Reframing vs Posing

I've written a lot about reframing. I've also written a lot about "being" versus "seeming" - aka posing, aka authenticity (which, btw, I believe accounts for autism). None of my writings has summed that up as crisply as my oft-repeated observation that most singers become singers because they want to be singers, not because they want to sing.

I haven't properly joined the two (reframing and being/seeming) together until now.


We can simulate reframing without ever budging our point of view. It's childishly simple: you just claim to have reframed. You say the words, think the thoughts, and call it an accomplishment. You can easily make yourself believe it. You believe lots of hollow things you tell yourself!

Let's take forgiveness as an example. As I wrote in "Liberation and Addiction" (as a recent addition you might not have seen upon first reading; I often post-polish my more ambitious posts):

A really useful testing ground for reframing is the application of Forgiveness. Not big showy huggy dramatic gestures; I mean the internal process. Shift from seeing it this way to seeing it that way. That's what reframing is, and it's stupendously, maddeningly easy (don't tell yourself a story about having done it. Don't just pose. Really actually do it!).

"Don't just pose. Really do it." One can easily say "I forgive you" without meaning it. The same pose can just as easily happen internally: "I forgive him". And the charade might be ongoing ("I forgave him"). We can carry a pose, a charade, forever ("I'm a wonderfully forgiving person").

But there is, of course, an enormous difference between rotely saying/thinking the words and actuality. That's an awfully sucky term - "actuality" - but human language doesn't offer a rich palette in this realm. Genuineness is not an issue humans consider much, so our language is parched for terms. Much as eskimos have an abundance of words for snow, humans have many terms for artifice, charade, and empty drama, but what shall we call the real thing? "The Real Thing" is an empty placeholder, an expedient means of pointing to something unnameable. "Actuality" sounds crisply scientific, but it's as vacant as a variable...and truth should be more than a variable.

This distinction is more fundamental than you'd imagine, because consciousness is bifurcated along precisely these lines:

There are two aspects to consciousness: cognition and perceptual framing. We know an enormous amount about cognition, but few of us spend even a moment considering perceptual framing. It is assumed that external factors frame our perspective for us; that it's not under our own volition.

We'd freely acknowledge that a given city block is experienced through completely different eyes, depending on, for example, whether we've just been kissed by a new loved one or been ditched by a previous one. But we assume we must wait for external circumstances to provoke emotions for perceptual shift to occur. There is no reason for this assumption. All frames are available in any moment. We just get lazy, and forget that we can actively choose.

We are wrong about both, assuming that we own our thought stream - though we obviously do not (just try to not think about the thing you're currently worried about) - while we assume our perceptual framing is imposed from without - though it patently isn't (you can't make me angry, only I can make myself angry). Our confusion about the operation of our own minds is a central problem.

I can muster the thought "I forgive you" regardless of my actual view. Genuine forgiveness is a separate action, and it's not verbal. Neither a thought nor an utterance, it's a doing. It's pure reframing. It's hard to talk about. It's just a faculty we have, though we often forget we have it.

There's another pesky factor. We confuse the action of actual forgiveness - the reframing - with anticipated associated emotion. There's a bag we carry around with us; a burdensome dramatic obligation. We can't simply forgive; first we must perform a movie scene. You know the one, where a grave-looking person stares with gloomy concern out of a rainy window while cellos moan. How can I possibly forgive him?

Poignant! But let's give that cinematic layer the easy dismissal it deserves, being nothing but indulgent bullshit. You're not in a movie. You can forgive someone as effortlessly as you can manufacture the empty thought "I forgive him"....but it involves a separate faculty. It's a shift rather than a thought.

Try it! Pick someone easily forgiven. Not your ex who said that horrible thing, or that old boss who fired you. Don't get ambitious! Think of someone more readily forgivable, and do it. I'll wait!

Don't just say the words. Feel the shift. Experience the minuscule sensation of blissful unwinding, like a knot being untied. Our bodies are programmed to reward certain choices - sleeping, eating, procreation....and forgiveness is an oft-forgotten item on that list. Why is it forgotten? Because we assume we must play out a movie scene, and it likely doesn't jibe with our current plot arc at any given moment. The fake, ridiculous, self-indulgent cinematic experience - me up there on that screen! - is, for most people, unquestionably primary. So if one fancies oneself to be in a movie, forgiveness requires a laborious rewrite.

