At the end of last year, as I started Dave Atkins Media!, I made a conscious decision to limit my "organizational activities" to avoid being sidetracked into non-productive activity. I spent about 2 hours making a website and elected to operate as a sole proprietorship with an excel spreadsheet as my general ledger. I used Freshbooks online invoicing to track my hours and bill my clients. Then, I landed the contract job at Mass.Gov and dove into that...

I'm going down to Needham Bank this morning to open a business account. Then I will turn in my d/b/a certificate at town hall, apply for an occupancy permit from the building department, apply for a sign permit to go on the front of my office space at 291 Washington Street, then get to work drawing up my articles of incorporation. What's different?

I will provide more details here, but basically, I'm more serious about this now. I have less time to talk about it and more time to do.

And yes...that website needs some work. I know where it needs to go now though...

The first rule of internet business is to find someone else who has done something similar to what you want to do and copy it. That's because success is in the execution, not the idea. Many people have great ideas, but the truly great idea is figuring out how to make it work.

As I think about a resource for creative and innovative living, I look to see what's already out there and how it is working. Guy Kawasaki's Alltop provides a great dashboard into lifestyle-oriented blogs and the Compete.com toolbar quickly shows me an estimate of monthly visitor traffic.

Twitter led me to a surprisingly successful site, The Art of Manliness. I say "surprisingly" because my first reaction was, "this is so NOT me." I'm not worried about proving my "manliness" to anyone. But that's not what the site is about and as I read deeper and found the diverse and thoughtful comments to posts, I realized there was a lot to learn from this site, especially since it draws about 90K visitors/month.

A tweet from @cjshaefer sent me to his post, Are the Suburbs killing your Manhood? Like most of the things on AOM, it was initially provocative, but illustrated deeper themes of living life with integrity and challenge. OK, "manliness." I don't see that as gender-specific. I checked out the relationships and family category expecting to find some caveman thinking, but instead found Quit Coddling Your Kids-- provocative title, common sense advice; and a poll where the majority of respondents felt being a stay-at-home dad was "manly."

Now is this site kind of an online "Men's Health"? Or a male Cosmo? Far from it. It's a clever and thoughtful site that doesn't lecture men on how to live but relates stories from men with strong ideas that then engage the community. The categories of topics are not just an index to "how-to" articles, they provide a thematic framework to ideas that matter, in a less ponderous way than I expounded yesterday. But the site does also include many "how to" items and features so there are multiple ways to engage readers. The weekly poll, constant reminders to subscribe to the newsletter, and above all, an attitude that says, despite the title, this is not a site that takes itself too seriously.

Key takeaways for me:

• don't forget the humor!
• blogs and opinions alone are not enough
• use a variety of fun features to draw people in
• don't take yourself so seriously
• do be controversial and risk offense
• underneath it all, the core ideas still matter and the passion of writers and commentors is still the hook. But it's got to be fun!

Great writing is fueled by passion. It's not just about organizing content and resources so they can be found; I believe the essence of connecting with people is to find the core emotional themes that matter--to identify what makes the content not only relevant and interesting, but necessary from a writer's perspective. We must identify the source of inspiration and honor it in all we write or our writing becomes nothing more than data.

The categories I described a few days ago are based on fundamental values and feelings. What matters is not the assemblage of facts--it has all been done before and anyone who knows how to use Google can probably find it. This is what matters:

