A few weeks back, one of my main dudes shared a link on Facebook from the humor site Cracked. It’s so great that I decided to share it with as many people as I can, as frequently as I can, for the full duration of 2013. For that reason I present it here in abridged form but I recommend reading it in its entirety at least once. Again – what follows is abridged text from this post on Cracked – and should be credited to David Wong.

#6. The World Only Cares About What It Can Get from You

If you want to know why society seems to shun you, or why you seem to get no respect, it’s because society is full of people who need things. They need houses built, they need food to eat, they need entertainment, they need fulfilling sexual relationships. … Either you will go about the task of seeing to those needs by learning a unique set of skills, or the world will reject you, no matter how kind, giving and polite you are. You will be poor, you will be alone, you will be left out in the cold.

#5. The Hippies Were Wrong

On Alec Baldwin’s genius monologue in “Glengarry Glen Ross“: It’s brutal, rude and borderline sociopathic, and also it is an honest and accurate expression of what the world is going to expect from you. The difference is that, in the real world, people consider it so wrong to talk to you that way that they’ve decided it’s better to simply let you keep failing.

#4. What You Produce Does Not Have to Make Money, But It Does Have to Benefit People

“I’m asking what do you offer? Are you smart? Funny? Interesting? Talented? Ambitious? Creative? OK, now what do you do to demonstrate those attributes to the world? Don’t say that you’re a nice guy — that’s the bare minimum.”

#3. You Hate Yourself Because You Don’t Do Anything

“Do the math: How much of your time is spent consuming things other people made (TV, music, video games, websites) versus making your own? Only one of those adds to your value as a human being.

And if you hate hearing this and are responding with something you heard as a kid that sounds like “It’s what’s on the inside that matters!” then I can only say …”

#2. What You Are Inside Only Matters Because of What It Makes You Do

“Inside, you have great compassion for poor people. Great. Does that result in you doing anything about it? Do you hear about some terrible tragedy in your community and say, “Oh, those poor children. Let them know that they are in my thoughts”? Because f*ck you if so — find out what they need and help provide it. A hundred million people watched that Kony video, virtually all of whom kept those poor African children “in their thoughts.” What did the collective power of those good thoughts provide? Jack f*cking sh*t. Children die every day because millions of us tell ourselves that caring is just as good as doing. It’s an internal mechanism controlled by the lazy part of your brain to keep you from actually doing work.”

#1. Everything Inside You Will Fight Improvement

“The human mind is a miracle, and you will never see it spring more beautifully into action than when it is fighting against evidence that it needs to change. Your psyche is equipped with layer after layer of defense mechanisms designed to shoot down anything that might keep things from staying exactly where they are — ask any addict. … Remember, misery is comfortable. It’s why so many people prefer it. Happiness takes effort.”

The post ends – and I really encourage you to read the original – with a call to spend 2013 acquiring a skill that will make the reader more valuable to the world. While I am confident that I am valued by the world today, who knows what tomorrow holds, so I am going to devote 2013 to rebuilding this site (and brand) myself. Of course, my learning basic coding and development will not shift the earth’s axis, but it will be a nice compliment to my existing skills and allow me to have more intelligent conversations with the developers and IT people I rely on daily.

What will do you this year?

Image at top by Amy McAdams Design. Available at Homespun: Modern Handmade and on Amy’s Etsy shop.

The last couple of years have been a blur of business plans, Kickstarter projects, Refresh Everything campaigns, grand openings, late nights, holiday rushes, dirty jobs and dirtier diapers. Homespun: Modern Handmade turned two years old this month, an important piece of trivia that was obscured by the rush to open our second location – Homespun: Workshops & Gallery.

Homespun was initially conceived as a boutique, gallery, and workshop devoted to contemporary handmade goods. But the we quickly learned that the demands of retail made it impossible to move forward with the gallery and workshop space in the same location on E. Washington St. So we decided to get the boutique part right and launch a workshop and gallery space at a later date. Last year you helped us win a Pepsi grant to cover most of the cost of opening a second location, we found a space close to the store, and we’ve spent the last five months getting it off the ground. We’ve held a smattering of classes there but our formal grand opening is this weekend.

We grossly underestimated the time, energy, and expense required to open a second location. When we opened Homespun I was working from home, Amanda was unemployed and pregnant. Now I have a much less flexible job, Amanda has a busy shop to run and our son is nearly two. We would not have been able to launch Homespun: Workshops & Gallery without the assistance, technical and moral support of Ryan Page, Angela Garvin, Rana Striedinger, Ivy Klein, Joanne Ash and the various friends and relatives they enlisted to help clean, paint, and do odd jobs to help us inch closer to opening day. Without your votes on our Pepsi Refresh page and the hands-on work of the people listed above, Homespun: Workshops & Gallery would not exist. So thank you. Sincerely. We hope that it’s well worth everyone’s time.

