Note: I drafted this post three months ago but never had a chance to polish it up. I’ve since replaced my “For Hire” avatar with my regular one. I took on a larger than usual client for a three-month gig, and things with HelpAttack! are really taking off, so much so that my plate is truly full. It’s a good thing!

The client job? I got that with my Twitter avatar. It absolutely worked.

_____________________________________________________________

I’m not the first person to write a post about how to get a job in the Era of the Interwebs, but I figured I’d share with you my own personal recipe. Feel free to bake the same cookies, add your own ingredients, share with your friends, or what have you. Times are tough, and every little bit helps.

1. Twitter campaign

I stole this idea from Rob Blatt, who is now gainfully employed at Symphony Space in New York. This is the most passive element of my job hunting campaign, and as you read above, it turned out to be the most fruitful.

It started off as a subtle tweak to my avatar. The words “for hire” posted under my smiling face. But desperate times do not call for subtlety, they call for boldness. Few people noticed or commented on the change.

I then tried blurring and fading the avatar image and letting FOR HIRE cross the entire avatar diagonally. People actually complained about that one.

I believe it was Aliza Sherman who suggested I alter it to look like Kilroy. In my third variation on the “For Hire” avatar, I peeked out over a For Hire sign:

orchid8 was here

I have no design skills, so I didn’t even try to do the hands.

Many many people have commented on my avatar, asking permission to use a variation of it. Of course! It’s a free country! Please steal my idea. It’s a stolen idea to begin with. For all I know, Rob stole the idea from someone else.

The important thing about this avatar tweak was to maintain the personal branding  as much as possible, but alter it in a recognizable way, so that people would say to themselves “what has Sarah done to her avatar? oh, she’s looking for a job!” instead of “Whose avatar is that?” If you have a consistent avatar that you always use on Twitter, I recommend making changes to that very same avatar, so that people will make the connection between You and Job Hunting.

(Oh my god I said personal branding in a sentence! And I wasn’t being snarky! The horror.)

I should note also that this was primarily a Twitter campaign, but I put this avatar EVERYWHERE, on FriendFeed, LinkedIN, Flickr, Google Profiles, everywhere I had a public presence.

2. RSS is your Friend

You probably already know this, but maybe you don’t. RSS is your best friend when you’re job hunting. Here’s a screenshot of my RSS job feeds in Feedly:

I Can Haz Jobs?

Indeed.com, SimplyHired, Craigslist and Mashable are all good sources for job leads. There are many Twitter accounts that are devoted to linking available job positions as well, and you can add those to your RSS feed reader without actually following.

(Update – a couple of job interviews resulted from sending in resumes and cover letter cold, and a LOT of rejections came through as well. You need to develop very thick skin when you’re sending out applications. I applied to an average of 8 unique jobs a week, for a period of 7 months. None of those applications resulted in a job, and only one got me to a face-to-face interview. For the most part, though, I didn’t let that discourage me. The best part about the online job application experience, I think, was it helped me stay on top of the job market, who was hiring, how job descriptions were being written, etc.)

3. Facebook Event

An Austin friend of mine turned his job hunting campaign into a FB group. I liked that idea, but decided instead to make it an Event, for the month of July. I invited all 360+ friends of mine, and made it an open Event so anyone with a FB account could come to the “party.” Two days later and 75 people have signed up to be there. This has already yielded 3 job leads I would otherwise not have seen and 4 LinkedIN recommendations.

(Update – this turned out to be a wonderful source of support and community for me. I really appreciated having so many folks rallied around me!)

4. Kick it up on LinkedIN

I’m not great at this, but you should be. Give LinkedIN some love every day. Participate in groups there. Ask and answer questions. And remember to check the job boards. There are many companies that post jobs ONLY on LinkedIN. The more you update your presence there, the more you’ll be noticed by friends, colleagues, and potential employers.

5. Blog, blog, blog

Yeah, I sort of suck at this too. But it’s a great tool for job seekers. Regular posting shows commitment on your part. I could go on forever about blogging and why it’s good for you, but I’d feel like a hypocrite.

6. Network, network, network

This is tough for a lot of people. Here in Austin, a lot of networking events take place on weekday evenings. As a single parent, these are almost always impossible for me to attend. But get to as many of these as you can manage. If child care is an issue, try to wrangle some free babysitting from your next door neighbor or your Aunt Madge. Put that nametag on your chest, get out there and talk to people. Face to face connections are HUGELY important.

