I recently read Gary Vaynerchuk’s book called Crush It, http://crushitbook.com It deals with how to really bust your butt on pulling all the social networking tools together to work for you. By “work for you” he means doing the thing that you’re passionate about.
The idea being - you have to be passionate about what you do or else it won’t be authentic, honest, true and if you are doing something that you are truly passionate about, it won’t feel like work. Which increases your chances of continuing and not giving up.
Well, I had to think for a while about what my true passion is. It wasn’t easy because I like to do, and have had good success at a lot of different things.
I am a public speaker. I speak on ethics, fraud and my experience in prison for being involved in a few sleazy real estate deals back in the 1990’s. I like speaking because I get a chance to connect with people, help them see a what their careers and lives could be like if they make the wrong decisions. And I also like to make them laugh. You’d be surprised at the comedy that just writes itself when you’re behind bars. My speaking web site is at www.fraudcon.com
And, lets face it, I am always starving for attention - always have been and I probably always will be. As such, I am a performer. I love being in front of people; connecting.
I am a musician. I’ve been a singer, a songwriter and a pianist for most of my life (I’m 42 now). I’ve written about 60 songs. I’ve recorded about half of them - half of the recorded songs are decent quality recordings, half of the songs that are of decent quality are recorded professionally. You can listen to them here on CD Baby http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/jeromemayne More on my old MySpace page http://www.myspace.com/jeromemaynemusic You can also find some of my songs on iTunes.
I like the law. My first career in life was as a litigation paralegal. I truly loved that job and the challenges one faces while putting together one side of a case. Trying to work one set of facts into the “book of laws” is cool. Then of course years later I got to trouble and trembled my way through a pre-trial and an eventual guilty plea. Not fun, but fascinating - and I was truly a big help to my attorney.
In addition to these passions, I really dig putting together business ideas. I’ve got one at www.generationethix.com. It will be the ethics movement for youth in America. The ideas I have for this are incredible! It will take a lot of work and a lot of people to make this project come together to be what I envision. So, we’ll see how that goes.
So why Tumblr? Why today and why criminals.fraudcon.com?
This will be my blog, maybe even a video blog, about criminals. I want to talk to and write about criminals I think are interesting. I may even follow their progress from the time they get arrested to the time they get released - maybe even follow their progress once they get back out into society.
How could this be my passion? Well, it incorporates a few of the things I am passionate about. 1) If I can pull this off as a video blog, it will allow me to perform (there’s me getting attention - front and center). 2) I have a pretty good understanding of the legal system and laws and such. While interviewing criminals about what they did, what they are going through and how they feel, I can exercise my legal, analytical mind, and give you my opinion. I was one of them once. I’ll definitely have a unique perspective and strong opinions.
I probably won’t be able to incorporate much music into this endeavor unless I write into and outro music to the video taped interviews. That’s not my musical style so, I guess I’ll have to leave that passion out for now.
At this time, I am still assembling the pieces of what I need. I have my Twitter account (www.twitter.com/fraudcon) I have a blog at www.fraud4thought.blogspot.com. I’ll probably incorporate that into this site or keep it going on it’s own. I have a personal Facebook page but am trying to set up a Fraudcon fan page - it’s quite complicated. I now have a Tumblr account though I haven’t set up the subdomain from my primary fraudcon.com. The sub “criminal” is still pending from my host GoDaddy. I’ll point GoDaddy at this Tumblr IP address as soon as it stops pending over there. I still have a few other components to put in place.
So that’s the start - this is the start. I’ll keep you posted on the progress. Hopefully we’ll have our first criminal interview within a few weeks. Oh, and make sure you share this with your friends.
November 12, 2009, 1:33pm Comments
