I’ve hated Flash for the better part of five years, a bigotry mostly inspired by how poorly it has worked for me as an end-user. It’s even worse for people who need to maintain web sites in Flash, as I later learned professionally. An essential tool for any computer I use more than five minutes is Flashblock for Firefox or the outstanding ClickToFlash plugin for Safari.

Then it dawned on me: If I hate it this much, surely Adobe, who is responsible for maintaining it, must hate it even more. Surely no amount of money is worth this much pain, right? There must be another reason Adobe prolongs this shared internet misery.

Drawing equal parts inspiration from 2001, Terminator 2 and Babylon 5, I present to you: Flash is My Keeper.

The universal trial, of course, is money and I’m hardly exempt. There’s a sixty day delay between me making money from an iPhone app and Apple actually paying me. That leaves immediate, painful gaps in my cashflow.

The obvious solution to this is consulting — I’m privileged to know how to do a lot of things that are useful to people. Unfortunately, I’m still learning how to market, grow and manage that particular end of my business, so I’m painted into the most dread of corners: retail.

I live by the axiom that no honest man is too good for honest work. So while retail is often the dullest, most imagination free work you can do before hitting manual labor, that’s not the part that I hate most about my seasonal job.

No, the worst of it is this: I have to call my customers “guests.”

This is some of the most odious corporate newspeak bullshit in recent years. It has always irked me. Guest means a specific thing: certainly it implies hospitality, which may explain the intent, but it fails to properly convey the truth of the relationship between the store and the customer. Being the guest of another places the guest in the inferior position and the host in the superior position. While manners may require that hospitality be extended, being termed a guest in the final equation simply means that the customer does not belong there. It suggests they belong somewhere else.

This is the wrong view.

The customer is not a guest of the store. A successful retail experience means that the customer is at home in the store.

Somewhere, somehow, having “customers” became a distasteful condition for large corporations. This is unfortunate and I wish they would cut the crap. The truth is that there is honor in having customers. There is honor in upholding the sanctity of the customer relationship. Being a customer of a business means something very specific that no other English word can capture. Being a customer means being the lifeblood of a business. Being a customer means being the motive force behind a powerful organism that provides products, services, livelihoods and, ultimately, the basic existence of others. Being a customer is being part of a tradition that keeps babies nourished, families housed and people clothed.

That means something. Something potent. Something that must be continually venerated if we’re going to keep moving forward as rational people. Does any of this sound remotely like having a “guest” to you?

I’m proud to have customers. I’m proud to respect their importance to my business and their contribution to the fact that I’m not sleeping outside tonight. That is essential to my work ethic and it will never, ever change.

The end of my seasonal retail job can’t come fast enough. I’m not sure my teeth will survive the grinding required for me to get the word “guest” past my lips on every shift.

See the little movement lines, there on the left? They suggest the weird little dollar coin is moving from left to right. In western cultures (to whom the ad was targeted) left to right progression is associated with forward motion, while right to left progression signals backward motion. This something you’ll see in movies and comic strips if you’re looking for it. Here’s an example we all know and love:

The stylized arrow beside the word “Back” is pointing, appropriately, back, via a right-to-left perspective, while all of the letters in that word are also skewed right-to-left. The word “future,” conversely, is skewed left-to-right. It’s an instantly recognizable logo that succeeds by embodying its idea without whacking you over the head with it.

So look again:

Bing is talking about getting cash back, but illustrating their point by showing cash flowing away. This isn’t the economy to be talking about cash flowing away. I’m not sure that the dissonance this creates registers for most people but when it’s already unlikely that people will engage with your ad unit, the last thing you do is add subconscious resistance.

Yeah, it’s tiny, but the tiny things pile up into the enormous sand dunes that dog every last Microsoft endeavor with needless, unnecessary friction born of poor taste and obliviousness.

For more on this, enjoy a deconstruction of the hideous Bing logo.

Out of 20 images, 10 depict people either wearing a headset or holding a phone.

It’s a sad state of affairs: we’ve all come to think of customer service as this thing that kicks in when a company has screwed up.

That’s not the way it should be. True customer service comes from a passionate, proactive culture that embraces every opportunity to make the customer happy and loathes the idea of ever being a source of disappointment.

