be mindful of your needs. Oh, and let me know if you have any good soap recommendations. I am partial to peppermint. 

For years, I've had difficulty with platform selections for most of my core mission-critical tasks in business. I've belabored website builders, financial software, design software, digital document tools... you name it.

I recently posted that I was finishing a current platform stack to be used on an indefinite basis. It felt great and I made major progress. But after having to walk away to address a teaching project, I found myself coming back to my platform stack very unhappy with several of the decisions I had made. Not because I made the wrong decision on paper, it's because the on paper possibilities weren't materializing in the real world.

For instance, here at ChaseRaz.com, I was moving from Ghost to WordPress to avoid the large upfront cost related to hiring a theme developer. After spending just a few days back in WordPressland the theming complexities were much worse and just as expensive. I had been under the assumption that WordPress solved those age-old issues from the 00s, but I was incorrect in my understanding. By some of my estimates, the cost to go from "good enough" included themes to building a custom design for myself resulted in 5-10x the cost... on a recurring subscription basis that would never end! That's a large gap for a small branding improvement on one person's website. And the tooling WordPress promotes to offer membership features comparable to Ghost... it's just a complex spaghetti-like pile of the same tools that caused me to leave WordPress years ago. I fell for the newer and fancier landing page.

As an aside: I know WordPress is a major net positive for the web, and many people do very well with it. But that doesn't change the realities that I'm describing. It's not a tool for everything, not even when focused on its core origin story: blogging.

One of the best options on Ghost, or Wordpress, may have been to contract a theme designer and hand the project to them. Sure, there would have been a large upfront expense, and I'll probably do this in the future, but the resulting theme asset could have been used for years without additional licensing or royalty, as I'd own it. But even this seemed more in line with what I might do for a business venture rather than my own site. In a final effort to save my Return-to-WordPress blunder, I started trying themes available to me via my Envanto subscription. I should have started there... but it's too late. I'm once again disgusted by that spaghetti mess of tooling described before in what must be the third or fourth time since 2004.

No, it's not just me, and it's not just about a website. I talk to many business professionals and business owners who struggle with the same thing. They're in education, accounting, consulting, manufacturing, construction, and even public service... there are some good tools out there, but the vast majority seem to be mediocre at best, even in our modern age of code and no-code both being ubiquitous.

About half of the tools in the stack I've implemented are having some difficulty keeping up or doing the job they were selected to perform. Or, I've learned that the problem is me in some cases, and I simply can't commit the time, money, or other resources necessary to maintain the solution.

Better alternatives must be found in these situations. To guide myself in this time of correcting my naïvely selected platform stack, I'm relying on simplicity and minimalism. Simplicity leads me to evaluate the most basic tool that can get the job done. If I can mockup a business application in Excel, then I use Excel and shun the modern trend of a SaaS for everything, and three more just to connect them all! Minimalism leads me to look at what gets the job done in the cleanest way, a search for nothingness. Bells and whistles are nice but turning them off and focusing on the core purpose of the action being taken is often nicer.

I have hope for the future that software and computing continue to be more user friendly, especially with the rise of AI. I look forward to one day being able to simply instruct the computer on what I want to make happen and allowing it to work its magic. That would create amazing jobs in technology developing and maintaining those technologies, but also ease the burden that many businesses feel around the concept of business applications to support operations that don't have to eat the technology department's resources.

One day, we'll get there. For now, I'm making a pitstop and running ChaseRaz.com on BlogHunch. I'm an early LTD investor in this tool, and very much impressed with how they were quickly able to build such a quality blogging and digital commerce product. They're not for everyone yet, and the team just disappeared for a quarter of a year for whatever reason... but the site still runs and at no additional cost to me at this time. Consider this an indefinite respite until a new direction can be charted by situation or business imperative.

# # #

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPVsfzZgX3A

I guess that I should first say how nice it is to be blogging on the all-new ChaseRaz.com.  Sure, I’ve owned this domain for an amazingly long time, and the site has even been active in the past, but not like it is now.  You see, I’m a bit of a perfectionist.   While that might be a good thing if I had a middle-management disposition or were an artist, it’s rather distracting to me because of my way of thinking which leans towards a hybrid of creativity and efficiency.  The trouble is, with that combination, almost nothing that I create becomes efficient and almost nothing that I’ve historically done efficiently is creative.

My websites and businesses often languish in a no-man’s-land of development hell.  I’ve even gained quite the reputation for being the “big idea guy” who never brings any of it to fruition.  Of course, I do have my successes that others conveniently forget about, but I understand their point.  It does seem as if I’m always on to the next big idea before the previous one has any legs to stand on.

Not only is perfectionism the culprit, but also the abundant motivation that comes from being an otherwise highly innovative business person.  Ideas fuel me like oxygen fuels a fire.  It is very likely that you can relate to the scenario I paint all too well, right?

So, what are some of the tools that I’ll use in order to overcome this development hell in my projects and move forward?  Well, workaholism doesn’t necessarily hurt, but it does exacerbate the work-life imbalance.  Instead of becoming a hermit that lives in the office, I’ll resort to two tried and true techniques (with some bonus selections for good measure).

Minimum Viable Product.  First, I’ll focus on the MVP, or Minimum Viable Product.  This concept, which comes from product and software development strives to create the base-level product to put in front of customers to provide the absolute minimum level of functionality.  While viewed as “incomplete” by 20th century standards, the 21st century business person understands that the functionality is perfectly in place.  Admittedly, however, we’d also acknowledge that more “fully functional” elements should be included into the product in the future.  Paradigm shift?  Excuse?  Well, the MVP may be neither or both, but it doesn’t matter.

This blog and my YouTube channel are my own personal case study into the MVP concept.  Instead of building some blogging system from the ground up (which I already have for my business technology podcast, Multinewmedia), I simply utilized the corporate training I provided in my corporate training venture (A.B. Gamma, in case you’re curious) to spin up a quick WordPress instance on a VPN.

Pomodoro Technique.  First introduced to me by a productivity YouTuber, Francesco D’Alessio of the Keep Productive channel, I experimented with this time management technique in 2017.  The concept is pretty simple: you work completely uninterrupted in a short burst of productivity and then take a short break.  Rinse, wash, and repeat is the name of the game.  After a few “Pomodoro” cycles, you take an extended break, and then come back fresh to start the cycle all over again.

Exercise and Sleep (Bonus Selections).  These go without stating, normally, but as a quick reminder, I’d like to stress the importance of a proper night’s worth of rest, aerobic and anaerobic exercise, as well as proper nutrition.  I suggest high fat, low carb (HCLF), but your results may vary and diet is something that you must fine-tune on an individual basis.

Having set up arrangements for Multinewmedia.com to have sponsors that include Amazon, GreenGeeks, BestBuy, and others, I can tell you first hand that none of them were actual sponsorships.  They were all affiliate programs with explicit approval to use the word “sponsor”.  Even when some of these companies use the term sponsorship, they still are running affiliate programs at the end of the day and not offering any of the value-add that a true sponsor would bring: money, equipment, ideas, content, etc.

For this reason, and the amazing success of A.B. Gamma (my newest venture) in its first three months of testing, I’ve decided to be my own sponsor for Multinewmedia.  Yes, A.B. Gamma is now the official sponsor for Multinewmedia.  The relationship is fairly limited, but it already builds a better and more lucrative relationship that any that I built with the aforementioned “sponsorship” programs.  A.B. Gamma can offer Multinewmedia content ideas, short training videos, and discounts for listeners and readers.  Multinewmedia, in turn, can provide increased visibility, conversions, and a testing ground for uncertain concepts.

If you’re running a podcast or a blog and are currently tied into affiliate-style sponsorships that aren’t converting or generating any interest whatsoever, try looking for smaller organizations to truly partner with.  If a sponsorship isn’t right for either of you just yet, then try some basic collaboration or co-branding of a new product or service extension.  Find where true value lives in two-way relationships rather than peddling advertisements in a one-directional push for the same old sponsors.  Your audience will thank you for not making them hear about Audible, GoDaddy, or SquareSpace for the 10,000th time in a day.

For me, my balance requires a lot of time spent energizing my body, relaxing my mind, and appeasing my curiosity.  Yeah, that means that I must–and I mean must–spend copious amounts of time exercising, resting, and following whatever neat interest-of-the-moment that I may have in order to be productive.  Potential employers beware?  No.  Mainly for two reasons: first, I’m already happily and gainfully employed; second, not to brag or anything, but I’m likely more productive than 90% of the people you work with.  In fact, there’s really nothing special about me that makes me so productive beyond allowing myself the indulgence to be human and not fight our shared natural instincts.  Again, in case you’re missing the full-circle loop: exercise, rest, and intrigue (or adventure, or curiosity, or wonder, etc.).

So, what’s my point?

I don’t have my house in order today.  Instead of happily heading off to work remotely, I’m waiting on a pair of pants to finish in the dryer before I can exit my front door.  Of course, if my trip had been important, I’d have been all over this issue at least a day ahead, but since I wasn’t I now have plenty of time to sit down and write this silly little post.

You want to accomplish something.  Whatever it is, you’re going to have to make an investment.  You’ll either be investing a lot of time, a lot of money, or a little of both.  In this article, I’ll illustrate this concept by discussing modern options for having graphic design work completed for business use.

Let’s pretend that what you want to accomplish is to have graphic design work completed for your business.  You need a logo, some brochures, business cards, social media post images, social media headers, and numerous other pieces of creative that relate to your field of business.  How do you go about accomplishing this task?  Well, how do you go about investing any task?  You invest time, money, or both.  This topic brings up a really interesting point about how money not only represents current and future resource allocation, but also time.  Sadly, to stay on topic, that interesting point will have to wait until a later date to be discussed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL88oQVMcrM

Investing Time

Your first option to achieve your businesses graphic design goals is to spend a lot of time learning the tools of the trade for graphic design.  Learn about color, shape, visual effects, and maybe even photography.  Now, we’re not trying to make a full career out of this task, so we’ll say that it should suffice to learn the industry-leading software for working with such concepts.  In this scenario, we’ll likely select Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, both from the Adobe Creative Cloud suite of tools.

How long does it take to learn Photoshop or Illustrator?  Well, you can take a brief class at a university or online and be fairly proficient in basic image creation or photo manipulation within a matter of days or weeks.  But will you have the eye for design?  Whether your answer is “yes” or “no”, we’re right back to the need to study shape, color, and so on.

Often, we feel the need as human beings to invest a lot of time into the mastery of things we’ll never master.  My corporate trainings prove this to me time after time.  I frequently get students in my Excel trainings who don’t use Excel professionally, have nobody (and no thing) pushing them towards learning or using it, but they’ve been exposed to it and simply feel that they should know the tool.  I don’t disagree, and I’m glad they’ve decided to take my course, but I am always a little shocked at the number of these people who also seem to have no intention on actually using Excel after the course unless some external force comes up with a reason.  If you know about a tool, feel you should learn it, but have no external reason, shouldn’t you create an internal reason?  One would think.  I imagine the problem is just as relevant, if not moreso, in the world of Photoshop.

Investing Money

What if you can’t, or don’t want to, invest the time to master the skill?  We used to say that this is where you invest money and have someone else do the work for you and your business.  This, however, isn’t technically true anymore as you’ll see in my next option of investing both time and money.  For now, I’ll maintain a hard line that investing money means still doing the work yourself (or within your existing team).

Consider Canva as an alternative to Photoshop.  You can technically use Canva for free, but we’ll also assume that you’re going to want to use the paid features in a business pursuit to have more design control over stock images, fonts, and whatnot.  So go to Canva, or a similar tool, and pay some money for credits or a monthly subscriptions, and you’re not getting to design, per se, but rather you’re getting pre-made design-as-a-service that you can manipulate to your own liking.  Some entity out in the world pieces together dozens, hundreds, or thousands of things that you’re likely to want and then provides them to you in a way that the design work is already done, but you can personalize and modify any element you want.

It should be acknowledged that investing money has a time committment, albeit the relationship is highly skewed.  The same is true for a time investement and its relationship to money.  Examples are; you have to take time to select and insert stock images that you buy (investing money); and, you have to pay to take classes to learn to use industry-leading tools (invest time).

Investing Both

When you take the traditional old-school approach to not investing time, you’re really simply reducing your time investment and increasing your money investment to where they’re nearly on part with one another.  This is accomplished by skewing how you spend your time rather than by directly reducing the amount of time (although that’s possible).  Instead of spending time creating the result that you’re looking for, you instead manage a person, company, or even an automated process with your time.  You subsequently pay that person or company and they use their invested time and monies to reach economies of scale for you to deliver the goods.  You invest your time and money in management and operations, and they produce the final product in a way that saves you either time or money, depending on which you’re optimizing for within your business.  Employees, contractors, outsourcing to other companies… all of these fit the bill.

Now it’s your turn!

So which works for you?  Think about a project you’re trying to complete right now and contemplate what deliverables are required to reach completion.  Do you believe it best to invest time, to invest money, or to invest both in a slightly different manner to allow external resources to get you to project completion?  All three options are valid, but they should be deployed in difference situations when the circumstances are right.  Being able to quickly select which method to utilize in order to complete projects and move work forward can be the difference between spinning your wheels to no avail and earning a return on a successfully completed task.

Let me know in the blog comments below or the YouTube Comments on the video above, and let’s start a conversation.

As a small business owner, increasing prices is really tough to do.  Reaching out to existing customers about rate increases is sometimes more painful than being on the other side of that equation.  Yes, you read that right: it’s often more uncomfortable to raise your own rates than to be subjected to a rate increase.  At least that gives us hope that our clients may take the increase with a poised sensibility.

If you need to raise your rates, and can justify the need internally, then do it.  Sure, your customers will balk, and you may even lose a few accounts, but it’d be better to quickly scramble now than to be slowly squeezed to bankruptcy over time.  Your clients may resort to utilizing a greatest hits of theatrical tactics to beg for–or demand–an enforcement of the status quo, but would you respect them if they didn’t try anything necessary to preserve their own capital?

Everyone knows that the cost of anything will, unless commoditized, continue to increase over time.   You have a choice to make when increases become necessary: commoditize your offerings to sell on margin, or raise your rates.

The trouble of raising rates is on my mind because I share this very necessity.  My corporate training rate was dictated by an external party almost a decade ago, and nothing has changed since.  The client that dictated was, and is, a non-profit entity in the education industry.  That made rates extremely low to begin with, but since the client represented a bulk of my work, their rates were used to calculate all of my other training rates.  On a whim, I sat down with a calculator and compared my corporate training daily rates to my “regular” earnings from my full-time job.  The results were astounding and jaw dropping!  I was netting less in a day of corporate training than in a day of regular employment.  Did you go into business to make less than your day job?  I didn’t either.

I’m not trying to make any announcements, but this is the first that I’ve publicly stated anything to this effect, but… my rates for certain services are rising immediately (actually after a one-month notice, I’m not a monster, after all).

Will this be painful for me and my clients?   Yes.   It is scary.  Some of my clients may kick and scream.  Others may outright refuse.  Still, others will understand and simply approve the change without question.   Still, there isn’t much to debate or consider in this situation.  All calculations indicate that the rate needs to be increase, and it will be better for my small business to have to struggle a bit now with backlash than to continue to operate at a pace that will slowly bankrupt the business and drive my stress levels so high that my earning potential is cut off due to stress related illness or death.

Now, for those of you dragging your feed on those long past due rate increase, I understand why.  Many of us start as the undercutting champions of our industries.  It hurts to grow up and not be able to undercut, but as just described, this can be a literal life and death matter for you (stress) and your business (bankruptcy).

Why have I gone almost an entire month without posting? Well, I’ve been taking my time evaluating existing projects and planning for new projects to replace those that are under performing. As a part of that, I decided that it was time for a bit of a technology update, specifically a mobile update.

No, I didn’t go out and buy some expensive phone, instead, I bought some tools to help make my existing phone more productive. The first thing I bought was a Raydem portable Bluetooth keyboard. It folds out into an ergonomic keyboard for easy typing into your mobile on the go. You can get your own on Amazon by visiting this like to the portable Bluetooth keyboard.

I like this new keyboard just fine, in fact, I’m using it now to type this post. The key arrangement is much more comfortable on the wrists than other (smaller) portable keyboards, but I still have some adjusting to do as the key position is still a bit different than my Microsoft Sculpt and MacBook Pro keyboards, which are my two primary text input devices. Given that this portable keyboard is just slightly bigger than a phablet, I’d much rather sport this in my pocket rather than lugging around a full size keyboard in my backpack.

In addition to the keyboard, I also picked up a Bluetooth mouse (because I hate TouchPad and every keyboard needs a mouse!) to pair with my Android phone. I have to say, Android isn’t all that bad with a keyboard and mouse. I’m not ready to give up Windows, macOS, or Ubuntu for it just yet, but with floating apps on a larger screen, it just might make sense in the future. The mouse is generic, but it’s slim and matte black. That makes it functional and stylish for travel and use with my phone.

I also got the Rode VideoMic Me and some aftermarket clip-on cellphone camera lenses, but I’m sure I’ll talk about all of those cool toys in the future.  So the big question remains: why all of these mobile tools? Recently, I’d been flirting with the idea of an 8″ tablet, an ultrabook, or even repurposing an old phablet. My mission would be to create a portable media capture and creation device. Doing so would enable me to forget the want of any of the aforementioned devices, and also stave off my latent desire to get a pricey DSLR camera. $100 in cell phone accessories which can be repurposed to any other phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop (okay, or even a smart TV or gaming console) made more sense to me than sinking $1,000 or more into a new device and camera.

