Category Archives: Treacy Mize

K is for kinship: How (and why) to cultivate relationship with your clients

Chris, fabulous mother of twins, called me several years ago for a portrait session with her and her family. She left me a message mentioning something about not being happy with her former photographer.  As anyone who serves clients for a living knows, when a potential client starts off the conversation with a complaint about someone else they’ve worked with, it’s a red flag. I almost put that follow-up call on the back burner.  But something in me had to know her story, and I wanted to see if I could meet her need.

Turns out, we had a great conversation, I showed up, took the photos, they went bonkers over them, and we’ve been friends ever since.  They take me on family vacations to document their stories, and we’ve become like family.

Image by Treacy Mize

Kinship is exactly that — when the people you serve become family. Maybe not every individual you come into contact with becomes a lifelong friend, but you share an affinity and a connection. One that allows you to make decisions based on strengthening that connection over strengthening your bottom line (funny how that bottom line tends to get stronger in the process).

Why would you want to be friends with your clients?

Most business wisdom would say to separate your personal and professional life. It’s not personal, it’s business. Don’t get too close or you won’t be able to make the hard business decisions later.

While it is difficult to make hard choices (that’s why they’re…umm…hard), distancing yourself from having a real connection with the people your nation is serving is not the answer. Kinship requires vulnerability (which can be scary), but it breeds trust, honesty, respect, and the benefit of the doubt when things go wrong. A little emotional risk is worth it.

The three things you need to know to foster kinship

First, I can only experience kinship with people who I have chosen to be in relationship with. That includes the client relationship. We may have a world of differences — if you were to stand me and Chris side by side and look at demographics, political and religious views, etc., you’d think that kinship had no chance — but the potential of a relationship between us needs to be important enough for me to take a risk.

Kinship doesn’t work when I take on a project that I’m ambivalent about because I need the money. It doesn’t work when I acquiesce to someone who is manipulating me or when I say yes to a job because it’s too uncomfortable to say no. I must be aware that I have a choice in who I work with. And I need to make that choice based on the kind of person I want to be and the kind of relationships I want to have — not based on obligation (even the financial kind).

Image by Treacy Mize

Second, kinship happens when I stop complaining about my clients and start listening to them. Ouch. (I’ll pause while we all nurse our wounds.) It hurts because we’ve all done it. It’s so much easier to complain about how inconsiderate, oblivious, and demanding our clients are. It’s less easy to see how unclear, assuming, and prideful we’ve been.

If I keep having problems with people being late or not paying on time, is it possible that my boundaries are unclear? If my clients aren’t doing what I’ve asked them to do, is it possible they have no idea what my jargon-y instructions mean? If my clients don’t want to pay for work that I’ve done, is it possible that I wasn’t clear about the cost before I started the work?

You are the leader of your nation. You make the rules and you create the structures that need to be in place for everything to operate smoothly. Use every difficult client confrontation as a clue to a new problem that your nation can create a solution for.

Image by Treacy Mize

Finally, kinship requires love. Love is the only thing that allows kinship to flourish, because its motivation is pure. You can’t fake it. In order to contribute to a client’s project (and their life) in a meaningful way, I need to feel compassion and empathy for the problems they’re experiencing. And that kind of emotional investment is something that can’t be conjured, manufactured, or manipulated.
 
What Chris needed wasn’t for me to come to her home and wield my camera.  That’s just what the initial request looked like. What she really needed was for me to care. Care about what happened before, care about what she wanted, care about her family and the story they shared, and maybe most importantly to care about who she was as a person.

And when I care, I do great things, with the camera and without. Serving becomes less of a buzzword and more of a way of meeting a deeper need than what’s on the surface. And somehow, I get my own needs met in the process.

Co-written by Treacy Mize and Sarah J. Bray

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We changed the entire way that we work in order to have the space to truly develop kinship with the people we work with. It was drastic. We’re willing to spill how that’s going for us, if you’re curious. Or about whatever questions or conversation you want to get into. For the next 24 hours, we’ll be here with bells on. (And after that, feel free to conversate…we just won’t have quite so many bells.)

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E is for experience: Finding the struggle that unites your nation’s people

When we were planning the writing and shooting for this piece, we had different ideas about how to approach it. What type of experience did we want to talk about? The “user experience” (how people experience your nation), or something more fundamental — the unifying experience that bonds the people of your nation together.

I realize now that the two are inseparable. You can’t talk about the way a person experiences your nation without first understanding that person’s individual experience…the way they experience the world.

