On the Vital Importance of Starting

With a capital "S."

Posting excerpts out of context can be problematic. This one, though... It's amazing to me how many people are afraid to Start something important, something that could make a difference. Equally amazing is how many forms our fear takes.

For that's what it is. Fear. But most of the things we can do to reach our potential are not going to kill us. What we need to do, whenever we consider Starting something important, is to ask the simple question: "What's the worst that can happen?"

Be honest with yourself. In the vast majority of cases, the worst isn't going to be all that bad.

Let's join Alabaster Prufrock Slore, then, as he encounters Blaine Stannard for the first time. Slore is the CEO of Slore's (It's Beer), the corporate brewery that has been buying up and assimilating every independent brewer it can induce to fall into its gaping maw of mass-market sameness. Slore is a risk-averse, profit-oriented corporate man, and yet even so, every now and then even he is capable of making a bet.

This passage was inspired by Seth Godin's January 10th, 2009 post "Time to Start a Newspaper."

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/01/time-to-start-a.html 

*****

As he left Battersea Park and came upon the power station and his main brewery and corporate offices, Alabaster was frustrated. Frustrated because, with all his experience and business acumen and willingness to try something new, this time, he couldn’t work past a vitally important question.

And that question was: “What next?”

He passed by a shabbily dressed man leaning up against a factory wall. This was a beggar that Slore had seen before. He looked to be of an age where he would have been in the war. On a whim, Slore paused and asked him if he had served.

“Yessir. Under Monty, it was. Operation Goodwood was the toughest bit.”

Good Lord, thought Slore. There were at least 4,000 casualties in Goodwood. Thinking back to the incident aboard Fish that had brought his stint as captain to an end, he had an impulse. He looked around to make sure that Hudeler wasn’t about. The man always walked to work in this sort of weather, and it wouldn’t do for him to see this. Finding himself free of the prying eyes of his CFO, Slore took out his wallet and gave the man fifty pounds, a princely sum.

“Cor, sir! Do you know what you’re doing? That’s fifty quid!”

“I know it is. And here’s the deal. I want you to take this money and start to make something of yourself with it. Get some new clothes, spruce yourself up and apply for a job, or start something of your own, like a food seller’s stand in the market—I don’t really care, but invest this, don’t drink it.”

“Sir, I wouldn’t—”

“It doesn’t matter what you tell me. What you do matters. And here’s the deal. If I see you on the street again, begging—I shall never give another tuppence to any person who asks for my alms. You will end my one-on-one philanthropy forever. And yet if you come to my office at any future time—I run the brewery, there—and show me that you’ve become something useful to yourself, and to the rest of us, well, then, I shall do the same with fifty pounds for another person. And another, and another, until the chain is broken.”

The two men stared at each other for a long time indeed. Finally Slore spoke.

“Do we understand each other?”

“Yes, sir!” the man of the streets said.

“What is your name? I’ll instruct my staff to let you in to see me at any future time.”

“Blaine Stannard.”

“Well, Blaine Stannard, a great deal now depends upon you. Many others will either benefit or lose out, depending upon your actions.”

Stannard gave Slore a hard look and said, “They will benefit, sir,” and walked off standing tall.

I hope so, thought Slore. And with that, he walked on into his business and tried to think of ways to get More, just as he hoped his new acquaintance was doing.

*****

Later that afternoon--

After his chance encounter with Alabaster Prufrock Slore, Blaine Stannard had sat in Battersea Park for hours, staring at the water and considering his future. This involved a great deal of consideration of his past, as well. Of bad decisions, of lost opportunities, and of his brutish treatment of the people who had mattered most to him. Slore’s words had, in an odd and unanticipated way, given him the courage to stare directly at the carnage of his sad, lonely life and confront its meaning. He found the insight that this was not so difficult as staring down a Panzer’s barrel, and he wondered why that insight had been so bloody long in coming.

And then he decided to start a newspaper.