Part of the plan is to eliminate the middle-tier form factors and rely exclusively, for now, on a powerful custom built workstation desktop and a very inexpensive mid-range Android phone. If I’m able to create audio and video content, edit, publish, and promote using each of these devices, I can save my business thousands of dollars by pushing off the need for additional form factor.

The largest drawback? I love the keyboard and mouse setup with my phone, but staring–at a distance–toward the tiny text on my average-sized phone is quite the eye-strain generator. I’ll experiment with increasing the font size on my phone while propping it up at some distance, but for now, I’ll just lean in and squint.

Recently, I took the Gallup StrengthsFinder assessment for the second time.  I first experienced StrengthsFinder in 2015 as a student of a leadership development program at work.  Now in 2018 I’ve taken the test again, this time to serve as a mentor for the aforementioned leadership program.  The results?  Well, at least I’m consistent.

My top five talents in order are: Strategy, Significance, Futuristic, Command, and Ideation.  At least this is the 2018 set.  This isn’t much of a deviation from 2015, however, which were: Strategic, Intellection, Futuristic, Ideation, Action.  Although, I may have placed the last of those three in a slightly confused order.

Now, none of this means anything or matters to you.  What will resonate with you is that you’re reading the blog of a business person with a particularly strange lineup of talents (StrengthsFinder is said to measure talents, not actual strengths).  Admittedly, my traits look ideal for business, but the combination of these desirable talents sometimes create really strange side effects.

Most noticeably with me, I alternate between action and significance.  This means I oscillate between the extremes of needing to put things into motion and the need to feel central to the process.  In all honesty, the truth is likely that I fell the need to be in the center of an in-motion process, but depending on my feelings of accomplishment at any moment that I take the StrengthsFinder test, this may manifest in different talents.

Also, for me, Intellection fell out of my Top 5, but I’m not particularly disparaged as it’s still near the top of my talents and its place in the Top 5 was occupied by something that I’ve long sought after, Command.  This seems like a fairly common story for male business people in the western world.  I say that nobody took me seriously until I turned 30 and then a switch flipped in other people without any changes in my own behavior.  Upon relaying this observation to family one day, my mom said that my dad (a small business owner through most of his working years) had the exact same observation in his 30s.

So what do my results have to do with anyone else?

First, take my discussion of these topics as an endorsement of Gallup’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 test.  It won’t solve any of your problems or cure your personal or Professional woes, but it is a tool of understanding that can be deployed along your journey towards self awareness.  Second, I encourage anyone who has, or will, take the StrengthsFinder test to really buy into the whole purpose of the process: to build upon your strengths instead of continually trying to improve your weaknesses.

I fully agree with the creators and curators of  StrengthsFinder that trying to improve your weaknesses is possible, but it is a completely misguided approach to improvement, and one that often leads to really mediocre results in life and possibly a negative ROI in business.

So, go out and find the talents that help identify your strengths.  Then, if you’re ever in need of the classic “thinking” type with Futuristic, Strategic, Ideation, and Intellection talents… well, you know how to reach me.  Meanwhile, if your particular talents align with Action or Woo, then know that I’m looking for you and you should certainly take some action and message me.

It is said that you should never stop learning.  As someone who works in education, both academic and training, I know this to be true.  What surprises me is just how much time really needs to be dedicated to learning in order to make the desired level of progress in professional pursuits.  Now, I’m not here to be negative about this, or to imply that this type of time investment is tedious or unattainable for most, but this observation does lead me to a rather scathing criticism.

The criticism that I have is for our current sense of productivity.  We feel like we must accomplish this and that in any given day.  Doing so means we’re productive, right?  Doing so means we get paid, true?  And, doing so means that our employers will rate us highly on our annual reviews, correct?  Forget the fact that I think annual reviews are a piss-poor evaluation system for workplace performance, and I’m still left with the conclusion that most everything we do professionally is a waste of time.  Activities that could be automated or outsourced to others looking for work, projects that have great optics internally but no KPI impact outside of individual departments, and countless other examples of time wasters abound.

I just gave a continuing education presentation at Full Sail University on how to succeed by doing less and failing more often.  Within that presentation I gave the standard advice to use the Pareto Principle to shift focus away from the 80% of your work that only nets 20% of the results, and to reverse Parkinson’s Law. that work will expand to fill the time allotted, by simply reducing the amount of time given to work.  But what is to be done with the saved time?  My suggestion was to make what I call progressive time investments.

Progressive time investments are projects that aim to achieve as many desirable traits at one time as possible: time savings, earnings boosts, costs reductions, etc.  They take large amounts of time, and this is why saving time on your daily maintenance work is so important.  Much of the time soent on these progressive time investments should be spent learning.  Let’s say that again, much of the time spent on progressive time investments should be spent learning.

If my assertions are to be followed, than that means that one of the most significant work tasks should be to learn new tools, technologies, systems, or ideas in order advance our workflows.  We should be learning what we, nor any of our co-workers, know how to do in order to create a tool or system that automates, re-engineers, or advances the ability to work.

Think about your own week.  Is this how you spend your time?  Or, are you constantly running around trying to check off some utterly bogus to-do list that doesn’t generate any real results beyond convincing your employer or clients to issue your paycheck?  Paychecks are important, yes, but they’re not the reason we’re in business.

I started a ketogenic lifestyle in June 2015.  It’s now July 2018, I’ve been off of keto more than a year—albeit with on-again, off-again starts—and I never really talk about ketogenics online.  Sure, my friends, family, and colleagues know me as a resource for information resource, but I haven’t been “living the dream”.  In fact, I’ve even gone backwards and gained 40 pounds of previously hard-lost weight.

What it boils down to, however, is the mindset.  When I first came off of keto back in 2017, I was already slipping.  My wife and I had our daughter in January 2017, and babies make it hard to maintain any type of weightloss.  Even when I could eat ketogenic meals (which surprisingly, I could), I wasn’t getting enough sleep or couldn’t make it to the gym… or both.  Slowly I inched up.  Ten pounds gained, then twenty and a shirt size.  Pants got tight and I hit 30 pounds up.  By 40 pounds, I knew I had a problem, and that’s where I’ve maintained for the past four or five months.  Maintained… despite multiple attempts to get back at it, maintenance is the best I can do.

Truthfully, I can’t pin this on my daughter.  It really was my own motivation and ambition that got in the way.  Several months after she was born, I got the opportunity to pick up a lot of work.  It wasn’t an amount of work to qualify as the most I’ve ever made in a side hustle, but it was the most this particular client has offered, and certainly in the Top 5 of side hustle rakes.  What did I do?  I took it.  I told myself I’d need three months to complete the work and then everything would be back to normal.  For each month away, I need need at least a week to ease back in.  I planned on three completely uninterrupted weeks of focusing on health, eating, and the gym.  Three months of work offered to turn itself into five for even more reward.  Then another month, then another… and finally, I set out to replace this now routine side income.  That’s right!  I not only converted a temporary cash surplus job into a near expectation, but then I set out to replace it via entrepreneurship.  Yeah, because starting a venture takes no time at all, right?!?

In fairness, starting ventures is what my side hustle is designed to do by the very name of the company: RCR Business Ventures.

So here I am, just finishing up the new website for RCR, which of course has caused me to sit and start at the computer for a week straight.  Before that it was creating the site for the new venture, A.B. Gamma, which was two weeks of staring at the computer without going to the gym.  Before that it was making classes for A.B. Gamma to release on Udemy, Skillshare, and other platforms.  The long and the short of it—because none of these specifics are actually germane to this story—is that there’s always something else to do when you’re an aggressive go-get-‘er Type-A person.

During all of these professional distractions I had my full time job, replacing a roof from last year’s Hurricane Irma, plumbing and appliances to fix, and loads of yard work above and beyond the normal maintenance that had to be taken care of.  I could really bellyache to you all day, it truly has been a perfect storm of being pulled in all directions at work, my business, and in my personal life.

Now, I just wonder how long it will be until I can break away from everything long enough to regain some sense about me and get back into the groove.  If you’ve ever had a ketogenic lifestyle, you know the groove that I mean: keto adaptation.  That moment that you know you’re there and you feel like Superman… ahhhh… why is it so hard to convince myself to become Superman?

I’ve become a bit of an overzealous project completer these days. Likely this is due to the fact that I feel the need to overcome the procrastinations and repeated dead-ends and failures of the past.  No matter what is causing it, I’m really enjoying the raised eyebrows and funny looks that embarking—and achieving—a diverse set of projects brings to my line of sight.

I’m not complaining. as a marketing professor, I have absolutely no business embarking on the strange and diverse array of projects that I’ve selected. At 35 years old and established within the business technology and marketing fields, what do I have any business doing creating my first musical album?  Why should I be spending time with digital canvas and painting tools?  And getting into software to help make video games in a genre in which I’ve never been particularly interested (I think I have a new perspective to add, however)? No, that certainly can’t be for me. But it is!

Now, mind you, I’m not going overboard with these pursuits. I don’t think that I’m going to change entire disciplines or fields and become an artist or drop out of society or something that would be silly given my personality. Instead, I’m trying to reduce my stress, broaden my horizons, and be even more efficient at my core proficiencies. Yes, efficiencies of proficiencies. Who knew that I could make artistic pursuits boring in the long run?

What I’ve found is that I feel like more of a complete person because of these projects, and I sense that I’m better at my job as a result. I feel like the world is both larger and smaller at the same time. I see more opportunity in front of me, and less failure behind me. Or rather, failure is re-imagined as more constructive experiences such as learning.

I really recommend that you, the astute business person, take time to check out.  My version of checking out is not just to go home at night, and not a mere recommendation for vacation. I suggest that you take a serious amount of time to think about various projects you can incorporate into your work week that—while seemingly completely unrelated to your required tasks—actually help you improve your performance where it matters the most.

Suggestions:

• Try artistic pursuits if you burn out from repetition easily
• Try building technical knowledge if you feel underemployed
• Try starting your own venture, project, or team if you feel a lack of influence

Let’s stop thinking of mildly unrelated tasks at work as goofing off.  Instead, let’s create a new understanding that work hobbies are productive and cost effective.

What an interesting experiment I’ve been on recently.  I’ve talked about the need for work hobbies, learning constantly, and project based work, but actually implementing these behaviors as everyday professional life is quite eye-opening.  To jump to what would otherwise be the conclusion, I feel like a more whole and complete person as a result of these practices.

It almost feels as if my life, not just my work, has a new layer of welcomed depth and complexity.

So now that I’ve reached a new sense of accomplishment and satisfaction with this cycle, I’m very much thinking that it’s not enough to simply have a work-life balance, nor is it enough to incorporate some of life (especially play) into work—and we can’t deny that work has crept into other parts of life.  I now think that we need more time doing absolutely nothing.

In the personal realm, this is often suggested by psychologists and health experts as a way to unwind.  “Spend time daydreaming like you did when you were a kid.” they tell us.  We find this encouragement from religion and spirituality as well, and increasingly fitness, where meditation and prayer are highly suggested as forms of reflection and introspection.

My charge is that I now believe we, the workers of the world (from CEO down to Intern) also need paid time on the job to “do nothing”.  Alright, alright, you already know that by do nothing I mean reflect, contemplate, and have moments of introspection.  Try some of the following tactics and tell me that they don’t lead you to some nice productive gains or insights into your job:

• Sit quietly in your cubicle or office, not typing, talking, or writing for a moment.  Observe your surroundings.
• In operations, take any down time (which is normally spent cleaning or organizing) and take a few moments to be aware of your surroundings.  Who, and what, is present?
• And if you can’t safely find time to do either of the above, take a break every time the smokers do and stay near your work zone but somewhat removed.  Simply observe the operations.

I stopped by Walt Disney World on the way home from work today.  The purpose was just to spend some time around the property without being at the parks.  Don’t feel bad for me, I’m taking the family to the parks tomorrow, but I just needed some alone time to walk around other destinations.

My destination ended up being the Boardwalk Resort along with the Swan and Dolphin hotels by Marriott.  Unfortunately, I chose my shoes poorly and ended up calling it quits after those two, which is majorly against my character, but I digress as that’s a personal problem, right?

Oh, by the way… there’s a new hotel extension coming to the Swan and Dolphin.  Keep reading…

I learned that there will be a new hotel addition to compliment the Swan and Dolphin will be built in the super small plot of land that used to be their tennis courts.  This was a rumor last year that was supposedly debunked, but according to a Concierge for the hotel as of August 2018, this is a real project moving forward.

More importantly for me, however, I learned that I really miss an old idea I had back in high school to create an evergreen type of website to showcase various entertainment and nature destinations within the state of Florida.  Apparently my own idea factory is like Disney Imagineering and “no good idea every dies”.

As you may have read previously, I’ve been looking for a project to embark upon that involves the Walt Disney World resort, but haven’t—at least not yet—decided what that project should be.  Today’s trip recitilized my desire to create an evergreen information resource (as opposed to the currently plentiful communities and social media content channels) for Disney vacationers and day-trippers. 

I’m still not 100% sure that I’ve settled on a direction, but at least I know a bit better what I am, and am not, interested in doing.

I’ve been feeling a little bit disregarded and disrespected recently in ways that I won’t address directly.  This experience, however has led me to be quite keen on detecting when others are also being disregarded or disrespected.  I teach, I consult, and I provide corporate training… I get to encounter a lot of businesses in any given month, so I see a lot of dirty secrets in business.  Now, I know that it isn’t considered appropriate to publicly suggest that such things happen within the walls of my generally up-standing clients, partners, and employers, but my first obligation is to my students who need to see the ins-and-outs of all things business.  Today, I bring you some ugly truth in two forms as previously stated: disregard and disrespect.

Let me lay the situation out in company-by-company scenarios for your understanding and potential commiserating.

Company A

Masters of Disregard

For some time, I’ve worked with an organization, Company A, that prides itself on openness, innovation, and for possessing a really disruptive and creative streak.  After spending quite a bit of time getting to know the inner workings of Company A, I’ve come to realize that most of their culture is fabricated and superficial.  It’s a mere story used to consolidate power into a dozen or so sets of hands in an organization of thousands.

The basic motivation is this: tell everyone how open you are and how new ideas are what build careers.  Tell employees that everyone has the autonomy to innovate, but then require that every meaningful initiative come from central management.  This is the ultimate way to tell your employees that they don’t matter… that you disregard the most valuable commodity that they are offering you in exchange for compensation.

“Thanks Jim in Accounting… that idea is now mine, don’t tell anyone I stole it from you, or you’ll be shunned.“

When any innovation has the opportunity to really impact the organization, the quiet and limited hierarchy rears its ugly head as if transformed into a mighty beast.  Managers who are fueled by their own ego and tiny grasp on authority scoop in to re-appropriate initiatives with potential.  

Managers and leaders at Company A see something with potential or momentum and they near-immediately work to shut it down.  Then, after some short period of time, here comes the very same initiative repackaged and treated as all shiny and brand new.  Except this time, the author’s name has been updated to reflect the manager, not the real originator.  The real creator has been disregarded simply so the ego of another person―who already receives more compensation and benefits!―can be stroked.

Company B

Disrespect as a Service

Company B is a bit more straightforward and easy to understand.  They have severely limited budgets due to external forces.  This means they staff highly technical jobs with employees willing to settle for maybe two-thirds of what they could earn by applying similar skills elsewhere. 

Some of these employees are wonderful, competent, hard working people who have made a choice to be with Company B for one reason or another.  Others, well… they’re the weaker players in the industry that have to downgrade to a lower paying job in order to stay within their field.

Inevitably, the weaker players within a company cause a problem that the other more talented and conscientious employees have to solve for.

While this particular scenario can go a nearly infinite number of directions from this point, my most immediate exposure to this type of company has been with an incompetent over-compensator using aggression to hide their (incorrect grammar intentional to hide gender) utter lack of competency.

Moral of the Story

So, what then is the moral of the story?   Our job as business people is to make the connection in people’s minds that we’re all human, and that business isn’t some thing that you compartmentalize out of the rest of your life.  Because, sadly, I could have picked from tens of stories from my past―or present―to serve as parables for disregard and disrespect.   The above two stories were chosen at random from my past.

Too many business people compartmentalize their lives.  They pretend that their family life doesn’t impact their business life, and vice versa.  That’s just utter bullshit.  Sorry, but there’s no way to state that truth any more politely and still have the desired gravity.

This compartmentalization is how we get predatory business practices, sleazy customer service, and price gouging.  It is how we end up with high employee churn rates, low customer approval, and missed opportunities.  

It is the job of any self-respecting business to minimize the use of disregard and disrespect resulting from their operations.  You’d be flabbergasted how much kickback I get for making this assertion, too!  Commonly, the kickback comes in the form of a pithy statement such as, “That isn’t the job of HR or any other department!”  Either way, the it remains quantifiable that there are clear and measurable costs associated with these all-too-common behaviors.

As for any of you who may be subjected to these behaviors in a way that they directly impact you, my advice is to keep doing what you do, don’t take it personally, and set a course into the future responsibly.  If mangers at your company take your ideas repeatedly, look for somewhere else to utilize your skill set.  If you’re belittled or berated, the advice is the same.  Yes, most of us have to work for a living, but the good news is that for every company out there that wants you but still wants to treat you horribly, there are others out there that will treat you like a rock star, so long as you are.