Regular readers will note that Netflix is a darling of mine. It’s with good reason: my personal relationship with Netflix is entirely positive. They provide me with a great product at a great price and have been consistently fervent in their interest to keep me happy as a customer. Beyond that, Netflix is a quintessential, recession-proof example of a company that spends its every second trying to make their customers as happy as possible. In a fascinating look at how a Netflix distribution center works, the Chicago Tribune revealed one of the most telling internal processes of all:

[VP of Communications Steve] Swasey, who drove in from Columbus, Ohio, where there is an even larger hub, pointed to a photocopy taped to the wall — a picture of Disc 4 of “Rescue Me” Season 4 alongside a sleeve that promised Disc 4 of “Rescue Me” Season 3. It’s a kind of Netflix perp walk. Some diligent associate caught the mistake before it shipped. “To me, I see it as a goose-bump moment,” Swasey said.

Sure, he’s the VP of communications. But the choice of words is so specifically visceral that you can’t doubt its authenticity. Not only does this organization care so much about their customers that they have real, living, breathing humans ensuring the discs match the sleeves, they even go so far as to nail potential customer disasters to the wall like trophies. They don’t know if you or I are enduring a TV cliffhanger that must be resolved with the very next disc of 24. They don’t know if you’re having a bunch of friends over to watch a specific episode of Rescue Me. All they know is that if you don’t get you exactly what you asked for, you’re going to be disappointed and they’ve failed. Right on up to the VP level, what might be seen as something quite small is enough to confer goosebumps.

That’s not an accident. That’s an organization spending a significant amount of time and effort on ensuring that its customers are its focus. Not after they’ve screwed up. Not after the customer is unhappy. They’re taking uncountable invisible steps to ensure the customer never has a reason to be disappointed in the first place.

The other modern paragon of customer service virtue is Zappos. True story:

My dress shoes were shot. Once upon a time I worked in an office and dress shoes were an integral part of a daily professional image. I needed new ones.

So I wandered around the mall with my girlfriend in search of something minimalist, comfortable and professional. I’m a picky bastard so after an hour, we’d discovered nothing quite my style. Finally, we found something perfect at Macy’s: simple, black leather, comfy as hell. After waiting about ten minutes for service, someone bothered to ask what I needed. When I requested my size in the shoes I’d found, I was told they were out of stock.

We left. I was about ready to resign myself to going barefoot the rest of my days when my girlfriend, a longtime fan, told me I needed to check Zappos. Sure enough, there were my shoes at a better price than Macy’s. At midnight, in around five minutes, I’d placed my order and with standard shipping expected to see my new shoes the next week. It was easier than shopping around, at least. I was happy enough with the whole experience.

Eleven hours later, my shoes had been delivered.

Let me say that again: eleven fucking hours.

This was eight months ago and I’m still a little speechless about this. My expectations were set so low by other online retailers, with their two days of processing and absurd charges for overnight delivery, nothing could have prepared me for the ridiculous, effortless haste Zappos showed in delivering what I’d ordered.

I’d never been unhappy with Zappos. I was already pleased with their prices, their solid website and their ever-present friendly tone. Behind the scenes, though, Zappos had spent countless effort, time, brainpower and what must be boatloads of money creating an infrastructure that can get a guy’s shoes delivered almost as quickly as he can choose them. Way the hell from Kentucky to anywhere in the country, no less. (This wasn’t a fluke, either – they reproduced their feat multiple times since)

This is behind-the-scenes, utterly invisible to the customer.

Your call center, if you need one, should be staffed with friendly, empowered people who answer quickly, work directly for your organization and give everything they can to address the needs of the customers they work with.

Then you should go further, giving everything in your soul to ensuring that most of your customers are so happy with what you give them, most don’t ever call you.

There are a laundry list of problems facing the growth of the App Store. I won’t bother to rehash them here. Let’s focus on the one that most thoroughly jeopardizes the future of developer businesses: Customer Service. Every other problem can be overcome or worked around but without the power of caring for your customers, your business has no reason to exist.

In an aside to a link last month, John Gruber muses:

I’m wondering how much of the problem is that the App Store is built on the foundation and framework of the iTunes Music Store, which was designed from the outset specifically as a venue for selling 99-cent downloads.

This is the most crucially important point: the iTunes Store was never designed to sell software. Among other things, Craig Hockenberry enumerates all the ways in which the App Store is hobbled by this historical truth. It’s a good, important post that you should read if you care about this kind of stuff. But it doesn’t address long-term outcomes related to customer service that will doom the developer community.

