Are we a free people?

With the rise of the Tea Party (note: NOT an official political party), there’s been a great deal of discussion about freedom and liberty, and whether we have it here in the United States.  Discarding the polemic on both sides, there is a real question here.  What is freedom, and do we have it?  Do we even want it?

I lived for two years in the People’s Republic of Hungary.  I lived there as a foreigner, not as one of the people in the complete sense, but I didn’t have a huge number of perks on a day-to-day basis.  I spoke the language, ate Hungarian food, rode the trams and the buses, lived in crappy apartments.  But I had a car when I needed one, and I had a passport with a gold eagle on it, meaning I could do the one thing Hungarians could certainly not do – leave.

Communism is a terrible thing, and I’m not suggesting that the USA is anywhere near that point.  But I consider what the average person in Hungary did on a daily basis, and it doesn’t seem to me that there was any terribly visible impingement.  People got up, ate food (bad food, of which there was not very much, at least in the cities), went to work, took the tram to the pub, got drunk, came home and watched the sports on the TV, went to bed.  In the morning, do it all over again.  And it increasingly strikes me that if this is your life, then pretty much any governmental system short of naked tyranny will do you fine.

Orwell and Huxley showcased this in their seminal works 1984 (which I read in Hungarian while I was there – and man, that’s one dark book in Magyar) and Brave New World.  In these books, most people are not even really inconvenienced by the totalitarian government.  Propaganda aside, for most of the people I met, the communist government of Hungary was no big deal as far as the things they were likely to ever want to do.

And yet.

Everyone hated the system.  And I do mean everyone.  The national mania was foci (soccer), but the national pastime was complaining about the government.  The things most people complained about were lifestyle problems, bad healthcare, long waits for things, unavailability of goods.  There were lots of things the average Hungarian could simply not get.  Those things were there in country, but they were behind the metaphorical gates of the hard-money stores.  If you wanted a decent television, for instance, you could only get one of those in the tourist shops that literally – by passport entry – were only for foreigners.  You can imagine how well that went over.

Since that’s what most people focused on, that’s what we now pay most attention to when comparing economic systems.  Does this one or that one produce more prosperity for the people in it?  Having spent time in the poorest parts of several countries, I can tell you that I think free-market capitalism is better at increasing average wealth than any other economic system.  I can also tell you that communism/socialism (because economically they are functionally identical) is better at alleviating actual squalor than other systems.  If you want to constrain people to the median, if you’re seeking a society where everyone is slightly above average (yes, yes I know), then you have to look fondly at socialist systems.

Which apparently is what we are doing in the US, or, at least, the political class is (the people themselves seem less excited about the wholesale government rush to annex the entirety of the economy).  There is a constant temptation to use the power of government to try to solve people’s economic problems.  The trade-off seems so entirely worth it, doesn’t it?  All we have to do is tax the big corporations, the wealthy and almost-wealthy, and we can make sure everyone has enough to eat and a place to stay.  I mean, how many pools does a house need?  How many gardens?  Isn’t a 50,000 square foot house just ridiculously too big anyway?

If only it actually worked that way.  What happens in communist societies, what happened in Hungary, is that there still were rich people, even obscenely rich people, only these people were all at the top of the government, instead of the top of Microsoft.  If you read that and think, “see, it’s the same thing,” then you need to get out more.  Bill Gates can clear a Spanish beach at the height of tourist season so that he and a handful of his cronies can frolic in peace, but if he does it, he has to pay the people to leave.  Michelle Obama does it with nightsticks.  And that’s only one difference.  But that’s tangential to this post, so I’ll leave it.

What afflicted the people of Hungary most was not their poverty (which was slight) or even their relative poverty, vis-a-vis the Austrians right over the border.  What afflicted them was not as much that they were prevented from doing things they actually wanted to do, but that they were prevented from thinking of things that they might want to do, because they knew they would never be allowed to do them.  Socialism didn’t deprive them of food and housing (at least, not often).  It deprived them of dreams and ambitions.  When you have to register with the police every time you move, you don’t move much.