A COMMON STRUGGLE

Have you noticed that self-sufficient people are often the most detached? Studies show that the more wealthy a person gets, the more they tend to isolate themselves. The more self-sufficient we are, the less we need to ask other people for help, and the more we protect ourselves from uncomfortable situations. Like asking a neighbor for a cup of sugar, for instance…which, if you had my neighbor, might actually be a harrowing experience.

This wealth-detachment phenomenon is also true on a national level (The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner shares some really interesting research on this). I’m sure you’ve heard stories of American ex-pats who have discovered the joy of going to a “poorer” country and finding rich relationships formed out of needing other people to fill life’s basic necessities.

While wealth and affluence have a tendency to separate people from each other, struggle brings people together. And people who are united in their struggle will also unite around the cause that will end that struggle.

IDENTIFYING THE PEOPLE’S STRUGGLE

If your nation isn’t helping overcome the people’s struggle, there is no cause to fight for. There is no reason for the people to unite together to support the nation’s Great Good. No founder makes a nation successful by sheer force of their own will. It takes the entire community.

The difference between a struggle and a symptom

When we were researching the experience of the people in Treacy’s nation, at first we thought it was relationship problems. People not understanding each other, families becoming more detached as they gained a wealth of technology. But when we looked at the relationship problems, we became overwhelmed. The solutions we were coming up with were all generic, and we couldn’t figure out why.

The reason is, we were looking at the symptom, not the struggle. Families were detached, yes. There were relationship problems everywhere we went. But trying to fix that problem without understanding the problem behind the problem is like going to the doctor and saying “I hurt”, with no other information. You have to look closer.

When we looked closer at Treacy’s nation, we found a theme in our relationships — our beliefs about ourselves and other people. We realized that we develop these theories over time that define every single interaction we have with a person. Take our relationships with ourselves, for example. We noticed that our relationship with ourselves was often the most damaged (and the one we needed to work on first). And we discovered that we had these theories about ourselves that we never spoke out loud, but became the lens that we interacted with ourselves through.

Some theories that hold us back in our relationships.

Once we knew the problem, we could then observe how Treacy fixed it. Because she was already doing it subconsciously (which is often how we operate in our true gifts…we have no clue how we’re doing it, because it comes naturally). And the answer turned out to be finding evidence that the theories are incorrect. Physical evidence, like pictures and the meanings we attach to them, are powerful things when you combine them with a context and a method for finding it.

You have to ask why. And then ask why again. Like a two-year-old, keep asking why until you get to a problem that is small and specific enough that you can actually solve. Be annoying about it. If you don’t, you’ll be struggling to fix a symptom without knowing its underlying cause.

But aren’t there lots of causes? Lots of struggles?

Yes, it’s true. There are many reasons people feel alone in their relationships. There are many root causes that you could attempt to solve. But you can only solve one problem at a time.

This is where weak products and services and brands fail. They haven’t reached deep enough to find the problem — they’re attempting to fix a symptom. And no matter how brilliant you are, you can’t fix a symptom. Solving one problem at a time is the only way to make big change happen.

The 24-hour comment conversation

Thanks to Carla for naming what we do here! For the next 24 hours, we’ll be actively conversating around this (I like making up words). All questions and points of view welcome. If you need a springboard for talking about this, what is the uniting experience of your nation’s people? What struggle do they need to overcome? What obstacles are in their way?

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D is for declaration: Why writing one is more important than you think

There are two kinds of people in the world – those who love mission statements and those who hate them. I hate them. For me, crafting a mission statement ranks somewhere near vision boards and manifestos on my “things that are a waste of time” list. (Yes, I have a list. Or I would if having the list weren’t also on the list.)

The reason mission statements are a waste of time isn’t because they can’t be valuable. It’s because we write them without clearly understanding why. We don’t have a purpose, other than “all good leaders do it”.

Two things mission statements and declarations have in common (and one they don’t)

To hold ourselves to our purpose in writing down our vision, we decided to toss out the mission statement in favor of something more meaningful to us – a declaration.

A declaration is similar to a mission statement in a few ways. They both help you understand your highest priorities and quickly communicate that to someone else. But a declaration has something even the best mission statements don’t have – a bias toward action (hat tip to Scott Belsky for introducing us to that concept).

When you create your nation’s declaration, you are not simply writing down everything you believe and why you believe it. You are declaring your true intentions and your plan to back up those intentions with clear and focused action. You are inviting other people to take action with you. You are clearly stating that you are committed and able to back up your commitment with whatever it takes to create the vision you want to see in the world.