As an iPhone developer, I have no control over my storefront – Apple manages it for me, with basic data I provide. On the one hand, this is incredible news: access to a huge pool of customers, a complete distribution infrastructure and – best of all – I never have to worry about payment processing.

There’s just one issue: Apple doesn’t give a damn about my relationship with my customers.

Generous, attentive, impassioned customer service is an important piece of any successful business. My customers mean the world to me. Unfortunately, iTunes does not provide a clear, encouraging feedback channel.

User Reviews

When you’re selling music, user reviews are a simple tool. Much is subjective, but overall quality will be reflected in the reviews.

With software, the reviews have become more complicated. The most tantalizing way for a customer to speak out about software that is giving them problems is to write a review. And that’s what they do. Bug reports, feature requests and anything else that comes into their minds gets dumped into the reviews. And why not? The ability to write a review is prominently featured and uses a built-in, official form. It’s infinitely more seductive than leaving iTunes to write an email to the support contact. It’s also a venue provided by the same service that is taking the customer’s money, so it feels more intimately linked to their purchase than anything they can do on an external website or in their email client.

This is infuriating since the communication is strictly one-sided. There’s no way for the developer to follow up on these reviews to ask for more information. Without that information, acting on a bug report is often impossible. The worst part is that without dialogue, it’s impossible for the customer to learn more about their problem, discover workarounds and discover that there’s a living, breathing person who truly cares about the quality of the software they’ve just purchased.

Like it or not, the iTunes user review becomes the support form of last resort.

The Consequence

There are ways around this. Tap4Help is an interesting example, providing a built-in feedback and support request system. Developers, like Lucius Kwok, report some success explicitly declaring their email right in their application description with a call to action encouraging its use. I do this, too, but it doesn’t catch them all.

Why not? Nothing will ever come close to the power and authority of iTunes itself. I theorize that part of the reason so many customers prefer the review form to using a support email or link is that they know that iTunes will provide them satisfaction. No matter what, iTunes will show their review. They will be heard.

By keeping these customers so thoroughly at arm’s length, Apple retards the formation of relationships that will build developers’ business. I’ve turned angry emails into loyal customers through the power of honesty and genuine interest in customer issues. I’d desperately love to provide that dialogue for every customer, ever, but iTunes, under the current system, will continue to siphon off some portion of those opportunities into its black hole of customer reviews.

Having good conversations with your customers is as essential and non-negotiable as having an engine in your car. When Zappos tweets at me in thanks for my praise, I feel as though my relationship with the company has been further validated. When Netflix gives me complete and generous support when I have trouble with their service, I feel respect for them, since their conduct conveys respect for my business.

It’s all about how the customer feels. If you never get to talk with them, you’ll never get to impact that feeling.

Let’s Do It Better

This is not a hard problem to solve. If you happen to work on the iTunes Store infrastructure team, you may feel differently, but the company you work for is in the business of accomplishing the impossible on a fairly regular basis. My sympathy is limited.

Developer Review Replies

This is the easiest part. Let the developer reply to user reviews. This isn’t groundbreaking and I’m the eight thousandth developer to suggest it. So make it happen. The developer can join the conversation and solicit additional information so that bug reports that go into the reviews can actually be productive. Notify whomever left the review that they have a response via email. For bonus points, let the customer reply directly to that notification to reach the developer.

Feedback/Support Form

Let the user provide feedback or support requests through an official, iTunes-embedded form. Send the feedback to the developer via email, with an anonymized reply-to address, like craigslist uses, so Apple can cover their ass on privacy concerns. For bonus points, provide a rating for each application that states how responsive each developer is to requests sent via this form.

There is no step three. With those two provisions, an open dialogue has been created for anyone who bothers to seek one. Software, even for the iPhone, is not music. The one-sided echo-chamber conversation of the iTunes Music Store does not work in the App Store. With the two modest tools I’ve described, developers will have an infinitely easier time creating the relationships they need to build their business.

I’m not going to hold my breath. Hopefully Apple is working on this stuff, but in the meantime, I need to figure out better ways to put myself in easy reach of my customers.

Unfortunately, HARO, as it is called, is an awful product. It makes the fatal mistake that many fast-scaling services make: screwing the most important customer.

Three Customers

HARO has three customers: journalists, who need leads, sponsors, who pay for placement, and subscribers, who consume sponsored content and respond to journalist queries.

Subscribers are the most important customer as they are required for both sponsors and journalists to even bother with the product. Without subscribers, there’s no one for sponsors to influence. Without subscribers, the journalists get no responses.