• Sustainability - Eating local produce feels right. Spending $20,000 to give a goose chemotherapy feels wrong. These days, sustainability is most often expressed in the context of "green living," but it's based on values of generational responsibility, stewardship and an abhorrence of waste. In positive acts, we commit to live our lives in ways that make the world a better place and set an example for our children. In the negative, while we risk being elitist and judgmental, justice demands we hold those who commit waste accountable.
• Parenting - The hardest part of parenting is not lack of knowledge, experience, or even stamina, but the difficulty of recognizing you are not as great as you thought you were. I love the life we are creating with our kids, but when my 2-year old son is pitching a tantrum...sometimes, we must just accept the moment and pray for time to move past this stage. Privately, we share our feelings of anger and frustration and other parents admit they feel the same but we say to ourselves, "how can I feel this way?" We are ashamed of our anger--even as we do nothing to harm our children, we feel the sin in our hearts and the desperate loneliness of failure and defeat in a moment...but the moment passes...we survive...and we make it through. We forget and move on. I want this site to share honestly in order that other parents may recognize they are not alone, they are not failures or monsters, and help them through the difficult times.
• Community - The most exciting thing for me as I started a town blog and got involved in local projects was the feeling of becoming a participant and a voice that mattered. Not everyone is going to find a "cause" to pursue, but I think we all want to belong. If we are new to town or work away from where we live, it is easy to feel disconnected and not know where to start. How we find our community is part of everyone's life journey. It's not just a checklist of civic activities--it is a part of belonging.
• Active - The key to sustained involvement in an active lifestyle is finding the joy in running, cycling, hiking in nature--whatever works for you. I remain amazed at how listening to a podcast sparked my interest in fixed gear bikes or how, when I was training for my first marathon, I could get up at 4am and run for 2 hours in the darkness. In isolation, the activity means nothing. But finding a passion gives epic feeling to what others see as mere exercise.
• Career - It's not about success. Many are passionate in their careers and some are passionate about their career/professional development. But the thing that drives me is a question of what role my career plays in my life? I am not only in search of a purposeful career; I want to live well. These is no magic choice, no perfect job that will ever allow me to "check off" career as done. Workaholism is failure at life--to believe you can find total personal fulfillment in a career results in perpetual job dissatisfaction.

This essay is mostly an exercise for myself, but it is a stake in the ground as to why I want the site to address these particular categories.

When we need to return to basic principles, to remember why we are writing, the words of William Faulkner echo to us from nearly 60 years ago:

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

I want 5 minutes of your day. As I think about the content behind this resource for creative and innovative living, I realize my blog currently asks a lot from its readers. I'm verbose, and, as a consumer, I would not have the patience to regularly read DaveWrites.

Cool People Care is based on the idea of "5 minutes of caring," giving readers suggestions on small things they can do in their busy lives to make a difference in the world. I'm not out to reproduce that or compete with it. My goal is more ambitious: to make the 5 minutes it takes to check out my site every morning be the thing you choose to do every day. I want to tell a story, highlight an idea, or challenge an assumption that leaves you thinking for the rest of the day or longer. The action is up to you and most of the time, you will simply read. But occasionally, I'll help you think of something new.

To make this work the content needs to retain depth but be more focused. The categories I described yesterday should help narrow the scope. The focus can come from thinking of a little bit different structure than a blog--while the content/articles will remain principally stories/essays/opinion, they could be organized more effectively. I don't see this as a resource compilation though--not just lists of tools, tests, etc., but more a collection of "inspirational" stories.

Innovative, creative living is the theme that connects the eclectic ramblings of this blog. To create a resource with broad appeal, but passionate focus, I've decided to organize around a set of key content categories. Content--whatever media form it takes--e.g. blog posts, articles, podcasts, video shorts, etc.--should be relevant to and help answer questions I believe people like me are asking around these topics:

