One of my favorite blogs, The Simple Dollar, posted a brilliant starter kit today for those looking to transition into self-employment. It’s so brilliant, in fact, that I don’t want to cloud it too much with my own commentary – I just want you to delve right into it: 15 Things To Do To Make Jumping Into Freelancing/Self-Employment Financially Successful.

Do you disagree with any of Trent’s advice? Of course, let him know by leaving a comment after the article, but also let me know here, too. I’m very interested in what you might have done in your own self-employment experience, what went gangbusters and what went bust.

If I had to pick one of these 15 steps as most critical for a new entrepreneur, I’d say #11: Communicate, Communicate, COMMUNICATE. (Emphasis added because I really do feel strongly about this.) You are your own ad agency, your own marketer, your own street team, your own promotional vehicle – even after you get to a position where you can hire someone to do these things for you. If you yourself don’t talk about what you do, then you miss all sorts of opportunities for new business. So go get the word out.

People like me do that sort of thing for others as our business, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t do it without hiring an outside entity. You can do it and there are plenty of resources, especially online, that can help you with this…like Trent’s blog.

An old friend who was appointed part of Obama’s team in D.C. recently told me about a new initiative the administration has kicked off to promote creative and effective community service. Check out Serve.gov, where you can look for projects to join up with, post your own idea and recruit the manpower you need to make it happen, and read about the work others are doing not just now (the “United We Serve” pilot program is set for 81 days this summer), but also well into the future.

The FAQ states that the site is a “comprehensive clearinghouse of volunteer opportunities” and I look forward to checking out the variety of organizations, individuals and ideas that are posted, especially since there is encouragement to take on leadership roles and create opportunities – no matter how small or outside-the-box – in order to make volunteerism more appealing to more people.

Not everyone has the desire or capacity to work in a soup kitchen, mentor teenagers, clean up public parks or paint community center walls like Obama’s doing in the picture. And so countless of volunteer hours go lost because someone believes there isn’t something out there that they feel comfortable doing. The point I’m trying to make is that there are as many different ways to volunteer and help make the world a better place as there are different personalities out there. So if you aren’t finding what you want on Serve.gov, make something up yourself, post it on the site so other like-minded helpers can join in, and use the energy of the site’s communal structure to keep you going.

I’ve already posted one opportunity and will be launching several others over the coming weeks. The Frontera Pride Film Festival was a total grassroots movement that I was asked to be a part of late last year due to my years of experience in the film industry, particularly with organizing and presenting film festivals. And it was one of the proudest moments of my life to see it successfully pulled off this past weekend, especially since my hometown is known for the pervasive mentality of “Nothing ever happens here/You can’t do anything new because it never takes off.”

Well, we did it, and what’s more, it was 100% volunteer. Not to mention it provided a huge boost to a community that could really use it, both in terms of promoting LGBT awareness and acceptance as well as giving locals something fun, inspirational and safe to take part in.

I’m brainstorming an effort now – also in my hometown of El Paso, Texas – which would provide free copyediting and publicity services for nonprofits. Resources like this are often at the bottom of a no-budget organization’s priority list, yet it’s this kind of polish and strategy that can result in exponentially greater support (monetary and otherwise) for the organization. I’ve seen the difference it can make to put concentrated efforts behind publicity, consistent messaging and, of course, spell check, so I want to channel my expertise in this regard toward a good end. Hopefully there will be a few other professionals in the area who’ll want to pitch in, too.

So these are my examples of being creative with volunteer opportunities. Think about what you’d like to see done around you and make it happen at Serve.gov.

The Sunlight Foundation is committed to helping citizens, bloggers and journalists be their own best congressional watchdogs, by improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and Web sites to enable all of us to collaborate in fostering greater transparency. (Their mission statement, not my own words.) Check it out. I’m very impressed by the lead post on their site today, which is about “RaceTracker” – a non-partisan, fully-referenced, open-source project of the OpenCongress wiki listing every candidate running in every U.S. Senate, House and governor’s race.

Both Sunlight and the wiki project are standing as strong examples for the kind of productive interactivity that social networking can foster and what the commercial sector most needs to learn. (In other words, stop spamming me on Twitter – it won’t make me buy your stuff!)

Noah Harlan’s excellent, robust and very true article is not just about the future of filmmaking and film distribution, it’s also about the huge window of opportunity open to filmmakers wanting to get their work made and seen RIGHT NOW. As a film producer and a frequent consultant on film production and distribution, I couldn’t agree more with what Noah’s saying.