A typical HARO email goes something like this:

1. Lengthy sponsored message
2. Cutesy personal update from the mailing list administrator, Peter Shankman
3. An absurdly long list of journalist queries

The practical result of this is that a subscriber will have to scroll an entire page before they even get to what they care about. Even better, HARO is sent out as often as three times a day.

Now, I disclaimed that as typical. What’s more interesting to my point are atypical HARO messages. These don’t happen often, but happened often enough to piss me off. HARO has particular rules about how subscribers should interact with journalists. It’s pretty obvious stuff, if you’re not five years old, but boils down to please don’t spam the reporters. Sometimes a HARO subscriber would go off the reservation, do something naughty, piss off a reporter and end up in Shankman’s bad graces.

It’s a closed system – a mailing list, after all. The solution seems pretty simple. When applicable, speak to the individual’s boss, if their wrongdoing was in the service of a larger organization. Then, kick the person off the list.

That’s it. Problem solved.

In Shankman’s defense, it seems he does do this. Then he takes it a step further, by venting his frustration into the next HARO email and scolding the entire subscriber base at large. Here’s a sample:

READ THIS: This morning, while being given a behind the scenes tour
at Busch Gardens, I had to spend a portion of the tour on my mobile
phone, calming a reporter from a major publication. Seems someone
at a major agency took it upon themselves to form an opinion on
what kind of story the reporter was writing, simply from the query
alone.  Long story short, this was a situation that should not have happened.

This isn’t brain surgery here, guys: If you can answer a query, do
it. If you know someone who can answer a query, send it to them. Do
not post them on the web, in blogs, or on message boards, and do
not email the reporter saying “You should do it this way.” Had I
not gotten an EXTREMELY sincere apology from a top-level person at
the agency, I’d be outing the person who caused the mess in the
first place, as well as outing the agency. Instead, he’s just banned
from HARO.

Five rules of HARO here: READ THEM.
http://shankman.com/the-five-rules-of-haro/

I can only speak for myself, but as a former subscriber, it’s worth listing all the things in this message I don’t give even a tiny fraction of a fuck about:

• Shankman’s very special behind the scenes tour
• The frustration of said tour’s interruption
• The existence of an over-sensitive, irate reporter who doesn’t know how to use the delete button on her keyboard
• A rehash of common sense HARO rules I already know
• Shankman’s super-duper ballbusting phone call to top-level Tommy
• The ban of another subscriber
• The power of passive aggressive ALL-CAPS text

The Precious Commodity

HARO exists thanks to a simple reality: time is a precious, ever-dwindling commodity. If reporters weren’t in a hurry, they’d spend weeks on just one story, finding the perfect source for their piece. They don’t have that luxury. HARO to the rescue. Similarly, subscribers don’t have time to build a publicity campaign, research publications or spend weeks pitching themselves. They often don’t even have time to learn how. Again, HARO to the rescue.

The issue is that HARO does not give any reverence to the time of its subscribers. Quite the opposite: not only do we have paragraphs of crap no one cares about at the top of each message, there’s this occasional business of Shankman feeling empowered to command the entire list to spend time reading a rant about the misbehaviors of a single participant.

This doesn’t even begin to take into account the amount of time it takes to scour the actual list of queries. Taken in aggregate, it’s shocking. Let’s not forget, it’s a thrice-daily proposition.

The reason it happens is that while subscribers are the most crucial part of Shankman’s business, they’re also the most plentiful – the most easy to replace. Sponsors are magic unicorns, treasured and protected. Journalists are golden geese, continually laying the eggs that make each HARO message. Subscribers? There are tens of thousands of those.

So HARO gets away with it. For now.

Complacency Breeds Contempt

I just checked my calendar. It’s 2009. A mailing list? Hell, let’s move the whole thing over to Usenet. Infinitely more retro chic and you don’t need to bottleneck the queries through a single guy.

The problem with HARO not caring about its subscribers’ time is that it completely erodes loyalty, trading every ounce of goodwill for an ounce of contempt with each message. When something better comes along, they’ll have no problem switching. Ask Blockbuster how that works.

Fine, so you’re saying if I’m going to be a douche and trash this guy’s hard work, I should have a better idea, right? Glad you asked.

Let’s Do It Better

Build a website.