I normally wouldn’t publish anything about the creation of my projects.  Mainly because my project ideation is almost always spontaneous and never meticulously planned like I’m doing for this so-called Disney Project.  Also, because I’m not really a fan of talking about things I’m going to do like I used to be as a kid and even into my early adulthood.  I’d rather just do something and then say, “Oh, by the way, I did such-and-such.”

For those of you joining from my “Business” category, just know that this post talks about a Disney-based content project I’m ideating, so don’t be thrown off when you observe mentions of theme parks and whatnot seemingly at random.

So how do we ideate what our business, project, or venture should be?  The answer isn’t simply found, unfortunately, but the journey can be pretty fun.  Yes, there are dozens or hundreds of worksheets and exercises you can find online or in mastermind groups, but they all pretty much boil down to the same process:  keep thinking and exploring and you’ll eventually build a path forward.  Just, do yourself a favor and kick the all-too-common notion that the path you come up with is fated or destiny. 

This fate feeling is an illusion created by the sense of satisfaction experience when you identify a path forward on an idea.  It’s an intrinsic motivator from what I would guess is a fairly primal source.  This feeling of fate does little in the modern world but cause people to work less on a project yet still feel entitled to more of a result.  

Been there, done that, it was such a waste of time that I don’t even want the t-shirt.

This project is worth me openly pontificating about because my process illustrates how to ideate upon a hunch rather than a solid spark of an idea.  Simply put, “I know there is something here to be done that can provide value, but I don’t know specifically what.  How do I come to the realization of what to do?”

Okay, we know the problem, so what’s my point?

I know that, moving forward, I don’t want to be responsible for talking about everything Disney, but I like the opportunities to be had (community, etc.) within that particular community.  The Disney-filled life of some of the YouTube vloggers and whatnot, however, make me cringe a bit when I think about even trying to become that myself.  I love what they do, I’m happy for them, and I think that their work is awesome fan-filled excellence, but that’s not me.

My interests and likes involving Disney or any given company, brand, or franchise are often particular, and I’m not willing to completely immerse myself in the story of one of these unless it’s mine, or unless I’m getting paid.  Cold?  No, I’m a business professional.  That’s my literal job.  Otherwise, I don’t sacrifice a neutral reality for a branded or themed one, whether that’s to be a “Disney” person or a “Google” or “Coca-Cola” person.   I don’t let brand preferences turn into an entire lifestyle except in small bursts for enjoyment.

What this translates into is that I don’t care to congratulate Disney on every new ride they open or movie they release.   I don’t want to read the news on Disney every single day.  I care more about two key areas: the general experiences that the company creates through theme parks, cruise ships, and travel excursions; and the inner workings of their pseudo-governmental Reedy Creek Improvement District.

So maybe you, my reader, don’t care about Disney one bit.  Maybe you’re a student or a client struggling with business ideation.  Maybe I’ve suggested reading this post as a way to help.  If so, let’s get to it!  What should you take away from all of this musing?

1. Recognize.  Sensing that there is “something there” to be explored is a great first step.  You’re not expected to have any of the answers as soon as you get a hunch on an opportunity.
2. Don’t rush yourself.  We make everything mission critical for some reason, and it shouldn’t be?  Starting a business and need to pay the bills?  Get a job to float you and provide time!  Need to diversify your business operations to achieve growth?  Cool, but let’s look at retooling your existing product or service line first.
3. Explore the opportunities.  Seeing what others are doing can be a strange experience.  For some people it creates a sense of panicked urgency to catch up to the competition, for others it instills an anger that external entities are encroaching upon what you perceive to be your idea.  Whatever your response, get through it and take the time to know the competition, customers, and any other elements of the landscape.  Afterall, you’re part of the landscape, not separate or apart from it.
4. Know your limits… all of them.  These can be technical limits, or just personal preferences.  Am I capable of blogging or vlogging about Disney all day every day?  Technically, yes.  I can write, produce videos, edit, publish… all that jazz!  But there is no way in hell that I would want to spend my entire worklife, even for a short period of time, volunteering to follow and report upon one company.  I don’t care how magical they are like Disney, or how rich like Berkshire Hathaway.  I don’t want to be a beat-reporter.  This is a limit just as much of a limit as not being able to do something.  Don’t force yourself down a path that you don’t like or that doesn’t feel right.  
5. Analyze.  Don’t leave your feelings in charge like I discussed above.  They are the result of your brain’s processing, but they’re attuned to animalistic survival, not towards business operations.  The feeling that I don’t want to be a vlogger comes from my lack of success with my first podcast, Multinewmedia, where the daily grind of operating a 30-episode per year podcast for absolutely no pay wore me out and frustrated me because those along with me on the journey weren’t giving equal effort (I know it’d be hard for them to hear me say that, but it’s very true… and okay!).  If I rely on this feeling-based information alone, I’ll miss what we professional refer to as a “shit tonne” of opportunities.  In my example, YouTube and blogs could be an important part of my project, as long as I honor my preferred limits of not working on those things day-in and day-out, and not working to compete against those who do.

Again, more succinctly:

1. Recognize
2. Take your Time
3. Explore the Landscape
4. Identify Limits
5. Analyze

Okay, so to conclude, I can finally get to the point for those of you reading for updates on my Disney Project more than my business chats:

I’ve decided that I want to deal with mainly static evergreen content.  I like the idea of everything from marketing materials to promotional posters and concept art, but I’m still exploring.  Additionally, after analyzing (deeply!) my lack of desire to be a typical Disney vlogger, I’ve come to the conclusion that my business acumen could help those who do feel like vlogging and blogging consistently on the topic.  I’m now free-form exploring (think: professional daydreaming) the opportunities that could surround that new found understanding.

I’ve discovered, much like with my podcasting, that opportunities exist to alter what it means to perform some action.  So, to be a “Disney vlogger”, would I need to do it full or even part time?  No.  Would I need to be on every week?  No.  At least, not if my business model and audience interaction model can support a less frequent need to be all up in everyone’s face online and constantly schlepping equipment through the theme parks which I’d rather just walk around and enjoy at this particular moment in my life.

For a number of years now, I’ve told myself that I’m going to update my graphics card and move from a two-monitor setup to a three-monitor setup.  Up to this point, I’ve been thwarted by unexpected expenses, indecision on desired specs, and a general laziness surrounding any in-depth work on my custom rig PC.

Unexpected Expenses

I’ve had two monitors since about 2009 or 2010.  I was late to the dual-monitor trend, and proudly so.  In fact, I’ve never truly jumped in.  The only reason I implemented a dual monitor setup was because I had an old 4:3 ratio monitor laying around the garage and thought I’d put it to use.  I kept that sucker in operation well after it was considered old-school to have anything but 16:9 on your desktop.

In 2015, I first said I’d upgrade, but my 2012 Kia Optima SX Turbo gave out—literally gave out as the engine just stopped while traveling 80 miles per hour on the Interstate—and I needed money for a down payment on switching to a more reliable (but much less fun) car.  2016 brought the need to save for the birth of my daughter in early 2017, and 2017 just flew by with work obligations and my business committing to paying off all of its debts, and helping me pay off all of my consumer debts.

Spec Indecision

Despite the financial stalling, I’ve made at least three or four earnest attempts to research options and price the purchase.  Although, that’s hard to do when you’re not exactly sure what you want.  Do I want 21″ monitors or 23″ (exactly how large is my desk?), do I need a good resolution or a great resolution?  What about speakers, webcams, etc?  And oh, the time I’ve wasted determining whether one of the monitors should be touch enabled!

General Laziness

Maybe it’s a combination of the above issues, or maybe I’m just really lazy, but I haven’t been working on my custom rig like I should.  Right now, I look at it, and the front panel is partly popped off from some previous exploit of integrating audio equipment for a project, the RAM is still sitting at 16GB rather than the 32GB that I sat out to include, and my video card is a dinosaur.  A powerful dinosaur—even by today’s standards—but an old, glitchy, doomed for extinction dinosaur none the less. 

Oh yeah, and as a content producer of all types from audio to video and from websites to images, I’m nearly out of storage space on three of my four installed hard drives with a fifth sitting backup ready to be installed.  Although, what I really need is a NAS solution.  I’m thinking about the following types of NAS devices:

• QNAP TS-451+ 4-bay NAS
• Netgear ReadyNAS RN214 4-bay

Coming to a Conclusion

You know when you’re coming close to a decision and you try to cut all of the excuse and justification bullshit?  You simply ask yourself, “If cost weren’t a factor, what would the ideal setup be to support my workflow?”  When I answer that question, my mind takes me to dual upper mid-range graphics cards (like an RX 580 because I’m an AMD guy), with three monitors on an adjustable mount, with the center-most monitor touch enabled.

… Sort of

Now, back to that indecisiveness, do I want a mount that can angle the monitors up and down, or do I want a standing desk mount?  Oh, and did I consider curved monitors sufficiently enough? 

This may take a while.

Have you read anything about the new AMD Threadripper 2990WX?  It has 32 processing cores.  That’s right, 32 cores in a non-server setting.  I… want… one.  Will I buy one?  Well, not yet.  Here’s why:

In my  production rig, ROI (Return on Investment) is a major factor, and I can’t yet justify the cost.

This 32-core monster (get it from Amazon) may clock in at 4.2Ghz, but it also clocks in a US$1,799.00.  Even though the most bogged down part of my workflow is audio and video processing, encoding, and transcoding, I still cant justify the cost.  I mean, after all, this price tag is just for the processor, so I’d need to replace my motherboard, memory, and even my power supply as this highest-end Threadripper pulls 250 watts.  Oh, and the proccessor doesn’t come with any cooling, but that’s find because water cooling is a must with a beast such as this.  Even my 8-core FX-8350 overheats with even the best fan-only coolers.

I’ll wait to see what happens to the price over time, but I don’t get the sense that it will be dropping any significant amount any time soon.  Until then, I can dream.

So, I’m way behind the curve alright?!  Today marks my first adventure with PC water cooling, and I’m equal parts frustrated, embarrassed, and overjoyed.  I’ll tackle each of these parts one-by-one within this brief piece on why you shouldn’t be overlooking liquid cooling.

Frustrated

To fan or not to fan?  Well, we all know the answer is to not fan—unless it’s a Noctua fan (Amazon link)—but still, I’d been using the same heatsink and fan since 2007.  Seriously.  Don’t laugh.  Okay, I know you’re laughing and it’s alright, I deserve it.  Here’s the old-school fan cooler I’m replacing:

What has me frustrated then, if I’m upgrading from a under-powered 11-year-old heatsink to a decently high-end consumer AIO water cooler like the Corsair H115i Pro?  The installation.

Yesterday, I realized that the radiator on the cooler and my case’s screw holes for mounting a radiator don’t line up.  Corsair is using a 20mm gap that they proudly advertise on the side of the box.  I don’t know if it’s a new standard, or an old one I’m unaware of, but I hate it because I had to get really handy with a pair of needle-nose pliers to secure the radiator to the case.  Several bends, warps, and scratches later, I’ve got a good connection.

Embarrassed

Being embarrassed is a little easier to understand.  After the case debacle yesterday, I apparently shut my brain off.  I converted the water cooler pump’s fitting from Intel to AMD as I should (I’m still rocking an eight-core AMD FX-8350 for the foreseeable future), but didn’t fully appreciate how the mounting screws worked.  I thought my brand new cooler didn’t fit.

So after all the fuss with the radiator mounting, I took everything apart, boxed up the cooler, and printed a return label.  I remounted the old heatsink and… nothing.  No boot.  The motherboard kicked on a processor LED, so I resat the processor.  Nothing.  Resat it again and finally got everything to book.

Now, you may think I’m embarrassed because I bought a cooler that didn’t fit my processor type, but no… it’s what happens next that really embarrassed me.

Sitting around with my wife and daughter in the evening, it dawned on me.  The mounting screws!  A visualization of them popped in my head and I could see how the whole thing came together.  Granted, I felt a bit of anger that the instructions didn’t clearly call this much-needed information out, but I was still somewhat relieved to know that I could try again in the morning.

Overjoyed

Fast forward to this morning and I obviously got the radiator re-mounted (adding a few more paint scratches due to the poor line-up), mounted the pump on the processor, and got everything working.  I did a test in Handbrake ripping a couple of DVDs and the temperature of the FX-8350 never touched 55°C whereas before I ran the risk of peaking well over 75° and forcing a throttle or even a shut-down if I didn’t set the processor affinity to ignore a few cores.

My new cooler is installed!

And the sound?  Whisper quiet.  In fact, I think I can now hear my non-Corsair and non-Noctua fans more than anything now.  I never noticed them before because the fan on the heatsink was so loud that I could hear it halfway across my house even under just 50% or 60% load.  Now, I can sustain 95% load and barely tell that my computer is on.  The mild hum of my ceiling fan is twice as loud as my computer under heavy stress.

So if you’re still air cooling… you need to go liquid.  If you’re still on the fence, let me review the benefits:

• Whisper quiet computing, even under high processor loads
• Long-term processor health through temperature regulation
• Crank up all the cores!  No more throttling or overheating crashes
• Mostly future proof.  Heatsinks are generally socket specific, liquid coolers can get new mounting brackets… but not always.
• Cool LED effects! (I honestly couldn’t care less about this and have a solid case so that I don’t have to see such mess anyway, but to each his own.)

… and Anxious, too!

I suppose that I forgot to mention that this upgrade makes me somewhat anxious as well.  I tend to upgrade my workstation in pieces over a multi-year period.  Knowing that this is the first piece in my system that is future-proof until at least the next motherboard and processor combo, I’m anxious to get going with all of the hopes and fears that anxiety can convey.  This supposes, of course, that my hopes are for a ridiculously powerful processor and my fears are for a ridiculously priced build.

I took the “Disney” menu item off of this site.  I don’t quite know what this means, if anything, other than I don’t want the menu item thrown in with some of my other topics for which I’m more professionally known.  

Yes, my Disney project will be a professional creative work.

Yes, I’m proud to be choosing a Disney-based project and have no weird hangup such as “that’s for kids” or “those fans are strange”.  In fact… I quite like that Disney is both adult and kid friendly and that many of us who are fans of one Disney thing or another—movies, games, theme parks, ESPN, etc.—are strange.  That makes me feel quite at home to some degree, even if my strange isn’t the same as yours.

How to still get my Disney Project posts:

You can still get all of my Disney posts as they’ll appear on the main page at https://chaseraz.com while they’re new.  You can also always just click to browse anything tagged “Disney”.  

Future plans for access

In the future, I may turn the Disney link back on within the main menu, or I may elect to use some type of a subdomain such as disney.chaseraz.com (not a hyperlink because it’s not active at the time of writing, and may never be).  I’ll decide as things unfold, but for now, I’m getting a better grasp on what I want the project’s content to be.  After that, there will be plenty of time to worry about the minutia. 

In the mean time, I’ll leave you with the following thought from a construction area within the Walt Disney World resort:

Over the past week or so, I’ve been setting up a HDHomeRun device to stream live over-the-air (OTA) television across my home network.  Okay, really, I spent five minutes setting up the HDHomeRun, about a day playing with recording settings in Plex for DVR capability, and almost every other annoying minute fighting with antennas.

As I mentioned, I started with an HDHomeRun device because their TV tuner hardware seems to have the best and widest capability.  The device plugs directly into a router or ethernet switch and to an antenna (or in my case a small array of antennas).  Technically, this is all you need and you’re good to go with just a couple minutes worth of setup. 

Any OTA signals received are now available over your network by installing the HDHomeRun app on Windows (including Xbox), Android, Amazon (Fire TV, Kindle Fire), Linux, macOS, or iOS.  While this is nice for streaming TV, to use the HDHomeRun app’s DVR capability, a $35/year subscription is required to cover EPG (electronic program guide) services and storage space for the cloud-based DVR.  As a Plex Pass user, I opted to not use this service and instead connect my HDHomeRun to Plex to record locally and take advantage of the included EPG service.

Antenna Hardware

I’m using two antennas.  First, a flat Terk indoor antenna which is good at receiving UHF channels.  It has a nice flat design and is multi-directional.  The Terk antenna isn’t great at picking up VHF signals—nor is any square or circular indoor antenna—so I’m also running an HDTV VHF Retrofit antenna from Antennas Direct.  The Terk antenna runs about US$60, and the VHF Retrofit kit was around $30 and it includes a combiner built-in to combine your signal from both antennas.

Scalable Experiment

In trying to stay scalable, I already mentioned that I’m using my existing lifetime Plex Pass to not incur any costs surrounding DVR functionality in terms of either EPG or cloud storage.  Similarly, I started with a simple two-tuner HDHomeRun Connect model.  Other models are available for four tuners, for real time hardware transcoding, or for use with your paid cable service as opposed to OTA signals.  Plex can manage multiple HDHomeRun boxes, so expansion in the future is no issue.

For now, I’m also not running a NAS.  I’m using a spare 1TB hard drive in my production rig as a sixth hard drive.  Eventually I’ll take the time to move everything to a NAS, but I wasn’t willing to put more than $250 into this total experiment including tuner, antennas, coax, and miscellaneous.  A good NAS will cost quite a few multiples of that, although for simple storage of recorded movies and TV shows, a much more economical personal cloud device from the likes of Western Digital would work.

Findings and Conclusions

I like the resulting experience, so far, but the process of setting everything up was tedious… but only because of the damn antennas.  At first, I didn’t know that standard indoor antennas as they’re made now (as squares, circles, or flat sheets) are absolutely awful at picking up VHF signals.  This is because of the length of the actual VHF signal that requires a longer surface for reception. 

