Posts Tagged ‘culture’
11
Mar
2010
Hard-Wiring Happiness
Why success and failure are exactly the same, or how process supersedes perfection.
We’ve talked a lot about the origins of happiness and the various ways people go about pursuing it. And while all these lofty concepts and creative approaches have their place, it’s in the sore absence of happiness that we fully realize the importance of specific, powerful tools and steps to bringing all the theoretical stuff to life.
In this excellent talk at Columbia University, Srikumar Rao (of Are You Ready To Succeed? fame) offers precisely the kind of cognitive toolkit to combat our ingrained preoccupation with success/fail outcomes standing between us and our own happiness.
You have spent your entire life learning to be unhappy. And the way we learn to be unhappy is by buying into a particular mental models. [...] The problem isn’t that we have mental models, the problem is that we don’t know we have mental models, we think that’s the way the world works.
Rao’s points about absolutism as the deadliest poison of emotional well-being poke brilliant holes in the very fabric of Western culture and its obsession with control, which yields only frustration and failed expectation.
We live in a world where what we think of, what we invest in, is the outcome. There is an alternative. You invest in the process.
Rao’s thinking reminds us of the slightly more life-coachish approach by Gay Hendricks in The Big Leap, a similar effort to dispell all the myths we keep perpetuating as we stand in the way of our own success and continue looking for happiness outside of ourselves.
Passion exists in you, not in the job.
Amen.
Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
10
Mar
2010
Crowdfunding for Creativity
Success via strangers, or what Transylvania has to do with an 8-bit tribute to Miles Davis.
One of the most exciting things about the social web is its tendency to democratize the creative industry, allowing creators — artists, musicians, publishers, filmmakers, writers, entrepreneurs — to bypass the traditional industry distribution model and self-publish their creative output by crowdfunding it through platforms that connect them with their audience. Today, we look at three brilliant platforms for funding creative projects, plus a few more options specific to narrower creative fields.
KICKSTARTER
We’ve already featured Kickstarter extensively, but suffice it to say this brilliantly simple yet remarkably slick platform makes it as easy for creators to bring their visions to life by collecting pledges — promised donation amounts — from supporters. Creators set a donation period for each project posted for funding, then people begin pledging money, committing to donate the promised amount if the project reaches or exceeds its funding goal before time expires. If it doesn’t, no money is collected at all and the pledges simply don’t materialize. If the project does get funded, Kickstarter only takes a 5% fee* and project owners keep 100% of creative ownership.
Kickstarter has funded anything from the brilliant 8-bit map of NYC, which we raved about on Twitter, to the The Obama Timecapsule project, which we featured in our curated gift guide to books last year, to a grassroots effort to save 10,000 Polyvinyl records from destruction, a project that resonated so much with the community that it was overfunded by 1563%, raising over $15,000 after an initial goal of just $1,000.
The only drawback: Kickstarter, still in Beta, is currently invite-only and requires a US bank account and mailing address. But we suspect the platform will open up significantly as it reaches Alpha.
ROCKETHUB
While we don’t generally support replica projects — which RocketHub seems to be of Kickstarter — this relative newcomer in grassroots crowdfunding does have a couple of advantages. Projects aren’t limited to the US — so long as you have a verified PayPal account, you can live anywhere and fuel your project with RocketHub. The platform is also open to anyone, no invitation needed.
But this extra liberty comes at a price — at 8%, RocketHub’s fee is significantly higher than Kickstarter’s, partly due to PayPal fees, which account for 3.5%.*
*Correction: Kickstarter charges a flat fee of 5%, but also passes along the Amazon Payments transactional fees (3%-5%) to the artists who use the platform, for a total fee anywhere between 8% and 10%. RocketHub charges a flat total fee of 8%. We apologize for the mix-up.
INDIE GOGO
Though limited to film only, IndieGoGo offers a promising platform for filmmakers, animators and web video entrepreneurs to fund their projects. The online social marketplace connect filmmakers and fans to make more independed film happen, giving filmmakers the necessary tools to make the elevator pitch for their porjects and allowing fans to contridubute directly to the films and causes they believe in.
IndieGogo is free to sign up and open to anyone. Unlike on Kickstarter, projects don’t have an expiration date and funding is ongoing until the goal is reached.
One of IndieGogo’s winning points is that it’s not US-only — it’s available in 90 countries and counting. And though it’s designed for film, anyone can use it — musicians, app developers, miscellaneous entrepreneurs.
The downside: It takes a 9% fee, almost double that of Kickstarter.
BONUS
Here are a few more options for funding projects in specific creative disciplines:
- Society6 matches visual artists — designers, painters, illustrators, photographers — with grant-givers. We interviewed founder Justin Wills about the platform last year, and have been delighted to see it blossom into something quite substantial.
- SellABand allows fans to microfund the recording and distribution of their favorite artists’ albums.
- Kopernik, which we featured last week, offers a microfunding platform for product design with a humanitarian focus.
- Spot.Us is a nonprofit experiment in communitiy-funded journalism, where freelance journalists can pitch story ideas and readers can pitch in money to bring them to life.
- Authonomy is an effort from publisher Harper Collins, using the wisdom of the crowd to spot — and sign — the next big bestseller.
- BuskerLabel, another crowdfunding venue for musicians.
- microPledge helps developers fund software projects.
- DonorsChoose offers microfunding for public schools by matching donors with specific classroom needs.
Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
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