PS: Special thanks and a fond farewell to Aubrey Chaney, Homespun’s first employee and one of our first champions. She has moved on to bigger and better things but we’re confident that her Backwoods Belle hair accessories will continue to be top sellers.

Cirque Du Soleil’s “Quidam” opens tonight at Bankers Life Fieldhouse and some folks from the cast were kind enough to take part of their day off to show us what they do up close and personal. Enjoy the video and learn more about the couple here.

I left the Indianapolis Star on Aug. 14, 2009. On April 30, 2012, I’m going back.

It’s funny to read what I wrote almost three years ago about my time at the Star, how much and how little has changed over that time. After I left the Star I spent almost a year and a half as the online editor at FIGHT! Magazine, immersing myself in the rhythm, stresses, and strains of daily online publishing. I build large social media followings for the company, learned how to edit other people, and became obsessed with metrics and data.

A year and a half ago Clay Robinson asked me if I’d be interested in using my skills to help manage Sun King Brewing Co.’s growth, so I brought my toolbox to 135 N. College and did what I do, learning a lot about marketing, market research and public relations in the process. I’m happy here. I will always be a part of the Sun King story, a proud veteran of the early days of what I am confident will become one of central Indiana’s defining enterprises. I wasn’t looking for a job but one found me. One I couldn’t say no to.

Sun King is in my heart but Indianapolis is my heart. There’s a lot of hard work ahead of me but I couldn’t be more content. Take this job and love it.

Keon and Alea doing footwork drills.

Some of you might remember a flurry of calls from me last May to help Indy PAL MMA win a Pepsi Refresh grant. Well, we won, securing $50,000 in funding for a not-for-profit youth martial arts gym on the east side. We moved into our space in October 2011 and began growing quickly. We offer free boxing, wrestling, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu classes for kids and low-cost training for adults who are willing to help out with coaching, mentoring, and gym upkeep. We’re currently serving almost 100 kids and we haven’t really promoted the fact that we’re there beyond creating a Facebook page and Twitter account.

That all changes on Saturday, March 10 when we’ll host a grand opening at our facility. Indy PAL MMA will be open to the public from noon to 2 p.m. and we’d love for you to come check out the facility, meet the coaches and the kids we work with. If you want to learn how to box, come in and check it out. If you want to learn how to wrestle, come in and check it out. If you want to learn Jiu Jitsu, come in and check it out. If you’re curious about one of the weird things I do in my free time (beer, crafts, mixed martial arts, whatever), come in and check it out.

Indy PAL MMA is only the second Police Athletic League-affiliated MMA club in the country and we are 100% privately funded. I think it’s a game changer in the way inner city youth athletic programs are structured, promoted, and funded, but time will tell if I’m right or not. The New York Slice (Facebook | Twitter | Yelp) will be on hand serving up pizza and garlic knots so come out, have lunch, and say hi. We’re located at 700 N. Sherman Dr. in the old RCA plant. Look for the red food truck. Tweet me for directions if you can’t find it. See you there.

Indianapolis isn’t lacking for post-Super Bowl commentary but I am in a unique position – small business owner, employee of another small business, privvy to some of the details of SB46 planning and able to view everything through the lens of a reporter – so I have decided to weigh in. Rather than stitch all of my thoughts together in a Frankentein’s monster of an essay, I decided to dedicate a post to each thought.

It’s no secret that outside of the area immediately surrounding Georgia St., the Super Bowl didn’t deliver the bar and restaurant business that central Indiana’s hospitality industry was told to expect. I don’t think that the city or the Host Committee made claims in bad faith, and even my hidden inner cynic doesn’t believe that we were duped by the dastardly NFL. I think that there was an honest belief, based on the size and geography of previous Super Bowl host cities, that there was no way that Indianapolis’ downtown could handle the expected crowds. The assumption was that the crowd would swell and expand and move out to the Celebration Sites out of necessity. It made sense on paper but like so many things in life it didn’t play out that way. So whose fault is it? No one’s.

I sympathize with the impulse to point fingers and place blame. But at the risk of sounding glib, shit happens. The city – and by that I mean everyone, public sector, private sector – did everything it could to prepare. Some merchants saw a storm of business and barely handled it. Some looked out at empty restaurants and were left handling excess inventory and bloated payroll. It sucks. It hurts. But there are several reasons why it happened and there’s not a whole lot of blame to go around.