There were a lot of songs and flowers thrown at the idea that, in the 1980s, the Russians and the Americans were really all the same, that they really wanted the same things and we should be able to bury the hatchet and get along.  This is a bald-faced, ridiculous lie.  We did not want the same things.  We were not able to want the same things.  Free people – people that can leave – want terrifically different things than captives do.  Free people can dream.  Free people can wake up in the morning and decide to do something entirely different than the day before, and they don’t have to get anyone’s permission.  They can move where they want.  Go where they want.  Be whatever they want.

In Hungary, you couldn’t do that.  If you moved, you had to register with the police.  You did not change jobs.  There was no discussion of starting a business, because that was impossible (unless you wanted to do a one-man deal in the gray market, with no “employees”).  You had your choice of shops, but there was not any difference between the products each was offering.  If it was next-to-impossible to fall through the cracks into abject poverty, it was also next-to-impossible to rise above the lower middle class.  As long as you had no ambition (or a conscience), you were constrained to be as close to average as it was possible for the machine to make you.  It made the people of Hungary, my friends to this day, half-men.  It made them less.  It made them almost a different species.

They would ask me about my future, and I would outline a few things I wanted, and they would shake their heads at me, half-uncomprehending.  They couldn’t process that I didn’t know or much care what I was going to do for work when I got back.  I knew I could get a job.  If I couldn’t, I could start a business.  I could do anything I wanted anywhere I wanted.  So I wanted things they couldn’t even understand.

But it is a law of humanity and nature that if you remove the possibility of failure you eliminate the chance for excellence.  It is impossible for any governmental system to create a society where no one can fail, but the possibility for unbounded prosperity remains.  As Helen Keller said, life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.  Daring means, by definition, that there is a chance of botching it.  Freedom requires the possibility of spectacular disaster.  Adults relish this, even if they don’t realize it (and frankly, most don’t).

Many people could, it is true, spend 80% of every working day locked in an iron box 10′ square, because they almost never need to get up from their cubicle anyway.  But they CAN get up, even if they don’t.  A lot of the argument about giving up freedom in order to get security centers on our giving up things we weren’t likely to do anyway.  I doubt I’d ever carry a gun onto a plane.  But now I can’t, even if I want to.  Heck, I can’t carry nail clippers or a bottle of water, things I actually DO want to do.

I doubt that I’d ever want to open a power plant.  But if I did, I would now have to pay tens of millions of dollars and spend a decade just in regulatory paperwork before I ever turned a shovelful of dirt, much less produced an erg of power.  If my business, which employs no one but me, moves even next door, it has to register with the police.  Yes, it is the “nice” branch of the police known as the city planning and zoning department, but it is the police nonetheless.  It is eerily similar to the situation I once knew 10,000 miles away.

The more we regulate, the more we tax, the more we try to get rid of the chances for failure, the less free we are, by definition.  The less we permit people to do what they want, where they want, when they want, without having to get anyone’s permission, the less we are adults.  The less we are men and women, and the more we are children.  We are not yet to the point where I cannot imagine the things my father could, but this is only because my imagination lags my reality.  The fact is that I cannot do whatever I like, even if what I like harms no one.  I need permission from the government.  Starting a business is not impossible, but it is difficult and getting more so.  Hiring people is becoming increasingly complex and dangerous.  Shortly, if we continue on the path tread currently, we will have similar economic conditions to the ones that obtained in Hungary 25 years ago, where there are three (really two) choices: work for the government, work for a large corporation functionally indistinct from the government, or run a solo shop with no official employees.

If all I want is to go to work, putter, head to the bar and get drunk, come home and watch the telly, then do it all again tomorrow, this system will work well.  The majority of people will probably not find themselves terribly inconvenienced.