THE TWO TYPES OF DECLARATIONS

There are two types of declarations. One is an overall declaration that covers the entire, broad-scope vision of your company. We put together one of these for Treacy’s nation when we first started her project. Each of us signed our names to it to show our commitment to doing whatever it takes to give her nation every possible chance to succeed.

The second type of declaration is specific to an initiative you are doing within your nation to accomplish a goal. We’re going to focus on this type of declaration today because it has more immediate applications to what you’re trying to accomplish.

For Treacy’s nation, we’re launching with three separate initiatives. The first is an “11 amazing days” list-building census to gather the people together in one place so that we can teach them the concepts they need to know to initiate change in their own lives. The second is an intensive workshop called “The Light Room” where Treacy guides people through their own relationship-changing work. And finally, there is the one-on-one work she does with families through her photography.

For each of these initiatives, we’ve written one short declaration, designed to clearly communicate the goals and the action people can take to get involved. They are:

11 days from now, we will have scientifically disproven one self-sabotaging theory that is holding you back from having a deeper relationship with a person you love…or even with yourself. It’s free. Get started here.

What if your mental picture of life and relationships isn’t the whole story? What if those images are actually negatives that need to be fully developed in order to see the true picture? Discover how you can use visual proof to improve your relationships and enrich your life experience. Join Treacy in the Light Room.

Getting your picture taken professionally isn’t about putting pictures of your smiling family up on the wall. It’s about capturing a memorable experience and then surrounding yourself with the truth of your most treasured relationships every single day. Find out more about how Treacy captures your family relationships in photographs.

Each of these declarations can stand alone, or be used to develop other ways of communicating (such as graphics, tweets, or sign-up incentives).

THE PARTS AND PIECES OF AN EFFECTIVE DECLARATION

A compelling declaration has three things (sometimes four). First, it has one or two things that you need to know about your nation’s intention. Second, it clearly shows what’s in it for the person you’re sharing it with. And finally, it gives a clear call-to-action.

The two things about the two things

I ran across this the other day, and I am now so compelled by this concept of “two things”. According to economist Glen Whitman, there are only two things you really need to know about any given subject; everything else is either the application of the two things, or it’s just not important.

For example, the two things about nation-building are:
1. An organized communal pursuit of a Great Good
2. Of the people, by the people, and for the people

And the two things about declarations are:
1. Clear intention
2. Bias toward action

If you can distill your nation’s intention into two things, writing any declaration (and getting people to participate) will be a downhill battle.

What’s in it for them?

It’s easy to get so caught up in the Great Good you’re trying to accomplish that you forget that humans are need-fillers. We perceive a need, and everything we do is a strategy to fill that need (read Gwen Bell’s excellent Reverb for more on that). In other words, no one is going to participate in your nation unless it is filling a perceived need in their lives.

For all of Treacy’s initiatives, the need is to find an effective solution for methodically changing relationships with people we care about, including ourselves. The reason this need is a good one is because it is something Treacy is sincerely passionate about, it is a need that is dearly felt (in other words, people know they have it without having to be educated or persuaded), and it’s something that she’s developed a clear strategy for fixing.

The call-to-action

If you’re familiar with marketing-speak, you’ve probably heard the term “call-to-action”. Here’s how I see it. If you want me to do something, it’s not my responsibility to figure out what you want me to do. It is your responsibility to ask for it. If you’re writing a blog post, hoping that someone who reads it ends up signing up for your email list, stop wishing. Ask. If you’re talking about your product with the hope that someone will take the hint and buy it, stop. Just ask. It’s a surprisingly effective and genuine way to communicate.

In addition to that, it makes sure that your declaration has a bias toward action, which is the main thing that sets a declaration apart from a mission statement or manifesto. It’s what makes this worth doing right now, rather than if/when you get a chance to slow-dance with your purpose and vision.

You don’t always have to have every piece of your declaration when you’re giving your elevator pitch or asking someone to do something, but having it in your mind will help you take focused action toward your next initiative and compel other people to do the same.

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Do you have questions or observations about writing your declaration(s)? As usual, I’ll be responding to everyone who writes in for the next 24 hours, and then sporadically after that. A toast to you and your declaration!

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C is for census: How to build your list by conducting a census

You’ve probably heard some marketer say, “The money is in the list.” They mean that your business is only as strong as the list of people who have given you permission to contact them.