That’s it. A problem actually solvable with a website. Could have been huge during the dot-com bubble, but I bet it’s enough to at least keep Shankman fed. Here’s what you do:

1. Persistent accounts that store basic bios and feedback ratings. Elevate the stars, demote those who don’t play by the rules, make it clear who’s making the best contributions
2. Categorized, post-moderated, RSS-enabled members-only query threads that let reporters post their queries whenever they want or need. Only postable by verified reporter accounts to keep the bozos at bay
3. Tagged queries: instead of having to parse a tedious headline that’s different for each query, provide the option for easy-to-scan tags
4. User-configured search agents to send email alerts any time a query seems of interest
5. Daily sponsorship opportunities, to keep Shankman in Busch Gardens tickets

That’s it. I bet you could accomplish most of it with Ning, without having to spend a dime. If you wanted to take it to the next level, you could impose a monetary bozo filter for new accounts.

Will it happen? Eventually, I’m sure it has to. Linking journalists with sources is an important job. Just because HARO’s implementation is completely hamfisted doesn’t mean someone else’s won’t eventually hit the mark. Will Shankman do it?

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Upton Sinclair, via Daring Fireball

So who knows. In the meantime, I’m off to half-heartedly find some other way to get journalists to talk about me.

But they called me. I had a job.

And I loved it. I’d never had more fun in my life. Thanks to a handful of adult mentors, I went from being shy and insecure in front of strangers to being outgoing, helpful and outrageously courteous, as befitted Publix’s customer service mission.  I got to meet people, learn about their lives and help make their day better, all in the time it took to bag up an order and pack in a car. Publix has a firm “no tipping!” policy and this was spelled out on a button affixed to my apron at all times. Despite this, not a week went by where a kindly retiree or harried but grateful parent didn’t stuff a couple bucks into my hand or pocket, buying me a sandwich or drink to end my shift. With a home life that was terrifyingly unpredictable and school that was tedious and unsatisfying, Publix, the people and the tangible benefits of my work there, became an escape that I craved.

There was plenty of reward in the fun of the job, but I found that throwing myself into my work with such gusto had other perks. When all of the front service clerks got reviews, there was much kvetching in the break room. Nickels and dimes, my teenaged colleagues moaned. They barely gave them anything for a raise. When my turn came, my boss, Mr. Starkey, called me into his office. After rattling through his estimate of my performance, I was given a fifty cent raise. It was the largest, Starkey confided, that anyone in my group had gotten. In retrospect, too, I realize that I was rarely tapped to do cleaning chores, since my management seemed to prefer me in front of customers as much as possible.

It was all so perfectly Randian, in a way that satisfied my then-Randroid brain. I gave honest effort in exchange for honest reward and recognition. Love your work, I thought as I pushed a pile of carts back into the store, and nothing feels like work.

Of course, it wouldn’t last. Home, as was its wont, took another lolloping, staggering jolt. For the second time in less than a year, we were moving away. Mr. Starkey was crestfallen. He’d been eager to groom me into cashiering and beyond. These were remarks that were and remain deeply flattering – it didn’t seem like he especially enjoyed terribly many of the other kids who had my title. At my request, he eagerly typed up a letter of recommendation. My favorite line, then and now:

“I would rehire him immediately if he were to return to Sarasota.”

I enjoyed it both for the heartfelt endorsement and for the tiny, whimsical implication that I was somehow in control of my existence.

I went on to be a salesman, an intern, a marketing manager and a project manager. With each job, I hoped to find the feeling I knew at Publix. The feeling of throwing myself into my work, enjoying every minute, and always hungry for more.

To be sure, I had some amazing jobs in the years since. Tremendous opportunities that provoked growth and change. But none of it could ever recapture the lost innocence of that first, magical time I worked at the supermarket. This realization, each time I started a new gig, was always a tiny disappointment.

For almost a decade, I’ve drawn a paycheck from someone. Until now. Not having been to the office, or any office, feels vaguely like retirement. Except there’s a ton of work to do.

And it’s back: that magic Publix feeling.

I love my new job. I’ve spent the last week building a new iPhone app from scratch. My new boss, me, really likes how it turned out. This is the most incredibly rewarding productive activity I have ever chosen for myself. The app is about done; I’ll have more to say about it soon. The most tremendous and powerful discovery came through its creation: I love developing applications for the iPhone. I can do it all day and night until my fingers hurt and still want more. It’s the most satisfying thing I’ve ever invested my working time doing. All I want is to get better and keep building.