I wonder if a cheap-ass $20 antenna with telescoping antennas (“rabbit ears”) wouldn’t have worked better than my combined $90 worth of antennas.  I likely wouldn’t receive as many channels, but it would have been easier to receive the main or “big” local channels that you expect to receive like NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, and PBS.

Speaking of PBS, it’s been the biggest pain so far.  I’m sometimes still uncomfortable setting things to automatically record because the signal seems so prone to interruption.  Considering that recording PBS shows was one of my driving motivations for this whole pursuit, I’m highly agitated.

Like everyone else online, I’d also suggest that OTA streamers who want to record to their own media servers consider the HDHomeRun Extend model rather than the base Connect model.  Having the stream already transcoded into H.264 would save my computer a lot of storage space while recording and a lot of processing power from not having to do post-recording transcoding.

All in all, it’s the antennas that make the process difficult or unpleasant.  Consider whether you already have an outdoor coaxial cable running.  If so, hop up and put an outdoor antenna in your attic or on your roof.  These were not acceptable to me, so I spent more on indoor antennas to get weaker reception.  It’s a give and take. 

If your place is already wired for paid TV service that you’re no longer using, the best thing is to hop up into the attic or down to the basement, or wherever the setup is and connect it to an outdoors or attic based antenna.  I’ll do that in the future, but for now, I’m content with my experiment with only a few feet of exposed coax in my home office.

You’ve been fed a bunch of lies about economics.  My question to you is, “What do the ketogenic diet and economics have to do with one another?”  It’s meant as a rhetorical question, of course, because I’m already aware of the answer and I’m eager to share it with you.  What they have in common is that they serve as reflections upon humanity and our progress.  And it helps explain why those who are politically motivate turn such a beautiful thing as progress into a bad word.

About Scarcity

It is no secret that capitalism relies on perpetual growth in order to maintain balance and stability.  Nobody really likes that fact save for those who have deluded themselves into believing such a stasis is permanently possible.  We’ve been sold a story that capitalism is the necessary tool to deal with scarcity.  That’d be cool, except for the fact that capitalism actually was pretty successful and, at least indirectly, aided in the elimination scarcity.

Yes, capitalism helped us, in part, transcend scarcity.  This will likely be studied for generations to come, but the perfect storm of two world wars and a global economic depression sandwiched squarely between led to an otherwise unfathomable second wave of industrialization and innovation.   

Forget people talking about money being a motivator… people are intrinsically motivated whether or not money is in societal use, but free market capitalism sure encourages the commoditization of any- and every-thing.  What motivated people to put green beans and brine in a can, however, wasn’t money; it was having experienced true scarcity.

Money wasn’t the objective for canned vegetables.  It was the tool for commoditization that afforded the possibility.

When is the last time that you went without the ability to acquire the minimally required amounts of food, water, metals, plastics, wood, or any other type of good?  If you can think of a time, I’ll rest assured knowing that it was caused by one of three situations: natural emergency, political interference, or some majorly abstracted economic instability (such as derivative devaluation).  Only the emergency scenario has any basis within uncontrived reality, and it is largely offset by the decentralization process known as globalization.

Learn more about Globalization’s Detractors

What does that say about a world where previous expensive luxuries such as refined sugar and added salts are less expensive than real food?  Humans eat meats, vegetables, nuts, and grains.  Pretty much in that order.  However, in the past 100 years, beginning in the United States, the order has become very confused (grains, vegetables, meats, nuts). 

Why is this?

Only in a post-scarce world can production of non-essentials like sugar and salt be economical enough to mass produce and utilize in everyday food production.  In fairness, salt is still very necessary in food applications not involving refrigeration and important in modern ketogenics as we don’t consume as many organ meats, but I digress.  Only in a post-scarce world does profit become a motive before nutrition.  Only in a post-scarce world does profit have the luxury of becoming a motive before even survival… we all know what sugar does to the human organism!

The cheapest of all food stuffs, grain, is coated liberally with sugar and salt because they are able to be mass produced and commoditized.   They mask the fact that grains are otherwise pretty undesirable to the human palate, and can lead to addiction, at least in the case of sugar.

So what, exactly, does the ketogenic diet tell us about economics?  It confirms that we weren’t only being lied to about the nutritional values of foods in the form of the U.S. Food Pyramid and the more modern USDA MyPlate serving suggestions, but also about living in a scarce world. 

We’re in such a post-scarce world that the only threats to material supply short of a truly global devastation are political and economic.

We’re in such a post-scarce world that we’re persuaded to promote cheaper but less biologically compatible grains in order to meet economic economies of scale in their production.

We’re in such a post-scarce world that eating actual human foods such as digestible green vegetation and animal meat is considered a diet in the slang-sense of the word.

Now, with only a few minor exceptions, the next time you hear someone talk about resource limitations on a global (or at least non-individual) scale, you can look them in the eye with a blank stare that very firmly matches the blank canvas that best describes their extent of reasoning.

Thanksgiving isn’t just about giving thanks.  It’s also about reflecting upon the very act of giving thanks.  In order to go to such a meta level, one must inquire about a given situation and deep-dive into its specific components and their constitution.  For instance:  what was involved in bringing an event to pass, who was responsible for each individual input, and how did events unfold chronologically?  Without this information, there’s not way to be properly thankful and you might as well just pray to Joe Pesci (a George Carlin joke) and be on our way.

My reflections this year have led me to… disappear.  I knew back in the second part of Q2 (2018) that I would be reflecting upon a lot this year.  I’d be reflecting upon my work associations, the efforts I- and others- bring to the table, and even the very nature of my workflows and their results.

All of this is a round about way of saying that I’ve been absent, but I saw it coming.  

I’ve been absent from this blog, from Twitter, and from other social media. I’ve been following a path that I’d tell any client to steer clear of, honestly.  But this little post is designed to both acknowledge that I’m aware of the ramifications of such things for my human readers, and to remind my non-human readers (Hello, search bots!) that I’m still here and plodding along.  After all, algorithms will determine they don’t need to index this site as frequently if I don’t publish some quality content relating to business, innovation, technology, and marketing. 

To focus on the humans a bit more, you’ll probably recognize this post for exactly what it is: a post to maintain publication frequency during a down period.  Additionally, it’s a chance to further train the bots on my writing style and topics, including a few important keyword drops.  Oh, wait, here’s a keyword drop about what I normally do: business consulting and corporate training.

Beep beep boop, you may return to doing other things or indexing other pages.  Just know to come back here again soon.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. It was sometime around Thanksgiving (U.S.) and even then the post was geared towards feeding search engines more than anything else. But I’m happy to announce that I’m officially starting to get my shit together for 2019.

The intention had always been to launch the new RCR.biz website in January, but that didn’t happen. What prevented me? Well, try this on for size:

• Influenza Strain A
• Bronchitis
• Bronchitis… again
• Vertigo for a day
• My daughter turning 2 (gulp!)

I’m not sure which of those was the scariest. Okay, I at least know my daughter’s birthday wasn’t scary… either I don’t have the annoyance response that other parents do or my daughter is just easy to get along with for a toddler. Either way… she’s not the problem.

Luckily, the site was able to be launched on the first of February. Sure, there are some (very well) known bugs and a few incomplete listing in the new Marketplace, but things are good enough. In this case, good enough had to be good enough! Not only was this a decently moderate aesthetic update, but it also brought about the introduction of my newest business division, RCR Media, which was salvaged from my dying podcast, Multinewmedia. Sure, Multinewmedia will come back around in some form, but for now, it’s doing best by repurposing all of its assets into letting me work with world-class technology services like Plesk and SiteJet.io.

By the way, have you seen the free Udemy course I re-recorded and produced with Plesk? It’s called “Making WordPress Hosting Easy with Plesk on Amazon Lightsail“. You’ll love it. It’s like my A.B. Gamma course “Hosting Websites with Amazon Lightsail” but very direct and focused on one singular thing: WordPress hosting with Plesk using Lightsail… obviously.

Multinewmedia’s first podcast series is winding down (yeah, that’s a hint there may be more), RCR has a new website and a new division with a new client type, and A.B. Gamma keeps plodding along (although I need to give it way more attention to scale it to goal in 2019). I even have my email organized… somewhat.

Let’s see how long I can stay ahead of the game, or at least caught up.

I know that what started as a consumer technology blog back in 2012 and eventually turned into a business technology podcast in 2015 is now finished. At least in its current incarnation. Today, I released Episode 110 of the Multinewmedia Podcast and announced that there will only be 10 more episodes.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Multinewmedia is going away completely, but… pretty close.

Back in December, I let it slip in a couple of places that my business RCR Business Ventures was getting a new division called RCR Media. I hinted, or even directly stated, that it was a new division created through the reappropriation of the physical equipment and the software tools from a defunct podcast. Well, I only had one podcast and it podfaded in August, four months before my statements. Yeah, Multinewmedia was done for and the assets were being stripped away.

But somewhere in my mind was the idea to still finish the fourth season that we had committed to. Each season was named after a year. We began in Season 2015, and we ended in Season 2018. The problem, for me, was that each season was supposed to have thirty episodes, and due to fading away, Season 2018 was left with only 19. What to do?

Simple. Earlier today, I expended one of the remaining eleven episodes announcing that Season 2018 will finish with its allotment of 30 episodes, just that the final 10 (and the announcement making 11) will simply be made and released in 2019. It’s just a classification issue, really!

I’m somewhat committed to continue working on the blog technology as I custom built it and it contains salvageable technologies such as a CSS UI library and JavaScript UX library. The Multinewmedia website also contains a rudimentary CMS and RSS parser that could fairly easily be turned into an MVP for a new SaaS service geared at digital publishers. But, again, I’m likely to have RCR Business Ventures–which has always owned all of Multinewmedia–reacquire these tools for new ventures.

So, the Multinewmedia Podcast will be done after another 10 hopefully wild-and-crazy episodes that go beyond the drivel of consumer technology we had turned into before trying to save the show around episode 100.

The blog and website will linger around for a while until a larger decision can be made about how podcasts and digital media distribution will be handled (or maybe even centralized) by RCR.

Until then, I’ve got a few guests to try and book and the last few hopes and dreams for the property to pack into a tiny box and send off into the abyss of my memory. Alas, it’s all okay. The property does truly live on.

• RCR Media already has new clients. In just a few short months, it’s expanded into an international content creation and production provider.
• The Multinewmedia Podcast will remain available in all podcast markets where it’s currently found.
• The website and blog will continue, even after Episode 120, until I can thoroughly understand whether it’s best to revitalize Multinewmedia with another pivot, reabsorb the remaining technology assets for new ventures, or extinguish them as unnecessary assets.

Years ago I worked in the Fortune 100. In my mid-20’s, like most of you, I transitioned from having jobs to having a career. My career, at the time, was all about saving a big company some even bigger bucks. At first by using a statistics-based just-in-time inventory system, and later by category expenditure reviews, product and service evaluations, and purchasing negotiations.

My job was to save a multi-billion dollar company money.

We always talked about passing those savings on to the customer, but that’s not the topic I’m on right now, so we’ll save how untrue that is for another day.

Why do big businesses hire people to do nothing but monitor and control purchasing and the associated coasts? Well, firstly it’s because somebody has to do it and the bigger your organization, the more time it takes. This justifies full time people to specialize in performing that function. There’s your clinical and boring answer.

Secondly, it’s because of cost creep. Maybe you’ve heard of this as price creep instead? They’re the same thing, except that cost creep can be a bit more broadly defined and not be solely based upon a direct price of something. You know, pesky indirect costs and all.

Every business is facing this cost creep, but so is every individual despite how much we love to claim that technology prices plummet over time due to scale.

How about an example?

You cut cable, but now subscribe to four different streaming services, don’t you? Sure, it’s still cheaper and you actually get things you want to watch instead of just drivel… but you also now subscribe to music services, book services, and even audio-book services. And you have to have the Internet to get all of this. That alone is about what a cable-only bill used to be in yesteryear.

Now that you think about it, you probably spend a lot more now than you did before, and you’re only okay with it because you’re getting a lot more perceived value. Compare: twenty mediocre music stations on cable that you can only listen to through your TV included for free, or 95% of all the music you’d ever want to listen to on your TV, phone, computer, Amazon Echo or Google Home, and anything else that can offer you an Internet connection… all for half of what a CD cost in 1999!

You spend more, but you get more. Okaaaay…

Do you really want to get more? Go ahead: take ten minutes and reflect on that question after reading this.

Are you actually the person that would buy 12 or more audio-books each year or do you do it because that’s your subscription allotment? Do you upgrade from free music streaming to ignore ads and skip songs… or just to tell yourself that you can, you know… if you wanted to?

Sure, you’ll see a lot of what you pay for, you do probably want and use. But, keep asking these tough questions and you’ll other areas where you’re paying a monthly fee for “getting more” of something otherwise never even use beyond your need to justify the expense.

Businesses want stable monthly revenues, so subscriptions are plentiful. Hell, give me 10 minutes and I’ll give you a PayPal link where you can give me as much as you’d like each month for absolutely no reason!

On top of subscription revenues to stabilize revenues, companies are fighting commoditization for products and services that should absolutely become commodities. Web hosting comes to mind for me. Artificial scarcity is the new norm for digital goods with virtually zero marginal costs. I can easily host a website for a year on less than the cost of a cup of coffee, but I don’t. Instead of $3 per year, we’re paying $20 per month. Why? In this case, my lack of desire to do any server maintenance creates a want or need, which has economic value, and that–in turn–can be used to prop up a product or service out of the commoditization phase.

Not to sound all sales-like, but that’s one reason I’m happy to have worked with Plesk in the past, and hope to do so again in the future. They provide a WebOps and hosting control panel that does most of the work I don’t want to do. One marginal subscription (even though it marginally uses artificial scarcity in its service level tier creation) covers the infrastructure tasks I don’t want to take care of myself… and the tool is configured by people who know a hell of a lot more about those tasks than I’d ever care to know!

To me, this is a great fulfillment of the promises of democratization, productization, and commoditization all intersecting and leading us to an eventual post-scarce economy.

(Note, these comments and reflections are mine and mine alone and don’t represent the interests or viewpoints of Plesk or any other businesses mentioned or implied.)

Information is knowledge. Knowledge is power. Power is money.
I think I skipped a few steps, but you get the idea.

Just as my business keeps getting annoying little pings on its credit card… a subscription service here, an unused domain name renewal there, so too do our personal accounts keep getting pummeled with nuisance charges. You pay for a family music plan, but you’re the only user; you forgot to make your HBO subscription dormant between Game of Thrones seasons; and you stupidly signed up for a random-piece-of-shit of the month club just because you liked the novelty of getting old school mail that wasn’t marked “Final Notice”. And, of course, the price has gone up by a dollar or two on all of these subscriptions over the years.

Did I mention living wages are down for about the fourth decade in a row?

Quit reading and go check up on all of your (business and personal) costs. Cut out what you can and put some money back in your piggy bank.

We talk a lot about the Artificial Intelligence (AI) that is being created thanks to our impressive technologies such as Machine Learning, but we never seem to talk about some of the other–more negative–artificial creations that technological achievements have brought about.

To fully understand this, we need to dip into economics for a moment.

Technology is very good at reducing variable costs. However, creating new technology products actually drives up fixed costs. This is why video games aren’t free… they take thousands, or even millions, of human hours up-front to create. Fixed costs, fortunately, are mostly distributed via economies of scale; and, interestingly enough, are reduced over time by leveraging the macroeconomic advantages of other innovations, but that’s an explanation for another day.

Technology is so good at reducing variable costs that they can nearly approach zero, especially for digital goods.

Imagine that you write a book.

In the ancient past, you’d have to find a scribe to copy your book word for word in order to make any sale past the first (the copy you wrote). In Ancient Egypt, successful families used to spend their entire life savings to pay a priest for a copy of the Book of the Dead which contained the negative omissions (e.g. “I have not stolen.”) to state in the afterlife to secure favor. It was an afterlife-insurance policy in a way, and it was expensive, especially considering it was often buried with the patriarch of a family. To put it colloquially, priests made mad bank copying and personalizing each scroll.

In the more recent past, you’d have found a publisher or printer to make your book using expensive machinery that the average person couldn’t afford. Technology drove up fixed costs by replacing one human scribe with machinery that required many unskilled laborers, and at least one skilled laborer, to produce. Great! We know we can offset fixed costs through methods alluded to previously.

Today, if you wrote a book, you could either print a copy yourself at home (another macroeconomic benefit), send your book to an on-demand printer like in yesteryear, or create a digital copy.

So, how much does that digital copy cost? Especially now that technological devices have proliferated (yes, macroeconomics again) and virtually every potential reader of your book has access to a display device?

Welcome to the present year!

The cost of a digital good, at least of any reasonable size, is a fraction of a penny for the storage space to hold the original; another fraction of a penny to store a duplicate copy for the purchaser, which is either offset to the buyer or is actually eliminated via centralized gated access like a subscription; and a fraction of a penny for transmission costs for delivering the copy or operating the subscription… either way.

Sometimes, these are fractions of a literal penny and not just a turn-of-phrase. In some cases, the three fractions don’t even equal a full actual penny. Still in others, like for video games, we may need to adjust to nickels or dimes.

Have all you want! This is Valhalla, and the feast never stops.

Let’s forget about your great book and now think about your favorite online service. This could be your web hosting through GoDaddy, your image creation through Canva, or your social media management through Buffer. Take your pick or come up with your own example if you prefer.

