Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World was a film that chronicled my 20s perfectly. It was such tough luck that it had to go up against BOTH the Expendables and Eat Pray Love on opening weekend. Now I have to buy up everything Scott Pilgrim from the video game, to the soundtrack, to five minutes on the Scott Pilgrim Suicide Prevention hotline to properly show my appreciation. Thanks a lot, movie-going public.

The story of Scott having to defeat seven evil exes to date his crush should feel familiar for anyone who has had to deal with relationship baggage. As I watched, all these memories came flooding back to me. Playing the Rifts RPG with my friends in rathole apartments, losing at Dance Dance Revolution in Lotteria Cafe, and my hilarious attempts at finding relationships at parties and nightclubs. You have all this energy that in another time would have been used for something real, like fighting a war and raising a family. Instead, you’re stuck burning it all off on sports, video games, or some other cheap distraction. The surreal video game tropes of Scott Pilgrim mirror that fact. Most nostalgic of all was the high pitched whine of self-deception. Trust me, with no job and a useless degree, you’ll tell yourself anything to get through the day.

So here I am at 30, looking back at the last of my adolescence, and I think, what’s different? What have I learned? I met my beautiful wife (thank god) so I don’t have to bother with nightclubs anymore. I can’t stay up until 4 am like I used to anyway. That’ll come around to haunt me once kids are in the picture. I learned that you could love your job, but there was no way it was going to love you back. People might toss you aside to maintain their self-image, but don’t take it personally. If you meet someone that doesn’t do that, hang on to them dearly. Action is a greater virtue than patience.

I’ve probably got dozens of these fortune-cookie aphorisms buried away in gut feelings and subtle hunches. That’s the funny thing about experience. We say we’re free and individual beings, but we still funnel ourselves down the same old paths of life bordered in by our fears and unanswered questions. If we can face down those situations with no easy answers, keep trying to face down the limits of our experience, we just might eventually get to the truth.

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My first week in the Fraser Valley Self Employment program consisted of workshops in Business Planning, Marketing, and Competition analysis. My class was quite small. Four people, including myself. There was a Music Teacher/Producer, an International Tax Accountant, and a Senior Care specialist. The sessions were very information-dense. It’s scary to think how many entrepreneurs try to go into business without knowing how to do a balance sheet or register with all levels of government. However, I think our most important take-away from those workshops was not the knowledge, but a chance to get our first taste of the culture of business.

There we were, circling a conference room table with wildly divergent forms of companies. It was almost addicting to hear all of the concerns and strategies involved in all of our companies. Did you know you could clean a house with lemon juice and steeped tea? How about the SOCANN tariff, and how that will affect the music industry? Were you aware of all the bugs that exist in commercially available accounting software? Each one of us had something to contribute. The presenters had almost as much to learn from us as we did from them. With no titles besides the ones we had given ourselves, our knowledge was one of the only things we had that proved that we belonged in this program. Our eagerness to help was the other trait that proved our worth. Not only could we offer our skills, but our network contacts as well. As time went on, I felt as though we were all on the boards of each other’s companies, brainstorming new ideas that would take us all to the top.

For all the talk about rational self-interest in business, my workshop group felt like a very egalitarian place to be. We all wanted to help each other.  Everyone was willing to share information, and they wanted to know what you thought in return. I’ll be interested to see my classmates in months to come after these workshops. Hopefully, I’ll even be able to send them a few leads.

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I got the call Thursday that my SeedsBC funding was approved. As of today, I have stopped looking for work. I have a new job. For the next 40 weeks, I’ll be receiving funding and training to start a new web design business. For the next couple of weeks or so, I’ll be attending workshops on marketing, accounting, and business planning. After that, I’ll start calling up the sales leads I picked up during my application process and go on from there.

I feel like say something inspiring or Seth Godin-like about this, but it just doesn’t feel like the right time. This is not a product launch. It wasn’t even a tough decision to make. Freelance contracting made me money. Sending out resumes did not. I’m not exactly throwing off my chains and seizing the means of production. This is just the first, faltering step on a long journey.