Like Publix ten years ago, it doesn’t feel like work. It’s fun. It’s… wonderful.

Time will tell if this feeling and the products it creates will be sufficient to feed and house me. For now, I’ve got enough to hold out for awhile and give it everything I’ve got.

It’s a scary prospect to abandon security and regular cashflow, move across the country, and go into business for yourself, all the while hoping to hell everything will work out okay. Like many projects, it’s one of those things where if you truly took the time to consider all the attendant difficulty, complication and risk, you’d never bother to do it all.

It’s the best decision I’ve ever made.

There are no words to convey my excitement.

For as long as I’ve existed, there has always been an obligation to someone else’s rules lurking just beyond the horizon. Even on vacations, where time is theoretically mine, there was the lingering, ever-present knowledge that before I knew it, I would go back to a world of obliging someone else’s whims. For the first time, I’ll escape those bonds. It’s a feeling of freedom I’ve never known.

It must be stressed that while Full Sail has been a great place to work and I’m grateful for the experience, I had a job there and I have a handful of problems with working any “job,” no matter who supplies it. When I say job in this context, I mean any paid activity wherein you provide 40+ weekly hours in exchange for a regular paycheck, benefits and perhaps a reasonable approximation of social interaction. I’m a difficult, demanding, even impossible person, so these problems loom larger for me than perhaps they do you.

Ownership

When you arrive at your job and get down to the business of working, you are addressing problems that are not yours. These are the problems of whatever organization has hired you for your job. Depending on your level of career advancement and achievement, the problems you solve may range from the tedious (data entry) to the complicated (project or team management). No matter the complexity of your daily tasks, though, you can be assured that none of the problems they address are actually your own. While it is true that, through initiative, hard work and persistence, your handling of the organization’s problems can enrich your knowledge, experience and career prospects, this doesn’t change the fact that you’re doing someone else’s work.

Time

Unless you’re working at some sort of hippy, ultra-progressive company, you give 96% of your weeks to your job. That is a shitload of time. When I write it out like that, the egregious criminality of giving away that much of your life to someone who isn’t you seems so obvious, I can’t even come up with anything else to say.

Direction

I’ve spent a lifetime resenting any condition where someone else had authority to direct the discharge of my energies. The trade you make while collecting a paycheck is that in exchange for the money, someone gets to tell you what to do with 96% of your weeks. Even with the best boss, this deal is crap: Who wants to spend this much of their lives following orders?

Wealth

In the typical job arrangement, I would  show up each day and give a significant amount of time, energy, imagination and passion to the tasks of the organization. If I worked exceptionally hard while not being a douche and doing my best to help others be successful, I could earn promotions and more money. I would not become wealthy. Meanwhile, assuming successful management of the company, those who own the organization would increase their wealth. For many people, maintaining the wealth of others in exchange for a job’s security is a fine trade. That doesn’t work for me. If there’s anyone who should be wealthy off the sweat of my brow, I’m the first person on that list.

This is also including the assumption that whomever it is who owns the company is making the right decisions, which is absolutely not a given. There’s an illusion of security in a paycheck that comes crashing down as soon as layoffs or bankruptcy are announced (hello, domestic auto manufacturers). I’d rather have control of my fate than leave it in the hands of someone else.

Alignment of Interests

If your company did not need you, you would not exist there. This is a simple, business-driven reality and under no circumstances would I ever begrudge any organization this simple fact. Business is not and should not be charity. Still, think about it. The interest of the business is always and will always be the business. Never you, as an individual. This is an important fact to remember as you commit 96% of your weeks to the job that has hired you. You are the only person you can trust to have your own best interests as a top priority. Rest assured, if the business felt as though it could get more of your time while paying you less, it would surely take that arrangement. It’s just business.

The Game

You show up early, stay late. You take on extra projects and complete them in your spare time. You’re good to your coworkers and can always be relied upon in a pinch. Congratulations, you’re on your way to promotions and potential raises.

The trouble is, if you gave this level of effort for clients instead of your boss, you’d make a whole lot more money.

If you’re following the thread of my argument, you might be thinking “hey, wow, having a job is slavery and my company is screwing me over!”

Two things to note: Having a job gives you incredible opportunities to learn, grow and network while giving you the stability to develop yourself over the long term.

Secondly, unless you signed some sort of contract, you can leave any time you like. If you’re prepared.