Real forgiveness is simple and instantaneous, but it's nothing like blandly uttering the words. It's a foundational shift, easy though it is. If you want to play with this function, and explore reframing, check out the previously linked post about forgiveness.


But let's go beyond forgiveness to a real world framing example that involves interacting with another person rather than silent machinations in the corridors of your private mind.

You run a business with a critical, terrifying problem. Your tech guy crashes on the problem tirelessly, finally coming to you, eyes ablaze, with an impossibly brilliant solution. He needs to share the details, because it could only be properly appreciated if you really understoodd what he did.

That's him. Now let's swing the focus over to you. You're not a tech person. You barely understand what he's saying. Every cell in your body wants to tell him to shut up, go away, and just hook it up, now.

Let's call that management choice #1: The Imperious Asshole.

There's a second management choice: The Patronizing Asshole. You recognize that he's bursting at the seams, viscerally needing to spike the football by explaining what he did. He will resent you if you dismiss him. It will harm your relationship and deflate his morale. So you steady your gaze at him, restraining your eye roll, and nod your head engagingly as he recounts his actions, punctuating the tech lecture with eager "uh-huhs!" When he's done, you express your astonishment re: his brilliant genius, wait a couple beats, then rub your hands eagerly together saying "Well, let's hook it up, then, shall we?", patting him on the shoulders as you retreat to your office to let this annoying, overheated little geek do his thing.

There's also a third choice, which would never occur to most managers. Actually listen to the guy. Try to understand, and genuinely share his enthusiasm - not just for the fact that a solution was reached, but for what he actually accomplished in solving it. Make an effort to get a genuine sense of what he did and share his moment. This involves shifting your attention momentarily away from the big problem stewing in the gurgling acid pit of your managerial stomach. Shift to his view and be an engineer for a sec, not a manager, even if this is a realm where you're tenuous and thus vulnerable, and must allow yourself to be lectured to by your institutional inferior. You'd feel much more comfortable; more secure; more yourself by interrupting him to tell him (more or less bluntly) to shut up and just go hook up the fucking thing. But you don't. You shift over to his world, his framing. You roll with it.

#1, The Imperious Asshole, maintains his perspective tenaciously, and would snarl at the suggestion that he do otherwise. As Manager, he occupies the center of the circle. Other people must shift to share his perspective, not vice versa. This, sadly, feels to him like privilege.

#2, The Patronizing Asshole, is just as tenacious in his frozen perspective, but goes through the motions. He follows a flowchart any dumb computer could obey:

EMPLOYEE HAS NEED
EMPLOYEE IS INDISPENSABLE
POSTPONE OPTIMAL ACTION
INITIATE RESOLUTION PROTOCOL
EMULATE ENTHUSIASM AND OUTPUT SUPERLATIVE PRAISE
MONITOR FOR ACCEPTANCE
TRANSITION TO OPTIMAL ACTION WITH REITERATION OF PRAISE

#3 doesn't have a name. "The Real Thing"? "Actuality"? "Humanity"? The manager reframed - amid a crisis, too, which is extra hard given that humans abandon their values under duress. You can't name what he did. It's not something taught in business school. You can't devise a procedure to accomplish this. It's the thing computers (or people who act like computers) can't do.

Reframing is the thing computers can't do.


There's a new wrinkle these days. Managers try to add genuineness into the mix. Like a powder. They recognize (blurrily) the shortfall I'm describing, and try to fix it via extra conscientious patronization. Let's call it meta-patronization. "PLEASE DON'T THINK I'M PATRONIZING YOU," the manager pleaded, patronizingly. It's just a minor subroutine to add to the flowchart - Patronization_Erasure.

This sort of thing is a natural outgrowth of the thinking that makes corporations design products to power up saying "Hello, Jim, how are you today?" It's a way of having computers - and people who act like computers - simulate better, to hastily patch over the sticky wicket of authenticity. Authentic authenticity is scarily unthinkable, whereas contrived Authenticity-Seeming is more viable. You can develop and procedurize and test it.

Four Scenarios of Authority

Leff's Fourth Law ("95% of apparent maliciousness is actually incompetence") turned out to have been observed by Napoleon centuries prior.

And now the bastard's gone and done it again.

