Things I’m Doing (almost) Every Day
- Leading Indy Hall with Geoff and my friends
- Writing a lot (long and short form)
- Trying new restaurants
- Proactive communications & growth, strategy & implementation at Wildbit (2 products, Beanstalk and Postmark)
- Directing product and business development at DynamicWear with Jarvus and ChoiceShirts
- Interviews and/or photoshoots
- Guiding technology decisions at ProWorld
- Listening to music
- Coaching small businesses & startups
- Developing a housing community based on Indy Hall with DIGSAU and Postgreen
- Planning parties
- Teaching people how coworking really works
- Drinking at National Mechanics
- Wishing I had a little more time to do a couple more things
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4 Years of JFDI
Bart had just handed me the telephone.
– “Hello?”
“Hi, is this Alex Hillman?”
– “Uh, yes. Hi. I’m Alex.”
“Hi Alex! My name is Jane Von Bergen and I write about workplace for the Philadelphia Inquirer. We heard you’re doing something down in old city and it sounds very interesting. I’d like to come by with a photographer and talk to you about it. Can we stop by tomorrow?”
– “Uh, no. I mean…sure, uhm…not tomorrow. Tomorrow? No, not tomorrow. How about Wednesday?”
“Sounds great. I’ll see you then.”
– “Yep, great!”
Shit. We had better go buy some furniture.
This was Monday, August 13th of 2007.
I’d just gotten back from my 4 year anniversary vacation with my girlfriend and some friends from college. But it was also the first weekday after we’d signed the lease on the office that was about to become the clubhouse for Independents Hall.
We had 18 days to transform an empty space into our home.
And the Inquirer wanted to talk to us before we even had any fucking desks.
So we went to Ikea. We bought desks. We put them together.
This was Sunday, August 19th of 2007.
Jane’s article came out just 1 week after that initial phone call, on Sunday. Well technically, it hit newsstands on Saturday night. Some of my friends called me to the bar after midnight to see it together.
So yeah. We were on the front page of the business section of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
My face looked a bit more like this.
Jane wrote “By Wednesday, they were showing up for work”. The fact was, we’d been there working feverishly for 48 hours to get the space in shape for our first emergency visit from a journo and a photog.
The group effort paid off. By Wednesday, we could work. Really though, we’d been working together for months. We just had a new place to call home. We had almost 2 dozen members signed up already, but we didn’t start counting memberships until September 1st while we weren’t 100% sure who our internet service provider was going to be. “Come by and work for free until our grand opening on September 1st!”, we said.
This was Wednesday, August 22nd of 2007.
If you did plan to work this week, you’d better plan to be near to a power outlet. A few days later, boxes showed up. My friend Jory worked at Belkin, and had coordinated a drop shipment of the most essential coworking space utility besides coffee cups: power strips.
This was Friday, August 31st of 2007.
3 weeks had passed.
I’d been up for 20 hours a day. I was basically a scarecrow except instead of being stuffed with bugs and straw, I was being propped up by gallons of coffee, a carton of cigarettes, and beer.
Indy Hall had people in it every day. Some mornings it was just me and Bart until noon. Other days we had a person parked at every desk before lunchtime. It was completely surreal. The only thing keeping me going was knowing that the people I’d been wanting to be around were at Indy Hall, ready to cowork with me.
Today, though, was the last day of “free coworking” for Indy Hall. On September 1st, the giant Dr. Frankenstein switch on our memberships flipped to “on”.
This was Saturday, September 1st of 2007.
Independents Hall was open for business. Of course, in true “independent” fashion, it was a Saturday.
Good thing, too. Because we had a party to throw. We got to transform this:
Into this:
That went pretty well.
Today is Thursday, September 1st of 2011.
Turns out those first 3 weeks were just practice.
Together, we’ve spent 4 years transforming our surroundings, 4 years of finding the best things in our worlds and coaxing them even closer to greatness.
4 Years of JFDI.
It started with those first 48 hours before Jane Von Bergen arrived at Indy Hall.
It happened during those first 3 weeks of making a loft in Old City Philadelphia the home for a community of nomadic workers.
It happened that September Saturday, when people traveled from all over Philadelphia, Washington DC, New York, New Jersey, and San Francisco to celebrate with us.
And we never stopped. I don’t think we will anytime soon.
A toast
To one of my best friends, my mentor, and my business partner Geoff DiMasi for being my own personal Yoda, and once in a while giving me the chance to Yoda right back.
To every person who is or has ever been a member or friend of Indy Hall.
To anyone who’s been inspired by Indy Hall.
To anyone who has given me the chance to be inspired by you.
To Philadelphia, for being so fucking rad that we couldn’t help but make sure everyone else got the chance to realize it too.