What type of Artificial Scarcity exists? You pay $15 per month for some digital good (again: hosting; design; or scheduling, respectively) that economically costs a fraction of a penny to deliver on-demand and in real time. Why can you only host one site; only get so many premium templates; or manage a certain number of social accounts?

GoDaddy makes you pay for a more robust account to host more than one site, and even hides certain features behind this elevated higher-paid gate. Canva allows only so many premium image or template uses. Buffer only lets you manage so many accounts and provides fewer analytical services. You know how entitlement tiers work.

And I’m not unfairly picking on these services… I’m just talking about them because you’ve likely heard of them. Almost every virtual good is in the business of pricing upon artificial scarcity these days. It’s not just GoDaddy, Canva, and Buffer by any stretch of the imagination.

You’re forced to pay an extremely high margin on a virtual good, but this is acceptable to many as the fixed cost of development is being addressed. But then, we have to pay substantially more to get a service limit or feature increase?

The fixed costs have already been dealt with by the markup on the base plan and the only additional variable costs are also minuscule (digital storage, data transmission, etc.). Certainly the bump up to the next plan should be a marginal increase, right? Instead, what do you often find? A multiple of the base plan’s price for any increased service entitlements.

This is a classic “Linear Programming” model (that’s math, not software development). With Linear Programming, something is being optimized, meaning minimized or maximized within a set of constraints using linear modeling. In this case, the current trend is to maximize by profit to the near exclusion of everything else, such as value, utility, adoption, benefit, etc.

So, what gives?

Humans and our economic wants are preventing the economy from being an agent unto itself in an unencumbered way. This isn’t necessarily bad… it just is. We’re accustomed to capitalism driving up prices through inflation as growth is required to survive. A fight against commodification and a need to stay balanced across high-tech and traditional industries lingers. Humans, at the end of the day, need to eat and have a place to sleep. We don’t like altering the status of markets, even when the inputs have fundamentally changed.

Ever wonder how so many people seem to be creating independent incomes and living off residuals? Yeah, it’s all related… we simply don’t need everyone’s labor. But, that’s a tangent and I’ll circle back to it in another post in the future.

Unfortunately, the costs of the human necessities (food, water, shelter, clothing, etc.) were set solely on traditional industries because they are the traditional industries. We don’t seem to be ready and willing to acknowledge that, or to truly adapt to a fully high-tech world. For proof of this, just look at the housing prices and the homelessness rates in two of the United States’ biggest tech areas: San Francisco and Seattle.

Houses and apartments can be constructed–using advances in technology–in a way that’s cheaper, faster, safer, and more luxurious than ever. We can build structures in a way that optimizes for a maximum population density while still providing ample personal space and comfort for the senses, but there I go with suggesting optimizations outside of profit again. We can even work remotely in many industries as a way to diffuse geographic supply and demand pressures. I mean, hell, we can practically almost print building rather than construct them at all.

Still, the cost of housing and real estate continue to increase in yet another bubble which is destined to literally destroy livelihoods during the next economic downturn… because there will always be a next economic downturn.

Getting to a Conclusion

You’ve likely picked up on my point by now and realize that book publishing and housing costs are just examples. The logic supporting these examples applies to almost every traditional industry prior to the digital revolution. Do healthcare, insurance, or traditional telecom services come to mind for you?

I’ll certainly be discussing this topic many times in the future, but for now it’s good enough to conclude with a prompt for you to think about. Something concrete and tangible. Here it is:

What would you pay for a house if you knew that it was built faster than ever, stronger than ever, by fewer people than ever? What if division of labor were offset and the work involved were similar to all work: interface with a digital tool which in-turn interfaces with other digital and mechanical tools? Sure the tools are expensive, economies of scale and macroeconomic benefits could offset them.

Would you still be okay spending a quarter-million dollars for a house? This, by the way is roughly the average home price in the United States.

A US$250,000 home represents four years of solid, non-stop, full-time work for the average U.S. household of 2.53 people and generally assuming between one and two adult workers.

The interest paid on such a home over a thirty year standard mortgage is an additional $300,000, or almost five additional years of work.

All things considered, the expenditure for a new average home is approximately $550,000. Think about that: an average of two adults, each with average incomes, working full time for 9 years each just to pay for a residence… not even the stuff to go in it, the expenses to upkeep that employment, or even food or water. That’s 18 full time human labor years just to buy a financed home. The financing is already worth more than the home, and that should tell you something about the future of work?

But again, this isn’t about houses, is it?

Under the same understanding, is it really sensible to be spending $15 per month to host one personal website? Business, sure! But personal?

What if you knew the rate used to be about $5 per month, even when the required technologies were more expensive? …and you could host as many sites as you could cram in! By the way, the monthly retail cost to acquire the computing power necessary for 100 of these sites today costs less than a cup of plain coffee at Starbucks.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is Artificial Scarcity (AS), and I’ll be addressing it more in the future, both positively and negatively.

Generating a lot of ideas is easy for some of us. Sure, you hear the technically proficient repeatedly decry, “If only I could come up with an idea!” But, for those of us who are creatives… oh how we wish we could get anything done!

Creativity and idea generation (ideation) seem to be a blessing and a curse in some ways. The relationship between generation and fulfillment seems to be quite proportional and inverse. Maybe that’s because those who do simply don’t have the time to get bogged down with the 8,000 ways to accomplish a task… they pick one and go for it.

Meanwhile, those of us who think incessantly don’t seem to be able to bring an idea to fruition. We’re too busy considering what the impact would be if we had been born in another country and therefore subject to a different tax rate. Or some other such trivial bullshit.

For me, all of this comes to a head when I launch a digital property.

To Pay or Not to Pay

This seems to be the true question for me most of the time. If I had unlimited funds, or even the perception thereof, I’d likely be more than happy to spin up an idea, pick the most raved about platform, and say, “Fine, you manage everything outside of my core focus.” This is actually what a number of highly esteemed technology professionals have kindly suggested that I do, with the kindly part being sometimes open to interpretation.

But money isn’t unlimited, cost creep and artificial scarcity are real things to contend with on top of limited resources, and there were too many small business owners in my family for my upbringing to have been anything but extremely scrutinous of any type of cost.

My Three Real Decisions

When it comes to running an online property, I boil my choices down to three real choices that are supported by a number of support technologies. For designing sites without having to do it by hand, I use visual design tools like Webflow and SiteJet that generate HTML and CSS code (and some JavaScript) on my behalf. Plus, good old WordPress can do the trick sometimes, as can the occasional hand coding.

Each of these tools also offers hosting services for a fee, but I independently maintain a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or two on Amazon Lightsail. I have a Plesk Hosting Platform and a more basic LAMP stack configured by Bitnami. So, my three primary courses of action for launching a new venture become:

• Design And Host – Use some service such as Webflow, SiteJet, WordPress, or even Wix or SquareSpace to whip up a quick design with included hosting all in one monthly price. The, additional functionality will come from third party tools. There may be some limitations on what can be used, but most of the big tools all play together despite bringing the risk of severe cost creep.
• Design Then Host – Use Webflow, SiteJet, or my coding skills to build a template or basic design and then export it in order to host on my own servers or with third party. This is great for mixing and matching services, but it adds another player into the mix and increases complexity. This is especially true when designs have to be converted into templates rather than merely being able to inject functionality into the exported files as-is. In other words, sometimes a design must go into WordPress or Shopify rather than just slapping some PHP or other dynamic code in a placeholder DIV. There are always at least two costs (one design, one hosting, often more for third-party tie-ins), but this means it’s easier to control the overall price by manipulating each price component individually.
• Turnkey – Bear with me, this is going to feel a lot like Design And Host, but this is when I outsource the entire thing onto one third-party platform. WordPress, Shopify, SquareSpace, etc. I use their tool, maybe pull pre-configured add-ins, but I’m limited to what their developers have built into the platform. You’d think this would always be the cheapest based on such a limited feature set, but this can be quite pricey due to pricing based on artificial scarcity. Afterall, one business-level domain at WordPress.com starts at $25 per month. That’s quite a bit more than even Design Then Host paying for both Webflow and a VPS, but it carries the most convenience of never having to think about the platform stack again once selected.

How to Manage

Well, I can’t really tell you how to manage these options, just that they exist. I continually find myself gravitating back towards Design Then Host, but that also slows my development down. Consider the idea of launching an MVP just to test an idea and you’ll realize that Design Then Host is way too front heavy in terms of effort.

Turnkey is generally the best for one-off MVPs, but the “What if’s” start to get to me. What if this scales, how hard will migrating be? What if this doesn’t scale, how will I have justified the higher budgetary requirement from artificially scarce pricing? What if…

The good news is that I find the Design And Host tools really are getting better at being a hybrid of the classic Design Then Host model for developers and the Turnkey solution for consumers. Webflow has blogging and ecommerce tools now, but the cost is literally the same as using Webflow for design and then an expensive specialized solution for hosting like Shopify for e-commerce. No price advantage whatsoever, actually.

SiteJet also has neat features, like the ability to automatically generate a design based upon a template and project specifications, but they’re not quite as advanced on the blogging or e-commerce ability, as even they generally rely on third party offerings that are quite limited.

Conclusion

So, what do you do? I suppose the best course of action is whatever makes sense on a case-by-case basis, but it doesn’t help that I’m 60% thinker and 40% doer, so I get entirely caught up in analyzing the situation if I’m responsible for both tasks. That’s why the President of the United States doesn’t have to single-handedly go perform each approved military action him or herself. But, as small business owners or entrepreneurs, we don’t get that advantage, do we?

An Inconvenient Post Script

The more I’ve thought about this idea while composing this post, the more I’ve been exposed to. Everything from free site builders to simple no-frills web hosting for hand coders. Systems to accomplish anything you’d like, from white label site builders to static contact card style splash sites.

Sounds like I need to formalize what I’ve learned and turn it into yet another course for A.B. Gamma, which I’m intent on growing this year.

Look, this title isn’t all that appealing, but it’s short and to the point. Fellow INTJ’s will appreciate that. I wanted to obfuscate it even more and call this post MBTI INTJ & SME MVPs, but I chose to spare you the trouble. Either way, I’m going to briefly discuss how MVPs, or Minimum Viable Products, have changed my life… in three parts.

Feedback Loops

We all know that each human is prone to mental feedback loops of some type, and a host of other issues. Over at Personality Hacker, they developed what they call a “car” model (yeah, like an automobile) for understanding each of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator “types” and how that intersects with Jungian cognitive functions. My type is INTJ, and my car model (such a fun model, really) indicates that, like everyone else, I have four cognitive functions that are passengers in the car: an adult driver, an adult passenger, and two children in the back seat: a 10 year old and a 3 year old.

Want to take a simple and somewhat accurate MBTI test? I suggest 16Personalities.com.

To make this short, my 10 year old gets into a spiral with my driver. They’re both introverted. The driver is very intuitive and can “read” other people and plot a course 100 steps down the road. The 10 year old checks internally to see how I feel about things. They set off on this journey together to create a perfect world, constantly adapting for the current and future situations and determining just how close to perfect my ideas have become.

The problem is that they completely cut off the fully functioning adult passenger serving as copilot: effectiveness, in my case.

Yeah… the driver and the 10 year old start dreaming a perfect world and completely push the person (adult passenger) who could make any of it a reality. That feels bad, so the 3 year old–who has been ignored to this point–gets his way. He’s an overindulge expert, by the way, and that should explain to many of you my seemingly crazy swings between extremely health focused big weightlifter guy and can’t-get-my-weight-under-control-I-think-my-pants-are-going-to-pop.

Good e-fucking-nuff

Excuse the vulgarity, but it’s important. Besides, you’re an adult… you’ve heard the phrase before, and likely said it yourself. There’s “good enough” which has a somewhat negative connotation, and “good e-fucking-nuff” which is the same level of completion, but with a neutral or positive implication by offsetting the desire for more as a defect of the user, not the product. Dangerous, but useful when applied from a minimalist and utilitarian viewpoint. Anyway, I digress…

When the current concepts of MVPs arrived on the development scene, they seemed little more than what we’ve always talked about on the marketing side of business: prototypes. They’re useful for product development and gathering product feedback, but we never fully released the prototype. It was kept in strict confidence and secrecy under an NDA.

These tech bastards don’t just create a prototype, they release it!

The concept is that market testing is the fastest way to do the non-critical portions of QA. Six Sigma people would have a stroke thinking about this! Yes, release a possibly buggy product to the market. Why? Because it will validate the concept and root out what is actually a bug, what’s actually a feature, and what is missing… plus the prioritization of those three factors in future development.

This has changed my world and helped shed the concept that things need to be perfect or just so before going to market. In fact, I can now get a little rush when slapping together a working prototype knowing I can market validate it. It’s like the oft-ignored adult passenger gets to finally have his moment and tell the 10 year old sensitive me, “Shut the hell up!” and tell the driver, “Pay attention! Keep your eyes on the road!”

Then, and only then, things get done.

Common Sense Nonsense

Some of you reading this may thing I’m being rather obtuse and simply stating the obvious. But, you couldn’t be further from the truth.

Entire generations of business people are trained to make sure everything is perfect, solidly under control, and not subject to any external influence before a project, product, or service can move forward. They are completing years worth of on-the-job training to up-and-coming workers of new generations.

Sure, this MVP concept may be nothing new to the Lean startups or Agile developers out there, but to the rest of the world, it’s down right transformational to know that we can build something, believe in it, and let it exist in the world on its own. To succeed or fail given its merits, customer need, and our ability and attentiveness to nurturing the growth and development as a response to feedback.

It may be common sense now, but to workers all across the world, and all across time even, this has been utter nonsense until now.

You’ve already asked yourself this question a dozen times. Build a house or buy an existing? Build a raised garden bed or buy a kit? Print your own vacation t-shirts, or order them online?

For someone with just enough development skill to be dangerous, the question is often the same. Should I build or buy?

The Question Remains Valid

There are times that you should build and times that you should buy. Let’s examine the pros of each. We won’t address the cons, because I have no desire to even accidentally insult your intelligence and we all know the downside of each option: cost. Since cost is the downside to both, they cancel each other out.

Benefits of Buying

When it comes to buying, you get a great ability to be more care free. If the product of service you’re acquiring breaks or has a minor bug, you’re not responsible. In fact, many corporate-level purchasing agreements have indemnity against such issues, but not nearly all so check your contracts accordingly.

For me, the difference between having to clear my schedule to fix anything that isn’t working, to roll out a new expected standard, or to address minor maintenance issues is a big deal. This is especially true since I often operate as a one-person shop still and can’t afford to spend a lot of time in maintenance or repair mode.

Another benefit of buying is that you know the playing field is more level than if you build. When you buy, you’re likely buying from a company that is keeping tabs on the competition and working to stay competitive even if they’re positioned slightly differently. Because of this, the playing field is much more even across your own industry or sector in the deployment of technology. While this sounds like a bad thing–because you want to have an advantage–it’s actually a great benefit as you can spend more of your development efforts on value-add activities to plus the baseline features.

Benefits of Building

Why build? Well, I place this answer second because it’s much more direct and intuitive. When you build, you get exactly what you want, as long as you’re willing to put enough time, money, and effort into it. Sure, this runs the risk of offsetting the obvious cost benefit gained from building instead of buying, but I’d like to use this time to challenge that assumption anyway.

Let’s say you build a product or service yourself. Sure, the direct capital involved may be much lower than the direct costs you take on from acquiring the solution from a market leader, but… what about the indirect costs. How many people did you have to divert, for how many hours, from their core work focus in order to create this new thing? Companies strangely forget to calculate such things in many situations (I know, you’d think we’d be past this!) because they already associate their labor costs as being set (at least as it relates to this) because the employee is already retained for another task.

But what about the time that’s diverted? Couldn’t it go into the employee further automating or otherwise improving their direct area of focus to get more and more gains (or efficiencies) in that area?

But again, I come full circle… when you build, you can custom tailor exactly what you want as long as you have the follow-through and technical ability to complete the project.

How to Solve

Start with a default position of “buy”. Then build when you outgrow available solutions or have a strong justification for something custom.

Starting with a buy-default position may not sound like the type of advice you’d expect from me, but I can’t stress enough how much a build-default position destroys resources. Even the businesses you think of as building are on a buy-default position.

Amazon may have the time and energy to create a lot of their own tooling, but they’re not out manufacturing conveyor belts, delivery trucks, and computer systems… at least not until every other way to maximize the distribution channel has been exhausted. They use leading B2B warehousing equipment, Mercedes trucks, and tons of third party computing equipment.

Ford doesn’t make its own bolts. Coke doesn’t roll its own aluminum. Automattic (WordPress) doesn’t author Integrated Development Environments. NASA doesn’t even launch all of its own missions anymore. And, if I ever become wrong on any of these issues, it’s because other opportunities have become exhausted and vertical innovation is required.

Personal Considerations

As for me, I’ve spent over two decades trying to justify a build-default approach.

I surrender to the truth: buy-default is virtually always the best foundation.

You may notice thing things are beginning to look a little wonky around ChaseRaz.com. Your eyes aren’t deceiving you. There’s a lot of construction work going on here, and my personal blog is growing into its own and serving as a resource for more than just my posts. This brings opportunities and challenges

Opportunities: This website now stands on its own in the lineup of growing digital properties managed by Chase. These properties are strategically selected and designed to provide optimal resources and information to the correct people… even when not serving content. Previously, ChaseRaz.com was just a collections of my thoughts or musings related to a variety of topics. Now the site is a full fledged resource for those just meeting me and understanding my professional value proposition, trying to leverage my network to accomplish more in business or in life, wanting to maintain contact at arm’s length (or finding my social media), or searching for information on my Chase Raz brand of training (shameless plug, this is through A.B. Gamma).

