Living Leadings

I watch a lot of documentaries and hear quite a bit about the difficulties of our consumer-driven society. In the olden days, “consumption” was a way to die; now it’s the way of life that big business is trying to sell you. The result of that way of life has been economic collapse, and the collapse of the American dream. Whereas the dream used to be building a stable life for yourself and your family, now it is having lots of stuff and passing lots of stuff on to your kids. We were told this would make us happy, but it doesn’t. We are waking up to the lie we’ve been told, and we don’t like it. The good news is that there is an easy way of changing this: stop being a consumer and become a producer.

As Wil Wheaton likes to say, we live in The Future. In The Future, there is nothing stopping you from producing artwork, books, software, or anything else and distributing it like crazy. With Lulu and CafePress and GitHub and CDBaby and other awesome websites out there willing to host and distribute your creativity, you just need to generate stuff, put it out there, and let people know that it exists.

On one episode of the very funny Memories of the Futurecast, Wil talks about how he went from amusing idea to Memories of the Futuremug in about 90 minutes. I do each episode of The Indie3 Project on my breaks from my Victory gardening on Saturdays. The “What is a BarCamp?” audio was done in an afternoon. That’s not a lot of time invested, so if there’s no pay-off, it’s no big deal—but you’ll never know how things will go until you put them out there. And if you enjoy what you’re doing, then investing the time is really no cost at all, but just an excuse to have some fun.

The one thing you are going to need is friends. You are going to need to reach out and ask for help from other people who have produced stuff before. Wil depends on his friend Will (two-L’s) for design work. I am indebted to the spectacular Alicia Weller of Graphic Karma for lots of graphic design work, and Dave Warner of Dave’s Lounge and Anji Bee of The Chillcast for help on The Indie3 Project. My Victory garden owes everything to Frog Pond Farm. So friends are vital.

The good news is that creative-producer types tend to get excited when someone else is excited, too, so all you have to do is get up the chutzpah to ask someone you respect if they’ll help you out. If you are excited and you come across like you have two brain-cells and some drive, then chances are pretty good that they will be happy to help out. And before long, you’re likely to have a new and exciting friend.

So what are you excited about? What are you going to make?