Melissa, Nicholas & Gaia, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Melissa Sconyers, Nicholas Deleon & Gaia Borgias Brown

Related Posts

• Deadlines
• E-Stalking [Part 2]
• E-Stalking [Part 1]
• Gaia & Bill

Hanging out on Melissa Sconyers‘ blog (aka E-Stalking), I came across this post called Work=Life. Amongst other interesting things, Melissa had this to say about the work-week:

“People prefer to build a dam, stopping the workflow the minute that the clock turns from 4:59PM on Friday afternoon. And it’s no wonder that people feel inundated and overwhelmed on Monday morning, when the floodgates are lifted, and suddenly they’re in way over their head, desperately trying to tread and keep their head above the water that threatens to drown them.”

I’m a freelancer. As such, I have no work-week. I have deadlines. Friday means nothing to me… Neither does Monday… Neither does Saturday. They’re all the exact same day. The only thing that matters to me is how much time I have until my delivery date (meaning videos, not kids, in case you don’t know whose blog you’re reading).

I’m not a 9-5er. It’s not in my blood. It’s not in my father’s blood. I “can’t” go somewhere every day and waste my time in order to get some money. OTOH, I edited my Vlog Deathmatch video in three consecutive days of probably 17 hours each:

Recently, I had a project deadline change on me from “Probably a couple of weeks from now” to “Tomorrow morning”. This would have freaked 99% of the population the **** out, and they would have folded entirely or turned in garbage on time. I was perfectly calm, for two reasons:
1) I had approximately 20 hours left to deliver the video.
2) I felt perfect… (felt perfectLY? sounds like an action, not a status. :D)

It was important that I had 20 hours left to deliver because I knew I could finish the project to my own personal satisfaction within that amount of time. I knew there was enough time for me to do a really good video, and this added to my state of well-being, because I didn’t have to resort to some sort of 2-minute drill style which would have been more of a salvage operation than a creative edit.

It was important that I felt perfect(ly) because I knew that I was going to be able to utilize as many of those 20 hours as I needed. I knew I wasn’t going to fall asleep. I knew I wasn’t going to lose focus. Mentally and physically, I was in perfect condition to think and ‘perform’. I didn’t have some 9-5 to go to in the morning, so I wasn’t worried about what time I might have to stay awake until.

So, basically, 14 hours after I found out about my 20 hour deadline, I was finished. The project was delivered around 3 am when the deadline was approximately 9 am. I felt fine. I felt accomplished, and “another one bites the dust”. :D

I’ve always had intense dedication to goals that I felt were important, but I’m sure my emotional reaction to time and deadlines was crafted in college. In school, we didn’t get homework. We got “Problem Sets”. Basically, you were given your assignment on Tuesday, for instance, and you were required to turn in the answers NEXT TUESDAY. Often, what this meant was that I didn’t do JACK about it until Sunday, hahaha and then spent every extra hour at my disposal on Sunday and Monday to do what I should have spread out during the week.

Because of this, a brotha had to “get in where he fit in” :) You don’t eat in the morning and then at 12 noon and then at 6pm. You eat when you eat… IF you eat. You might have to take that trip to the candy machine in the lobby and get back at it. You don’t sleep at night. You sleep when you can’t stay awake any longer. Day and Night doesn’t mean anything anymore, and you wouldn’t even know if you didn’t have windows. You never know what day of the week it is, because it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is how many days and then hours you have left before you have to walk into that classroom with the right answers for the professor. You never know what time it is, because that doesn’t matter either, unless you’re still working on a Problem Set on the day it’s due, and you don’t want to miss the class you need to attend to hand it in.

So there is no “stopping of the workflow” that Melissa mentions in her post. There can’t be… because the deadline is always there, and it’s always approaching. Not working on your project only makes you *MORE* aware that you now have EVEN LESS TIME to accomplish your task. Psychologically, it’s in one’s best interest to “clear the desk” and knock off projects as quickly as possible. There is no “time for work” and “time to not work”. There’s only the list of projects you have to complete and the time you need to allocate to complete each one.

Right now, I’m running into a birthday party deadline, so that’s a wrap!

Happy Birthday, Steph & Brett! :D

Related Posts

• Time And Productivity
• Time, Part 02
• What About The Proletariat? [Time, Part 11]
• “Free” Time [Time, Part 10]
• Business, 2010 [Time, Part 09]

… continued from E-Stalking [Part 1]…

So… I’m minding my business, like I love to do… (my sister’s patented story-opening line)… and I start getting hits from Melissa’s site…

In the first line of her post, Being a Relater, I saw my full name and a link to my site. To this point, I’ve only referred to Melissa by first name in text & tags because I wasn’t sure whether my post was going to become some format of a ‘conversation’ between us or just one post BY me ABOUT her. :) I felt it would have been a Social Media faux pas to encroach on her Google Search results (like my posts love to do). So, since she’s ack’ed me at this point, I’ll mention that her name is Melissa Sconyers, and as far as I can tell, she’s a prodigy/phenom.