Good luck to any of you searching for work, and please let me know if I can help in any way.

…You’re coming, right?

As many of you know, I’ve been hard at work these last few months getting a brand new startup off the ground. HelpAttack! is an idea that started to form during last year’s Movember drive on Twitter. It occurred to me (while sitting in traffic at 38th and Guadalupe) that there are:

a) lots of people out there who use social media and who are looking for ways to be more involved in supporting causes

b) lots of people out there who don’t have tons of cash to throw around but would still be willing to give, say, a cappuccino a week.

Other things occurred to me as well, like that traffic light at 38th and Lamar can be unbearably long, and Texans are terrible about turning left at a green light (why don’t you people pull halfway into the intersection like the rest of the world?)

So, I talked to one of the smartest people I know in the online nonprofit world, who luckily for me lives in Austin. Also luckily for me, he performed a thorough background check and decided I was a reasonable person to get into business with (I have contacts at the police department who hid all the incriminating evidence). Of course I’m talking about David J. Neff.

David brought in Ehren Foss, who is brilliant, hard working, loves nonprofits and has a shiny head. Ehren built the website from scratch in his kitchen, using eggs from his very own chickens.

And now, a mere nine months after my traffic light epiphany, and thanks to the tremendous wisdom and teamwork that Ehren, David, our Board of Advisors, our lawyers, our designers, our friends and family, and the Austin startup community provided, HelpAttack! has evolved from an idea into a product, and is ready for launch.

So I would be delighted if you would go to the website, sign up, pick a nonprofit to support, and start making your Twitter stream count for something!

“Absolutely, Sarah!” you say.  “But wait,” you ask, “WHAT ELSE CAN I DO?”

I thought you’d never ask. You can do these things:

1. Follow HelpAttack! on Twitter.
2. Become a fan of HelpAttack! on Facebook.
3. Offer feedback about the website and service on our Get Satisfaction page.
4. Write about HelpAttack! on your own blog.
5. And if you’re in Central Texas, come to the launch party! We’d LOVE to see you there.

Happy Tweeting and Giving!

My coworking compadre at Conjunctured (that’s a lot of C’s!), Brad Istre, designed a logo for me a few months back. I’m still working on a business site for my consulting company, so I haven’t been using it much…yet. Today he told me that he added business cards and letterhead to the mix…

Sweet, right?

You can check out the rest of his portfolio at Sidedoor Studio. And stay tuned for the new site, it’s coming soon.

I swear to Thor that HootSuite was eavesdropping on my brain last night. The title of the original draft of this post was “Dear HootSuite, I Love You, Please Change” – but an email arrived this morning that changed all that.

Here’s the story: As social media management tools go, HootSuite and CoTweet are both way up there in terms of team management of Twitter. CoTweet has some advantages for team communication. I especially appreciate the ability to “assign” specific tweets to other team members, and to toggle the on duty/off duty switch, allowing members to work “shifts” when managing a Twitter account. Here’s a screenshot:

CoTweet

But HootSuite has some major advantages over CoTweet, including:

1. Multi-Channel Management.

In addition to Twitter, HootSuite allows you to manage Facebook accounts and pages, LinkedIN status updates, Ping.FM, WordPress, MySpace and even FourSquare. CoTweet allows you to manage…Twitter. These days, I don’t have a single client who’s worried solely with team managing a Twitter account. At the very least they have a Facebook page that requires updating, and if you’ve spent any time trying to integrate your Facebook page with your Twitter account, you know what a tangled web that can be. HootSuite eliminates that problem quite neatly.

HootSuite Social Networks

2. Cross posting.

Not only can I send a single message to several channels (i.e. Twitter stream and Facebook page), I can send a single message to several ACCOUNTS at the same time. This isn’t a feature I take advantage of often, but I can see where it would come in handy in certain scenarios.

3. Attaching pictures.

HootSuite includes a button on the status bar which allows you to attach photos to any status update. CoTweet…doesn’t. Unfortunately, the photo comes through on Twitter as an ow.ly link. I’d like to see HootSuite offer integration of some of the more common Twitter photo sharing apps like TwitPic and YFrog, which would allow users to view the picture in a pop-up when using an external Twitter client, but they have their own self-serving reasons for holding on to your picture’s URL:

Ow.ly Twitter Image

Namely, product placement.