A nation is nothing without the action of its people. To be able to inspire any kind of action, you need to know who the people are and how to communicate with them. So whether the nation you are founding is for-profit or not, the same rule applies — the strength of your nation is in the quality of your list and how many people it’s reaching.

Once you know your nation’s vision, it’s time to build your list by conducting a census. Time to put on your tricorne and grab your parchment. It’s strategy-time.

STEP ONE: KNOW THE PEOPLE

If you’re going to conduct an effective census, you need to know the people and where they’re coming from. Ideally, you’re one of them, or one of the key people on your team is.

There are lots of nuanced cultural things that an insider will know about its nation’s people. But for census-conducting purposes, the question we’re asking is:

How do they communicate? How do they receive information?

Whether its by text message, facebook, email, rss feed reader, twitter, or the good old postal service, we want to find the ways that the people are already effectively communicating. To choose how YOU want to communicate (and therefore, what information you need to collect on your census), consider this:

  • Value – Make everything you produce a gift (because life is just better that way). How can you reach out to the people in the most valuable way possible?

  • Friction – How easy is it for you to send information, and how easy is it for people to receive it? How can you deliver the highest value with the least amount of effort (both your own and the people you’re serving)? This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to produce things that are short and quick. Sometimes the communications with the greatest return take more time and skill. But not always.

  • Signal to noise ratio – Internet-renowned marketer Seth Godin said it best, “A whisper in a quiet room is all you need”. Rather than jumping on any kind of bandwagon, think about the context of the communication. Take twitter, for example. Do you have a strong enough signal to stand out in that kind of noise? Or is all of the shouting going to weaken the effects of your effort?

  • Regularity – People must be used to receiving information through the channel you’re trying to share it. Are they checking it every day? Is it one of the main ways they get information? How are they feeling when they get information that way? Are they receptive to it, or are they closed off?

Email, and how to get people to read it

Not everyone loves getting email. Let me rephrase that. Everyone HATES getting crappy emails. People have always loved getting fun, personal mail of any kind.

You know why our emails have a 61% open rate while our industry standard is 22%? It’s not because of the fancy subject lines. It’s because they know we send great emails, without fail, every single time. And by “great”, I mean fun. Personal. And with some sort of usefulness built in.

Your emails don’t have to be fun and personal (though humor and personality goes a long way in making a real connection). But they do need to be clearly meeting a need that your people have. That’s why, when all else fails, “How to do X” subject lines work so well. Not because they are super-enticing, but because they clearly meet a need. If the person wants to know “how to do X”, then they’ll open it.

STEP TWO: GIVE THE PEOPLE A REASON TO CARE

Create a compelling list

People are not obligated to participate in your list-building census just because you tell them to. And no matter how compelling you think “Sign up for my weekly newsletter” is, it just…isn’t. There are so many newsletters out there. Even if your nation is clearly meeting a need that I have, I probably don’t want to get its second-rate newsletter.

To make sure the communication people receive when they sign up for your list is compelling, ask yourself:

What are people getting by giving me their email address (or their cell phone number, or their facebook “Like”)?

You can’t just dangle a carrot on a stick and expect the people to sign up and stay around. Yes, giving them some kind of free offer for signing up for your email list will increase your subscriber count (and we’ll talk about that further down), but if the list itself is not compelling, people will either desert you or resent you as soon as they realize how little value its adding to their lives.

Make a list of what people are getting when they hand over their contact information. Make sure that every benefit that they’re getting is meeting a specific need that your nation is designed to meet. If you can do that, you’ll be a long way toward creating a list that people will want to sign up for.

Create a compelling sign-up offer

For your list to be a quality one, you want the people on it to love being on the list. You want them to love getting email from you, even if you were to offer absolutely nothing additional for signing up. But you will drastically increase your participation if you have a free sign-up offer that is so good that it hurts to give it away.

How do you know your sign-up offer is good? If you keep having second thoughts about giving it away. If you keep asking yourself, “Is all of this worth it for something that’s free?” If you feel just a little terrified that people won’t appreciate it enough because it’s free.

THAT’S when you know it’s good enough.

For our current nation-building project with Treacy Mize, we are creating an email series called “11 amazing days”. The people who sign up for this list are going to discover a theory that they have have about a relationship in their life (i.e. “He doesn’t do thoughtful things for me”). And then for 11 days, they are going to be led in an experiment of collecting evidence against that theory until they have successfully disproven it.