Challenges: The challenges aren’t so complex, and really there’s just one major challenge: maintaining relevance. The opportunity to grow into more than a mere collection of musings means that the blog must pivot and be significantly more focused. This creates yet another thing to manage, but with modern tools, I’m up to the challenge.

Over the next couple of weeks, you’ll have the pleasure (or displeasure) of watching this site undergo a transformation and receive a brand new design. Everything from the top to bottom will look different by the time I’m finished, but navigating the site will become easier than ever. This humble little blog will grow into a quick reference for anyone looking for any of my business activities, my teachings or trainings, and my social media activities online.

Think of it as my virtual business card. Except, right now, it’s an absolute mess while I prepare for something bigger and better.

You want to get better at predicting the future,and you want to be better at being yourself in the here and now. This doesn’t require metaphysics or pseudoscience… it just requires a few meditative thought exercises. Let’s take a few moments to explore the future together.

Exercise 1: An Empty Crowd

The above image has always inspired me. It’s a space station corridor housing the entrance to a space hotel, and a Hilton at that. The image is from the 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The scene shows a number of seating options, but nobody is around. This is fairly common for hotels with the lobby occupied only at key times of the day… but what if the future were always like this? We have a number of population density forces pulling and tugging at each other. First, we have the crowding from increased population density. We crowd into cities and suburbs for access to amenities, services, and resources. Second, we have telecommunications allowing us to be further apart than ever while still instantly connected.

Exercise: Imagine your workplace or business existing in an extremely population-dense area that feels utterly deserted. Thousands of people in close proximity, but having the ability to go all day without seeing anyone. The goal is to find the reasons people still interact with your source of income and sustenance while keeping the crowd size near zero.

Professional Benefit: This exercise helps you think about three key factors of your business or employment: value proposition, efficiency, and automation. Value proposition comes from examining why someone would venture out into “nothing” (an empty crowd) just for you. Sometimes this spills into thinking about promotion… don’t let it. Automation ideas come from trying to keep the crowd size as close to zero at all times as possible, including workers and customers. Efficiency is a balance between the product or service rendered, automation, and the fulfillment or service wants or needs of the customer.

Personal Benefit: If you’re not a “business person”, or simply trying to remember that business people are human also, this still helps as it can create a reflection on whether you feel valued. Is value imparted upon you in return for providing value to your company and its customers? If the answer is no, you may want to think long and hard about what you want in life and hit up the job boards. This exercise can also help you identify if your job is on the chopping block with impending automation.

Exercise 2: Death of All Professions

Your profession is a part of you, but it isn’t you. That doesn’t sit well with many of us in the modern world where we don’t just have several careers throughout our lifetimes, we often now have several careers all at once.

Yay, the joys of being a thirty-something in the modern business climate… yuck!

In this exercise, we want to identify some information about who we really are and bring that existence back into our professional life. In other words, this will help you stop “living the lie”.

Exercise: Pretend we live in a post-apocalyptic world. You survived. Your loved ones survived. A healthy sized community is still healthy and active. Food and water sources have been secured, and there isn’t much struggle for them because the population is so low that a spirit of cooperation has come over all survivors. There is no power, however, so your computer and phone aren’t useful for anything more than serving as doorstops… at least for now. People are starting to settle back down into a routine, so what do you do with your time?

Benefit: This exercise provides for your core needs to be taken care of, at least in terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Food, water, shelter, clothing, love, acceptance, etc. Now, you’re heading back up the pyramid and looking for some meaning and self-actualization. Doing this thought exercise, at length, will help to identify core beliefs and values that you hold, and possibly latent interests that haven’t been able to be explored or incorporated into your daily life and work. Do you build things? Farm crops or animals? Work on restoring technologies? Take the solution you identify and work that modality (method by which you chose to work in this fake scenario) into your daily life in the real world, whether that be thorough work, family life, or hobbies.

Exercise 3: Outlive the World

A quick warning that this exercise is very uncomfortable for some people. The idea is that you should imagine yourself being a semi-immortal being that will live to be several hundred years old. A sweet spot for this seems to be somewhere around 250 to 400 years, based on the current and projected longevity of human beings currently.

This, of course, is the most personal and introspective of the three exercises. It isn’t designed to make you feel lonely, although that natural response will likely impact you. If it helps to consider that you’ve had a consciousness transplant and are a conscious part of the singularity, that is appropriate, but only as long as you don’t consider yourself to be a mere copy of the real and present you… your feelings and memories must both be in-tact and impactful upon your being.

Exercise: Imagine that you live to an extremely old age, but that your body degrades increasingly slowly from this point until your final death and you keep a healthy amount of agility and cognitive ability. After your parents and their entire generation are gone, you watch your generation disappear, including your spouse and friends. Your children grow old and pass, as do your grandchildren. You finally depart as your great-grandchildren are approaching or passing middle-age and heading towards their retirements.

Benefits: It seems like there aren’t any at first, but then you begin to contemplate how you’d deal with loss, and then with joy. The cyclical nature of life becomes apparent and then you see the cyclical and polar nature of the universe itself. Then, it’s possible to internalize this understanding and begin to contemplate the actions you’d take with each birth, passing, amazing innovation, victory, and failure. Once you’ve identified your presence as a multi-centenarian, compare the actions and responses to your current life and see if you’re living as fully as you’d imagine yourself to live if daily life were no concern at all and the real matters were of those of life, family, community, and fulfillment.

It’s your turn!

Share your favorite futurism-related exercises and your results from these below in the comments.

You could say that I have a problem with staying on-point and on-message. In the early days of social web-based technologies, this varied focus was a trademark of thought-leaders and influential early adopters. When the masses came around to the adoption of a more social web, it was mistakenly viewed as taunting or troll-like behavior.

Now that social communications are ubiquitous, my particular brand of verbal diarrhea (We each have our own, you included!) simply isn’t desired or welcomed in even the most recessed and ancient parts of the web. Furthermore, it is a detriment to the jovial common sense and optimistic sarcasm I actually hope to create within our seriously convoluted world.

Because of the realities spelled out so far, I face “going corporate” with my current re-imagining of ChaseRaz.com. I lend myself to the criticism that I’ve sold out or that I’m always on and trying to run my personal brand like a business. That my name, my being, my essence is all about the businesses I’ve brought into the world, the companies I’ve consulted for, or the brands I have worked with.

The joke is most certainly not on me.

The joke isn’t on me. It’s on the assholes who make the claims that I’m a sellout or, even worse, a blowhard, because they aren’t criticizing me… they’re properly assessing the situation. Just, with a twinge (read: way too much) of their own personal biases and opinions being placed unfairly upon my shoulders. I have to represent myself… because nobody else will if I won’t.

I’d tell the nay-sayers to kindly fuck off at this point, but I’ve already clarified that my raunch thought-provoking commentary is well understood by me to be no longer welcome.

The difficulty is that I now need to sit down and apply to myself what I do for businesses. Gulp! It’s a simple but daunting task: identify all the keywords and phrases for which I want myself to be known. But, an idea person like me doesn’t want to be permanently tied to a word or phrase. Its’s like asking someone who isn’t even remotely prepared to die, “What key points would you like your eulogy to deliver?” Shivers all around, right?

I think another fuck off is needed here just at the thought of that eulogy thing. But, this time, you’ll likely welcome it and direct it toward me for sparking the thought.

But that’s all. There’s no more to it beyond, I’ll keep you posted on what I come up with, but this is likely going to get pretty weird for me as I evaluate myself and the value I bring to the world like I’d evaluate a business.

Remember being young and idealistic and thinking deadlines were stupid? Somehow, I’ve come back around to that position. Sure, there are times when deadlines are necessary or simply unavoidable. The pace of the world needs to keep moving forward and sometimes there’s just not an unlimited amount of time to otherwise accomplish tasks we’d rather not do. Paying taxes comes to mind as I write this on April 12th in the United States… just three days before the IRS deadline.

This week, I’m giving a presentation to students about time management. Specifically, I’m presenting on how creative people who want plenty of time for more lofty and artistic projects can use time management techniques to not feel like they’re getting lost or assimilated into the corporate or academic worlds. These are the very same students that I “inflict” with weekly deadlines. But, it’s not these types of deadlines that are dead. Rather, they’re the deadlines that are just emerging as milestones.

Nothing has made me realize that milestones are the new (and better) deadlines than my recent work expanding internationally as a voice over corporate trainer (and content creator, and video producer, etc.) for a couple of multi-national technology companies. In many of these projects, we set arbitrary deadlines just to keep things on track and that somehow makes the delivery time longer. It annoys them, frustrates me… and the truth is things would run faster without the deadlines.

As Agile continues to take over the world as the business practice of choice for this decade, and Scrum convinces us that working in short sprints is the way to go, there’s no real reason to kill off deadlines completely, but they should be treated as what they are: one data point to meet. One particular moment in time in which you hope, expect, or agree to be finished with something… but hope is often the most applicable word. In the grand scheme of things, the simple whim to be done by a particular date means nothing. Without milestones tracking a clearly rationalized and thought-out workflow, deadlines are dead. Read: it’s mapping and adhering to process that’s important, not a completion date set in a vacuum.

As much as we like to pretend that meeting deadlines is an act of professionalism, most of the time we’re just inflicting ourselves with additional stress out of obligation. Unless something is routine or utterly mission-critical, a deadline doesn’t truly make sense. What makes sense is very clearly understanding a process you’d like to take, being open to change and new routes along the way, and setting milestones (or frequent pause points) to continually reevaluate along the journey. Does this mean I’ll remove deadlines from my class? No, but they’ll certainly be repurposed into milestones with extremely clear targets rather than a deadline with the expectation of perfect completion.

So maybe I’m suggesting you set a deadline to do away with all but your most pressing (and well justified) deadlines. For everything else, a road map with clearly defined work intervals tied to targets is probably more important. For those of you saying, “But that’s a deadline!” you may have missed the point entirely so I’ll conclude with this: a deadline isn’t even a deadline if it doesn’t have a clear reason for existing and an identified method for acquisition.

A couple of weeks back, I went to a theme park that I love. It’s not just a local theme park that I visited frequently as a kid, but it’s also where I started the marketing portion of my career. Marketing has been one of the three pillars of my professional identity, along with business and technology. In other words, my heart has that warm feeling when I think of this place.

But waiting unnecessarily to access the park in a row of completely blocked main gate queues, I realized something. Your customers are waiting on you, and that’s not a good thing.

Waiting at a theme park isn’t anything new or remarkable. Long lines have plagued entertainment operations for… well, forever, as far as I know. The trouble isn’t the obvious limitations of physical systems to handle a demanding population, but rather that the delays clearly stem from operational ineptitude.

At a theme park, you can see both badly designed systems and poor systems execution very clearly. Those not trained in the discipline of business may not be able to discern which is which, but nonetheless, the problems are observable by everyone. Applying the same type of insight and observation to our own businesses is difficult and not always as obvious. When customers have difficulty accessing you, it likely doesn’t literally generate a stalled line outside your front door, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have inefficiencies in your systems and execution.

In business, we often feel like nobody understands us or our products. Again, the transparency at a theme park is high. When a problem is experienced with your ticket or pass, there’s a clear difference between a main gate attendant executing a fault tolerant system as opposed to having to triage anything beyond normative.

Designed System
“Welcome! I hope you have a lot of fun today, but first we’ll need to talk Ms. Smith who will help us update the expiration date on your pass.”

Triage Everything
“Welcome! How are you today? Oh, wait… hold on. Let me check something. Is this the right pass? Oh man, your pass is expired, you need to go renew it.”

As the former example illustrates, a system can be developed that kindly removes the guest from the entry queue and addresses the problem in a manner that’s respectful to this customer, and the other customers who are patiently waiting. A lapse in payment, an expired pass, the wrong ticket type… these are minor obstacles if your system and employee training reinforces the idea that the customer is a welcomed part of the process, and things happen from time to time.

The latter example turns the customer into an embodied problem merely blocking the system. The system only assumes a nominal, or normative, state and has no recourse for exceptions or deviations. Other customers suffer as they’re made to wait on a resolution, and they sometimes rejoice if the “problematic” customer is booted from the queue without any resolution or assistance. “Good riddance you problematic asshole. Get your shit together.” Opposition exists between your organization and its customers, and friction is created between customers and independent agents vying for your resources rather than communally sharing an experience.

Ask yourself, is this how you want your business to be? Competitive and confrontational?

Ask yourself:

• Do I ever feel as if the client or customer is a burden or creates inconvenience?
• Do I often expect the client or customer to take on the full burden of solving shared issues?
• Do I wish clients or customers could just “get it together” and stop inflicting my business with nonsense?

Chances are, you somewhat agreed to more of the above list than you’d like to admit. Face it, we’ve all had days where the external world is the actual problem. Crowds like the one in the hero image for this post don’t represent a problem of “too many people showed up unexpectedly” to a theme park, but rather “we didn’t adequately predict customer wants and needs.” Likewise for me as a teacher, constant last-minute requests for extension on that one bothersome assignment typically indicate that I’ve skewed the assignment parameters in some way and caught students off guard.

As a final thought, let me say that I’m not advocating that you internalize all issues. My actual purpose is to assert that you customers aren’t as distant and “hard to capture” as you’re probably thinking. They’re out there… in the world… wanting your product, wanting your service, and wanting to build a community around common interests with you and your company, and even other customers. They’re literally waiting on you to create the experience they crave.

Start building the new systems, test them, let them fail to identify non-nominal states, and rapidly advance the prototype to address various states.

Go do it. Your customers are waiting on you.

Why Do Undergraduate Students Want Grade Reviews?

It’s easy to identify the reasons that a student should ask for a grade review, because there are very few reasons.  Obvious math errors, typos, and other clerical mistakes are typically processed quickly and come attached with an “Apologies for your troubles” message.  Requests for grade changes for other reasons are often processed just as quickly, but not in the student’s favor.

The three categories of reasons for non-errata grade review requests that will be covered in this post are:

• Feeling a grade doesn’t reflect expended effort
• Wanting to earn a particular score or GPA
• Expecting grades to represent personal worth

Who Actually Grades Student Work at University?

In some cases, a professor may not be the person grading student work.  This is most common in large undergraduate courses where Teacher Assistants (TAs) are present.  The TAs are often graduate students working for the University as a part time job, to receive a tuition stipend, or as a part of their degree requirements.

While it may seem as if these situations are the easiest to get a grade review, they’re often the hardest. The reason is that a TA is often working as a part of a team to complete grades.  Either a single TA grades with the professor, or as a part of a team of TAs for a large course.  In either situation, significant resources are expended to ensure that all graders perform similarly, often to the style and expectation of the professor. Furthermore, TAs (and professors) may even cross-examine each other’s grading to perform either spot checks or a thorough review.  Therefore, in these situations, a grade is very likely locked in quite tightly.

Contrary to the popular zeitgeist, however, it’s been my experience that the vast majority of professors and other instructors actually grade their own work.  You’ll be hard pressed to find many TAs in community colleges, smaller state schools, and niche programs of study.  You mostly won’t find them at all in private for-profit colleges where TAs were cut decades ago or never hired on in the first place.

In these situations, a professor or other instructor still has checks and balances.  They often are required to grade according to a published rubric that all students and other faculty can access.  They’ve also likely worked with adjuncts and cross-trained faculty on standardizing the grading process for a course.

How Do Instructors Feel About Grade Reviews

It may seem as if you could get a variety of answers on this topic, but when you press for details there seems to be only one overarching viewpoint:  professors don’t mind grade review requests if they’ve made a legitimate mistake, but are utterly annoyed by them in any other situation.  One of the challenges is that many times, students are unable to discern the difference.

Notice that the three categories of review reasons given all start with emotional words: feeling, wanting, expecting.  This isn’t by accident.  Let’s look at each one of these systematically and address their particular nuances.

Feeling a Grade Doesn’t Reflect Expended Effort

Depending on the professor, you’ll get a completely mixed range of sympathy here, but very little in terms of willingness to review or alter grades as a result.  Sometimes, we don’t manage our time efficiently and could learn from the Pareto Principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 rule.  In fact, I teach this to students as a method for optimizing grades with minimal effort… assuming one can be happy with a B or C from time to time, and only expend additional effort to improve from that baseline.  Also, we must each face the fact that we’re not good at everything.  Personally, I had to struggle and work for hours on end to make an A or B in accounting, but I could walk right into a management course and pass the exam without so much as a lecture or textbook.  Guess what my undergraduate degree is in… it’s not accounting.

Wanting to Earn a Particular Score or GPA

Very little sympathy is to be had from professors on this one.  In fact, when I hear or read it, I blatantly roll my eyes, even if the student can directly see me doing so.  Your want of a score doesn’t make the reality so.  “Can you please review my assignment because I really wanted to make an A this time!”  Are you kidding me?  Did you put in the time and effort?  Maybe, but see the above paragraph and accept my condolences that you seem to require more time and effort.   If the criteria to earn a particular score wasn’t met, it wasn’t met.