But woe to those that dream larger dreams.  Freedom is not and rarely ever was a drink for the average man.   Its loss will not be felt as more than a vague unease by the teeming masses.  There will be, there already is, a lot of bashing on the people complaining about the blizzard of regulations and restrictions being daily levied on businesses.  But this is like bashing tall people for complaining that the ceiling is too low, just because the average guy’s head still has clearance.

The sky may not be falling.  But it is being lowered, and there are a lot of people having to hunch over.  We are still more free in the US than anyone else, but make no mistake: we are no longer free.  The question is, do we want to be?

Oh, I hope so.

That was this week.

And you know how some weeks the things you mean to do and the things you have to do collide so violently that even though you are working constantly, knocking things off the to-do list with abandon, and seeing real (even some times miraculous) progress, you get to the end of the week and you realize that you accomplished almost none of the things you meant to?

That was this week, too.

Mortgages being what they are, the opportunities to do really significant good for people don’t come along every day.  When they do, you often have extremely short windows to get things moving.  That’s what happened this week, as rates dived a bit and some potential streamline refinances came into play that honestly I never thought would happen.  But you have to strike while the iron is hot, even if that puts a lot of other things – worthwhile things, even necessary things – on the back burner.  That’s what I tried to do this week, and maybe I even succeeded.  We will finish the week with more business in process than we’ve had in a year, and the immediate prospect of cutting $1450/mo in interest out of the payments of our clients, a not-insubstantial sum.

So, a good week.  I sent a son to college, set up a company, closed a purchase for a really exceptional young lady, learned to love the Tenth Doctor (but not as much as the Ninth), read Drive, by Daniel Pink (two thumbs waaaaay up), blogged a couple of times and exchanged Twitter messages with Chris Brogan.  I discovered that the most durable brand in all of business is Notre Dame football.  I debated the sociology of rites of passage with the wonderful and amazing Pastor Chuck Lovelady.  I drank homemade grape juice and took a beautiful girl to the football game.  Wrote more of my book and an article on lending in Utah.  There was some stuff I didn’t do.  But I promise not to mention any of it, if you won’t.

Go have a great weekend.  You deserve it.  Really, you do.

He made our lives better the second he was in them.

We loved his little pudginess, we doted on everything he did, as parents do with their firstborn.  We still remember his first word, about when he walked, how long we had to let him cry in the other room before he finally went to sleep.  We remember sending him off to school the first time, and how we cried seeing that little child go off down the street.  His first talk in church.  His first fishing trip.  His first (of many) pets.

And then that child was gone.

In his place was a very interesting, at times exasperating, but nearly always good young man.  He got a suit.  He started noticing girls (this was the exasperating part).  He got a job making stained-glass windows.  He ran for student government (great, great speech he gave).  He was on every church committee you could be on.  He dated.  He drove (NO ACCIDENTS).  Eventually his mother he even earned his Eagle Scout award.

Through all this, his presence in the house was pretty close to always positive.  He, like his father and his father’s father, has a need to be the Smartest One in the Room, which drove his brothers crazy, but by and large he was incredibly fun to be around.  Wherever he went, things happened.  When people were crying, he cheered them up.  He organized the games.  What he was doing, they all did.  There were two of them, then three.  Then fourfivesixseveneight.  Hanging out with Alexander was how you could make your day better.  His two just-younger brothers were with him so often we called them the three musketeers.

He did fight with his mother on occasion, a credit to his mother, who was willing to wade into the vicissitudes of teenagehood and do battle with the demons there.  He never really fought with his father, and that’s a credit to him, because Heaven knows there was often what to fight about, but when I dished it out Xander took it and either shrugged it off because it wasn’t worth anything (often true) or separated the nasty tone from the nuggets of wisdom, internalized them, and became someone better.  I was very hard on him.  Vicariously, I was backhanding my own self as a teenager, seeing in my eldest son all those things I still hate so much about myself.  But Xander could see that, too, and he allowed me to be an idiot without holding it against me.  He was better than I was.  Probably, he always will be.