4. Bookmarklet.

Over nine months ago a thread was started on the CoTweet’s Get Satisfaction support page regarding the need for a bookmarklet.

I Can't Get No Satisfaction

Astonishingly enough, it was started by CoTweet themselves. Several people (including me) chimed in saying they could really use a bookmarklet. But nine months later, nothing’s changed. Even more discouraging, there’s been no activity on the thread from CoTweet representatives since the initiation of the ticket, leaving the commenters to wonder if CoTweet is really listening at all.

In terms of my daily workflow (I manage one Twitter account that consists mainly of links), the lack of a bookmarklet has been a major PITA. My workaround has been to grab a bit.ly link first, then open the HootSuite Bookmarklet, and copy and paste the bit.ly link into the HootSuite bookmarklet.

Why didn’t I just go ahead and use the HootSuite url shortener, ow.ly?

Well, that was the original purpose of this blog post. Up until this morning, when HootSuite rolled out some very welcome changes, an ow.ly link created a “social bar” on the linked-to page. This “Evil Page Frame” as my friend Sheila Scarborough called it, created a bar at the top of the page which included sharing links and a ReTweet button. I, for one, prefer to send out links to my audience that are as unadulterated as possible. In other words, it seemed obnoxious and more than a little spammy to ask readers to click on a link that then asked readers to click on even more links. Thankfully, the folks at HootSuite have changed all that. They still have an opt-in social bar on a new url shortener, ht.ly. But ow.ly links from now on will be completely uncluttered. You can read about the changes on their blog.

I still love CoTweet, and I still recommend it to clients. If your goals are to team manage a Twitter account, and especially if you have a lot of customer service or community management issues that need to be handled over the account itself, CoTweet is for you. But now that ow.ly is free of its social bar, I’m switching to HootSuite full time.

15 January 2010 Update: After reading on Gawker and other sites that Yéle’s finances are less than squeaky, I’ve removed the link to their page. My apologies.

Watching the news unfold yesterday, I quickly heeded the call of Wyclef Jean and sent a financial donation to Yéle via text. I noticed others on Twitter recommending donations to the Red Cross, MercyCorps, Partners in Health and other organizations. Who to choose? Here is an alphabetical list, not meant to be comprehensive, of organizations currently mobilizing to bring help to Haiti. Most have donation buttons on their homepages. Please feel free to add more in the comments:

AmeriCares

This organization has been mobilizing emergency response efforts throughout the globe for over 25 years.

AmeriCares Website

From the site:

AmeriCares is preparing to respond to a 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti earlier today. The earthquake leveled a hospital in the Haitian capital city of Port-au-Prince.

Official casualty reports are being developed, but witnesses near the disaster could hear screams of people trapped inside the hospital. AmeriCares is pledging $5 million for the people of Haiti.

ICRC – International Committee of the Red Cross

The International Committee of the Red Cross is perhaps the best-known international provider of relief in times of disaster and emergencies.

ICRC Website

Money can also be donated by phone at 816-931-8400 or 800-RED-CROSS.

To donate $10 via text message, text HAITI to 90999.

From the site:

The ICRC has joined its Red Cross partners to support the earthquake victims of Haiti. It is mobilizing resources and staff to respond to the earthquake in which thousands of people are feared to have died.

Médecins sans Frontièrs / Doctors without Borders

MSF provides medical care to people in danger all over the world.

Médecins Sans Frontièrs Website

From the site:

First reports are now emerging from MSF’s teams who were already working on medical projects Haiti when an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter Scale struck the country early January 12. MSF staff immediately started treating hundreds of people injured and have been setting up clinics in tents to replace their own damaged medical facilities.

MercyCorps International

Mercy Corps “is a team of 3700 professionals helping turn crisis into opportunity for millions around the world. By trade, we are engineers, financial analysts, drivers, community organizers, project managers, public health experts, administrators, social entrepreneurs and logisticians. In spirit, we are activists, optimists, innovators and proud partners of the people we serve.”

MercyCorps Website

From the site:

A major earthquake struck Haiti’s capital, collapsing buildings and disrupting communications. As the devastation comes into focus, Mercy Corps is deploying an emergency team.

Partners In Health

Founded by Dr. Paul Farmer, PIH has been providing community-based medical treatment to the citizens of Haiti since 1983.

Partners in Health Website

From the site:

A major earthquake centered just 10 miles from Port-au-Prince has devastated sections of the city and knocked out telephone communications throughout the country.

