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    • Houston, We Have Lift-Off!

    Posted on | August 26, 2008 | No Comments

    FINALLY got my blog back up! Thanks to my fellow Twit-kin who notified me that it was down. It’s so lovely to have people that you don’t even know watch your back … especially when some people you DO know are trying to shove a knife into it. (APAwho?)

    I am so excited – my first workshop for the Houston Arts Alliance T3 “Tech Tools & Tips” Series is tomorrow and it’s SOLD OUT! (http://t3workshops.eventbrite.com/) I can’t wait to engage people in one of my passions: using social media and Web 2.0 tools to help non-profits and artists promote themselves and their work, grow audiences and community, build capacity, and all that good stuff. This will serve as a launchpad for my permanent transition to consulting for non-profit organizations and artists. It marries three things I want to sculpt my life around: doing good work/helping people realize their dreams and goals; developing a creative and supportive community of like-minded individuals; and creating a career that allows me to be creative and nerdy (and mobile!) all at the same time.

    It’s so good to finally share my knowledge and expertise with people who actually respect it, want to learn from it, and appreciate that I’m sharing it with them in the first place. It seems like I’ve been trying to help the wrong people all these years.

    I’ve learned that you just can’t help those who refuse to help themselves. You can NOT help people who dump everything on you under the guise of “delegation,” especially when they continue to dump everything on you at the last minute because they themselves procrastinated. You can NOT help people who “pass the buck” at every opportunity and refuse to accept responsibility for their actions, preferring to blame everyone else around them until everyone else has left them alone to blame themselves…and even then, their delusions of righteousness convince them that it must be another person in the mirror. You can NOT help people who think that cracking the whip on team members like slaves is “good management.” You ESPECIALLY can not help people who have no clue they’re even doing these things: it’s their default behavior – they’ve probably been that way their whole lives and it would be impossible to teach them otherwise. They’ve hit blindness, and no amount of lasik could bring them back to sight.

    As much as I’ve tried ever since moving to Houston and getting involved in the APA community, there’s just no helping people like this. They love spinning the wheel – like hamsters thinking, “wow, I’m running really fast!” – without realizing they’re still not getting anywhere.

    It’s time to focus that energy and resources to people who are worth it!

    Category: a musing

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