And now, he is gone.

Physically, he’s only just down the road about four hours.  With Facebook and cell phones and reasonably reliable transportation he’s never going to be all that far away (except when he goes on his church mission, about which much more in eight months).  But just as the little boy, my first little boy, is gone forever, so now the young man is gone, and he will never return.

That is the way of things.

I did not design the plan for us here on this earth.  I approved of it, or I wouldn’t be here, but I cannot help thinking that times like this, separating ourselves from people we love so fiercely it makes breathing an agony, were not comprehended when the plan was presented to us.  How could we have understood?  Only the Father knew what this would be like – was already like, for Him – and He though this was a good idea.  He told us so.  And so because I have faith in Him I believe that He knows what He is doing.

Because I do not.

My head knows that Alexander cannot become the person he is meant to be without leaving the place where we are.  My head knows it.  My eyes don’t, because they are weeping.  My heart doesn’t, because it’s breaking.

He walks out the door at 1:30 today.  I’ll be there, and I’m trying to do my crying now, because his mother will need me to be done with that, so she can have her turn.  My father will be there as well, to take Xander down to school, and he’ll be smiling inside, remembering when his firstborn son walked out the door and how he felt then, with the perspective of another 25 years of adult friendship to foreshorten the ache of that day.

But I don’t have those 25 years with Alexander yet.  I don’t have an adult association with my son, and a relationship with his children, and the greater joys that will come with that as he and I grow together.  Not yet I don’t.  The patch on my soul where my infant son used to be has healed over now.  The patch where the little boy ran and giggled has mostly ceased to hurt.  The place where the young man was, just a second ago, is raw, and bleeding, and it hurts like…well, it hurts like Hell, because that’s what Hell is, to be separated forever from those you love best.

I am proud of him.  He is good.  He is strong, and he is happy, and he knows everything I know and a thousand things more.  He’s as well prepared to shed this skin as any young man I ever knew.  He is and will be a delight and a joy to us, to Jeanette and myself, all the days of his life, and forever after that.

But couldn’t I have just one more day with that little, little boy?  Just one.  I wouldn’t yell at him this time.  We’d go fishing.  Or play golf.  Or legos.  Whatever he wanted.  One more day.  Just, please, just one…

Tomorrow I’ll be thrilled.  Tomorrow I get to start knowing the adult Alexander Christopher Jones, and the prospect is wonderful and delicious to me.

Tomorrow.

I reached the office and sat for a moment and thought about that.  It’s a tradition we;ve established.  My wife does it and I do it, every time, without fail.  We never leave without taking a moment for each other.

Everyone tries to avoid thinking about the terrible things that can happen.  Most of the time, because they don’t happen all that often, we succeed.  We can get complacent.  We can get sloppy.  This is the sure path to regret.

I kiss my wife goodbye every time I leave, and I do it because one time it will be the last time.  Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day, one day it will.  One day I will kiss her goodbye, and it will be Goodbye.  I doubt very much that I will get advance warning.

There’s an apocryphal but wonderful story of Martin Luther.  He was out in a yard, working, when one of his parishioners came by and saw him with his hands in the dirt.  Indignantly, the parishioner said, “Martin, what are you doing?  If you knew that Christ would come tomorrow, what would you be doing right now?”  And Luther looked up at the parishioner and said, “I’d be planting this tree.”

Always be doing what you would be doing.  One time, it will be the last time.  Leave with no regrets.

One fee goes up (probably, depends on FHA bureaucrats), and one comes down (ditto).  Monthly mortgage insurance (which the Post calls an “annual fee” for some reason) rises from an annualized .55% of the loan to .9%, with the FHA having authority to take it to 1.5%.  But the up-front mortgage insurance fee (UFMIP), which had been 1.75% and is now 2.25%, will come down to 1%.  The net change is measurable, about $40 more per month on a typical mortgage in Utah, so the fees are being “raised” in that sense, but more importantly, they’re being shifted.