Weekend reading: New York Magazine feature “In Defense of Distraction” by Sam Anderson.

I liked this piece and not just because there’s a Beatles reference practically on every page. If you can get past the headache-inducing imagery, there’s very solid food for thought…also provided, of course, you can go beyond whatever else you happen to have going on while you’re reading the article – which is the point of the piece itself.

I like some of its positive suggestions for balancing information overload with selective focusing; namely, meditation. The article give a little history of meditation going from foreign and far-fetched to faddish, especially in scientific circles. Some artistic and science types have been delving into meditation with astonishing results for decades and I’d like to call your attention to several of them now:

1. Mattieu Ricard, former molecular geneticist at the Pasteur Institute turned Buddhist monk. Here’s a great TED Talk he gave in 2004:

2. David Lynch, lauded filmmaker who after 30 years of personal meditation practice founded the David Lynch Foundation to ease stress and violence in schools and fund research on meditation and brain functioning, learning disorders, depression and substance abuse.

Also, here’s what the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has to say about meditation via their National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Ironically, I only got around to posting this “weekend read” on Sunday afternoon after getting about 39 other things out of the way, most of which were accomplished (however dubiously) via multitasking…

I’m choosing to agree not with the doomsday outlook that the Internet and technology will bring about the end of days. Instead, I most emphatically cheer on the more positive stance of this statement from Anderson’s piece: “The truly wise mind will harness, rather than abandon, the power of distraction.” It absolutely speaks to the way I operate not just with my various work efforts (journalism, publicity, marketing, film, etc.), but also the guidance I give to clients about how to harness all that they do across a spectrum of employment experience, education, practical training, career ambitions, networks and personal achievements in “a sense of the way ten projects all dovetail into something totally new,” as the article also states.

Just my attempt to be a human being going with the flow of the 21st century.

nonprofit and social enterprise jobs

More often these days, people are choosing employment that reflects what they stand for rather than just taking any ole’ job to make ends meet. Some may not have this luxury, but I feel the mindset behind that kind of “I can’t afford to do what I want” platitude is due more so to a lack of information and access than a lack of opportunity.

To help in this regard, the Obama administration created Change.org. It was an effort for the campaign to put it’s money where it’s mouth was, so to speak, and bring about all the change that it kept going on about. The part of the site I want to call out and make relevant to this post is Jobs for Change. It “seeks to spark a nationwide movement toward careers in the nonprofit, government, and social enterprise sectors.” This means jobs of many different types calling for a vast range of skillsets, educational backgrounds, age ranges and personalities.

It’s a great way to connect your work history and talents with ambitions and employment opportunities that you previously thought may have been out of reach. Chances are there are openings you’ll find here that you never even knew existed. There’s a very active discussion section that addresses this kind of thing, plus advisors you can connect with for guidance pertinent to your specific situation. Just outta college, mid-career switcheroo, coming out of retirement, young with no college yet – everybody’s here and they’re getting matched with some great stuff.

Maybe you were on the ball and heard about this last year during the presidential campaign. But I’ve mentioned it a bit lately to different people around the country and they didn’t have a clue that something like this existed. So take a look – your future could be here.

While you’re at it, watch this great TED Talk (and discover TED if you haven’t already) from Michael Milken on using your skills to effect real change:

“I don’t say that radio networks must die… Every effort is being made and will continue to be made to find new patterns, new selling arrangements and new types of programs that may arrest declining revenues. It may yet be possible to eke out a poor existence for radio networks, but I don’t know.” (David Sarnoff, president of RCA, c. 1950)

A lot of my friends in the media — and by this I mean the press, a more traditional definition of “media”, and specifically newspaper and magazine reporters — have been engaging in very vocal fear-mongering lately regarding the future their livelihood. They’re feeling the sting of downsizing and closure and I don’t blame them for being scared. They feel threatened and so they’re asking questions rooted in fear, in a resistance to change, in a blind panic that exacerbates itself in a vicious cycle. What will happen to media in light of the raging, rampaging Internet? Where will our jobs go? What about the art of our work, the tradition of The Fourth Estate?

