Last year I had a conversation with Christy Marx, creator of the great — and, I cannot resist, “truly outrageous” — cartoon Jem. She told me what would come to be one of my working philosophies.
She said, “I have a pretty firm rule that life is too short to work with [jerks], so I avoided them as much as possible.”
Time is too short to wait to become something better. And when it comes to avoiding jerks, you have to — to lift the King of Pop’s righteous cliche — start with the man in the mirror.
These are the foundations upon which my partners and I built have built our business company. Broadly, outside the work that we do, we work hard to not be jerks. Specifically, we are devoted to putting our employees and community first, paying creatives well for their labor and expertise, prioritizing use of our channels and resources for giving voice to marginalized communities and sharing space for enriching challenging dialogue.
As far as we are concerned, honoring these values in a variety of different ways is as important to — as they are, in part, responsible for — our bottom lines.
Community has always been something that has driven me, and that started back with music, really — and punk rock, specifically. In a recent conversation between Chris Gethard and Mark Maron, Gethard recalled a time when he was at a hardcore show as a teenager, and he was really bummed out and wearing it on his face. The singer of the band approached him — those shows were always so small, and there was little hierarchy between the musicians and the audience because the audience made the musicians’ jobs possible. That stuck out for him, he said, and he tries to incorporate that into everything he does.
The same goes for me. I remember traveling with my friend Nathaniel Whittemore, who for the past 10 years has been at the forefront of what’s going on in entrepreneurship and startups. He wanted to start a conference rooted in that approach — we both were punk kids — where there wasn’t really a clear line between the audience and those with the coveted wisdom. He started Global Engagement Summit out in Chicago based on that model, back before social media had really decentralized these power dynamics, and as radical as it felt then, it’s a norm today.
It’s one I see utilized even locally, here at Maine Startup and Create Week. We are inseparable from our communities because they make us possible.
Which brings us to addressing what, exactly, it means to be a jerk and how we can change ourselves so we don’t attract them or exist in environments that elevate or celebrate them. And I think the most fundamental piece of doing so is to, in the spirit of that punk approach, always honor, respect and give back to your community however you are privileged to be able to do so.
Give the maximum, not just barely enough to get by. And you probably won’t become the next unicorn by doing so, but you’ll find yourself surrounded by some greatness.
In a marketplace, you’re never the only person performing your service, manufacturing your widget or creating that invention. You can, though, be the one who returns the greatest value to your community. The one who is not a jerk.
It is easiest to do business when people are rooting for you, and people root for you when you prioritize doing what’s right rather than treating it like an afterthought. People want to support good people doing good work.
They want to invest in organizations that don’t just pay lip service to doing the right thing for that marketing bump. In addition to good service and a great product, isn’t this what we all want? To not feel terrible for buying what we need? Maybe even to feel proud to support something good? Why not strive to be that company?
I offer this all at the risk of sounding self aggrandizing or falsely proud, but I’m just here to share that I feel like I struck a jackpot for which I hadn’t known I was in the running. To share that I’m glad we stopped waiting. To remind that you’re going to die, and we always end up having less time than we’d expected. I challenge you — especially if you are privileged enough to start your own endeavor — to join us by investing in your community with the same fervor that we fetishize the virtues of profit and consumption.
Alex Steed has written about and engaged in politics since he was a teenager. He’s an owner-partner of a Portland-based content production company and lives with his family, dogs and garden in Cornish.