To Ben Franklin, the original coworker.
To everyone who’s helped tell our story, online and off, in video, audio, and in print.
To the global coworking community, for keeping me on my toes.
To my parents, for loving me and being proud of me even if they’re not 100% sure what I do.
To everyone who’s believed in me, and believed in us.
To everyone else who lives to JFDI.
To the last 4 years, to the next 4 years. To many more years.
Thanks.
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Becoming Better
Reading this old letter (circa 2005) from prolific but otherwise anonymous writer/programmer/artist Why the Lucky Stiff, I’m reminded of the simplicity and playfulness that’s always driven me.
Sometimes I “get serious”, and I find that those are the times when I lose sight of what I really care about.
Anyway, you say you want to become better. I mean that’s really all you need.
_why points out to this aspiring programmer that all he needs to get better is to never lose the desire to get better. Everything else is experimentation to figure out how to get yourself there.
When I was speaking to a Drexel Alum group earlier this year, somebody asked me “why I chose to be an entrepreneur”. Frankly I’m not sure it’s something I chose, but my answer was off the cuff and still pretty accurate.
Every major decision in my life has been fueled by my unwavering intolerance of the status quo, for the static, and for the unchanging. I don’t just want me to get better, I want to be surrounded by things that are getting better all the time. My motivation to make everything around me better, even just a little bit better, and never forgetting that as my primary motivation – I’ve gotten better myself, even just a little bit better, as a result.
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1000 reasons not to try
Excuses.
Everybody has excuses. For every idea, brilliant or terrible, somebody will come up with at least one reason not to bother in the first place.
I hate excuses. Hate is a strong word, but excuses are really the one thing that my tolerance levels have dropped to zero for.
When I’m critiquing something, I’ve tuned my focus to be on identifying the things that can or should be better rather than the things that can’t or shouldn’t ever be.
Chris Lehmann wrote a blog post titled “A School I’d Love to See“. It’s the most inspiring thing I’ve read all day.
Near the end, he says:
I’m sure there are 1,000 reasons not to start this school… 1,000 reasons this might not work. But isn’t interesting to, instead, wonder if it could?
Chris and I share an affliction. We know that those reasons – those excuses – exist. But rather than be inhibited by them, our affliction is to be inspired to search for the one reason to try anyway.
When you’re presented with 1000 reasons not to try, take it as a cue to find the one reason to try and – if you can find that one reason – go for it..
JFDI.
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On Risk Taking
I spent some time this afternoon having an excellent conversation about many, many different things with my new friend Kira Campo. I’m hoping I can get a copy of her notes because we covered a lot of ground and I stopped taking notes when I realized I couldn’t read my own handwriting. But for the last hour I’ve had something in my head that needs to get out.
Before I go on, I want to point out that one of Indy Hall’s core assets has been it’s ability to build networks of trust. Back to that in a moment.
Risk taking means different things to different people. To an entrepreneur, it may mean betting it all on a big idea. To an artist, it may mean sharing or inciting an emotion. To many working class americans, it may be leaving a job that’s anywhere from “okay” to “god-awful” in pursuit of something better.
But I think that if you dissect successfully (read: healthy) risky behavior, it comes down to an either innate or learned ability to trust yourself.
And I’m not talking about skydiving, swimming with sharks, doing drugs, or having unprotected sex – that’s not risky, it’s dangerous.
“See what is possible in what you don’t yet understand, share what is possible in what you see differently.” – Hilary Austin at TEDxSoma
Kira reminded me of this quote that I tweeted from TEDxSoma back in the middle of June. I’d forgotten about it, but hearing it again put it in a new light.
If I think about the risk-takers I admire, they spoke out about what they thought was possible in what they saw differently and shared that with others. That took a large degree of trusting themselves to be more than right – but to not be alone in wanting to be right.
I think back to when I first met Chris Messina and Tara Hunt – these two people were operating on a completely different set of frequencies from the ones that my employer-at-the time was.
On one hand, the way they were thinking, talking, and acting was different from the environment that I actively wanted to remove myself from. On the other hand, and more importantly, that they validated my feelings that what I was thinking could be realized in the form of words and actions.
I went from being alone in my craziness to realizing that I could trust myself to be right. And that’s when I started to open my mouth and bring words into action, even when it seemed risky – because I learned to trust myself, and I understood that somebody else could be having the same experience I was having before I’d met Chris and Tara.
If they unlocked me, who could I unlock, simply by trusting that I wasn’t alone?
Risk taking is a polarizing activity no matter how you slice it. But when you lead risk taking with trust, rather than disillusionment or false hopes & expectations, amazing possibilities lie on the other side.
What are you doing to help people learn to trust themselves rather than operate on disillusionment and false hopes & expectations?
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