• Sustainability - How can we favor conservation over consumption? We join CSAs, set up rain barrels and recycle, and look for many little things to do to make the world a better place. We also long to find ways to solve bigger problems like world poverty and are inspired by the example of social entrepreneurs like Muhammad Yunis. But we are not mindless slaves to "green living" faddism. I think there is a long, rich thread to be explored talking about how we can work sustainability--as a form of social justice--into our lives so it is not just a marketing play or big ideas we can only contribute money towards...by telling the stories of many things people are doing, I believe we can inspire others to action.
• Parenting - I feel more practical than most of what I read. When I talk--to other dads, at least--I get the sense that we are all just muddling our way through. Generation X is different--supposedly, we were latchkey kids or something and now we make parenting a bigger priority than our parents did. Not true for me; my mom stayed home until I was 16, but the point is I think most of us are not really interested in reading about Manic Mommies and don't relate to people who are so absorbed in their parenting that after putting the kids to bed, they go blog about it. Nothing wrong with that, but it is a saturated field these days. Here's a less manic mommy blog that does a great job of covering a broader spectrum of experience. But, while I think stories of Equally Shared Parenting and the great comment thread it inspired on Penelope Trunk's blog, are fascinting, I want to hear stories from parents with perspective and ambivalence. Generation X may be rewriting the rules of parenting, but the great stories are not the lists of urgent things to do to make your kid better or heartfelt stories of daily life, they are the honest stories of parents who describe how parenting is a different kind of hard. I have not written that post completely yet; it is a difficult tightrope to walk, because there is a fine line between ambivalence--holding strong, conflicted feelings and opinions on an issue--and uncaring or selfishness. I want this site, this resource to have the guts to go there.
• Community - We want to be a part of where we live but we don't have time. How do we make the time? I've blogged about this here and even created a separate blog, WestwoodBlog, as part of an effort to get involved. Part of the story here involves talking about social media like I've done for facebook, twitter, and wikis. But that's only a start. Most of us are not going to start a town blog or wiki. I've seen my town blog was valuable, but not exactly as I hoped--I have still not achieved the participation level I hoped for like what Brian Keaney did with myDedham.org but I think people in town want to read the blog and found it useful during town meeting. I'm also working to set up our Community Access Television station and perhaps that will "fit" the participation level of more people. But regardless, just getting the information out there is valuable. If this site can tell stories of how creative people are engaging with their communities--with or without technology--it will help us all think of ways to be involved.
• Active - Exercise should be recreation. I think we want to be active, not just as a chore to keep fit but because we love riding bikes, hiking in the woods, running and being outdoors. People ask how I find time to exercise and I don't; I've made it a part of my life. Stories of creative life have to include stories of adventure and active living. We don't need to scale Everest or prove anything, but it is a part of a complete life.
• Career - the bottom line is that we want to live first, work second and we choose careers in an online/connected world that helps us achieve that. Or we start our own businesses. But we are not workaholics anymore. Career is a part of a blended life. This site will leave the advice to the professionals, but tell stories of those who are taking control of their careers to provide for the lives they want to live.

That's my list for now. There are plenty more things that could be on the list...like Art, Entertainment, Technogadgetry, Relationships...but I don't have the passion, expertise, or interest to go deep in those areas yet. If I were truly assessing the market, I would probably be driven there, but I think these topics are enough--they are what's on my mind anyway and I think I'm not alone. The site doesn't have to be comprehensive, it just needs to cover some key areas to fulfill the mission of: Often useful, usually relevant, always interesting.

What next? Enough thoughts for tonight. Perhaps I'll talk about media types tomorrow.

Blog experts say not to post things like "what you do want me to blog about?" because it's gutless and demonstrates you don't have a clue what you're writing about. Well, I'm going to go one step further than that and start a thread here on what could be a business plan for this site.

Thing is, there is nothing new; it's not like my idea here will be so revolutionary that potential competitors will find my blog and steal the idea. I think a more likely outcome is that similar-minded people will find this idea, realize how they could contribute to it, and join me.

I want to create a resource site, a social resource for people who are and want to live creative, innovative lives. The topic is broad, but it is driven by two realizations:

1) The goal--in addition to helping people, being interesting and relevant, and perhaps helping to change the world--is to make money. To make money, I need a site that can attract a significant, well-defined audience. So, while a blog or site about tools for becoming involved in your community might be a good idea, it would have such narrow appeal that it would not be marketable. In order to be successful--in a way that the founders can monetize it--the site must attract and capture a large audience that advertisers want to reach.

2) The quality of the writing is part of the value proposition. Penelope Trunk did a great job of hitting goal #1 above with her startup BrazenCareerist. It's a site that clearly attracts the Generation Y professional--young people starting their careers who blend work and life to achieve their still-idealistic goals. But it is not necessary or even desirable for such a site to be 100% valuable content--bits and bits of factoids and advice nuggets. Part of the value of any media is that is enjoyable to experience.

Consider home improvement television. It is theoretically possible to record a show on how to build a deck, then play it back while you work on your deck. But hardly anyone does that. Most consumers passively watch these shows because they like the people telling the stories. They relate to what those other homeowners are doing in renovating their homes and they watch the show not only to gather ideas, but to live vicariously.

A resource for creative and innovative living must be more than tips and tricks, best practices, etc. You can get stuff like that from Lifehacker or many, many other blogs that cater to a specific interest.

The purpose of the site should not be to have the best tips or information you cannot find elsewhere. That's a very difficult challenge and hard to stay on top of. I think a successful site will present quality in a personal and engaging manner to stimulate good commentary. Often useful, usually relevant, always interesting.

To be continued...