So prepare yourself. Maybe I’m young and idealistic, but I firmly believe that the pursuit of things I genuinely love will bring me infinitely more reward than being paid to worry about someone else’s problems. I believe that dedicating the bulk of my time to my own growth, wealth and self-selected challenges, rather than to the development of someone else’s business, is the only conscionable use of my time. I believe that investing myself in an organization whose best interest is something that isn’t me would be to ignore one simple fact: I’m going to die one day. I need to make the most of my life and working for someone else isn’t going to cut it.

You may be following this, finding none of my assessments about having a job objectionable and thinking to yourself that I am, in fact, absurdly difficult and demanding. If that is so I salute you: your expectations for your life are much more easily satisfied.

I’m stuck wanting something else for myself. Thankfully, I’ve got some role models to help me handle this drive for a self-directed life.

Adam Savage

I heard Adam Savage give a talk where he mentioned that his line of work is mostly freelance. This perked up my ears. If you’ve spent any amount of time watching MythBusters, you know that Adam has a singular passion for the creative work that he does. He currently has the best job in the world because he desperately, obsessively craves the joy of making things. He’s incredibly good at it. I’m certain he never could have attained his world-class skills without first loving the work to begin with.

Nick Popovich, Super Repo Man

If you need a defaulted plane retrieved from a deadbeat, you call this guy. Nick had some flight skills and did his first repo on a whim. Now he owns a $20 million business grabbing planes from all corners of the globe. He’s good at it and he enjoys the work. Imagine the waste of his talents if he had stuck to being a traditional pilot and never realized his unique ability to resolve impossible, dangerous situations.

John Gruber

John is obsessive about details in design, typography, user experience and software development. He’s also obsessive about Apple. It shocks me that time and again, John is able to render completely accurate predictions about Apple’s direction and upcoming products. It’s a level of insight no one else on the web can match. It also puts professional investment analysts to shame. Is it incredible that six-figure salaried analysts can’t match the insight and prescience of a guy working from his home on a blog he maintains by himself? A little bit, but it should not be surprising at all. Only a love and passion for his subject matter could have made John the authority on all things Apple on the web.

My mom

I don’t know that she feels great about me saying so here, but it’s important to the legend: my mom didn’t finish high school or go to college. She does have a GED. She’s a minority for whom english is a second language. In pretty much all the ways a single mom can have the chips stacked against her, she had.

My mom loves animals – always has. It’s truly an obsession with her. In my childhood, I can recall the ownership of three ostriches, a donkey, six geese, dozens of chickens, an African Grey Parrot, dozens of dogs, some cats and multiple generations of coral reef tanks with tropical fish that made the house a viable field trip destination.

When I was very young, my mom took a certificate program at the New York School of Dog Grooming. To pay homage to James Herriot, no capped and gowned don ever looked back to his years among the spires of Oxford with more nostalgia than did my mother to her two months at NYSDG.

If I am difficult and demanding, then my mom truly is impossible. Nonetheless, she endured years of working for shitty bosses at shittier dog grooming shops. I don’t know how she did it, but one day, she had enough. I’m not sure where she got the funds, but she put together enough money to lease and renovate a commercial space, adding all of the kennels, baths, and other equipment necessary to provide absurdly clean, professional dog grooming services. For pretty much the rest of my childhood (and to this day), she was self-employed, her own boss. Despite the statistics for small business failure, my mom was and continues to be wildly successful at her trade without any training in business, marketing or finance. She doesn’t need it: she’s just incredibly good at what she does, wanted to provide the best possible service and has always loved her work. Not many other people can offer this. This was enough to ensure I never went hungry as a kid.

The message is clear: if you love the work you do, you can become so good at it that whatever rewards you seek become attainable.

I’ll say it again: I’m going to die one day. I don’t know if it’s next year or many decades from now or somewhere in between. What I do know is that expending my energies within the narrow, limiting, self-denying confines required by the traditional job is a complete waste of whatever existence I have at my disposal.

Aubrey has brought many incredible gifts of insight to my life, but chief of among them is this: you shouldn’t spend any significant amount of time doing something you don’t want to do. I owe so much of my evolution to that crucial realization.

I’m excited to be in business for myself. The nagging feeling that plagued me for so long, the feeling that I was somehow missing the point of life and wasting my time, is completely gone.

I’ve discovered a list of things that I absolutely love to do. I’m already good at some of them while others will require years of time to develop. That’s no problem – the love makes it easier to get through the rough spots. I’ve spent years aggressively growing myself to reach this point. I had no idea where I was heading.