In Part 21 of my epic tale of selling my company, Chowhound to a major corporation (CNET, now CBS), I noted "Leff's Four Scenarios of Authority"(noting that dumb/lazy management can be relatively benign):

In declining order of preference:

1. Smart ideas, good execution
2. Dumb ideas, bad execution
3. Smart ideas, bad execution
4. Dumb ideas, good execution

Scenario #1 is too much to hope for, and #3 is heart-breaking and volatile and makes everyone give up (#4, God help us, is Nazi Germany). Scenario #2 is a stable condition of steady-state status quo (let's call it "Planet Earth").

It turns out that Napoleon got me again:

Someone once asked Napoleon how he decided where to assign soldiers. Napoleon’s reply was that it’s simple: soldiers are either smart or dumb, lazy or energetic.

The smart and energetic I make field commanders. They know what to do and can rally the troops to do it.

The smart and lazy I make generals. They also know what to do, but they’re not going to waste energy doing what doesn’t need to be done.

The dumb and lazy I make foot soldiers.

But what about the dumb and energetic? “Those,” Napoleon replied, “I shoot.”

If you'd told my teenage self that one day Napoleon Bonaparte would be all up in my grill like this, I never would have believed it.

---

Update: It turns out it wasn't Napoleon who said this, but an anti-Nazi German general, Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord:

The Four Classes of Military Officers

I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.

Beware Indian Summer

There was a point when Chowhound had experienced one of its early press blitzes and way more people were coming around than I'd ever planned for. Yet it was going okay. I'd learned how to handle things. I had developed procedures. Urgencies that had previously sent me into a panic were expected and efficiently handled. Despite the crazy scaling (hundreds of users!), I could breathe. I was spending most of my time at it, but it was still fun; it still felt like a hobby. And it was far more comfortable than six months earlier, when I was completely out of my depth. I was hitting my stride.

And, because I can be blindly stupid, I was blindsided when we doubled in size again...and again...and again....and again. I wound up spending years flailing (as cataloged in the series on the site's later days and sale, which starts here).

There is a biz-cliché retort to the scenario I've described: "Tons of scaling would be a good problem to have." To anyone who's ever said that, my suggestion is to never advise anyone on anything. We live in a real world, not in a pie chart, and if you can't tell the difference, you need to take your confident smirk and your coffee breath to some far-off cubicle where you won't do harm.

Once you're caught off-balance and the waves won't stop coming, balance will never be reestablished. But I figured my brief reprieve was the way things would always be. An endless summer!

Nope. I got punked. It was Indian summer.

---

When I was 48, I wrote about how Jon Stewart and Barrack Obama, both my age, had made it hip to be 48, boastfully titling the posting "The Hippest Time in History to be 48" (following up, chastened, a few years later with this.)

Previously, 48-year-olds seemed crustily avuncular at best, but these guys were cool. And, come to think of it, I felt pretty cool, too! Maybe this was a new normal. Endless summer!

It wasn't a new normal. Nothing's ever a new normal. Have a look at these guys now and tell me how cool they look:

Indian summer's over, kids. Indian summer always ends, and it's never pretty.

---

Both my parents hit their 70s feeling reasonably solid. They weren't running marathons, but my mom could walk a couple miles on the treadmill and my dad was viably doing his thing. They thought they'd hit a stride. Indian summers always feel like a new normal; the sweet perpetual upswing we'd always hoped for. "It's my time!"

They bought into the false confidence and narrowed framing of Indian summer. When it fades and the frost hits, you'll be caught in shorts and t-shirt, scrambling for cover. You will flail. Indian summers leave you more disoriented than unremitting declines. Indian summers are a sucker punch.

I always advise new entrepreneurs not to wait until they're overextended to start hiring extra help - or to efficiently delegate to the team they've got. Once you're overextended, there's no time to make these laborious moves (I'm a poster child for being crushed beneath the boulder of runaway growth). You can't recruit and train amid a hurricane; all you can do is drain your adrenal glands running around endlessly patching disasters (I actually figured this out as a kid; see "Heating the Entire Atlantic Ocean").

Once my parents began fading, they were too occupied with the exigencies of the fade-out - playing feeble whack-a-mole with each accumulating indignity - to deal with any larger-picture view.