Now, Mr. Sarnoff of RCA had a pretty sweet position, no doubt laden with much stress but also quite a big paycheck. So the fact that he wasn’t worried about his own mortgage may have contributed to the rather cavalier attitude of his quote above. The truth is he didn’t have a clue about what was going to happen to radio in the advent of television; he probably didn’t feel very confident about whether TV would last another 10 years, either. It was totally new and crazy and nobody had a clue about its capacity or how big of an audience there was for it or that audience’s appetite for this thing.

But I like that attitude. I think it’s the right one to have. And it’s what entrepreneurs — particularly those involved, whether they like it or not, in a wave of evolution sweeping them into unknown territory — must have or else they need to find a new profession. It’s what helped Sarnoff maneuver from radio into television and it’s what going to help news reporters adapt from print to online. It’s also helping innovators in business and the arts — my clients — pave new avenues of income for themselves and there’s no reason at all why journalists can’t take this mindset and apply it to their own work or for the journalistic values they try to uphold to disappear simply because their writing doesn’t get produced on paper.

Pioneering media theorist Marshall McLuhan (patron saint of Wired magazine and revered by generations of mass communications professors, students and entities) is most known for his simple yet loaded statement, “The medium is the message.” During the early 1960’s, he also said the following: “If the audience can become involved in the actual process of making [it], then it’s happy. It’s like the old quiz shows — they were great TV because they gave the audience a role, something to do.”

Wired knew way back when they launched in ’93 that McLuhan got it. What I mean by that is that he didn’t just get what was relevant and in existence during his lifetime, he got the fact that “it” has and always will change, particularly in terms of the technological advancement of a medium, whether radio or television or computers or the Internet. He also felt confident that there would always be an audience and that this audience would always be seeking information.

I wish my comrades in journalism could get this, too. I wish they wouldn’t let fear of the unknown and uncertainty about the future dim their brilliance and innovation. Granted, some of them will not survive the transition of newsprint to .com; not everything is for everyone. But they need to see — and capitalize on, whether as a creator or an audience member — is that there is tremendous opportunity out there because the Internet is making it more feasible than ever for anyone to find something that not just appeals to but also actually benefits them. Exploiting this kind of individuality now is what will keep these reporters from dying off later.

The medium is changing. The message that the press needs to get out of this is that their skills can and should adapt to this change. Audiences will always need news, will always desire information. So let’s give it to them in the best way possible by going with the flow.

“Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people” (Sarnoff)

I don’t want to see my friends at their worst, paralyzed by fear of products like Twitter and Facebook and whatever’s to come. Embrace what’s out there — there’s plenty of room for your talents. Contribute to the newness and you’re likely to discover that there’s a way you never thought of for those talents to be monetized, thus saving you from starvation or the need to find a new trade. The time of new media is about opportunity, not desperation.

C’mon, journalism — the Internet is giving you a role, something to do. Don’t cower. Rise to it.

What’s all this “community marketing” stuff going on nowadays? Here’s an example of it as illustrated by the advice I just gave a prospective client who is an independent musician and also has a wealth of experience in film (it’s his day job, so to speak):

“As for expanding your audience and customer base for BAND [real name omitted for anonymity], consider joining some online music licensing communities as an authority both from the filmmaking side as well as a musician. If you start to spread awareness about what you do in this realm and share your expertise, then really valuable word of mouth will spread about the quality of your music, resulting in more customers not just for this album but any others you decide to make available. Definitely put up a Facebook page for BAND (not a personal profile, a business page) with some samples of your stuff spanning all the years you’ve been doing this (or at least as far back as you’re comfortable going) so as to demonstrate your prowess. Then start dabbling in some of these communities (blogs, message boards, sites like YouLicense or group aggregators like Ning) and build cred with your own very powerful unique and broad expertise. Trading your smarts will result in dollars dropped on your product. This is how things work these days.”

To me, this advice was pretty much a no-brainer; it was about the guy connecting his spheres of experience and passion so that one can feed off of the other. Utilizing the web effectively to promote your work and make money (not to mention a career) off of it is about being mutable like this, crossing predefined boundaries and taking yourself outta the box. Think Venn diagrams. The purple area in the picture is where your most effective messaging to the most supportive audience – the ones who’ll not just buy this album but rally you through the rest of your career to come – comes into being because its the convergence of what you do best with the people who appreciate it most.

I am not tempted one bit to add the “Random Cat of the Day Photos” widget to this blog.

Seth Godin’s marketing blog is awesome.

I am especially partial to his reinforcement of the “long tail” principle, which I make work for many of the filmmakers, musicians and artists I work with. Learn it, live it, love it.