I have chosen the project I’m going to work on next.  It is: IT IS.

In between work at Baynote being super busy lately, visits with my daughters, and moving out of my apartment in Cupertino and into Brother Dale’s house in San Jose, I’m also been doing a lot of contemplating about my situation, my future and the future of my daughters.

The question I’ve been mulling over is which of my projects featured in Project: Overnight Success should I focus my attention on.

A few weeks ago I made some good progress on WaveCenter and my thinking was that I would move forward with WaveCenter is my first project.  My thinking was that WaveCenter is the collaboration platform that will enable the development of my other various projects.  I would enlist help from wherever I could get it, probably oDesk, to get WaveCenter functional as a collaboration platform, and then dock my other projects on one-by-one, starting with Enormal, the most commercially oriented project, followed by Strands, which has the potential to be huge, and then top it all off with IT IS–the most sophisticated yet esoteric of all my projects.

But two things have cause me to change my mind.

First, it occurred to me that I’m repeating the same old pattern that has failed me again and again.  I’m always trying to establish some kind of platform beneath me so I’ll have some kind of freedom to do my higher callings.  I’ve been trying to build a business foundation to provide cash flow and to build my reputation.  That was the plan for Everybody’s Delivery back in the 80s.  That was the plan with MentorNet.  That was really the plan for Project: Overnight Success.  I’m always trying to build some up from ground up, starting with the grass roots and building that base from which to launch the next project.  And it has never worked.

I have no platform.  I have no support.  And at this stage, the thought of trying to build a platform just makes me tired.

But the second reasons I’ve decided to change my approach to life is that I’m feeling incredibly inspired about IT IS right now.  It just seems that everything I see and experience today is reinforcing my belief that the IT IS philosophy is exactly what the world needs right now.

And the more I think about it, the more all the pieces are falling into place.  I’m realizing like I never did before that IT IS is a truly complete and profound philosophy that can really help people achieve the joy and piece of mind that they desire.

I’ve also realized that one of the key reasons I’ve hesitated to pour myself into the IT IS philosophy is because I felt like if I wasn’t living my ideal life, how can I make any claim that the IT IS philosophy is worth anything?  I mean, if I can’t make it work for me, how can I suggest it will work for anybody else.  I’ve come to understand a couple key things about that lately, too.

Although the external circumstances of my life aren’t even close to my idea life, I find that I am generally in pretty good spirits–optimistic for the future and engaged with life.  I’m happy.  To remain in high spirits in spite of the chronic condition of living within the confines of a restricted life–that is a great accomplishment indeed.  And I’ve decided to give myself credit for that.

The other point that occurred to me is that I never have really developed the IT IS philosophy.  For the last 20 years it has just been a mosaic of free-floating concepts in my mind.  What if I developed the IT IS philosophy, applied it to my life, and then actually achieved my ideal lifestyle?  Now that would be a great first testimonial!

So that’s the plan now.  I’m going to develop the IT IS philosophy into a complete program including tools and exercises, all laid out in a clear and entertaining way.  I’ve got lots of ideas for promoting it, but I’ll just put it out there and see if people catch on.  I am absolutely certain that a lot of people are going to look at it and instantly realize that they are learning something that is truly profound.

And nothing but good can come of that.

To learn more about the IT IS Philosophy, visit http://www.projectovernightsuccess.com/it-is

It’s been a month since my last post, and felt it was time to check in.  Not that I’m expecting anybody to see this.  My site gets an average of one to two visitors a day, and that has to be just random noise.  Hard to imagine a site that’s been online since 1996 getting any less traffic.

Anyway, I’ve been laying low for the last month or so.  Doing a lot of reflecting.  Trying to gain some perspective.  I read “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl a couple weeks back.  There’s a book that will put things in perspective for ya.

I’m not fooling myself.  I took a pretty severe psychological beating recently, and I’m feeling it.  My inspiration is depleted and I find it difficult to focus.

I know.  I know.  What’s new?  A lack of focus is apparently my thing.