And why?  Glad you asked.  Whatever the stated rationale for the change in fees, the effect will be to increase the competitiveness of FHA loans vs. conventional financing, by decreasing the UFMIP to 1% and increasing the monthly MI, FHA loans will more closely match their conventional counterparts, but with just a 3.5% down payment requirement, FHA will now have an even clearer advantage in the marketplace.  Borrowers were skittish (and rightly) of paying a whacking 2.25% of the loan amount in UFMIP.  The number for a $200,000 mortgage in Utah is $4500, and that’s a massive and visible addition to your closing costs when shopping for a loan.  Under the new rules, it would be only $2000, a much more manageable number.  Then the fee increases are hidden in the monthly payment.  Presto!  Much more palatable to the consumer, and more money for the FHA.

Expect the changes to take effect around October 1.

Welcome to RateWatch for Thursday, August 05, 2010.  Here’s what’s happening:

Employment again is the news of the day, with new claims up another 20,000 or so to 479,000.  Continuing claims were down, though, to 453,700.  That was not as far down as the markets were expecting, however, and that’s meant that bonds have stayed strong.

Not too strong, though.  There really is no upside here.  Unless we get a truly shocking number tomorrow from the unemployment people, showing unemployment at, say 10.5%, there just isn’t any confidence in the bond market to cause a buying wave.

What that means for rates: nothing.  We’re down 6bps, which might just as well be flat.  There is no upside without huge news, and no downside because what news there is is bad.  So we’re hanging out with rates in the 4.5% range.

Anything else?: yep.  Sure is.  The big news today comes out of Washington, surprise surprise, with the Senate passing a bill that changes FHA fees.  Up-front MI will move from the current 2.25% down to 1%, a positive change, but more than made up for by the increase in monthly MI from an annual .55% to .9%, and the FHA gets authority to go all the way to 1.5%.

Bottom line: on a $200,000 loan, you are paying right now $4500 in UFMIP and $91.66/mo in monthly MI.  When these changes take effect, you’ll be paying $2000 UFMIP but $150/mo in MI.  For more commentary on that, see the blog at thechrisjonesgroup.com.

I’m Chris Jones, aka Agent Zero.  That’s RateWatch for today.  Until next time, we’ll be watching the rates.

A few things here.

1. The number 1 predictor of foreclosure is negative equity.  Those that are underwater in their homes are 3x as likely to walk away as those that are even or have some money in their properties.  Some of the foreclosure wave has been caused by job losses, but as much as 26% of foreclosures are termed “strategic” – that is, homeowners walked away as a financial decision, not because they couldn’t make payments.  So to stem the tide of foreclosure, eliminating underwater mortgages is likely to be a good thing.
2. Foreclosure decisions are heavily impacted by the amount of the negative equity, not just its existence.  The National Bureau of Economic Research found that 17% of homeowners would default on purpose if their debt overhang was 50% of the value of the house, but almost nobody would if the overhang was 10% or less.  To reduce the volume of foreclosure, then, simply reduce the debt overhang to 10% or less of the home value.
3. Debt forgiveness is not, by itself, a bad thing.  I have long advocated for banks holding mortgages on underwater properties to forgive part of the principal owed and wipe out the overhang.  Doing this substantially reduces the likelihood of foreclosure and earns incredible goodwill in a time when banks could use it.  But few banks are doing this, and none with any regularity.  We can deduce from this that stopping foreclosure is not necessarily in the banks’ best interests.
4. When something as nasty as a foreclosure, with its attendant legal fees, loss of capital, and negative impact on home prices, stops being viewed as an unmixed evil, it is certain that something is screwing with the market.  That something is 99.94522% likely to be the government.  In this case, banks have come to understand that what makes for happy regulators and what makes for healthy banks are not necessarily the same thing.  Banks understand that in the event of trouble, they can count on the government to “do something”.
5. The economy always recovers fastest when government STOPS “doing something”, and leaves things for the markets to sort out.  Uncertainty is the enemy of markets.  In the event that government has to be acting, and it will tell you that’s in pretty much every event, the best thing to do is always reduce regulation and taxes and let people fix things themselves.  Unfortunately, an election year is never a time to expect this kind of restraint.