In an urgent email from Port-au-Prince, Louise Ivers, our clinical director in Haiti, appealed for assistance from her colleagues in the Central Plateau: “Port-au-Prince is devastated, lot of deaths. SOS. SOS… Temporary field hospital by us at UNDP needs supplies, pain meds, bandages. Please help us.”

We are still in the midst of collecting information from all our sites in Haiti, and determining how we can best help with the recovery efforts in the areas hardest hit.

UNICEF

Unicef is a branch of the United Nations specifically devoted to assisting children worldwide.

Unicef Website

From the site:

In coordination with all other UN agencies present on the ground, UNICEF will provide supplies to allow access to adequate sanitation, safe water and basic health care.

UNICEF is also preparing materials and staff so that children, tremendously vulnerable during natural catastrophes, are protected.  UNICEF materials and advisors will assist so that children are able to continue learning and studying, and be provided safe recreation areas while their caretakers turn to rebuilding their lives.

Last week, in my role as community manager for FeaturedUsers, I interviewed Guy Kawasaki for our #FollowFriday series. We talked about the startup economy, his books, Alltop, and how to get a standing ovation.

As if that wasn’t cool enough, I got to test out Wetoku, which is a sweet little embeddable app for doing online video interviews.

You can see the interview and read the transcript here.

Last March, Bijoy Goswami and I sat down for a fascinating (and lengthy) conversation about mental models and bootstrapping at Progress Coffee on Austin’s East Side. The interview was recorded and transcribed, and we’ve broken it up into a four-part series for the blog. While preparing it for publication, Bijoy and I both felt it was important to stress that the chief mental model being explained here, that of the Maven-Relater-Evangelist, may or may not be useful to you in understanding your own place in the world. The point is not to take Bijoy’s model, or anyone else’s, and indiscriminately apply it to your own life. The point is rather to start thinking about how you might create models to better understand your own path in life.

- Sarah

Getting back to mental maps, or mental models. You say mental model, and a lot of other people say mind mapping, and I wonder if there’s a difference in your view about those two things.

Digital Mind Map

Well, yeah. Mind mapping is a very technical term where you essentially brainstorm by putting an idea in the center, and sort of spiking out. I remember when I discovered mind mapping in college. I was doing a research project in India, and I discovered mind mapping, and all of a sudden my world opened up, because it’s more mapped into the network structure of the brain. But a model is just a representation of reality. So a mind map could be a representation underneath that, but mind maps are subsets of all models.

Mind maps don’t work for me, and I think that has to do with how I learn. But I wonder if you run into this also with mental models. Are there people who absorb that information better and worse? Are there people who find this more or less useful? What is the response to mental models?

I think there’s a whole variety of responses. My models occupy the simple but not simplistic spot. My models are bootstrapping you into your mental models, if you like, to be sort of self-referential. Because I don’t want to give you the whole answer. What I find is mavens are the most dubious about my models, because I reduce them down.

Elephant Carving

I remember this art project that I did in 8th grade. I had a block to carve. And I started carving, and I had this elephant. My elephant was just this blocky thing, because I was afraid to cut too much, because you couldn’t glue it back on. That’s where I feel people are with mental models. And I’m always, like, cut, cut, cut down to the bone, so I can get to the essence. So when I say people fall into one of three categories, maven, relater, evangelist, both the mavens and the relaters go “noooo, that can’t be right.” Evangelists are like, “sweet, that’s easy, that’s quick, I need a quick model I can use,” so they’re good. Mavens are like, “that can’t be right. Really?” Because they look at people as mysterious.

And relaters like me say “but I’m all those things”

Exactly.

Because they relate.

Exactly. And “oh, people are so varied.” That’s where I get the resistance. Bootstrap, you get resistance from the other two sides. The cookie cutters go, “well, I want control over this, I’m not going to let it just go out.” And, “I need a business plan,” and stuff like that. And the funding-driven guys go, you know, “what are you talking about? I’m the master of the universe. I know what’s gonna happen, so why am i gonna let the process deliver?”

But you’re not creating the model for them.

Right.

So that’s okay.

It is, you’re right. That’s the subtlety of why I go slow with all this stuff, because I don’t want people to take my models and make them their reality. I want them to say, this is just showing up here. You asked about Bootstrap Austin. It started because I was even more convinced after my tech start-up deal, where I had raised half a million dollars from friends and family, spent it all, and found myself with nothing to show for it, going why didn’t I trust myself? I’m a bootstrapper, I knew about bootstrapping. I didn’t know the whole model. But I started with it back at Stanford.