But what if I’m just focused on something bigger?   It seems to me that my perspective is zoomed way out from where most people are focused and where they expect me to focus.  So things that I see with crystal clarity seem blurry and random to others.  It’s as if I am operating on a very different plane than most people.

I don’t mean to sound self-important.  I didn’t say that these were parallel planes and that I am on a higher plane.  I really mean that my particular plane is askew from the norm so that I have a somewhat narrow overlap with most people I encounter.   I’ve always kind of known that about myself.  I’m a wild card.  An oddball.

Not that I’m completely lacking social skills.  In fact, I have mastered the fine art of gliding along through life so I rarely absorb negative energy from other people, and the people I engage with in my day to day life probably see me as quite normal and even a very nice guy.   And I am normal.  But I also know I have a lot of ideas that many people would think are pretty far out.  I think that has hindered me in the past.

Anyway, I’m just trying to take a very objective view of myself and my life and make the right decisions about how to move forward accordingly.

Anyway, speaking of focus, outside of Baynote and my daughters, my focus has now shifted to a project I’m working on with my old friend Brian Chew and Roy Lin to develop a real estate investment business opportunity program.  Roy is very serious about it and raising some money.  I’m off to a good start on building a platform based on Joomla.  It actually seems like a really cool project, and who knows, maybe this is the one that will finally take off and help move on to the next project.

Because WaveCenter, eNormal, Strands, IT IS and a bunch of other ideas are all clamoring for their turn.

I’m feeling 100% better than I was a week ago. Thanks for asking. At that point I was still coming to grips with the realization that pretty much no one in the world has any interest in any of my projects. My mind was reeling from the idea that not only did people showed no interest in any of my ideas, no one even noticed that I committed public hari kari. It’s not an easy thing to come to terms with.

But then I spent the weekend with my daughters and that really helped me regain my perspective. There’s nothing like hanging out with two happy little girls to lift your spirits. And Sofia created a special gift that just brought tears of joy to my eyes.

As far as Sofia and Sasha are concerned, I’m the Best Dad Ever. And as long as I’m their Daddy, the rest doesn’t really matter. Anything that happens on top of that is just gravy.

But I do want to see more happen. Being a father is enough, but I believe that if I don’t do more with the gifts I’ve been given, I will somehow be letting down my Creator. So I will continue to work on willing these ideas into reality.

I don’t have it all figured out, but I sure do have a lot of it. The key thing I haven’t figured out yet is how to get a steady foundation of assets and income with plenty of free time to work on my passion projects. I’ve managed to generate enough of an income to keep me afloat, but I have to give up 40-50 of my best hours every week for that. How can I get myself into a situation where I am at least fully supported and yet can apply those 50 hours to my own projects?

I’m working on that. Meanwhile, I’ll just continue to squeeze in what I can on my passion projects.

I’m psyched about WaveCenter. I’m sure that Atlassian Confluence is the right platform to build that on. Their $10/10 seats is perfect. I’ll develop a fully-loaded version of the application, wrap it in all kinds of resources and support, complete social integration, and a game-layer to really make it stand out from the crowd. We can focus on the concept of forming your Mastermind Group so you can achieve financial freedom. Slap that beautiful WaveCenter brand on the concept, and I think we’re talking about a real business.

I am seriously thinking about IT IS now, too. That will be the featured idea for Webisode 7, and I would love to at least capture some video this spring. But I don’t know he realistic that is.

I long to work on Strands, but it’s hard to imagine having time to do that. Still, we’ll see.

And then there’s eNormal. I know it’s a winner. It will kill me if somebody else does that one and strikes it rich because I couldn’t get anyone to support me on it.

So I’m definitely feeling that perennial prodding to take action and make something happen. But I’m just trying to relax and get into the right frame of mind.

Either way, stay tuned. I’m not finished yet.

My sixth day in limbo. Feels pretty weird. Six days since the bottom dropped out on my life on my Big 5-0. That’s the day I realized that my experiment in social networking had backfired and turned into a test of how much psychological pressure one man can take. As that strange day unfolded my understanding of what I had done became more and more clear.