You need to look ahead; to lead the football. And you need to plan and act while you still feel comfortable, perhaps even a bit invulnerable. Watch out for that invulnerability feeling! The moment you believe you've hit your stride and attained a new normal; that's your cue. See Indian summer for what it is, resist false assurance, and use the momentum! Jump into gear and plot smartly! Put up storm windows, recruit troops, inscribe protocols, and generally look out for the pathetic slob who's destined to find himself underdressed and overconfident in the howling frost. He will be in no position to take thoughtful action. 

---

The other day, as I was counting out my comical daily pill ration, aware of the chronic pain in my feet, my back, my neck, and my shoulders, I thought to myself, "I'm not actually doing so bad, considering." I don't grunt when I get up from a chair. I've got lots of energy. I run up steps. My avuncularity is low, but there's hardly any crust, at least internally #LowInternalCrust. Maybe I'm beating the clock. Hitting my stride. New normal. Endless summer!

That was the day I wrote my defiant (almost smug) tale of the fish, including this passage:

I've been blithely me the whole time. I've lived straight through it all, treating it like a ride, come what may. I’m fresh as a daisy (or whatever the non-fruity version of that expression might be).

Uh-huh. Sure you are. 

Indian summer, baby! So this time I've hopped into gear, and begun working out strategy for what I'm going to do and where I'm going to go 10 or 15 years from now (sooner if my health crashes). It seems oddly premature at age 57, but I won't wait for the hurricane to force me into a hasty expedient solution.

Management, Art, and The Price

George W Bush was correct: management is primarily about decision-making. Many, many, many decisions. You must be a decision machine, just spitting them out, one after another. Steve Jobs didn't wear those black turtlenecks as shtick; it simply removed a layer of decision-making from his day. Anyone who's ever managed anything can relate.

To be successful, 95% of those decisions must be smart (I cherish my beloved headroom of 5% stupidity, and viciously defend it whenever astonishment is expressed at my lapses). That's a lot of pressure. And a certain number needs to be beyond smart - either brilliant or else just super creative. That's not pressure, however, because that's a pull, not a push. As I once wrote: "the really good stuff arrives via epiphany, eureka, and inspiration - 'out of nowhere' and hard to claim credit for."

Creativity works the same way - it's all about decisions. This note or that? This color over here or over there? Which word in that place? In fact, art (in all its myriad forms) is a much denser aggregation of decisions - by at least an order of magnitude.

It is very serious over-exertion to try to do both at once. I did it once and barely survived, and now I'm doing it again - and once again experiencing the sensation of trying to warm an ocean. But it will be over soon.

The most important part of myself absolutely thrives from giving my all, but extreme commitment also exacts a terrible price.


When my impending project - which will be unlike anything that's come before - launches in January, I really hope people enjoy it, and support it by spreading the word. Stay tuned.

The Manager's Dilemma: Talent and Laziness

Here's the most counterintuitive management tenet I know: urging workers to try harder isn't the appropriate recourse when they're performing tasks for which they're ill-suited.

My sister - a natural artist who emerged from the womb able to draw, paint, and sculpt - inadvertently taught me this early on. Like most naturally gifted people, she didn't view her talent as special. She assumed everyone could do art! From her perspective, people who draw poorly simply aren't trying hard enough.

This misapprehension can be spotted in many circumstances. Gregarious people assume shy people don't try hard enough to be social. Attractive people think unattractive people don't make enough effort with their appearance. Etc., etc..

I grasped this early on, yet it was slow to fully sink in. This led to problems when people I've managed have failed to be, for instance, creative, or clearly articulate. My urge is to coax them to try harder. They seem, above all, lazy. I've continued making my sister's error long into adulthood.

Egotists don't have this problem. They see people around them (especially those under their supervision) as lesser creatures, so deficiency is unsurprising (they'd never have expected workers to match their magnificent talents). Given that egotists run most hierarchical organizations, this explains why such operations are usually stiflingly drudge-ish. If you never expect people to step up, to "bring it", to leap to unexpected new heights, there's little alternative but to treat them as finite commodities, and to box them in so their core competencies can be efficiently pumped, like egg-laying chickens in tight little pens.

Managers who don't have big egos, by contrast, are shocked and perplexed when workers can't do what they can, leaving those workers confused and annoyed by the expectation that they'll magically exhibit faculties not in their nature. The problem is that the very notion of a fixed, limiting "nature" involves a condescending worldview that's creepy terra incognita for those lacking the condescension gene.