Entrepreneurship, for the most part, is still something I’ve only read about in books. I have no doubt a lot of its details are obscured by the triumphalism and tragedy that makes for good business publishing. But I can’t give in to the fear of the unknown. As of now, there is no boss I can beg for my job back. I signed a contract with my government that I would give this venture my full attention. I have a mortgage and car insurance that can’t be paid with anything less than profit. It sounds like pressure, but to me it’s comforting. We spend our whole lives looking for direction, wondering where to put our energies. The only direction I have now is forward.

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A common complaint about living in Abbotsford is that there are no good bookstores. We have four, but your choice is Coles in Seven Oaks, Hemingway’s used bookstore, the House of James Christian bookstore, and Food for Thought if crystals and tarot cards are your thing.

Sure, it’s an eclectic selection, but we’re a city of over 125,000 people. We deserve some kind of ostentatious literary presence in our town. I watch every big box development with baited breath. Maybe the shell of Linens & Things will be resurrected as a Chapters. Perhaps that giant red thing will be- aw, it’s just a Shopper’s Drugmart. It’s like we’re the town that doesn’t like to read.

To make matters worse, I think we’ve just passed the point where big box bookstores are profitable. Most of the books I buy are marketed and purchased entirely online. I see an interview or a video from the author and I just sashay down to the Chapters website where everything is (almost) always in stock and cheaper than the brick and mortar store.

Is the idle pleasure of browsing a bookstore doomed to antiquity?

Having an actual physical store is different enough from online retail that we should have them well into the future. The question is how to monetize real life stores. I think we’ll see something akin to the hyper-competitive retail market I saw in Tokyo. Every store had to compete with hundreds just like it in the area. There was nothing they wouldn’t do to try and get customers to spend time shopping. There were streetside barkers, brightly coloured (and colourfully written) deal signs, animated displays, and don’t get me started with the cross-promotion! Who would have thought of using a maid cafe to market transformable cell-phone robot toys? Whatever form brick and mortar retail takes, the common factor is going to be the passion of the salespeople. As much as I hate using that word, if you are going to sling books like a machine, you might as well get replaced by one.

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I was tooling around on wikipedia the other day and found the page for the definition of elitism. On the right hand side was elitism in all its forms, classism, racism, even terms like heightism and mentalism. With all these ways for us to be more sensitive about people, I wonder if we’ll get to the point where no one has to feel bad about themselves, ever. I don’t think this is a good thing.

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Now, I trust all of you, so I’m hoping you can help me weigh in on this.

About once a week I see a thread on Fark.com like this one about a news story concerning youth unemployment, debt, or other factors in a failure to launch. Each and every one of these threads devolves into a raging flame war between people who believe young people aren’t working hard enough and twenty-something college grads who can’t get jobs.

I wonder why some people get so angry when college grads expect to get better jobs using degrees they paid thousands of dollars for. Why shouldn’t they? The government expects them to. Billions in student loans go out to colleges and universities every year with the expectation that they produce graduates that make enough money to pay those loans back. The US is facing another debt crisis because they can’t collect on these education investments.

Moreover, it’s not like getting a degree just involves smoking weed and arguing about Sartre. Students spend hundreds of hours doing research and writing papers in order to graduate. In essence, they paid for the opportunity to work hard at something. Does that not mean anything in today’s economy? Even if someone is over-qualified for a position, isn’t a degree a written guarantee that a person can get up in the morning and follow through with their degrees?

Probably not, given that there are millions of people out there with these degrees. It’s almost as if an important human element is now missing from the hiring process. We’ve put so much stock in degrees and certificates, but all we’ve done is create a soulless buyer’s market. Where is the future of industry going to come from if we don’t create a path for new workers?

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I read the story of dino town closing down in the Vancouver Sun yesterday. Really poignant stuff. The park had survived Time Warner pulling the Flintstones license out from under them in 1994. The original owners are now retired. Their son took over the park, but developed a benign brain tumor. Though he recovered,  he sold out to a land developer so they could put an RV park in there.

I know this is how business works. The RV deal was the best the owner could ever have hoped for. My generation just seemed…so small when I read that column. The park was built for Baby Boomers and their kids. Now that the next generation has families of their own to entertain and share memories with- poof, no more theme park. The retirees need somewhere to empty their septic tanks now.

There’s a lesson here for us though. There are times when it seems like we’ll never top the Baby Boomers, let alone the Silent or Greatest Generation before it that fought WWII. We are taught that the frontier is over, that best we can ever do is to maintain the institutions that our parents built for us.