“11 amazing days” is a highly effective relationship re-programming tool that can be used over and over again to get real, lasting results. It’s not just pie-in-the-sky “think happy thoughts” thing. It actually works. And we’re giving it away for free.

It’s painful because Treacy has spent so much time (and money) creating the concept behind it, testing it out, writing the content, and making effective visuals for it. It’s painful because people would pay to get it, but we’re giving it away for free.

STEP THREE: CREATE A LANDING PAGE

I love this step. Why? Because people are so relieved to know that they can just get started and not wait until they have a full-fledged website. In fact, it’s better not to wait. Since landing pages have only one choice (ideally, to sign up for the list), they are more effective for list-building than a website with lots of things to see and do.

What to include on your landing page

The rule is simple: include whatever information people need to identify themselves as part of this nation, and to know that it was created specifically to meet their needs.

On a landing page, it’s important to make the benefits clear, but we like to stay on the laid-back side of things. If you try too hard, people might get suspicious of your motives.

Still, there are some things the people need to know:

  • What the list is
  • What the list’s benefits are (what they are getting in exchange for their email address)
  • What the free download is, if there is one
  • What the free download’s benefits are
  • A clear entry box and sign-up button

If your stakes are higher (for example, if your census is being conducted to immediately sell a product) or you want to get more effective, you can also include:

  • Proof that people are getting their needs met by being on the list (you can use social share buttons or testimonials or both)
  • Proof of your nation’s credibility (if you’ve been in the New York Times, say so)
  • A sample of what they get in the free download
  • A compelling video (again that word again; people throw it around a lot, but it’s actually RARE to find something that is truly compelling)

Ready to conduct your nation’s census?

We love the census-conducting process because your numbers give you immediate feedback, and the results are easily measurable. And if the success of your nation is in the quality (and quantity) of your list, it’s one of the most important things you can do. Best of all, you can do it while the nation is being built.

To that end, we’ve created a handy census-conducting worksheet to help you get started. Print it out, scribble all over it, and you’ll be on your way to building an effective list.

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So I’m curious. How strong is your list? What has been your experience with conducting an effective census? As usual, I’ll be responding enthusiastically (and with toast!) for the next 24 hours in the comments below.

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Diary of a nation-builder

Hey folks! We’re working on a design upgrade with brand new content (and a few new faces), focused on not only the nations we are building with our clients, but on the concept of nation-building and how you can apply it to your own projects. And also the crazy things we’re doing as we build ours. We hope to be live in 4-6 weeks.

In the meantime, we’re starting a new email-only series called “diary of nation-builder”. In it, Sarah shares the pitfalls and the triumphs of nation-building. See our first email in the series here. If you’re already on our list, you’ll be receiving the first entry shortly. If not, sign up for free right here.

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What we really think about Treacy’s nation

Shocking, I know. Even Julianne’s hot boyfriend and Kenneth’s cats get in on the action.

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Testing the tools of your nation

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been transitioning to a new phase of Treacy’s nation-building project. We’ve explored what this nation is founded on and we’ve agreed on how Treacy would like to lead and contribute. Now we’re placing my giant hat on her head. She’s using us as guinea pigs as she experiments with creating her flagship product. Simultaneously, we’re using the epiphanies she’s having to begin the design process and develop how we’re going to reach the people she wants to serve.

Last week, Treacy brought us all together to talk about her vision for relationships and what she believes needs to happen to change them. It’s a big task, and one of the major challenges is…can we do this? Can we actually change the way people relate to each other? Can we even change how we ourselves relate to the people in our families and our lives? That’s what we’re here to find out.

One of the main tools Treacy is experimenting with for creating this type of change is the concept of a Record of Right (which just happens to be the opposite of a Record of Wrong). It’s that internal dialogue we have with ourselves about the way things are, the way things have been, and the way things will be. That dialogue is especially loud when we’re talking about relationships.

Immediately, the objection I have (and one of my big jobs in all of this is to run my strategic bus-brain over all of our ideas) is that this sounds like so-much positive thinking. Think about the good things, not the bad. Choose to be happy. Choose how you want your relationships to be. But that’s not what this is.

As I’m learning in a study I’m doing on money, there is a rule at work here. What you appreciate appreciates. If you appreciate (focus on) the desirable pieces that are already there, however small they may be at the moment, then those pieces will grow bigger and more desirable. If you focus on what you perceive is lacking, then that lack will grow in proportion to your focus.