Yet, as with many shortcomings, there's a hidden pearl. If you don't know better than to expect greatness and transcendence, workers sometimes, indeed, will step up to meet those expectations. Whenever people recall that they "did their best work" in a certain situation, it's generally the result of having worked for a non-egotist, who declined to box in chickens because "nature" was never imagined a limiting factor.

But while it's fine for hope to spring eternal, the challenge is to remember that it's not laziness that prevents cats from fetching balls or cows from hunting mice.

How To Tell if Somebody Is Capable of Actually Doing Something

In my last posting Don't Take it Personally That Nobody Ever Does Anything, I explained why people who join teams and commit to projects most often wind up doing absolutely nothing. It's a serious problem for managers and recruiters of every stripe. Workers capable of follow-through - of actually producing - look a lot like everyone else. So how can you recognize them?

Don't do what I did; don't shower time and attention on every bright prospect who professes interest. Instead, send them a long email. Very few people will read a long email. Most will never even reply. And most of those who do will not have carefully read it. So embed some simple instruction within that long email, and see whether they follow it.

If so, you've found someone with merely a 50% or so chance of turning out to have been entirely yanking your chain. There's not a gold mine in the world capable of winnowing so effectively!

Don't Take it Personally That Nobody Ever Does Anything

I've been working on an ambitious project with a team. And it's been jarring some deeply repressed memories.

I'd forgotten all the time I squandered on people who offered to help with Chowhound, who occupied my limited attention and wasted my dwindling energy, but finally did absolutely nothing. Nada. I'd train, manage, and synchronize them with great care and attention, but they'd not do even a single thing. They'd vanish wordlessly into the vacuum of space.

Of course, I blamed myself. I must have handled them poorly. But, eventually, I accepted a horrific truth: there are two kinds of people: those who produce, and those who suck all the blood out of you and don't lift a finger. And, alas, the vast majority of people are blood-suckers. I built up powerful resentment - so negative that it's no surprise I suppressed the memory.

But now I've been facing that same problem once more, developing what everyone agrees is a sorely-needed, very clever, unique and potentially lucrative idea. What's more, it's fun. And it will do some good for the world. Hey, how often do all those factors coincide? Everyone I've mentioned it to has wanted to be involved. But 75% vanish without doing a thing, and most of the rest drift off wordlessly after contributing some trifling, crappy shred. Getting anyone to complete even the simplest of tasks is like pulling teeth. Even if they loved the idea, and fully grasped its potential. Even if they've signed a contract offering a share of the proceeds.

This time, I'm older and wiser, so the "Blaming Myself" period was brief. And I also blew quickly through the "Angry Resentment" phase. I understand that this is how humanity works. People don't do stuff.

If you pay people a wage they need in order to survive, you can spur them to show up most days, but not do much more than cover their asses, push papers around, and kick cans down the road. That's the apotheosis of human contribution. Beyond that, with regard to side projects and cool endeavors, there's zero initiative. People like the idea of those things - they like to think of themselves as the type who's involved in fascinating and productive things (and they often are....but purely as passive consumers rather than action-takers) - but they don't have it in them to move a muscle. Discovering this deeply embarrasses them, hence the wordless departures. It hurts them more than the likes of me.

If people could follow up on the things they say they're going to  - even want to do - then the gyms would be full, everyone would be slender, we'd all be decent guitarists and our living spaces would be tidy and organized. We'd all speak decent French. It would be a totally different world.

The bloodsuckers are sincere in their desire to contribute. Just as they're sincere in their desire to quit smoking, eat more vegetables, be nicer to their kids, and finally watch "The Wire." They don't mean to conk out. But if they can't follow through on their own personal needfulness, how could they possibly do so for optional third-party schemes?

A couple years ago I devised a remedy for IBS attacks. It was a simple muscular action (35 years of yoga have conferred deep body awareness), but a bit tricky for a non-yogi. It was perhaps as difficult a skill to learn as rapidly slicing a potato. Nothing tremendous, and well worth the trouble. IBS is intensely painful. In the throes of an attack, you really, really want it to stop. You'd write a check for any amount if someone would shut off the pain. And there's no cure. I'd devised a lifeline for folks fated to wretched helplessness

So I coached some people. I'd love to tell you they worked at it, and some found success while others fell short. But not one person got past the first introductory email. It's not that it was tough reading. I'm a professional writer; people have paid to read my prose! But I required them to actually do stuff. Not pop a pill, or submit to a medical procedure; no passive consumerism, but actual reading of stuff with actual paying of attention and action-taking. People couldn't find sufficient drive to conquer an otherwise incurable painful ailment (hey, many emphysema patients keep smoking, right?).