Now I know. I can’t wait to be able to focus on what’s truly important, free from the distraction of minding someone else’s business.

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Restaurant 1′s manager:

“That chicken won’t take very long at all to cook – I’ll get it replaced for you right away. I’m so sorry about this, there’s really no excuse for it. While you’re waiting, are there any appetizers I can get for you? On the house, of course. Let me get you some menus – choose whatever you’d like.”

Restaurant 2′s manager:

“We’ll fix it,” with the dish yanked roughly from me and a replacement dropped wordlessly on the table minutes later, without hint of apology or even embarrassment. Annoyance, on the other hand, is exuded in abundance.

Which restaurant do you feel better about?

Restaurant 1 is a clear paragon of basic decency and above-average customer service. Restaurant 2, despite delicious but somewhat high-end fare, gives the same rude service you’d expect from the most indifferent fast food joint at the busiest rush hour.

But why bother giving above-average customer service? It takes time, it can be expensive, it may require significant investments in training if your team is large or spread out.

The business case is an obvious one: negative word of mouth travels with much more grease than does positive. One bad customer interaction can mean the loss of future business not only from the person you’ve disappointed, but also from many of the people they know. There’s also the trope about it costing more to replace a customer than to keep one. Worst of all, if other customers witness an especially bad interaction, they might abandon you themselves despite an otherwise trouble-free experience. No one wants to deal with a someone who looks like a crook.

That’s a short list and there are plenty of practical reasons not to screw your customers. They all miss the point.

You should give above-average customer service because it’s fucking wrong to give anything less.

I am not a man of any faith. There are few things I hold sacred. This is one of them: If you work a job at a business and interact with customers, whether you are the lowest paid hourly employee or the CEO, your highest duty is to the customer. Not to policy, not to your boss, not to your shareholders, not to anyone alive before your customer.

Why? You would starve without them. The roof over your head, the lunch in your stomach, the weekend trip you’re about to take – all of it exists thanks to the grace and honesty of the customer who will pay, time and again, for access to your goods or services. If their satisfaction, their absolute fucking bliss, is not at the core of what you’re doing, you are absolutely, one hundred percent doing it wrong. I don’t care if all you’re doing is punching the clock, if your boss doesn’t care about you, if you hate the stupid uniform. I’ve been there, it sucks. Doesn’t make a difference – you still owe the customer the very best you have to offer. It is your duty. In my retail days I sometimes broke the rules and defied my boss to make my customers happy while giving them the respect their patronage had earned them.

When you ignore that duty, when you maximize profit and personal convenience at the expense of loving your customers, you will eventually be slaughtered brutally and painfully and your customers will laugh when that day comes. Want proof? Look at Blockbuster. Everyone who existed in North America in the 90′s has at least one tale of woe at the hands of the video store’s brutal late fee policy. Blockbuster stocked only movies that were obvious mainstream bets, with a few token art house and foreign selections, without bothering to sort out what their customers actually wanted to watch.

Then, one day, technology changed, allowing the entry of a bizarre new competitor. Netflix, out of nowhere, showed up and gave customers genuine respect. Netflix provided a service with generous, flexible terms, abundant selection and entirely reasonable pricing. The offering was so compelling, people changed their habits to accommodate this weird mail order movie service. Netflix, in turn, listened to their customers and broadened their selections further while building ever more distribution facilities to ensure that no one had to wait more than a day or two for fresh movies. Through Watch Instantly, Netflix continues providing incredible value instead of becoming complacent and allowing the rise of someone else with a better feel for the needs of their customers. Most importantly, when a customer has a beef, Netflix makes it right with friendly, generous customer service and proactive communication that owns up to every screwup.

It’s up to you. Do the right thing for each customer every single time and sleep well at night with the knowledge that your business is safe and you’re a good person. As for the alternative: I have a handy chart for that you may find instructive.

Choose wisely.

Footnote:

If you’re wondering, restaurant 1 is the excellent Spice in Winter Park, FL. Restaurant 2 is Greens & Grille, in Orlando. Greens & Grille has one particular manager who seems so exceedingly annoyed at the very existence of my girlfriend and I that we routinely forgo their delicious, sublime organic meals because we’d rather not feel quite that unwelcome. We eat three times a day. That grumpiness has cost them, in the last six months, what could have easily totaled hundreds of bucks because they’d get our business a few times a week if we actually felt welcome there.