There may come a day when someone else builds a place like DinoTown, using intellectual property that’s owned by its creators and cannot be usurped by faceless Multi-nationals. (Time Warner itself is losing money hand over fist, proving that things like Multi-national corporations are a bad idea anyway.) Somehow, this is a clean break. It’s a reminder that our world is mortal, maintained by the constant care of people who love it and want to make it a better place. If we want places for our kids to play, good restaurants to eat at, and beautiful towns to walk in, we must look to ourselves to make all of that possible.

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Yesterday, my wife and I spent a couple of hours at the Powell Street Japanese Culture festival. Check out the photo gallery after the jump!

Click the images to see descriptions.

[View with PicLens]

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No one tells you how hard it is to write content. People think that just because you speak English and type using the home row, you should be able to dash off post upon post without breaking a sweat. Not so. Even if you have something to say, you need to undo years of academic conditioning. University will tell you how to write for the professor and how to make everything “correct”, but says almost nothing about writing honest, human communication.  That kind of writing takes training. When I need training, I head over to 750words.com.

750word.com was started by Buster Benson, a developer living in Seattle, WA. It’s a writing challenge where you sit down and write 750 words of free associative writing, a practice inspired by writing exercises and psychotherapy. Only you can access your words (although you can export them), so you don’t have to worry about taking down bad ideas. It’s a great way to experiment with your writing, and leaves you open to those “happy accidents” that are the soul of true creativity.

The site also takes down statistics about your word use and tries to figure out how you are feeling at the time of your writing. You can learn a lot about yourself by just letting your fingers fly across the keyboard. When I decided to show Sara what I had written, she was surprised learn exactly what was going on in my head. I mostly wrote about the move, getting my business going, and all the stress associated with it. I find it difficult to just talk about this stuff verbally. If I write it down, I don’t have to worry about stuttering or messing the words up. Correction is only a backspace key away. I used to think that writing about yourself was kind of narcissistic. While it’s true that having no filter can make people uncomfortable,  attention is not the only reason to reflect. Your own advice has more power when you write it down.  Your words don’t just stay inside your head. You can catch yourself in a lie, or better yet, you can catch yourself speaking the truth. That truth, once etched in letters, can blossom until your life is changed forever.

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Do you ever worry that you’re basing your life decisions on bestseller books?

I’m talking about new, fresh off the presses books where the authors are still alive and doing press junkets on Regis and Kelly. The ones that sitcoms always warned you about following. I know it seems like everyone’s chasing their guru of the week, but lately there have been a lot of good gurus to read. You have Levitt and Dubner telling us why swimming pools are more dangerous in your home than handguns. Malcolm Gladwell says that success in the NHL can be attributed to something as random as a January birth date. Seth Godin has us looking at that resume and wondering if it’s even worth the paper it’s printed on when it comes to landing a job.

Right now I’m reading Nicholas Taleb’s book, “Black Swan”, which talks about the nature of improbable events and that lack of knowledge is just as important as knowledge itself. I’m sure my mind is going to be blown and I’m yet again going to take a hard look at how I make my decisions in life. What does that mean? Why am I willing to make choices based on something that millions have already read? If the ideas in these books are so good, the world should have already changed based on what we’ve learned. Traditional commercial advertising should be dead and buried already. We should know that easy access to birth control methods results in less crime. We should have a comprehensive energy conservation plan already. Yet we don’t. If most of the world can’t do anything with same knowledge that I’m getting from the exact same book they are reading, what chance do I have of doing anything different?

The problem with that world view is that it assumes that everyone has read the same bestseller I have. Most people don’t have the time to read them. The fact that these books are bestsellers has nothing to do with how the knowledge inside them could be used. Reading them is easy, but implementing the ideas in real life is something else entirely. Besides, we’re still in love with the idea that success is something magical, ordained by prophecies and other mumbo-jumbo. No one will laugh if you tell them that the key to your success was found in your local library. Unfortunately, no one will believe you, either. Your confession will end up as one of those quotations,  passed off as one of those trite particles of dime-store wisdom drilled into the heads of school children. It might even be used as a chapter heading in your biography, which by that time will be a bonafide best-seller.

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