I'm a mutant. I actually do stuff. I've had success in five different fields, and people have referred to me as a polymath. But no, that's not it. I just lack the gene that inhibits people from doing stuff. And if you actually do stuff, well....stuff gets done! (It doesn't even have to be good stuff. Nobody thinks the Watts Towers are, like, beautiful; they were just yet another notable accomplishment of yet another person lacking a flair for paralysis.)


Life consists of a series of revisitations to tired cliches, certain with each new pass that we now really understand them. And so it is with Edison's "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety nine percent perspiration." That quotation used to conjure up images of wild-eyed fanatics banging hammers in garages in the middle of the night. But it's just a matter of normal people blithely but indefatigably putting out. The Colorado River, etcher of the Grand Canyon, is just some shitty little river.

The best among us are shitty little rivers. To me, that's what Edison was saying.

Bad Boss, Good Boss, Great Boss

Bad bosses think their employees work for them. They delight in saying "no".

Good bosses realize Marx was right about one thing: the workers are the engine. These bosses work for their workers, and say "no" as seldom as possible.

Great bosses do all that, but when they do say "no", it's respected.

Bubbles, Slogs, and Selling Out: Part 16

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Without our staff of volunteer moderators, Chowhound would long ago have ceased to be Chowhound. Our users see friendly, focused, honest conversation, but the raw version behind that well-gardened veneer is a fearsome thing, rife with guerilla marketing, flaming, trolling, self-promotion, and all the other familiar online detritus. For their trouble, these guys receive no credit, and take endless crap from users, none of whom like to be moderated.

Our moderators are heroes. I'm intensely grateful for the job they've done (and continue to do; all our moderators stayed on board after Chowhound's sale to CNET, and we have lots of new ones, all drawn from our user base). Looking back, I see that we made some smart decisions in how we recruited and managed them, and, before continuing with this tale, I need to explain one of the more counterintuitive precepts of volunteer management.

Anyone who ever volunteered in any capacity for Chowhound (four or five dozen people in all, working on publications, business or tech issues, etc., as well as moderation) was informed that no commitment would ever be expected. No one is "responsible" for any given task. For example, no moderator takes responsibility for a given message board; everyone lends a hand everywhere. In fact, no one even commits to showing up! If someone needs to drop out suddenly for weeks or months, we wish them a cheery bon voyage, and that's that. No one's locked in, tied down, or hooked up in any way. They come and go as they please, and determine their own respective roles and workloads.

As a result, moderation feels just as recreational as surfing the Chowhound site for food tips; it's a pleasant diversion undertaken on momentary whim. And great things can come from the proper channeling of whim! Consider Wikipedia (which Chowhound predated by four years), where a critical mass of users enjoys managing and editing as much as reading. Both the back end and the front end are handled in the same carefree, self-paced spirit.

Paradoxically, the slack we offer our volunteers ties them more tightly into their roles. Freed of any concern of bogging down, or any sensation that they're "working", they happily contribute countless hours. We literally could not pay people to work this hard or this well.

And so, counterintuitively, paying would actually mess everything up. It would drastically change the entire dynamic. Because here's the thing: if you pay people, they've got to show up. They have to commit. And regardless of how much you love what you do and believe in it, if you have to show up, it's a job. You're working...period. Helping Chowhound would come to feel like work...and all these folks already have work lives. In fact, moderating Chowhound is their diversion from all that! If we paid moderators to moderate, and posters to post, the whole enterprise would turn to crap in weeks. Just think: could you pay people to compile a Wikipedia?

Why maintain a forum for free? For the same reason they chip in food tips for free: it's a pleasant hobby, and the results are highly useful to themselves and others. I experienced this, myself. Difficult though my unpaid slogging years were, there was an underlying playful glee to it, which was utterly stamped out during the year I was drawing a good salary from CNET. I'd worked hard on Chowhound all along, but there was never so much as a whiff of that stultifying time clock/workplace feeling. When that cut in, I could feel the life force draining out of me. Jesus, what a buzz kill.