Oh, he wasn’t insane—he didn’t expect to buy printing presses and a distribution network and establish relationships with advertisers on fifty quid. But he did have a friend from his old regiment who owned a printing shop, and who would certainly give him a good price on some broadsheets. And he knew a number of interesting people in business and politics, again mostly through his military service. Then there were the students. All around him, in the ancient, storied universities of Great Britain, the universities that he himself had never been able to even dream of attending, there were young people throwing themselves into the challenge of learning and finding their purpose. Setting out to make a difference in their world.

Stannard conceived a plan to buy a nice suit of clothes and a fine writing pad and pen. And then he’d interview people. Prosperous, successful people. People who were throwing themselves at problems that needed solving. Students who were grappling with humanity’s most powerful and influential ideas. He’d use his feet and the telephone relentlessly. After all, what else did he have to do with his time? He’d interview these people with a focus. Everyone was facing the weak economy, thus everyone was interested in success stories from any quarter. He’d ask businessmen to tell how they’d got through the war and how they were managing to be successful now, in the midst of all the hardship and change that surrounded them. He’d ask students to write out their goals, their life’s dreams, probably for the first time. And then he’d be the one who led all these diverse people to share their ideas and actions amongst each other, through his newspaper.

The best part was that he didn’t have to ask permission from anyone to do this. There was no banker, no editor, no boss, no president of a company before whom to grovel on bended knee. He really didn’t have any serious complaints about Monty’s leadership during the war. But just the same, he’d had enough of generals. It was time for him to be his own general.

There were obstacles, to be sure. It would be most difficult when there were only a few subscribers, which in his model were the same thing as interviewees. Starting would be the hard part. When there were only five or ten or even twenty people he had interviewed, the sum of their interactions would be of small value. But when he reached fifty, or a hundred—at that level, he would be the one connecting a powerful circle of influential people. Get to a thousand? With a thousand subscribers, all interacting with each other, Blaine Stannard would be presiding over an empire.

He knew somehow that his venture would be successful. He could feel it in his bones. For his readers, no matter how accomplished they were, would always have challenges. And they’d want to learn from others who had already worked through a similar challenge. It was blindingly simple, yet compelling beyond reason. And no one else was connecting people in this way. The concept of connecting the disconnected was hidden by its own obviousness.

As he sat there before the water in the park contemplating his vision, Stannard realized he had seen this all before. In the war, if they had beaten back the enemy infantry, the Panzers would challenge them. Then, once they had smashed the tanks, the Luftwaffe would appear and bomb them from the sky. It never ended: there was always another difficulty to face. But the thing was to keep going, and to learn from what you had done before.

Stannard wasn’t even sure how, specifically, he’d thought of this madcap plan, except that perhaps he was driven by his own irony—the irony that a beggar without any success to his name would be the one to bring successful people together.

He leapt up from the bench he had been sitting on with no idea how much time had passed since his morning encounter with Slore. He was hungry, and the sun had already moved considerably to the west, so it was sometime in the afternoon. He was headed through a secluded wooded area of the park on his way towards the first steps in accomplishing his great goal when they attacked. Four hooligans, one from each compass point. He would never know if they had patiently shadowed him since his meeting with Slore or if their attack was random. He fought back hard as he had learned to do in the infantry, but the odds were too great and they beat him savagely. Fortunately for Stannard, they beat him savagely only until they had his fifty pounds, and then they ran off. He lay there moaning, having suffered cuts on his face, innumerable bruises and two broken ribs.

The first people to find him in this state were a young couple out for an afternoon stroll. As the man trotted over to render him assistance, the young lady begged of him what they could do.

Stannard didn’t answer her question. He let his rescuers help him up, then stepped back from them. He ripped off the right sleeve from his shirt and tied it in a makeshift sling, and uttered words that seemed strange and out of place to the couple who wished to help him: “I’m going to do it anyway. I’m going to do it without his fifty quid! I’m going to do it anyway.…” He limped off, having paid a heavy price in precious money and even more precious blood, yet rejoicing anyway, right through his pain, in the belief that he had got something supremely valuable in return.

Blaine Stannard had learned to Start.