So if banks should write down mortgage debt, why shouldn’t Fannie and Freddie?  Two reasons.  One, banks are going to make different calculations about whether it makes financial sense for them to do this.  Those calculations are heavily affected by the competition, and what the competition is doing.  The decision to do something or not to do it will be made with reference to the markets and what will be in the best interests of the long-term health of the bank.  Fannie and Freddie have no such calculus.  They have no competition.  They can’t fail – the Treasury Department already said it wouldn’t let that happen, no matter what.  So the decisions will be made by bureaucrats without any requirement for financial sense.  Bad, bad combination.  Isn’t that a major reason we ended up in this mess in the first place?

Second, Fannie and Freddie (and by Fannie and Freddie, I mean Bernanke, Obama, and Geithner, et al.) aren’t playing with private money.  They’re playing with PUBLIC money.  Tax money.  If Chase Bank wants to write down a couple billion in mortgage debt, they’re making a financial calculation that this is going to be good for the company in the future.  If they’re wrong, only they and their shareholders suffer.  If, however, Fannie and Freddie make that same calculation, it will be a political one based on what will be good for the administration in an election year, not necessarily (and some would argue only accidentally) what is in the best interests of the taxpayers.  If Fannie and Freddie miscalculate, it harms the entire country.

The law of unintended consequences is at work here.  Connect the dots:

• Bank makes loan to home at a high loan-to-value (LTV).
• Housing market declines, leaving the house underwater.
• Bank sells loan to Fannie Mae at 100% of face value.
• Fannie Mae writes down the debt, re-establishing equity using (future) tax money.
• Mortgage note is now worth 80% of original value.

Pretend for a moment you’re a bank executive.  You can connect the dots, can’t you?  You will in the future make a) fewer high LTV loans or b) more high LTV loans?

Very good.  If you chose b), you are ready to be a bank executive.  Your risk is mitigated strongly by the backstop of tax money that Fannie/Freddie provide.  You make a miscalculation, no problem.  Fannie Mae (a stand-in for Uncle Sam) is there to bail you out.  If Fannie were a private entity, this calculus would be quite different, but the giant mortgage-purchasing behemoths FNMA and FHLMC are pure government now.  And this is only one of the consequences; doubtless there will be more, and even worse ones that I cannot forsee.

I think writing down mortgages is a good idea.  I advocate it.  But like all good ideas, this one can be done by the wrong parties for the wrong reasons, and in those cases the results will almost always be disappointing.

Stay tuned.

It might be a great idea.  Can I offer one thing, as a lender in Utah (and the rules are the same everywhere), for you to think about before you go?

If you’re going to refinance or buy a house, do it before you leave your job – before you even mention to anyone that you’re thinking of doing so.  Underwriters are unkind to the self-employed (and even more unkind to those whose verifications of employment come back with “we don’t think he’s staying here very much longer”).  There are no more stated-income loans (well, essentially), so you’re going to have to document all your income, and not with bank statements, either.  It will be tax returns. And those will be verified by an IRS transcript.

You’re going to want to have a long chat with your accountant.  She’ll probably have some suggestions for ways that you can minimize your tax liability while maximizing your adjusted gross income (AGI), and you definitely want to do that.  Underwriting is going to look hard at your AGI, and there are also add-backs for depreciation and amortization, so you can get some tax relief there without hurting your qualifying income.