I had confronted my most primal fear–that no one is interested in what I have to say–by intentionally putting myself in a position to have society demonstrate that indeed, no one is. Of course, I didn’t fully comprehend what I was doing at first. I understood the risk, but I never imagined that the result could be this extreme. Only a handful of the people in my social network even bothered to watch Webisode 6 – “Happy Birthday Dane”. Of those, there were just a few courtesy Likes.

A few people have come out of the woodwork to correspond with me and lend some morale support. (Thanks especially to Sandy Murphey and Ed Alberts for your advice).

But otherwise, all communication with the outside world has stopped. There are no emails or calls from family or friends. At work, nobody talks to me unless we have to for a project. Only my daughters are happy to see me. And that makes up for a lot. But it does hurt to know that nobody out there even realizes what I’m going through, or if they do, cares enough to reach out to me.

So here I am, floating in limbo. Waiting for my head to stop spinning so I can regain my balance and carry on. Waiting for something to change in my world so I can start moving forward again. But I’m tired of trying. It doesn’t seem to work. Something is going to have to change, or who knows I’ll be stuck in limbo.

Everything seems to be happening in slow motion. I’m observing as my life spins into a curve so sharp and so long that I can’t see what’s on the other side. I’m trying to wrap my head around the reality. I just completely bombed out on this biggest project of my life. Stood up on a platform and said “look at me!” and did a great big swan dive right into a shallow pool. And now I’m not sure whether I don’t hear from anyone because they feel awkward about it, or whether people just don’t even register that I’m in a psychological free fall.

I don’t mean to over-dramatize. I’ll be fine. I’m resilient.

But I am very aware of the absurdity of my situation. Four months ago I set out on a plan that I had been contemplating for at least a year before that and preparing for all my life. I was going to attempt to achieve overnight success on a specific day and in an organized way–like a mission. I developed a very elaborate plan to accomplish the goal. I invested everything I could possibly muster, and I had a strong reason to succeed. I truly believe I have some wonderful gifts to share with the world and that’s what this project is really all about.

But back to the absurdity.

Despite all my planning and effort and the great contributions from a super group of collaborators, the project failed miserably. The feedback was clear. For the most part, nobody bothered even to watch. Of the few that did, a small fraction clicked like or commented. There’s no other way to see it. The metrics don’t lie.

And now it seems like all communications between me and the outside world have stopped. My phone isn’t ringing. My email has slowed to a crawl. All I see now are the automated robomails and a few requests for web work from clients who have no idea what’s going on with me. Nobody skyping me either. chats. texts. nothing.

And I don’t know which thought blows my mind more–that the few people who are aware of my situation must see me as a pathetic person, or that so few people even realize or care what I just did.

In this psychological experiment, I confronted my deepest fear–that I have very little impact on the world. And I found that my fears were accurate. I do have little impact on the people or world around me. The metrics don’t lie.

So there it is. That is my reality. There’s no point in denying it or shying away from it. In addition to already being effectively powerless in this world, I have now humiliated myself by embarking on what must appear to be a quixotic adventure in self-promotion that demonstrated for anyone who cared to see just how powerless and non-influential I really am.

Think about it. How would you feel if you were in my position? Of course, you would never in a million years let yourself get into my position, but just imagine if you did. What would you do?

Here’s what I’m going to do:

First, I’m going to take a little time to recover. Project: Overnight Success didn’t kill me, but it sure did hurt. So I’m going to spend a little time getting back on top of my job, taking care of finances and other facts of life, re-energizing with my daughters.

But along the way I’ll start to develop on the Projects. I’ve got WaveCenter set up on Confluence. And I’ll start recruiting my team–my mastermind group. There’s no deadline this time, just regularly plugging away at any of the various projects I’m interested in.

I’ll probably focus on eNormal to start. But I’m really tempted to start trying to build a virtual production team to develop Strands. Anyway, musn’t get ahead of myself.