I had intended to go in a different direction with part 2 of E-Stalking, but I hadn’t anticipated her posting about my post, so now I’m compelled to respond to a couple of her points.

he talks about how he didn’t recognize my Twitter name or my real name, and therefore was unable to place me in context. He also mentions that’s he when he tried several times to draw a connection between us, and found none.

Yes. This happened in the very beginning of when I spoke to her. Most of the time that I go to Social Media events, I’m hanging out with my friends and I meet friends of my friends. I was immediately at a loss, not being able to connect Melissa to someone I had already met, so I believe I reverted to the dreaded “what do you do?”. :) I don’t exactly remember her response, but it was one word. It was probably “marketing”. Whatever it was that she said, the WAY she said it was what was of interest to me.

Most people that you encounter on the meetup circuit are “looking to make a come-up”. IME, they normally connect themselves to the largest, most recognizable company or accomplishment they’ve achieved so far. Whatever Melissa’s one word was, it was delivered with the matter-of-fact-ness of “I do what I do”. She didn’t feel any need to explain her “doing” any more than that. Something about her demeanor indicated a confidence and self-sufficiency about her that made me figure that if she had been from around here, I would have heard of her by now. Since I hadn’t, I believe I asked her if she was from out of town.

… it’s easy for me to tell people what I “do right now” with any number of simple answers — marketing, advertising, search marketing, digital media — and much, much more difficult to explain what it is that I “do.” Because I do a lot of things.

See, this is what I was talking about. Having so many skillz to “fall back on” makes it so that one doesn’t have to latch onto any particular thing to receive props. If Rob hadn’t told me I should wait and get a new iPhone, I would have already replaced my old-ass phone with the little alien in it that jumps rope and takes baths (don’t ask), and I would have googled her right there on the spot.

… to his credit, he did a very thorough e-stalk on me, and emailed me with all sorts of comments and questions.

haha Yes I did Laugh Out Loud at “thorough e-stalk” hahaha :D

The way I see it, the net is a place where you can put all sorts of information about yourself, and if it’s not buried too deeply, anyone who’s interested in finding out about you can do so. Also, if they find out things they don’t like, they can eject without ever having to contact you. The reason I say “buried too deeply” is that I have over 300 videos that I’ve posted to the net since 2006 and *I* can’t even find some of my own videos easily! :D My cousin asked me the other day “How’s that girl doing that you did the music video in the car with?” and I was like ????? I didn’t even REMEMBER doing a music video in a car.

Song: “Tease”
Artist: Kelly (www.myspace.com/KellyPorter)
Video performed by Firestarter from KR3Ts (KR3Ts.com)
A&B Camera: Krys G., Bill C.
Edit: Bill C.
Date: August 02, 2006

Anyway… yes. I am an extremely thorough E-Stalker. Depending on my level of intrigue, I will skim every single piece of media that I can find on the internet with your name on it. Everything means something. It’s so interesting to build a psychological profile of someone, pieced together from your guesses about their media and then see how close you come to their actual demeanor and way of being, IRL. :)

This makes me quite good at small talk. But it still doesn’t mean I enjoy it by any means.

To me, small-talk is similar to not browsing the other person’s media on the net. It’s like throwing away time. I’d rather say nothing and enjoy my own thoughts than ramble on about some nonsense. Even if someone’s on-topic with me, I’d prefer that they knew what they were talking about, haha. I *can* small-talk… but if I did, I’d be perfectly aware that I was wasting my time as well as theirs.

As a keen observer, I prefer to move around a room, watch how people are interacting, overhear a couple of conversations, and then find one where I can jump in. This is my way of finding context, when it isn’t possible to know something in advance about the person standing in front of me. Plus, the participants in the conversation are already more interested in talking to me than if we had all started cold, because I’ve made myself relevant to what they’re already talking about.

I enjoyed reading this paragraph, because this is exactly what Melissa did to me. :) Once I had determined that Jonathan was in twitter contact with Melissa, I knew what I was going to do. I was going to find her the next day in his twitter stream and get my E-Stalk on. :D Until that time, I was perfectly content with my current understanding of “who she was”. I knew how tall she was, that she had something to do with marketing, that she was cute and that she spoke English. That’s it. :D Oh, and that she had a Twitter account name, which I was currently too inebriated to remember, but knew I was going to get from Jonathan ‘on the morrow’.

At some point, she says something to me about my shirt.