But the big thing is that if you are self-employed, you have to have two years of tax returns showing this before you can be qualified for a loan under FNMA/FHLMC (Fannie/Freddie) guidelines.  So it’s going to be at least 24 months, and possibly longer, before you’ll qualify, once you leave.  And don’t try to claim that you’re not self-employed just because you get a W2.  If you own more than 25% of the business, you’re self-employed no matter how you get paid.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it.  I love self-employment.  I’ve been self-employed for a decade.  Small businesses are the heartbeat of the economy.  But before you go, get your house in order.  Literally.

An aside here: I’ve read everyone I can get my hands on.  Tony Robbins, Stephen Covey, Napoelon Hill, Tim Ferriss.  Everyone (yes, I know, that’s not everyone, that was meant to be a range).  Some have things that I was improved by (thank you, Jim Collins), and some not.  This really doesn’t mean anything, except to me.  You will find that some systems work for you, and some don’t.  Some women/men are attractive to you, and some not.  My preferences are mine, and your experience may will vary.

I read an excellent post of Simon’s last week and commented on it.  I have checked back a couple times to see if there were responses, since my comment is by far the longest on the post, and even though I wasn’t expecting much.

Aside #2: I LOVE LONG COMMENTS.  I know some people are embarrassed that they write novels, but as long as you’re not threadjacking, I’d rather have a real conversation with you than have you post “Great post!  Keep it up!”  Not that I’ll be sad about those, either, but I like talking with interesting people, even if they don’t agree with me.  So comment away, and don’t spare the electrons.  You will always get a response.

Well, shoot.  Nothing there.  No response from Simon, even though I called myself his biggest fan.  In the comments section of his own blog.

Whoops.  Today I got a response.  He called me.

Right.  As in, on the phone.  Now, my article on the Six Channels of Marketing has not come out yet in the Scotsman Guide (due in September), so I’ve not posted anything on that here for fear of letting the cat out of the bag.  Suffice it to say, then, that the more personal time you invest in a contact, the more powerful it will be.  I hoped (didn’t really expect) that Simon would comment back.  I didn’t even hope that he’d click through to my profile and see who I was.  I never thought he’d email me.  Or visit my website.  And here, he went all the way through the whole thing and then CALLED ME.

In one action, here is how you take a fan and make him a fanatic.  If you thought I was excited about Simon Sinek and the things he has to say before, just wait.  I’m going to review the book, the video, all of it.  First, I think his message is excellent, right on target, and exactly what I needed to hear.  He’s concise, his explanations make sense, and what he says works.  And second, he acts the way he says you should.  If his why really is to change the world, then personal, one-to-one contact is the only way to start.  It is the only way to make a lone nut into a leader of a movement.

Consider me enlisted.  Much more about this as time goes on.  And doesn’t it always?

I lived for twelve years in one town down the road. Met a few people. Caused some trouble. Ended up not wanting to stay because of the reaction some had to that trouble. I had a few friends, knew a couple of people, but on the whole, I was nobody.

Then I moved up the road. The first week I was here, I went to the Chamber of Commerce meeting. And instead of sitting at the back, getting my bearings, I sat up front and introduced myself to the Chairman before the meeting. I was invited to stay after. Then to sit on the Board. Then I was the Chairman myself after a couple years. The same thing happened in Rotary, and over and over in other organizations. Shockingly, in just a couple of years I knew everyone in town, where in the other town I knew only a handful of people. The difference was exactly what Tamsen brilliantly outlined in her post.

People drop out of those organizations all the time, and the main reason they give is “it just doesn’t work for me”, which, being that I was in a position to observe, meant “I don’t do anything, so nobody can tell how awesome I am. Guess I’ll quit.” Those of us that have been there, and worked, some of us for years, know that these organizations can be fantastic networking tools, but they respond with a multiple of the force we put into them, after we demonstrate that we’re in it for the long haul. Put in zero, and no multiple will help. Put it huge effort for one project, then disappear, and a similar thing happens.  But stick around and push, and pretty soon the other workers want to know who you are, and what you can do to make their lives better.  That’s business.

Tamsen put this all so well. And do we ever need the reminder.