When I first started my blog I looked up at him as one of those people I wanted to use as a model/reference of what I wanted to become by using the net. He was among the first few to show up on my Sharewood Tidings blogroll and to this day he holds a comfortable slot in it with the following description popping-up when on my home page you hover your mouse on his name:
"The reality director. 360° vision. Radical. Futurist. Interconnected. Involved in designing a better world. Great writer. Great name too."
But today our positions have reversed. Flemming has had a tough and challenging trail to follow in the last year and a half, has relocated half-way across from where he used to live, and has stretched his flexibility and dignity to bring peace of mind to himself and his family by investing his energies in a job that, like most of those out there in the marketplace, enriches someone else while making your creative talent a indistinguishable wheel within a monolithic money making factory.
Nonetheless the above, Flemming has not stopped writing or sharing his thoughts. His Ming.tv newslog has kept running great essays and stories, which range from insightful political commentary to the perception and creation of "realities" around us.
Ando so, it was with major surprise when this morning, as I went through the seventeen articles appearing on his new blog Escape Velocity (without knowing who was the author) I recognized the ideal, perfected model of someone who I would have really wanted to help. As I was reading, it just didn't seem to be true. There I was reading about someone (again I didn't yet the name of the writer as I read those articles), who had much of my same ideals and goals. The author appeared to had finally decided to leverage the Internet not to just fire-off his views and personal ideas, but to actually build a sustainable personal publishing business with the goal of bringing financial independence to himself while fully sharing the lessons learned along this journey with all of his readers.
I recognized myself in him and felt at once a compelling desire to reach out and say: "Hey, I have done a great deal of the research and experimentation you are embarking on and you need not make the same errors and spend the same amount of time to get where I am now.
I am willing to share, synergize, reveal and partner. Your growth is mine and your independence is my reward.
Can I help you?"
And so, as I reached the last of his articles, the first one he had posted not more than two weeks ago in this new blog, I posted a comment to him (and to all of you who are in one way or another like Flemming) offering my sincere help in getting him to become a truly financially independent online publisher.
I don't know how Flemming will react and what will come out of this, but fact is that I am indeed here with the openly declared goal of transforming (supporting and helping) those who want bring about change and personal independence to their lives because they either have:
a) something important to say,
b) a desire to influence and change what they see around them,
by actually showing them the way and the means of doing it.
(Thank you Bala for this inspiration)
Escape Velocity is therefore a positive sign of the times as it represents even more than my own effort, a focused desire to become independent and sustainable online writer by researching and sharing everything that is learned along the way.
This by itself is a major emerging trait of the new content economics taking force on the Internet. It is a force countering, with increasingly tangible results, the apparently untouchable staples of old traditional media interests and business philosophy now camouflaged under new media technologies-enhanced paid content publishing ventures.
I bow to Flemming new blog and if you are on a road paralleling mine, I invite you to follow it close, much closer than the (nonetheless great) Paidcontent.orgs of this world. Escape Velocity may not have the disgrace of being cluttered by an orgy of apparently high-paid ad banners and sponsors but it surely does not track or serve the interest of the big media content companies.
Because it is there again that the transparent, invisible, all-permeating veil of getting people to work for a salary while serving goals and deadlines that have no meaning to those who realize them (outside of getting another big fat check) gets to be perpetrated.
We want new media, but we want to be authors of the new content in it.
Not paid content designed to serve, promote and distribute vested interests agendas and money-making-only agendas. We want Real content. We really want to know what is going on.
And by that we mean content that helps us understand better what is happening in this world, that allows us to become more critical and wise in the choices we make, and that facilitates us to become independent, respected and listened-to voices in the society we are all changing, one post at a time.
"If you shoot up a rocket, the escape velocity represents the energy needed to break free from the Earth's gravitational pull. If you don't have enough, you either fall back down, or you might manage to go into orbit, being captured in forever circling around the planet.
This is an excellent metaphor for what it takes to be successful in business and to achieve personal freedom and independence.
Most people don't really reach escape velocity in their lives. The majority of people are stuck in a job or a financial situation that keeps them forever trying to keep up, and sort of barely managing, at most. But never really succeeding in becoming independent and secure.
And the thing is that it takes an extraordinary amount of energy to break free. You've got to be pointed in the right direction, you need to have worked out a system of getting somewhere, and then, even with the best of ideas, it takes an extraordinary amount of focus and persistence and hard work to break free and make something actually work "on its own", without it instantly dropping to the ground, the moment you look the other way.
You might arrive at a certain amount of comfort by achieving an orbit around a gravitational body. I.e. you might have gotten a good job, and as long as you stay where you are, you keep circling. That's better than falling, of course. But you're not free, and you're not in control. The company might go out of business, or your job might become irrelevant. And you'd fall again.
There are many good activities one can involve oneself in, and which potentially could accomplish good things, and make you successful and independent. But just trying to do them doesn't do it."
(extracted from: Escape Velocity)
Time to do it for real, yes.
Just like Flemming has done.
Reference: Escape Velocity [ Read more ]