I replied something like “Oh, that’s Renzo Gracie. He’s a fighter”, and expected that to be the end of the conversation… except she goes “I know” to which I raised an eyebrow and listened to her continue about a topic that I’m very interested in. hahaha Excellent Technique! On top of that, it worked on me just like it was supposed to. That conversation went directly to the top of my ‘understandings’ about her, because as she says:

In my experience, people aren’t interested in “you.” They’re interested in how “you” are interesting to them.

heh. Spot-On.

Apparently, Bill wasn’t the only one who didn’t get a full impression of who I am.

I think the important thing is that the impression that I *got* was that there was more to learn about Melissa. I don’t think it’s feasible that I would have gotten the entire picture, IRL. People will type stuff like this, but they won’t rattle it off when they meet you:

Yes, I am in advertising. But I’m also a geek, a writer, a blogger, an author, a photographer, a photojournalist, a restaurant reviewer, a programmer, a world traveler, a public speaker, a fluent Mandarin Chinese speaker, an entrepreneur, a web and graphic designer, a videographer, an inline speed skater, and probably a lot of other things that I’m forgetting.

I think the best you can do in a social situation is exude potential. Maybe potential, personality and class. When people ask me what I do, I say “I edit” or “I’m a video editor”. I’m not actually interested in people knowing how good I am at editing or what schools I graduated from or that I’m a world-class XBOX team leader or an ultimate frisbee terror. That’s because I’m not “tryinna make a come-up”. I don’t go out to make business contacts. That’s why I don’t carry “business cards”. I go out to spend time with cool, fun and intelligent people. If we have something in common, let’s chill. If not, let’s not! :D

Basically, I derived enough from our interaction at that event to consider Melissa someone I’d be googling in the near future… and I think that’s really all the impression one needs to make in this day and time! :D

Continued in part 3…

Related Posts

• E-Stalking [Part 3]
• E-Stalking [Part 1]
• Tech Stole Your Girlfriend!
• Online Dating Tactics
• re: Raymond Kristiansen’s “The Audience of Ten”

So I stopped by Melissa’s blog, and I’m skimming/reading her ideas, and I see this post called Stalking 101. The reason I decided to blog about reading her post is that she was blogging about exactly what I was doing at the time. :)

I decided to check out her reasons for googling people (searching for references to their names or sites they author or are a part of like, Bill, for instance :D) to see if they were similar to my own.

To paraphrase, here are her reasons:

1 ) Being an introvert (including potentially appearing “maladroit at small talk”)
2 ) Needing context for conversations
3 ) Wanting to ‘get to know someone’ before engaging them in “inspiring conversation”
4 ) Attempting to form a fairly complete picture of you based on your online thoughtstream
5 ) Giving the stalkee the respect of wanting to know more about them
6 ) Respecting the time you’ve spent in putting information about yourself on the net
7 ) Wanting to have a meaningful interaction with the stalkee IRL
8 ) Relieving them of redundantly explaining their life story

My reasons for e-stalking overlap with hers at several points, but I have a couple of different ones, which I’ll get to…

Another thing that was funny to me after I read Melissa’s post was that we had met each other “cold”… purely by accident. She happened to be standing with a group of friends of mine, and since I hadn’t met her before or seen her around, I introduced myself. I figured that even though I hadn’t seen her before, I’d be familiar with her twitter name, so I asked her what that was…. No dice. Never heard of that name before. :) So, now… Here I was, at a social media event, having ZERO point of reference for who she was. To me, this was like falling off a cliff into a chasm, with a cheap greenscreen effect to show me supposedly falling away from the camera. It was like a system shutdown. To illustrate how strange this was, I could have taken a rock and hit no less than 45 people that I knew in the same room with us. I mean, no walls between us at all, and I couldn’t draw ONE connection between her and any of them OR anybody else I knew on the social media scene. So the next question I had was something to the effect of:

“So… You’re from out of town?”

Which she wasn’t, which made me fall farther from the camera into the chasm. :) What I realize now is that I was doing what Melissa describes in her post. I was attempting to latch onto some sort of internet-based understanding of “who she was” in order to have some form of useful conversation with her. Once I drew a complete and absolute BLANK, I had no point of reference and probably seemed like I didn’t have anything to say to her. I’m sure I had lots to say to her, except as I mentioned in Chris Brogan’s post, “Five Levels of Social Conversation”, I’m not a small-talker. I’m interested in USEFUL conversation, and by now, I’m very used to knowing what conversation is useful to whom because of what they post to the net.