1. The weather was beautiful. Big win for the city, bad for bars, restaurants and shops. If it was snowing all week Super Bowl visitors would have had to seek refuge indoors. They didn’t. In fact, they didn’t even seem to worry about food that much, they just bought bottled water and kept moving through the Village. Who’s to blame for that? God? Al Roker?

2. Crowds like crowds. It’s simple psychology. When people see a big crowd they want to be a part of whatever all of those other people want to be a part of. Which is why when the news reported crowds in the tens of thousands packing Georgia St., tens of thousands of people got in their cars or boarded buses and headed downtown to check it out. Crowds also have gravitational force. Once you’re in you stay in until you want out permanently. And once you shear off from the crowd you don’t go looking for another one – you go home.

3. The consumer gets to decide what he or she wants. As much as I’d like to steer people toward craft beer, artisanal produce and heritage meats, the Joe Six Pack doesn’t give a fuck. He may never. So while we can kick and scream about what “shouldacouldawoulda happened if we had just did x,y,z,” you can’t force people to do anything. Nothing that we do in the short term will defeat the billions of dollars of marketing that fast food, cheap booze, and crappy merchandise manufacturers have used to shape the attitudes and behaviors of the public. It’s a long process and we have to keep telling our story in an inviting way and accept the fact that the payoff might be five, 10, 25 years down the road.

Losing money sucks and it’d be nice for it to be someone’s fault. That way you could heap abuse on them and shun them and pretend that anger and resentment serve a productive purpose. But you can’t blame the seed company for drought.

Next…Past Is Prologue

Read more:

Bowled Over Part Four: Us vs. Them
Bowled Over Part Three: Blood In, Blood Out
Bowled Over Part Two: The $100 Million Ad Buy
Bowled Over Part One: Let Us Give Thanks
Naptown To Super City (Video)

Indianapolis isn’t lacking for post-Super Bowl commentary but I am in a unique position – small business owner, employee of another small business, privvy to some of the details of SB46 planning and able to view everything through the lens of a reporter – so I have decided to weigh in. Rather than stitch all of my thoughts together in a Frankentein’s monster of an essay, I decided to dedicate a post to each thought.

I spent several months working with Indianapolis City Market and the Mass Ave and Fountain Square merchants associations to plan, fund, and execute a free Super Bowl circulator shuttle. And the process reinforced a very simple truth that applies to all areas of life.

There’s no business owner versus merchants association dichotomy, no tenant versus versus landlord division, no merchant versus resident opposition, there’s just neighborhoods, communities. A business owner might succeed for a bit while only thinking of herself, her immediate needs, her bottom line. But the moment she falters she’ll reach out to the very people who needed her when they struggled and she might find herself without a net.

Be a good neighbor. Find ways to satisfy your needs in the context of your place and your community. Take responsibility not just for yourself but for the things at the periphery of your reach. Don’t let ‘adversarial’ be your default position. Because there is no us versus them. There’s just us.

Read more:

Bowled Over Part Three: Blood In, Blood Out
Bowled Over Part Two: The $100 Million Ad Buy
Bowled Over Part One: Let Us Give Thanks
Naptown To Super City (Video)

Despite what greeting card manufacturers, chocolatiers and jewelers might want you to believe, love is not a commodity. You can’t buy it, sell it, bet on futures or (despite what your attorney tells you) hedge against future calamities. Love, like happiness, is work. Not a sentiment that sells Hallmark cards or condoms but it’s the truth. Love is ceaseless, selfless work. Love is obligation. Love is strapping everything on your back, legs trembling under the load, and smiling. Love is getting up before you want to in order to do something you don’t want to because you promised you’d do it. Love is holding your tongue when it does more harm than help. Love is embracing someone for who they are instead of what you want them to be. Love is submission and acceptance. Love is making your busy wife breakfasts you know she’ll forget to eat. Love is putting everything else on hold when your son wants you to read a book…four times in a row. Love is what gets me up every morning and carries me through the day until I can finally lay back down with my family and be reminded why I’m going to do it all over again the next day.

Indianapolis isn’t lacking for post-Super Bowl commentary but I am in a unique position – small business owner, employee of another small business, privvy to some of the details of SB46 planning and able to view everything through the lens of a reporter – so I have decided to weigh in. Rather than stitch all of my thoughts together in a Frankentein’s monster of an essay, I decided to dedicate a post to each thought.