Along with this desire to have a “perfect 100”, or “straight A’s”, there’s a whole subcategory that’s defined by expecting that more than once chance be given to earn the desired grade. It’s one thing to have that opportunity when you’re younger, as you’re still learning how to conform to requests and requirements, but as we progress in years and experience, there are often times in which something must be done correctly the first time.  Can you imagine a home builder getting to try as many times as they want to get a certain score on a final exam before getting their license?  No thanks!

Expecting Grades to Represent Their Personal Worth

Occasionally, professors will encounter students that take their grades entirely too personally.  They view earning a C on one assignment as suddenly becoming nothing more than an average person.  As if any above average intellect, athleticism, or other capability was instantly sucked away into the ether by one report on the Norman conquest of England in 1066.  A spiral begins and these students can sometimes become despondent in a class, leading to further disappointing scores that seem to reinforce their new-found bleakness.  Most of the time, these students need perspective mor than they need a grade change.  They need to understand we’re all great at something, and it’s okay to be middle-of-the-pack in other areas.  Nobody can be the top of all fields without looking like a complete fool… take Elon Musk for example.

Secret: Requests Almost Always Get Reviews

What students may not realize is that most requests for a grade review get one, even if otherwise declined. Simply think through the mechanics of a grader replying to a grade review request and you’ll see that it’s not possible to review a work simply through the lens of the request itself. The grader must find the work, look over the score and feedback they issued, check the alignment with the rubric, and roughly skim the work to check for obvious mistakes.  This in itself is a mini-review that must happen in order to determine if a review is warranted.

Therefore, if you request a review and the review is declined with an attached reason… it’s probably best to consider that the review and reply without pushing the issue further.

Of course, there are some classes, and graders, that will auto-decline any grade review, but generally, that’s made known up front.  In these situations, only errors or errata are on the table, and never under the auspices of a grade review.  To resolve these situations as a student, you’d contact the professor and TA to inform them of an error within an assignment, exam, or other work.  Be specific and indicate which activity contained the error, and very specifically what and where the error was observed.  The error in question can then be reviewed systematically and, if the error is confirmed, it will be addressed for all students impacted by the error outside the scope of one’s individual work.

But What if the Student is Right?

Let’s use our imaginations. Universities are machines.  The available labor force is a warehouse.  The university machines pump out knowledgeable and qualified workers into the warehouse.  Worker-products consist of product attributes: a degree specialization, an optional minor specialization, a GPA, any honors and awards, etc.

To make this worker-product, many widgets must be assembled and encased within the product.  These widgets are assignments, quizzes, exams, discussions, reports, and the like.  The varying worker-products all have equally varying widget qualities inside of them—A-grade, B-grade, C-grade, etc.—based on the quality of the raw person material placed through the machine, as well as the environmental factors at the time the person-material is processed into a finished worker-product.

The university machine does make mistakes.  Sometimes a C-grade widget appears in an A-grade rated worker-products, even if the raw inputs were flawless.  There is a certain level of quality assurance that is happening, however.  Maybe not to the tune of six-sigma, but certainly better than randomness.

Ending this imaginative scenario, we see that the ultimate result is that sometimes a defective widget is placed inside a perfectly working product.  A $2,500 TV that I bought had a dead green pixel straight out of the box, and one that would have been noticeable in QA. There’s no recourse for that, because the company had to set quality thresholds that accounted for the reality of dead pixels given the technology of the time.  The TV has otherwise worked just fine and served as a beautifully thin, frameless, smart TV for twelve years for me.

You see where this leads us and can therefore infer all the rest.

What about the United States?

Something that was surprising throughout my research was that the United States seems to be one of the only places where Grade Reviews are ever considered a good idea.  I’m sure that attitudes on this are changing across the globe, especially as various types of education are deployed. Even I would strongly advocate for review requests in certain types of liberal arts or progressive education that are currently not the traditional form at most universities.  However, if we leave the arts and leave concept-driven courses, there is a certain point at which proficiency must be demonstrated. Possibly in the future we can replace proficiency exams and projects with psychometric observations that can make accurate competency assessments, but we’re not there yet.

What is Generative AI

AI, or Artificial Intelligence, is the use of computational systems to mimic human intelligence. When talking about AI, we’re mostly talking about combining the technologies of machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and some type of statistics or predictive analysis to determine confidence in the answer being determined.

While AI can perform a wide variety of tasks, Generative AI is a type of AI that can synthesize output using deep neural networks—machine learning designed to mimic the human brain itself—to process large volumes of input on the subject and generate new output that is similar in character to the original inputs.  Whether viewed as mere mimicry or even as akin to the output process of learning, these newly produced outputs are increasingly realistic and uniquely formed, whether written text, images, music, spoken word, or even video.

Where can Generative AI be found?

The two primary providers of Generative AI technology, under the hood, are OpenAI and Google, with the former being the leader in the space.  OpenAI tools you may have heard of include GPT-3 (and GPT-4 coming soon), Grover, and the now-famous ChatGPT which deploys the aforementioned GPT technology within a conversational interface.  Google’s AI initiatives are best known through their LaMDA products, such as the upcoming BARD search updates. These tools, and independent AI models, are now built into software of almost every category or type.

Generative AI is most likely to be used by students when it has reached mainstream status, however.  This means that the OpenAI tools are by far the most likely tools to be used by students for now.  Written works created with ChatGPT’s free tier are the most likely at the moment. But early adopters who have relied on generative AI for the longest are likely using third-party tools that give them access to GPT-3 or other similar AI models for writing text and copy: Jasper, Copysmith, Rytr, Frase, and the countless others you can find online.

With Microsoft investing a cumulative $15 billion in OpenAI to date, even the Bing search engine now has chat-style generative AI built in while Google still languishes behind.  However, the use of ChatGPT within Bing Chat is still in an early preview as this post is being written, so it will be some time before it’s adopted by anyone beyond the most stalwart of Microsoft fans.  Bing distinctively bases all answers on web search results and cites each piece of data provided.  This can be extremely useful for conducting research, as will be discussed next.

How Students Should Use Generative AI in Education

In my view, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the use of Generative AI by students who are old enough to be trained in both its usage and the processing of the resulting output. There are three primary ways that I openly support the use of Generative AI within my own classroom: tertiary research, focused microlearning, and proofreading.

Tertiary Research

Wikipedia has long been debated in academic circles. Historically, the question has been whether Wikipedia is a valid source of research. I’ve always found this quite concerning as it demonstrates that the detractors are insufficiently versed on research. Wikipedia, to continue this tangent, is a perfectly valid source of tertiary research. Tertiary research is research that is used to identify additional information or even sources for secondary research. So long as students follow the research trail to valid secondary sources, Wikipedia should be fair game although never cited directly.

Using Generative AI for research should be considered within the same framework. It’s a valid tertiary source for data and information. As a tertiary source it shouldn’t be cited directly in academic work. However, the output of Generative AI tools can lead students to valid sources of information that can assist with their research tasks, whether formal for peer reviewed work or informal for in class discussion.

Focused Microlearning

Since Generative AI can create new output from a variety of vetted sources, it will become common to utilize it for focused microlearning. I tell my students that if they’re having trouble understanding a concept through the various resources I provided to appeal to multiple intelligences… go ask AI. While currently viewed as heretical, this is actually similar to directing students to a textbook, online videos, or other sources that are known to be likely valid, but not necessarily perfectly aligned to the course. The purpose isn’t so much to offload the teaching responsibility to technology, or a textbook, but rather to reinforce the existing teaching with an additional voice.

In my own undergraduate experience, I know that I spent many hours scouring textbooks that were only mildly aligned with coarse content for a better understanding of lecture topics and assignment requirements. By being able to ask a Generative AI specific questions about my understanding deficit, I would have been able to accelerate the learning process and spend much more time creating my own output and exploring through other means, such as kinesthetic, instead of spending the vast majority of my time on reading. As much of a fan of lecture and reading as I am (And I am!), even I have to admit that more verbal, visual, and kinesthetic learning would have been beneficial to my learning experience. By understanding this, I can try to offer that to my own students.

Proofreading

Many educators are already in the habit of suggesting tools for spelling and grammar check. While I grew up in a time where the use of spell check was debated, it’s now virtually a non-issue to the point that we’d actively have to turn off spelling and grammar suggestions in most software, including the web browser. Gone are the days that spell check is a Microsoft Word-only feature.

So too will we see the day where tools such as Grammarly and others that are commonly suggested to students are integrated into our computing experience. My current web browser, Microsoft Edge, already has predictive text built in on the desktop. While we’re used to this technology from mobile devices in order to save thumb strokes on the screen, the technology applied to the desktop is much more advanced. It understands what I’m writing and can offer contextual suggestions for how I’m most likely to finish a sentence, including referencing my main topic, and not just generic grammar suggestions.

With tools such as Grammarly being focused on student use, and many Generative AI text writing tools having rewrite features, it’s unlikely for any classroom to not experience these within the next few months to years. Even primary education will be heavily impacted by these tool sets just as we currently are with spell check.

How to Counter the use of Generative AI by Students

Many of the tools you’re likely already using to identify plagiarism from sources on the web are beginning to build in detection methods for identifying whether a paper was written with Generative AI. Other tests exist to determine if images and other creative works were created by AI, but those are beyond my current scope. If you are looking to keep synthetically created work out of your classroom for the time being, your best bet is to rely on these tools and follow their adoption of anti-AI algorithms.

The tool available to me currently, TurnItIn.com, is leading the charge and publishes semi-frequent updates on their AI detection initiatives.

Benefits of Generative AI for Teachers

Whether you’ve decided to eliminate AI from all student work completely, or openly embrace it by offering best practices for students to follow, you should at least consider how Generative AI could impact your own workflow. As a teacher your discernment of the appropriate usecases for a technology may be beneficial while conducting this analysis. In order to better understand the benefits of utilizing AI—from the teacher’s perspective within the classroom—I asked ChatGPT why an educator would want to use AI for their own purposes. Here’s what it said:

Generative AI provides a major advantage for educators by allowing for automatic generation of material to meet the individual needs of each student. This technology can help tailor teaching content quickly to various learning styles and aptitudes, which makes teaching more effective and engaging. Generative AI also helps teachers save time by automating the creation of personalized lesson plans, activities, and materials in minutes. This technology also opens up new possibilities to create different types of educational experiences with simulations, games, virtual field trips, and more.

My Classroom Best Practices for AI

In case you’re curious about my own views on allowing students to utilize AI within the classroom (an undergrad digital marketing course), I’ve adopted the following best practices.

1) AI is a welcomed addition to your work efforts.

2) You are encouraged to interface with trusted AI products (ChatGPT, Bing, etc.) to learn more about our topics.

3) You are encouraged to have AI help you structure your writing (outlines), but you must manually ensure compliance with class requirements, which AI still has difficulty doing.

4) You are welcome to review the results that AI produces for our class writing prompts, but you must still manually write your own work—even if it’s a derivative of the AI’s output.

5) You may use spellcheck, grammar check, and grammar rewrite tools as much as necessary to best conform to U.S. English.

6) Feel free to ask AI to make your writing more concise, but I’d urge you to not trust it to make your writing longer… the results are often light on depth and negatively impact scores in the analysis category of the rubric.

Tools Discussed Within This Post

1. OpenAI ChatGPT – https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt
2. Google LaMDA – https://blog.google/technology/ai/lamda/
3. OpenAI GPT-3 – https://openai.com/blog/openai-api/
4. Jasper – https://jasper.ai
5. Copysmith – https://copysmith.ai
6. Rytr.me – https://rytr.me
7. Frase.io – https://frase.io
8. Microsoft Bing Chat – https://bing.com/chat
9. Grammerly – https://grammerly.com
10. TurnItIn.com – https://turnitin.com

This type of internal incubation isn’t new to Zilliqa. What is new, however, is Zilliqa’s clear stance that they are intending to serve as an internal incubator and accelerator to web3 startups.

In the past, Zilliqa relied solely on their ZilHive incubator to incubate and accelerate third-party developers. Now, it appears there will be an external effort through the rebooted ZilHive and an internal effort through Zilliqa itself.

This move is notable and likely beneficial to the long-term viability of the somewhat stagnant Zilliqa, which has been stuck in market cap rankings between #50 and 100 for years.

Detractors will note, however, that Zilliqa has been financially “tapped” before by their founders and management team to fund their vanity projects (Aqilliz, Metapolis, etc.). The funding came at the expense of unwilling value loss from token investors as previous attempts were fueled by large sells of the $ZIL utility token.

But despite being my favorite input combo ever, it comes with a lot of problems.  Including many problems that shouldn’t come with a Microsoft branded device.  If you’re looking for a keyboard and mouse combo and considering the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic, I’ll run through a brief list of pros and cons for you to consider.

Pros

• One of the few wireless ergonomic keyboards available in stores.
• Microsoft-branded and amazingly sleek design.
• Very nice typing experience from the keyboard for office settings.
• Extremely comfortable mouse for lengthy computing sessions.

Cons

• USB dongle wakes up monitors immediately upon power savings, never addressed by Microsoft.
• Low-quality mouse buttons wear out in 1-2 years of normal office usage.
• Uses AA batteries instead of having batteries built in. (Although this helps some business users avoid charging downtime.)
• The 10-key pad takes several key presses to wake up from power-saving mode.
• The 10-key pad has poor input reliability, even with a fresh battery and in close proximity to the USB dongle.

You Decide

• Separate 10-key number pad which can be moved anywhere within range.
• Large, round mouse for extreme ergonomic design.

After having three models of this keyboard and mouse combo, I think I’ll temporarily move on from the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic set.  While I’ll likely come back sometime for the sleek design and sheer comfort of using the set, the poor software support has left me with bad memories… and I mean that literally.  

The fact that a Microsoft product interacts poorly with Windows and causes hard-to-resolve power management issues is a major detractor.  I’ve spent countless afternoons (and nights) manually adjusting settings in the device manager, registry, and elsewhere to prevent my monitors from flicking back on as soon as they turn off for power savings.  The cause is always the same… it’s the Sculpt Ergonomic’s USB dongle.  Yet, Microsoft never fixes this often-reported issue.  Microsoft’s lack of care to correct this problem is akin to disdain for the end user.

But, the ultimate kicker for me that causes me to move on is that I’ve love this product enough to buy three of them.  Each time it was because the left mouse button began to experience hardware failure and clicks wouldn’t register or would be inconsistent.  After assuring that the culprit was hardware failure, I’d immediately run out and buy another Sculpt Ergonomic combo because of my affinity for the set.

Buying a fourth keyboard and mouse combo because Microsoft uses poorly click-rated buttons in an arguably premium set of input tools for office use is where better sense starts to kick in.  I’ll try something else this time, even though I’ll surely miss the Sculpt Ergonomic and its ability to fade into the background and keep my long work sessions comfortable.

If you’re looking for a nice office-friendly ergonomic mouse and keyboard (with detached 10-key even!) then this set might be for you.  Just know that it will only last a year or two, and then the entire set will need to be tossed or recycled. Mass production consumerism at its worst embodied in a comfortable keyboard… all due to weak hardware buttons.

The Benefits of Deep Work

It takes mere minutes searching the web to see an enormous number of benefits of deep work or being in a state of flow.  Better performance, greater accuracy, higher completion rates… these all sound like wonderful outcomes.  It’s even said that those working in a state of flow have less self-doubt and more confidence about their work.  Who wouldn’t want that?

The Negative Effects of Deep Work

The negative side effects of deep work are much less extolled. They can include the obvious, like losing track of time, and the less obvious, like burnout from overexertion.  It’s difficult to imagine a smooth state of intensely focused, and almost meditative, work leading to burnout, but all that focus depletes a massive amount of mental energy.

You’ve likely experienced side effects of deep work yourself from time to time, even if you’re not a proponent of productivity crazes or trying to maximize your performance while working in a state of flow.  If you’ve ever worked intently on something in a systematic and involved way only to feel trouble reconnecting to the world afterward or felt brain fog consistently after performing a particular task, you’ve experienced the negative effects of deep work.

Work Addiction can be Caused by Flow

Brain fog and difficulty connecting to the world, and its inhabitants, isn’t the end of the negative effects from a state of flow.  With deep work we’re seeking the productive benefits described earlier.  But as we receive them via completed tasks and projects, we receive a dopamine reward from our brains in addition.  

Dopamine doesn’t solely manifest at the end of a task or project, but all throughout.  Dopamine is directly involved in creating and maintaining the state of flow as it reduces activity in the prefrontal cortex and therefore reduces your processing of time, memory, and awareness.  It’s these reductions in alertness which let you deeply focus on one task.

We should, therefore, relabel “flow” to be more descriptive: dopamine flow.  Once the dopamine flow ends, the boosted productivity and focus also end.  We know that the inhibiting of the prefrontal cortex can result in brain fog. During the stress response, cortisol is released which inhibits the prefrontal cortex and can lead to brain fog.  Unlike dopamine, however, cortisol can lead to lower performance and lack of focus.

After dopamine helps us reach flow and accomplish desired outcomes, it then ends leaving us feeling disconnected, foggy, and down. A cycle develops where the frequent user of flow increasingly relies on deep work sessions to feel functional or even complete.  You may even suffer through the supposed enjoyment of life during off-hours, waiting for your next chance to get back to work, forgetting that you work-to-live and not live-to-work. You chase the dopamine dragon.

Techniques for Deep Work Optimization

You’ll want to optimize deep work in order to thwart the potential negative side effects, including brain fog, depression, disconnection from other people, and even workaholism.  Avoiding flow altogether isn’t a great strategy, however.  Our brains have the capability to enter this state for an evolutionary reason, and the advantage is worth the effort required to maintain its healthy operation.