I knew that was my path, not the Silicon Valley dominant path. What’s the founding company of Stanford? HP. Bootstrap. Scott Cooke came and spoke, the founder of Quicken. Bootstrap. Oracle: bootstrap. And yet I had allowed myself to go away from my own intuition. So I was talking to a lot of entrepreneurs, and they wanted to get funding. This was 2002, 2003. And I said “dude, you want to bootstrap your company. You want control,” and so on and so forth. I was having all these lunches, coffees, and dinners, and it started to get to be a real pain. So I thought, I’ll get these people together, I’ll introduce them to each other, and that’s how Bootstrap Austin was born.

Bijoy, thanks for your time today, and good luck with SXSW and your upcoming projects!

Thank you.

This is Part IV of a four-part series. Part I can be found here.

Bijoy’s Amazon list of suggested reading material on mental models can be found here.

Last March, Bijoy Goswami and I sat down for a fascinating (and lengthy) conversation about mental models and bootstrapping at Progress Coffee on Austin’s East Side. The interview was recorded and transcribed, and we’ve broken it up into a four-part series for the blog. While preparing it for publication, Bijoy and I both felt it was important to stress that the chief mental model being explained here, that of the Maven-Relater-Evangelist, may or may not be useful to you in understanding your own place in the world. The point is not to take Bijoy’s model, or anyone else’s, and indiscriminately apply it to your own life. The point is rather to start thinking about how you might create models to better understand your own path in life.

- Sarah

Tell me a little bit about Bootstrap Austin and your involvement with it.

I inadvertently stumbled into another model, which is bootstrapping. I would say bootstrap is the third way of entrepreneurship. So when we think about entrepreneurship, we think of it as one activity, and it’s not. It’s an infinite set of activities. I like to break thing out into three, if you hadn’t noticed! I think of the cookie cutter entrepreneurs, the funding-driven entrepreneurs, and the bootstrap entrepreneurs. Cookie cutters are anything from franchises to any business whose business model is already known. Doctors, lawyers…

Widget sellers…

Widget sellers. Someone else has already discovered the business model, and now you’re making one of your own, but you’re not making anything new. The new seems to always come from Silicon Valley, where you throw money at it, and you IPO it, and all that. But it turns out that bootstrapping is really the way that built-to-last companies get built. Microsoft, HP, Oracle, even Google…

So what is bootstrapping? What does that mean?

It means a lot of things. The simplest way I think of it as, from a business model point of view, is that the business model emerges from the process of bootstrapping.

And the process of bootstrapping is…

Is right action, right time. It’s demo/sell/build. It’s constraint creates innovation. It’s use everything. It’s most described by a story about Baron Munchhausen. He supposedly found himself in a swamp. He’s drowning in the swamp, yelling for help, trying to get out of the swamp, no one’s there to help him. So he said well, I’m either going to be dead, or I’m able to get out. What am I going to do? I can’t get any help.

He looks around and sees his bootstraps, and pulls himself up by his bootstraps, and gets out of the swamp. There’s a competing myth which is that he pulled himself out by his hair, but “hairstrap” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. So bootstrapping is that story. Wherever you are you can make progress. You can create something out of nothing. And what happens with people, is we often fall into “well, I don’t have what I need, I need to do this big thing so I need to go get resources from an externa sourcel.” That’s why I think of it as right action, right time. You are essentially letting something unfold and evolve and emerge, and you’re the shepherd of that emergence, you’re not the author or the controlling entrepreneur.

So it lends itself more to collaboration.

It does. It is fundamentally a co-creative process. You’re co-creating your venture with your partners, with your customers, with the world. You’re on this journey of diminishing yourself into the right spot, and you’re watching what’s happening, and as you get better at watching, you make progress.

So we have this model, this map that we built, and it talks about the different elements that keep showing up. Each stage is nothing more than the birth of an element. So the “You” stage, the first stage, is the birth of you. What are your unique talents, what are your unique passions, what are you good at – your MRE!.

Once you start figuring that out, then you get into the “QUEST(ion)” stage, where it’s like “Oh my gosh, do I want to go on this hero’s journey?” This is Joseph Campbell and all of that. Because many people are called, few take the action. That means that you’re going to go on this journey away from what society tells you you’re supposed to do.