But Chowhound had two volunteers who, over the years, had gone way beyond whim. They took on a managerial role, and while they were free to disappear at any time, per our policy, they didn't. They could be counted upon, and I started to involve them in more and more decision-making. In the final year, when my workload and stress level had grown grotesquely overwhelming, and I was damaged goods (my memory shot, my judgement shaky), they covered for me, taking on many tasks far beyond their roles. These were not mere volunteers, and I owed them.

Every once in a while over the years, I'd daydreamed about Chowhound winding up a financial success. The high point of my fantasy was the part where I'd send generous checks to each of these two, along with hand-written notes, which I'd already composed and polished in my mind. So as we started wrapping up the particulars of our deal with CNET, I announced to my lawyer that a share of our proceeds would be going to these volunteers. The lawyer blandly questioned me:

"Are these people paid workers?
"No."
"Do you have a contract with them?"
"No."
"Do you have a verbal agreement to pay them a certain amount in the event of acquisition?
"Uh-uh."
"Then...unnh...why, exactly, are you paying them??"
"Because they deserve it."

On the other end of the phone there was a vacuous silence while the word "deserve", that most nonlegal of terms, was pondered and chewed upon. Then I heard a long, slow inhalation through tense nostrils, followed by a weary, pained promise to take the idea into consideration.

The news of my request was relayed to our accountant, then to CNET's accountants, and their lawyers. Each, in turn, asked the very same questions: Are these paid workers? Is there a contract or verbal agreement? Then why, exactly, are you paying them....???

These were all experienced professionals, very strong on mergers and acquisitions. They'd seen it all. But I'd stumped the band. Cold. This was not a move they could wrap their minds around; it completely threw them. Why, why, why, why are you paying these people? It's just not done that way! There's no precedent! This is madness! Everything's growing cloudy....can't think...

I'd done psychic damage by throwing this wrench into the machinations of corporate power. Our corporate treasurer threatened to resign her position as an officer of Chowhound, Inc., out of fear of legal spill-back. CNET railed against it, and our lawyer offered me the following sole hope:

If I could persuade these individuals to affix their signatures to a page full of cold legalese in which they'd swear, for the love of Jesus Christ and the preservation of their dainty, uncrushed kneecaps, to never sue, or try to get any more money...then, ok, fine, we might find a way to accomplish this.

The document would, essentially, read something like this:

"I, XXXX, do hereby agree to accept $XXXX in blood money under the provision that I release Jim Leff, and the awesome, intimidating powers standing behind him, from any delusional notion I might be owed even so much as a spit in my face. This is an unearned gift, and it's all the money I'll ever be getting, and I understand that I won't even get this without explicitly renouncing my claim to anything else...ever. I will grab your check in my hot, greedy, litigious little hand, and kindly get the F away from you."

[Obviously, I've just slipped into surreal mode again; something I hesitate to do because so many aspects of this story are genuinely surreal, and I don't want you to think any of it is invented or exaggerated. But I'm aiming for vicarious impressionism here, so indulge my kookiness...which I'll always clearly label as such.]

The document, obviously, would be starkly dissimilar in tone to my long-imagined hand-written note of gracious thanks. My loyal colleagues would open their mailboxes and find this insane bit of ugliness, which would utterly poison the loving impulse behind it all. I tore myself up, lost sleep over it. I protested loudly that these people were not going to sue anyone, for God's sake. My assurances were politely ignored.

Adding to the excruciating discomfort was the issue of a particularly damaged and damaging ex-girlfriend of mine who'd provided some key help with Chowhound's formation way back in 1997. Bob and I had promised her, at the time, that if Chowhound ever amounted to anything, she'd receive a cut. (Note to entrepreneurs: don't ever do this. Sign a formal agreement or just shaddup!) We obviously needed to honor that promise.

My two colleagues were, as ever, completely understanding about this whole affair (the ex-girlfriend was handled via our accountant). They signed the scary document. And then, at the eleventh hour, for reasons I can't recall, the whole thing was off. CNET was refusing, even with the legal protection of signed affidavits they'd insisted upon, to pay these guys directly out of the deal. It had all been for nought. Bob and I would be paid, and afterwards, if we liked, we could cut personal checks to send as gifts. Which meant that Bob and I would be forced to pay the (substantial) tax, plus we'd use up a substantial portion of our lifetime allotment of non-charitable gifting.

It was all so crazily screwed up. But nowhere near as screwed up as things were about to get...

Read the next installment (#17)...