From now on, it’s slow and steady. And if that wins the race, great! If not, then at least I’ll be able to hold my head up and say I tried.

And I really do think it will all come out in the end. I believe the Strands series could be viewed by millions–maybe even billions of people. I believe enormal can become a hit and attract millions of members. I think IT IS could become a great multimedia self-help collection that they give as gifts on PBS. I still believe all that is possible. And Project: Overnight Success just captured my first step.

I am in a very strange place right now. Here is the situation. I’ve spent the last four months putting in all my spare time and several thousand dollars to produce a webisode series based on my life and my ideas for the purpose attracting people to collaborate with me on projects. I set the date 2/24/12 as the big finale date for the series, as that was my 50th birthday. It seemed like a great target to shoot for to add more drama to the story. In fact, I wove that right into the storyline.

But I wasn’t too far into the webisode series when I saw it was going off track. People just didn’t get it. It started early and the feedback persisted with each webisode I released–”But what is it all about? What’s your point?” Actually there were only a few people who said that. Most people didn’t say anything at all. The handful of people who did come to watch the webisodes just took a glance and then quickly moved on. I could tell almost from the start that my webisodes were having no impact at all.

I actually hit the crisis point about half way through the project, when I was awaiting the release of Webisode 3 expecting it to be really poor production quality. I knew it was a disaster in the making then, and I told my brother Dale that the only thing more humiliating with carrying on with the project was quitting. So I soldiered on.

Each Webisode did include some small triumph. Webisode 3 made up for the audio problems by including a cute story that developed the story line. We came up with that one on the fly at the studio. I thought the acting in Webisode 4 was pretty solid. Tamara Gurbis did an awesome job in that one. For Webisode 5 I pulled the Social Media Virtual Roundtable together within a few days. And it turned out really great. And as for Webisode 6, well, I think it actually turned out pretty great after I made a desperate midnight run to Eddie Granillo’s to shoot the extra shots that turned it from a tragedy into a comedy.

So all in all, I’m pretty proud of what I produced with the meager resources and time I had to work with. And if nobody else gets it, well, that’s their loss.

But that doesn’t change the absurdity of my situation. I have utterly failed at my stated goal of “getting famous” on my 50th birthday. And I not only didn’t get famous, but I am astoundingly unfamous. Almost nobody Liked my most recent post on Facebook. I got just a couple sympathy comments. But the only consolation to having completely humiliated myself is that hardly anybody noticed it happened. I had a complete public meltdown on my 50th birthday–went down in flames. And nobody even noticed.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t me whining and crying and being melodramatic. Those are just the cold hard facts. Facebook, Gmail, and Google Analytics, tell the story very accurately. I am a Ghost.

Hello World,

I think that at this moment I’ve got a pretty unique perspective on life, and I believe one worth telling about out. So as usual, I’m going to just dive right in.

It’s two days since my 50th birthday–a cataclysm for me on a personal level. Just another day to everybody else.

And the surrealism is starting to sink in. You see, my 50th Birthday was what it all came down to. Five decades of collected thoughts. Two years of contemplating about how to present them to the world. Six months of planning and production. More hours than I can remember poured into trying to present what I have to offer. That was the target date that I thought I’d have the best chance of catching somebody’s attention and somehow lighting a flame that catches and grows.

Instead, there have been 30 or so views on YouTube. 20 visitors a day to the site according to Google Analytics. Four likes and one comment on FB. If ever there was a more appropriate place for background crickets, I haven’t seen it.

The only consolation for the fact that I poured my heart and soul out to the world and got virtually no reaction, utterly humiliating myself in the process, is that hardly anyone noticed that it happened. So maybe there’s not that much to be embarrassed about.

But if I’m having a total midlife meltdown and basically dramatizing the whole thing in nearly real-time, wouldn’t you think somebody would notice?

I mean, you don’t see that every day, do you? How many times have you seen someone go to all the trouble to produce a webisode series about themselves leading up to a very specific moment–their 50th birthday? Especially when that person is some idealistic anachronism going on about all these great ideas he’s got. I mean, you don’t see that every day, do you?