When looking to utilize deep work or flow, consider following these three simple recommendations:

1) Eat, Sleep, and Exercise

Let’s put the big elements right up front.  If you eat healthy, sleep properly, and exercise appropriately, it’s likely that your mental health and fortitude will better handle the occasional temporary dopamine flow for deep work.

When it comes to eating it is suggested that protein, fatty acids, fats, and antioxidants are best for regulating dopamine.  From experience, I know that I had immense success with regulating flow while in nutritional ketosis, but I struggle immensely with dopamine-fueled work addiction while consuming carbohydrates of various types.

2) Break Out Often

The Pomodoro Technique was pioneered by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980s using a tomato-shaped (a pomodoro tomato, to be exact) kitchen timer.  The general premise is that you work in interval cycles consisting of single-task focused work for 25 minutes and then a short five-minute break. After five of these 30-minute pomodoro intervals, you take an extended break which can range anywhere from 15 to 60 minutes.  

The benefit of these cycles is that you accustom yourself to regular and predictable work-related dopamine bursts, but more importantly that you accustom yourself to exit flow routinely.  Relying on an external timekeeping device while your temporal awareness is diminished ensures that you don’t get lost in your work or inhibit your pre-frontal cortex to the point of brain fog or burnout.

3) Augment with Other Dopamine Sources

As you’re utilizing a dopamine release to help increase productivity on single-item tasks, be sure to find non-work sources of dopamine to avoid dependence upon work to feel focused, present, or satisfied.

Exercise helps increase dopamine and its regulation, as mentioned previously. Other activities to consider that have a similar effect include meditation, listening to music, and playing or watching sports.  Spending time with others who you enjoy, friends and family, also helps regulate dopamine. Conversations, outings, games, and the like all help, as does having sex or other intimate contact with your partner(s).  Without a partner, other types of socially acceptable intimate contact can also be very effective, whether they be a massage at the spa, a manicure or pedicure at the nail salon, or other types of grooming such as you’d get at the barber shop or hair salon.

…at least not anytime soon.

Recession Looming

The conversation of a looming recession keeps getting stronger despite apparently falling away from the average consumer’s consciousness.  It’s hard to blame these average consumers because their peers are spending mightily and unemployment is somewhat curiously falling.  Those are normally excellent signs for an economy. However, inflation is still a problem, interest rates are making borrowed money unaffordable (all to fight runaway inflation), technology companies are conducting mass layoffs, and… yes, now banks are beginning to collapse.

Look, I’m all about content that’s a bit more evergreen, and I don’t care to chase the news, but something is going on here.  Let’s explore a brief timeline of what’s happened this month (March 2023) alone.

Bank Failures

Silvergate Capital collapsed on Wednesday 08 March 2023.  Silvergate was a major lender to mainstream crypto, blockchain, and web3 companies.  On its own, the collapse feels like a very isolated incident more related to the current crypto winter than to global economic woes. In fact, I’d forgive anyone for incorrectly pointing to Silvergate and proclaiming, “I knew something was fishy about that crypto stuff.”  Of course, that’d overlook the fact that Silvergate didn’t deal in cryptocurrency, but instead dealt in lending and financing large crypto-oriented ventures that possessed solid backing and massive assets.

On that same date, however, something else took place that was historic.  Silicon Valley Bank begin to spiral, creating the second largest bank failure of all time. It was the first large bank collapse since the economic collapse of 2008.  Within a mere 48 hours, by Friday 10 March 2022, the bank had been shuttered and federal regulators had seized control of the bank’s deposits with plans to reopen under the regulator’s authority the following Monday for withdrawals.

But this post isn’t about bank failures.

It’s about what’s coming, and why it’s coming.

Human Persistence

We, collectively, have withstood a lot recently. Despite this, we haven’t quite learned our lesson. We haven’t learned how to be a population of 8 Billion people in a global capitalist society.  We haven’t learned how to transition our technologies—much less our processes—fast enough to meet the needs of progress.  We haven’t learned how to mitigate reactionary forces, and we haven’t learned how to properly mitigate political conservatives who opine over overt racism, sexism, and fascism in favor of more level-headed economic or environmental conservativism that protects our fiscal health or even our planet.

What this means is that despite the warning of a near complete global economic collapse in 2008, we still wanted to return to business as usual.  Then, despite collapsing ecosystems, despite geopolitical war, despite multiple regional pandemics and a global one, despite deforestation, despite receding glaciers, despite rising sea levels, and despite every other immense and immediate warning sign around us… we seemingly crave business as usual, even at the highest literal cost.

The best part of us, our human persistence and perseverence, has been completely hijacked and weaponized against us.  Whether by governments or powerful groups as conspiracy theorists would have you belive, or by the meandering of our own mind’s natural evolution.

What’s to Come?

So yes, Virginia, there is a recession coming.  Furthermore, there is a depression of immense magnitude coming.  I can’t tell you when.  It could begin this year, or maybe it’s already begun.  Likewise, it may not begin for another 10 years, but it is coming. And as for why?  It’s because we’ve been given every bit of instruction and feedback from our people, our systems, our businesses, and our planet, and yet we haven’t sufficiently course corrected, or even attempted to.  I won’t even pretend to offer a solution within this piece, although the functional-health and mindfulness communities could probably benefit from a shoutout, but what’s certain is that the system we’ve been on for the past two hundred years works, but has serious flaws that cause it to be self-terminating if not sufficiently managed.

From nuclear winter to catastrophic climate change, and from ozone depletion to weaponized gene-manipulated viruses, we develop technologies that require massive responsibility because of massive consequences of misuse.  Yet, we let these technologies either control our own societies (like the automobile) or we fail to regulate them at all (like the gun industry in America).  It’s time that we collectively require and mandate that the anti-intellectualist strain of self-destruction is silenced, along with the prophetic end-of-world dominionistic philosophy, and anything else that speeds along our demise.  It’s not political, nor really even economic.  It’s literal survival.

Conclusion

In short, a major recession or depression is coming.  It’s coming because we’re doing absolutely nothing to prevent it from happening.  Sure, there’s economic policy designed to stave off each current and immediate threat, but there’s nothing along the lines of reinforcing the underlying economic systems that run our planet or buttressing the required health, environment, and lifestyle requirements to allow humans to conduct business of any kind.

Until these facts change, the impending doom will keep coming, and coming, and coming in successive, yet certain, waves.  This will happen over and over again until we take specific and unified action to stop it from coming.  And you can take that to the bank… so long as it can stay open.

Microsoft adopts GPT-4 into Bing and Edge

Microsoft has announced that it has integrated OpenAI’s latest language model, GPT-4, into its Bing search engine and Edge web browser. This is a major milestone for both companies, as GPT-4 is the most advanced artificial intelligence system of its kind, capable of generating natural language texts and images from any input.

GPT-4 was officially unveiled by OpenAI on March 14th, 2023, after months of speculation and rumors. The AI model has 1 trillion parameters, 10 times more than its predecessor GPT-3, which was already considered a breakthrough in natural language processing. GPT-4 can not only generate coherent and diverse texts on any topic, but also produce realistic images from text descriptions or captions.

However, what many people did not know was that GPT-4 was already powering Bing since February 2023, as part of a secret collaboration between Microsoft and OpenAI. Microsoft had access to an early version of GPT-4 through its exclusive license agreement with OpenAI, which gave it the right to use the AI model for its own products and services. Microsoft decided to test GPT-4 on Bing as a way to improve its search quality and user experience.

According to Microsoft’s blog post, Bing users can now enjoy several benefits from using GPT-4:

• More relevant and comprehensive search results: GPT-4 can understand complex queries better than traditional algorithms, and provide more accurate and diverse answers from multiple sources.
• More engaging and interactive search experience: GPT-4 can generate natural language responses to user questions or comments, as well as suggest related topics or queries for further exploration.
• More visual and creative search options: GPT-4 can create images from text inputs or modify existing images based on user requests. For example, users can ask Bing to show them “a cat wearing a hat” or “a sunset with purple clouds” and get realistic images generated by GPT-4.

Microsoft has also integrated GPT-4 into its Edge web browser, which now features a new sidebar that allows users to chat with Bing’s AI chatbot. The chatbot can answer user questions about any topic, provide useful information or tips, or even generate fun content such as jokes or stories. Users can also ask the chatbot to show them images created by GPT-4 based on their inputs.

Microsoft claims that using GPT-4 in Bing and Edge will enhance user satisfaction and loyalty, as well as attract new users who are curious about the AI capabilities. Microsoft also says that it will continue to work with OpenAI to improve GPT-4’s performance and safety, as well as explore new ways to apply it across its products and services.

GPT-4 is currently available only through OpenAI’s API, which requires developers to join a waitlist and pay a fee based on usage. Microsoft is one of the few companies that have direct access to GPT-4 through its license agreement with OpenAI. However, OpenAI says that it plans to make GPT-4 more accessible in the future, as part of its mission to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits humanity as a whole.

Microsoft Whiteboard

Let’s start with the obvious fact that Microsoft Whiteboard isn’t new.  In fact, at the time of writing, it’s between six and seven years old. If it were a child, it’d have already been through preschool and kindergarten and would now be at the end of first grade in the U.S. education system.  It’d have lost several baby teeth and have a few full-adult chompers… you get the point, it’s not new. However, what began as a straightforward whiteboard app has evolved in more recent years to be an extremely light competitor to the leading multi-user canvas or whiteboard apps today: Miro,  Mural, Lucidspark, ClickUp Whiteboard, and HuddleIQ.  This slight upgrade has made the tool much newer than its actual age would suggest.

What’s missing in Microsoft Whiteboard is an extensive set of integrations with the rest of the Office suite, and templates.  Having a massive push to diversify, deepen, and enrich the ploppable templates list would singlehandedly make Microsoft Whiteboard a more serious contender in the space and keep people engaged within the Office environment.  Beyond that, integrations with Office would make obvious sense, or at least the ability to easily load Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, and other Office documents into the Whiteboard which currently doesn’t exist at all.   An ideal solution would be to hybridize these two ideas and add a library for users to maintain a custom document or template library so they can deploy documents and templates on the whiteboard.

Microsoft Designer

Microsoft Designer is a new-for-2023 tool that seeks to transform casual graphic design into an AI-powered turnkey solution.  Instead of competing head-on with Canva, Adobe Express, VistaCreate, and others, Microsoft’s approach is to leverage their investment into OpenAI to have Dall-E create images for users.  The benefit of doing so is that a complex library of pre-existing social media, advertisement, flyer, poster, and other design types doesn’t have to be created in advance for users to customize.  The human middleman is extracted in favor of an AI middle-man who is trained to create such templates on the fly from human instruction.

My suggestion to Microsoft on this piece of software is somewhat unorthodox.  However, with the recent spike in acquisition of content creation tools from Microsoft, I believe they should create a Microsoft Create subscription that pairs with Office.  Combine the Microsoft-acquired Clipchamp Video Editor together with Microsoft Designer and they’d be partway there.  From that point, create a more advanced AI copy writer based on Edge’s Compose tool in the Bing Discovery panel, and add in the other requisite creation tools: an audio editor, a transcoding tool, and something for basic animations.  A Microsoft Create subscription might even give Microsoft reason to keep the next PDF editor they acquire instead of instantly selling it off like normal… for PDFs, ePub, and Mobi digital publication creation.  Hell, it’d finally give a proper home to Microsoft Publisher, as well as cause to continue developing it, or maybe merge it with Designer itself.

Microsoft Loop

This weekend, I’ve been most excited to get into Microsoft Loop for the first time.  Admittedly, it was a bit disappointing to not find a Notion-killer, but Loop does directly go up against Notion, ClickUp, and other types of collaborative workspace apps.  So far, however, it’s pages are very limited and its tables (the real power in many collaborative workspaces) are pretty basic.

Despite the early status of Microsoft Loop, Microsoft should 100% press forward with this one.  While I agree with many who say that Microsoft’s offerings are becoming too cluttered, I also see that they’re creating a “pivot table” of interfaces, if you’ll excuse the Excel reference. Microsoft has worked hard to ensure that whatever your default UI for Office is, that it surfaces all the tools you’re likely to need while burying the rest.  Whether your starting point is the Office app, Office.com, a desktop app’s home screen, or Microsoft Teams, the information you want most is made most readily available.  Microsoft Loop looks to be yet another entry point on par with those just listed, but one that also helps integrate tools for the view-only among your team who are using the Office apps, viewing your Sharepoint sites, or collaborating in Teams.

Conclusion

Ultimately, yes, Microsoft’s product and brand managers need to get together in a room for a week and not leave until they have a much more user-friendly categorization system for Microsoft’s offerings.  They need to answer the tough questions like, “Who competes with Canva… Designer or PowerPoint, or do they need to merge?  Can they merge?  Can they evolve?”  The same is true for Excel and Airtable.  What about Word, how will the new Bing’s generative AI capabilities fit in?  I don’t envy their task, and I honestly doubt this proposed conference of brand managers will happen in the way I propose, but boy I’d love to be not just a fly on the wall, but also the one bringing Post-It Notes and Starbucks coffee to that meeting.  Maybe I could even convince some of those Redmond folks that Dunkin’ Donuts really is better than Starbucks, but I probably shouldn’t push my luck too much.

For now, I’ll just leave it with my excitement that Microsoft is better organizing their tools with subdomains at the main Microsoft.com domain (eg. whiteboard.microsoft.com, designer.microsoft.com) and that helps those who want to directly dig into one tool instead of a whole suite an easy point of access.

But, even I had to admit that the lack of solid platform commitments on my part was causing a larger issue. It wasn’t just ChaseRaz.com suffering, it was all of my personal ventures. I realized that nothing was getting done because I wasn’t practicing what I essentially preach. Putting in the work to find a platform, commit to it, plan and schedule the content… none of that was getting done for a number of sites I was trying to push forward.

In the mean time, I’ve landed on platforms for almost everything.

• RCR: Webflow
• TZO Network: Webflow, YouTube, Spotify, X
• Multinewmedia: YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, X
• A.B. Gamma: Udemy, Skillshare, EzyCourse
• XLworks: Spreadsimple

The list goes on, but what I haven’t been able to successfully identify is the right platform for me. Currently, I’m just as torn as I’ve ever been in the past. Previously, I’ve used Blogger, WordPress, and a custom-built CMS. I’m certainly not interested in using Blogger or my own custom code this time around, and WordPress is way down the list. However, there are days I want to throw my hands in the air in defeat and just use WordPress like everyone else.

At the time of writing, I’m using the commercial (hosted) version of Ghost. But I’m also exploring a new startup called BlogHunch. There’s always the possibility of easily putting a blog on Sitejet, Webflow, or a number of other site builder tools. It’s just that nothing stands out to me as the clear right decision.

Of course, this platform indecision all loops back to the topic at the beginning: the cobbler’s kids have the worst shoes. The platform indecision stems from a mental list of hypothetical outcomes for the property. I could create a members-only area, or I could start a newsletter, or I could sell digital downloads. The problem with all of these “could” statements is that I haven’t put in the proper strategic planning work to know which of those things I will do.

And that part is a bit embarrassing, because in my work with clients and students, I’m extremely blunt about the fact that if you haven’t properly planned, you’re going to fail.

I guess it’s time to put even a simple site like ChaseRaz.com through the planning process.

With rcr.biz and chaseraz.com both live (er, live enough), it’s time to begin focusing on the ventures and consistently dedicate my time to building them out little-by-little each day.

The general plan

The general plan is to keep A.B. Gamma as the primary focus and always have a training course in active development, specifically in the business and technology fields. This primary everyday focus will be called the “alpha block” for planning purposes, but it’s only coincidental that the alpha block is for Alpha Beta Gamma… that was unintentional. Consider it a general tell into how my brain is wired for base-level naming more than anything.

Multinewmedia and its flagship b2c content distribution channel, TZO Network, will then alternate in the beta block. Multinewmedia and TZO are not lower priority, per se, but they are secondary in terms of RCR’s mission, vision, and values. Specifically, they directly align to the RCR vision of an egalitarian world with three direct outcomes: a higher quality of living, increased human rights, an individual fulfillment. A.B. Gamma, on the other hand, speaks to all portions of RCR’s mission, vision, and values.

How many blocks are there?

Is this a TV show with just an A-plot (alpha block) and B-plot (beta block)? No. Of course, I like to work in threes and there is a lesser priority “gamma block”, which serves as the C-plot. The gamma block will—for the time being—be split amongst XLWorks, Nootropics.com, and various other projects that are direct incubation projects of RCR Business Ventures or are designed to be content or IP holdings for Multinewmedia.

In fact, just today we tested our rapid iteration capabilities and launched the coming soon page for XLworks at https://xl.works. We went from absolutely nothing but the idea to a fully launched landing page in less than a day’s work. The point in mentioning this here is that the gamma blocks may be much less frequently scheduled than alpha or beta blocks, but they can be wildly productive.

Keeping priorities in check

The purpose of all of this is to be able to rapidly produce content for the core list of RCR ventures currently under development. A secondary consideration, but not less important, is to be able to maintain these accelerated operations while still operating with very minimal resources, especially minimal human resources. I don’t want to be forced to be at my computer even more throughout the day, but rather, I’m seeking to accomplish more while spending less time at the computer.

So, considering that I’ve launched the entire coming soon platform for a tertiary business today, I’d say it’s time for me to get out of here and go take a walk.