And if you say yes to that, then you enter into the “Ideation” phase. What are you going to do? That’s the birth of your “it.” Your product, service, experience, cause,  community – whatever it is that you’re going to make. And then once you do that, you enter the valley of death. And then you’re on the hunt for this customer. You’re like, oh my gosh, someone please pay me for what I’m doing so I can be sustainable.

The Hero's Journey

But all these elements keep going. The You still keeps going, the Inner Journey keeps going, the Product Journey keeps going, and the job of us as the entrepreneur is to weave them and integrate them together, so with the addition of a new element, kind of like a fugue, the addition of a new element doesn’t disrupt, but it forces and harmonizes with the previous elements.

I see this mental map as an animation. I mean, I imagine that it would be really useful to people. If mental mapping is about visualizing the process, or an idea, this is a particularly fluid process, as you describe it, as a fugue, as music. I wonder if you’ve ever thought about animating your mental maps.

I haven’t, but I’ve done some half-assed attempts in Power Point to show the elements coming in. But again I need my power of two on that!

Well I’m not the one to help you I’m afraid!

Thank you for illuminating a gap in my power of two (laughs). And not helping me at all.

You’re so welcome! As a relater maybe I can find somebody for you.

There you go.

This is Part III of a four-part series. Part I can be found here. Part IV is here.

Bijoy’s Amazon list of suggested reading material on mental models can be found here.

Last March, Bijoy Goswami and I sat down for a fascinating (and lengthy) conversation about mental models and bootstrapping at Progress Coffee on Austin’s East Side. The interview was recorded and transcribed, and we’ve broken it up into a four-part series for the blog.

While preparing it for publication, Bijoy and I both felt it was important to stress that the chief mental model being explained here, that of the Maven-Relater-Evangelist, may or may not be useful to you in understanding your own place in the world. The point is not to take Bijoy’s model, or anyone else’s, and indiscriminately apply it to your own life. The point is rather to start thinking about how you might create models to better understand your own path in life.

- Sarah

You were talking about dance partners earlier. I’m assuming those people were often relaters.

dance partners

Or mavens. Yes, exactly. They were the complementary energy. Evangelists tended to be more of my friends, but we weren’t getting anything done because we were stepping all over each other. Whereas a Maven or a Relater, and more often Mavens, because their strength was my minor, I could relate to them. But it wasn’t my deal, my core thing. One of my favorite examples is we had a teacher who was having us do Shakespeare creative projects. It was the morning it was due, and we’re waiting in front of the class for it to start, and I go, “I know, I’ll do a one-man King Lear!” So I’m writing it, I start Act I, I’m busily working on this thing, and my tall friend Jon Barden walks up to me, he says “Hey, Bijoy.” And I’m like “yeah Jon,” kind of, ‘can’t you see I’m busy?’”

Doing your one-man King Lear…

He goes, “What are you doing for your creative project?” I go, “I’m doing a one-man King Lear!” He goes, “Wanna make it a two-man?” And I looked up and went, “Oh my god! Totally!” And we blew this thing out, it was the most hilarious project that I’d done, we ended up performing it at the theater in the school. The funny part was years later, I did a short play called Mystic Cab. Same thing. I decided to do a one-man, one act play. This was like five years ago. And I had been working on this thing and it was a total mess. I’m driving downtown and my friend Kert calls me and he says, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m working on this thing, I signed up for Frontera Fest. I’m so screwed because five days from now I’m gonna have to present something, do 25 minutes of a play, and I’ve got nothing.” And he says, “I’ll do it with you.” And I said “Oh my god, that would be so great!” And then I thought, why didn’t I think to ask him? Because he had some free time, he’s a theater guy and we’re good friends. Right?

So now, have you learned? I mean now do you reach out?

Now, after 17 bonks on the head from the universe? (laughter). Yeah, I look at all my projects as collaborations now. And I think “who’s my dance partner, or dance partners?” within anything that I’m doing. The book I wrote was written with Dave Wolpert. The film version of Mystic Cab was with Nils Juul-Hansen. Bootstrap Austin is one big collaboration. And I constantly go okay, my job is to reduce down into my thing and to create the space for others.