Building on yesterday’s theme of “was it worth it” it’s important to stress that securing a Super Bowl and hosting it successfully wasn’t an end in and of itself. It’s a membership card, a letter of reference, the beginning of a new chapter.

Was it expensive? Yes. Was it painful? In many ways, yes. But there’s always a cost of entry. Whether it’s a personal seat license, membership dues, or a kick in the teeth, you have to get jumped into the gang. Blood in, blood out. Once you are in the club the real work begins. You don’t pay thousands of dollars to join an exclusive club and then sit at home complaining that you’re not seeing any benefit. You can pay all the money in the world to become the official sponsor of an event or an athlete but if you don’t have the time, money and energy to market that relationship, you’re wasting your cash. You have to activate your membership/sponsorship. Indianapolis is the newest member of an exclusive club. Now we have to schmooze, play a round of golf, order a cocktail, have dinner.

Many people around the country doubted that we could pull it off. Many residents of central Indiana doubted that we could pull it off. A small number of fuddy duddies actively discouraged the city’s efforts to secure a Super Bowl, but of course they weren’t successful because fuddy duddies are never successful at anything but being unhappy. Our situation is not unlike the one Chicago found itself in when it hosted the World’s Fair in 1893. Against the supposedly better judgement of many citizens and critics, the event was staged and carried off with great fanfare and city leaders used that momentum to become one of the great cities of the 20th century. Indianapolis can use the momentum from Super Bowl XLVI to own the 21st century but we have to want it. We have to activate our membership in this exclusive club to attract events and employers and investment that will give Indianapolis the tools to improve its infrastructure, transit, and educational system.

We’re here. Let’s do something with the opportunity. More on that tomorrow…

Read more:

Bowled Over Part Two: The $100 Million Ad Buy
Bowled Over Part One: Let Us Give Thanks
Naptown To Super City (Video)

Indianapolis isn’t lacking for post-Super Bowl commentary but I am in a unique position – small business owner, employee of another small business, privvy to some of the details of SB46 planning and able to view everything through the lens of a reporter – so I have decided to weigh in. Rather than stitch all of my thoughts together in a Frankentein’s monster of an essay, I decided to dedicate a post to each thought.

The question of whether hosting Super Bowl XLVI was “worth it” was being posed days, weeks, even months before the event took place. It’s a valid question but the underlying assumptions rarely are. That’s because when many people pose the question of whether or not hosting the Super Bowl was “worth it” they actually mean, “did having the Super Bowl in Indianapolis profitable for me / the city this week?” The hard truth is that even if it wasn’t, having the event in Indianapolis was still well worth the time, money, and effort expended to carry it off. That’s because the true return on investment can’t be measured now or maybe even for months or years to come.

Hosting the Super Bowl is equivalent to a $100 million-plus ad buy. Our city was featured on television screens, newspaper pages, and radio frequencies worldwide and thanks to many of our guests, was the recipient of quite a bit of online buzz. Indianapolis could never purchase advertising, editorial coverage, and goodwill on the scale that we enjoyed for the last few weeks and will continue to enjoy as long as people remember Super Bowl XLVI. That value cannot be understated.

Consider for a minute how you feel about places like New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Mexico City, Bangkok, and Cairo. Chances are that you have traveled a bit but you haven’t been to all of those cities. But I’ll bet that you know something about them, you have a general sense of what they are like, a feeling about the character of the place. But how could you possibly know what New York is like without walking the streets of Manhattan or Williamsburg or Flushing? You know what you know in large part because of the story that the city tells about itself and that media companies tell on its behalf.

Super Bowl XLVI was Indianapolis’ chance to tell our story to an international audience. While Indianapolis is unlikely to become a global city like New York, Chicago, or LA, it still needs to have an international brand. We are starting to build one now because of the Super Bowl. I guarantee you that I will never again have to explain to someone on a plane that I don’t live in Minnesota.

It sounds silly and it’s hard to measure, but you cannot underestimate the emotional and psychological power of having an international identity. Why would anyone want to come to a place they’ve never heard of, and why would anyone want to stay in a place that’s flown over and ignored? Historically they don’t and they won’t. That tide has started to turn and will likely reap benefits that we still can’t predict.

Marketing is part magic and we cast a spell on a lot of people last week. Just because it will take time and a lot more work to make that pay off doesn’t mean that it won’t happen.

Read more:

Bowled Over Part Three: Blood In, Blood Out
Bowled Over Part One: Let Us Give Thanks
Naptown To Super City (Video)