Anyway… A mutual friend standing in that group was already in social media contact with her, so I decided I was going to “quit while I was in the middle of nowhere” and just google her the next day. To her credit, she struck up a conversation later on, based on what was on my shirt and I found out that we shared a mutual interest. That’s always a good thing. :)

So it was really interesting to me that in the process of e-stalking her, I arrived at a post that talks about how she e-stalks people, and why. :D I thought it would be interesting (to me) to see where my reasons and Melissa’s paraphrased reasons overlap…

1 ) Being an introvert (including potentially appearing “maladroit at small talk”)

I’m not an introvert at all. I may actually qualify as an extrovert, haha. However, as I mentioned above, I don’t small-talk. I’m not interested. I’d rather say NOTHING than say (or listen to) nothing interesting. I don’t care about the weather. I don’t care which direction you brush your dog’s hair OR that you even HAVE a dog. At the same time, I don’t want to bore you with things that *I* think are interesting that YOU don’t care about. E-Stalking helps to avoid this, because I know that Charles likes politics and Grace likes food and Annie likes to read books. I know ahead of time what conversations I’m going to get into, so I’m properly prepped for the evening’s events.

2 ) Needing context for conversations

I don’t *need* context, but it’s good to have. It’s way more efficient to walk in the door knowing what someone thinks instead of deciphering it halfway through a conversation. Context is what I was struggling for when I met Melissa. Is she in video? Is she in web design? Is she in finance? If I had heard of her ever in life beforehand, I would have known these things by the time I physically met her and I would have had some intelligent questions/statements. :)

3 ) Wanting to ‘get to know someone’ before engaging them in “inspiring conversation”

I agree with this, entirely. E-Stalking is fantastic for understanding what someone’s passionate about ad how/if their mind works. It’s one thing to say you have a dating blog. However… What are you REALLY talking about? Are you original? Are you regurgitating stuff you see in movies or read on other blogs? Is your material useful to ANYBODY past a basic, surface level of dating idiocy, such as “you messed up, so buy her flowers”? Being able to read people’s material ahead of time saves you from wasting the time, energy and breath of starting a discussion that you quickly find out you’d like to end. :)

Another thing is that people involved in social media are more likely to post something to the net than bring it up IRL. I found out, for instance, that Melissa’s been to China. I would never have asked her about that, because, to me, “travel” falls under the category of small-talk. Besides… I’ve been to ChinaTOWN in NYC, DC, Philly, etc, but actual CHINA never enters my mind as far as a topic of conversation. Since people are more likely to post on the net that they went to China than to blurt it out randomly in an IRL social setting, e-stalking helps you to know who has stories you’d like to hear about places you never plan to go.

4 ) Attempting to form a fairly complete picture of you based on your online thoughtstream

Spot-On. This is one of the best parts of e-stalking! :D You can meet someone IRL so you know how it is to be around them and how they carry themselves and how they speak, smile and laugh… then you get to figure out on your own time and at your own pace what level of interaction you’d like to have with them, going forward. Of course, this works in both directions, haha. Your social media presence could enhance your relationship to someone or delete it entirely. :) Assuming that what you’re posting is a good representation of what you really think or feel, even deletion is a good thing. Social Media allows people to passively opt-out of socialization with someone, due to irreconcilable differences based on personality, activity or philosophy. If someone decides not to like you for some reason, they can carry on that relationship with themselves, and you don’t even have to be aware of it. :)

5 ) Giving the stalkee the respect of wanting to know more about them

This is definitely true. It takes a lot of time to read people’s blogs and watch their videos and read their forum comments and twitter posts and emails. Every minute you devote to someone else’s self-expression on the net is a form of respect, IMO. Then again, it could also be a form of your own personal entertainment, assuming you read blogs of people that you don’t respect yet find entertaining.

6 ) Respecting the time you’ve spent in putting information about yourself on the net &
7 ) Relieving them of redundantly explaining their life story

This was one of the things I really, REALLY enjoyed about starting my own site… as far as business and as far as pleasure. The first time social media hooked me up was when a company wanted me to bring them an editing demo reel, and I was able to point them to the URL to see samples of my work on their own computer screens and I got booked on the spot. I used to waste SOOOOOO much time redundantly telling people what I do. Now, I just point them to my site. My site URL is the same as my name. If you can’t remember my name, google “Bill”. That’s all I have to say. Also, I bring my iPod Nano with me with my video blog on it. I can show you what I do and you can read about the rest of it on the net. Lovely. :)

8 ) Wanting to have a meaningful interaction with the stalkee IRL

This is similar to (3), except once you already know the person. Bre moved from doing videos for Make Magazine to doing videos for Etsy. I learned about it via social media, so when I hung out with him the next time, I asked him about it. It was a much better conversation than the weather or something that we weren’t mutually interested in. It’s useful to have the option to gather this info ahead of time and increases the amount of quality conversation, accelerating people getting to know and appreciate each other.

I think I’ll add my e-stalking reasons in Part 2…

Related Posts

• E-Stalking [Part 2]
• E-Stalking [Part 3]
• Tech Stole Your Girlfriend!
• Online Dating Tactics
• re: Raymond Kristiansen’s “The Audience of Ten”