Now, one interesting caveat: I have a strong minor energy. Some people are very much on the points of the triangle. They’re like hard core mavens, hard core relater, hard core evangelist. Some of us are major-minors. We have a strong minor. Then we’ve got to reconcile within ourselves how those two integrate and don’t kill each other. I’ve had another journey, where I was essentially outsourcing my maven to other people, and my internal maven was kind of peeved. Like, “hello dude, I’m here, I’m a maven.” And when the evangelist essentially took people off a cliff with my tech start-up, the maven said, “look, go in the corner, I’m gonna show you what’s up.” And in a sense these last number of years have been a maven exercise. My maven energy has been dominant in terms of building these models. And he showed my evangelist energy, “guess what, that’s my contribution. Yeah there’s these great mavens and relaters, and maybe even other evangelists that we want to partner with, but what you need to evangelize are these models. These are the creations that I’m coming up with, so now let’s work together.” So that’s another interesting self-reconciliation.

I find the choice of maven interesting, because I guess in my head there’s a little bit of a disconnect. I think of a maven as a proselytizer. But you think of a maven as a learner? or as a thinker?

An expert, yes.

An expert. Alright.

I mean these are just words, so you end up having to pick some word.

I’m just trying to understand the model a little bit better. And I think I do, but we have jumped so into it that I want to clarify it at this point. An evangelist is definitely your proselytizer, that’s definitely the person who is the leader, brings people together…

"Bono, not the Edge"

Bono, not The Edge. You know, The Edge is the maven, Bono is the evangelist. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak. You see these pairs.

And the relater? Where does the relater fit in? The relater feels like a third wheel to me, in your model. And that’s because you’re probably describing yourself that way.

That’s where I’m sitting, yeah. I live in that region of the world. The relater is the glue. The relater is, if we have the human fabric as the title of the book, the relater is the weaver of the human fabric. What they do is, mavens pick an area of the world and study it. Relaters pick people. For relaters, people are the thing. And people are this infinite puzzle, and they’re just so interested in people. Oh my gosh, your journey, and how’s your day, and all this stuff. What they’re gathering data on is this entity called a person; and where they are; and then you should really talk to this person. My youngest brother is a total relater. and I have these great relaters in my world, and I look at what they do, and it’s incredible. It’s sometimes really frustrating, because as a maven or an evangelist you don’t think of a person as a universe unto themselves. but a relater does. So they’ll sit there and if you say, tell me about Joe, they’ll go oh, you know, and 20 minutes later you’ve got a soliloquy on Joe. And I’m like no, don’t tell me that much. What they’re doing, and this is the interesting thing, is I always used to draw the triangle as maven, evangelist, relater, like that…

Maven at the top.

Maven at the top. I didn’t know why. But I learned later that a model is already communicating information when you place the elements. So my friend Tina, who did the book cover, she has a company called Spoon Bend, it’s a graphic design marketing company. She took the triangle and she tipped it. and she also did three paintings that illustrated the energies of these three. she tipped it forward, and all of a sudden it all made sense. because the evangelist was on the ground, pulling the triangle. the maven was stepping up on the top. and the relater was in the back, connecting, making sure everything is good, but taking a quiet role. That’s the thing with relaters is you can tell who the mavens are, you can definitely tell who the evangelists are, the relaters are in the background. they’re the unseen third. But really each of these two resolves the duality for the other. So when the maven and the relater have a conflict, the evangelist can come in there and broker that discussion; because all of their energies are in a tight triangle like that – so, relaters are incredibly important.

Societies also fall into the triangle. Think of America: Evangelist/Maven. Right? I mean our dominant is we’re evangelists out here, we’re the Wild West, those are our heroes. Relaters don’t get much play here. Whereas in Japan, that’s a Relater/Maven culture. What’s Japan all about? It’s how you treat each other, how you interact. Whenever you’re looking for a culture’s energy, look at what they formalize. Germany: mavens. Uber-mavens.

You mentioned Hong Kong. Did you grow up in Hong Kong?

Yeah.

So how would you describe Hong Kong?

Hong Kong at night

Oh, Evangelist. Very clearly. Which is interesting. Hong Kong and Singapore have an interesting relationship, because Singapore to me is maven, Hong Kong is very evangelist, and I always thought the obvious thing for them was to hook up and start, you know, getting all the business people in Hong Kong talking to the inventors and technologists in Singapore. That would be my economic prescription.

This is Part II of a four-part series. Here’s Part III.

Bijoy’s Amazon list of suggested reading material on mental models can be found here.