In other words, if I focus on the way my husband connects with my son, then that connection is going to grow stronger. If I focus on the way he doesn’t take out the trash when I want him to, then his inattention to my trash-removal needs will tend toward getting worse rather than better.

The trick is, we need a complete reframing of all of this. We don’t need another person telling us to look on the bright side. We need to believe that change is possible, and that we have the tools we need to make that change. If not directly in other people, then in ourselves. And through changing ourselves, we change the world around us.

Things I’m reminding myself as we move forward: don’t compromise on the beliefs that this is rooted in. You’ve already decided that this is the change you want to see happen. If it seems huge, then great. If it seems like the problem is as old as Methuselah, fantastic. Just because the problem is big doesn’t mean that it is unworthy or unsolvable. Just because the current solutions in the world feel trite and weak doesn’t mean that the solutions you discover will be trite and weak. Trust this process. Trust your own experience and intuition and the experience and intuition of the people who have committed their hearts, hands, and brains to this. It will be worth it.

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” – C.S. Lewis

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Treacy speaks!

One of Treacy’s assignments is to start talking about this nation-building process with her mailing list. I love using mailing lists as a sharing ground for works-in-progress. Email is more intimate than a blog post, and it’s a natural setting for stuff that’s more off-the-cuff and vulnerable. Plus, you know that the people you’re talking to are very interested in what you have to say, because they had to go through the sign-up process.

We put up a temporary splash page that will morph as things get more solid. (And for when this is no longer live, the image.)

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We’ve signed the declaration!

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Love Clarity is all you need

Writing a declaration for a nation requires extreme clarity. Not just vague ideas about “We want to help people. We want to make people’s lives better.” But clearly, what problem are you solving? And is that a problem that people are aware of? And how are you going to talk about that problem so that people can understand it, see their place in it, and be motivated to want to get involved?

We’re still in the process of writing and refining Treacy’s declaration. We hit yet another roadblock this week when we realized that we didn’t have a way to explain what we were doing without resorting to overused language.

So I might as well share the background with where our thought process has been going, so that this all makes sense. Here is the progression of how we’ve understood the problem, from the beginning of the month to now:

Treacy is…

  • 01/02/12: a family lifestyle photographer who wants to make a difference beyond her backyard
  • 01/04/12: a photographer who is gifted at bringing out the best in family relationships and capturing real moments on film
  • 01/09/12: a photographer who is concerned about self-image and how that affects relationships
  • 01/18/12: a photographer who wants to fix disconnected family relationships (“family” meaning anyone that we have loyal, intimate relationships with)
  • 01/20/12: a photographer who believes that disconnected family relationships are caused by people keeping an internal “record of wrong” for themselves and for the members of their family
  • 01/27/12: a photographer who believes that the only way to change the disconnectedness of these family relationships is by keeping a record of right; replacing old assumptions about who we are and who other people are with the truth

And so we arrived at the problem. A big, giant, change-the-world problem. A problem worth solving.

Our first idea around this was that people could submit to voluntary brainwashing. Because Julianne and I are a bit rebellious, we loved this idea and really pushed for it. I mean sure, brainwashing has a negative connotation…but if it’s voluntary? I would totally sign up.

But it wasn’t Treacy’s thing. She couldn’t grab a hold of it, because it seemed a little on the negative side. Totally un-Treacy-like.

So then we started thinking about keeping a Record of Right. (And hey…recordofright.com is available! But oh wait…it looks like record o’ fright. Which is an entirely different thing.) But it felt very clinical, and it was hard to get excited about, without the context of “keeping a record of wrong”. Even in that context, it just wasn’t hitting it.

So you can see the challenge. We’ve known what the Great Good essentially is for a few weeks now, but explaining it in a way that isn’t trite or benign has been the struggle. So on Tuesday, Jules, Cali, Treacy, and I were having another brainstorming session.

We put it out there on Twitter…

And then later…

Always count on Kenneth to provide the best responses:

A few of the other, more normal responses:

We almost gave up and decided to go the route of the 50s housewife:

Obviously, we weren’t there yet. But yesterday, it clicked. We had the epiphany we were looking for. (Which reminds me of a joke I need to make up…how many epiphanies does it take to build a nation? I just need a punchline.) And so at this very moment, Treacy’s diligently working on her declaration, and then we’ll all refine it and sign it. And share it with you. Hooray!

(Oh yes, for more about why we’ve structure nation-building the way we have, check this out.)

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"You can choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know."
– William Wilberforce