Doesn’t this seem like the opening to a psychodrama where the guy then get’s a gun and holds himself hostage until somebody pays attention to him. He goes to some hidden location, goes on a live cam, holds a gun up to his head, and then threatens to pull the trigger unless somebody comments on his blog.

PLEASE NOTE:
I AM NOT THREATENING TO ACTUALLY DO THIS. I WOULD NEVER DO THAT.
IN FACT, IF I ACTUALLY DO TURN UP DEAD TOMORROW I DECLARE RIGHT NOW
THAT THERE IS LIKELY FOUL PLAY INVOLVED.
PERHAPS SOME CONSPIRACY TO SILENCE ME BEFORE MY IDEAS TAKE ROOT
AND UPSET THE STATUS QUO

Anyway, back to the surrealism. What makes my situation doubly strange is that the very psychological defect I identified in the backstory montage of Webisode 6 – “Happy Birthday, Dane!”–this feeling that nobody cared or was interested in anything I had to say, is exactly the reality I am confronting in my life today.

The ironies abound.

You’ve heard the saying “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.” It’s kind of like that. Just because you feel like everybody is ignoring you, doesn’t mean they aren’t.

I don’t blame others. What I’m doing is obviously both unusual and multi-faceted. I’m trying to distill 50 years of unconventional thought down into soundbites the public is willing to absorb at a time. It’s not easy.

Knowing that doesn’t ease the sting though. I am definitely feeling the melancholy of realizing just how little impact I do have on the world around me.

And yet, you’ll be happy to know that I am actually feeling oddly sanguine, maybe even joyful about the way the story is unfolding. It is clear to me now that I needed to go through this public humiliation for some reason. Perhaps I’m atoning for past sins. For whatever reason, it seems I needed to be humbled.

And so I am.

I admit that I can’t do it alone. By myself, I am as insignificant as a wisp of air. Only through the combined strength of others will I ever be able to have any kind of impact on our world.

I’ve known this for a long time, yet it seems I always find myself striving alone on something that matters only to me. That’s what I’m trying to change in my life. That’s really what my journey is all about.

And the other reason my hopes aren’t dimmed is because I still believe I have some knowledge of substance to offer the world and that sooner or later people are going to recognize it, appreciate it, and really enjoy it.

I still have this sense that I’m keeping a secret hidden within the contents of my mind over the last 50 years. It is complex and multi-faceted and really quite amazing. Most people hear that I’m looking for collaborators and they assume that my ideas are as generic as everybody else’s who think they have great ideas. But they don’t see the totality of my thoughts and plans, let alone comprehend how it all fits together.

But I do. So who should I believe? All the people who have a tiny fraction of the information and a lifetime of preconceptions? Or the only person who understands every facet of every aspect of the subject and the only person with any skin in the game?

I’m going to believe in me. If I don’t, who else will?

And I’m going to keep moving forward, with purpose.

Please stay tuned for updates.

And of course, the BIG FINALE Webisode 7! (and the cheers erupt!)

Dane

Project: Overnight Success – Webisode 1 – “The Vision” from Dane Christensen on Vimeo.

I’m getting really excited about the release of Webisode 1! We are wrapping up the editing now and should be releasing on Wednesday, 1/17. We’re a half week behind our release schedule, but I think we can make that up.

Meanwhile, we’ve been working away at the multimedia pieces for Webisode 2 and I think it is going to be really great! I think people will start to get what the project is about after they see these two webisodes.

Stay Tuned!

Well, looks like the release of Project: Overnight Success – Webisode 1 will be delayed a few more days. We discovered a problem in the shots in the final editing phase, and we just can’t edit around it. So now we’re looking at early next week. Oh, well. I’m not that upset. It’s not like people are out there anticipating the launch or anything. It’s kinda nice not to have the pressure.

So we’ll launch Webisode 1 early next week and Webisode 2 next weekend. It’ll be great!