The American Dream is dead. Or at least, the iteration of the dream that pundits, politicians, and media personalities keep bemoaning, that's dead. Jefferson's dream of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" isn't dead, but most people are too interested in assigning blame for our current troubles to actually understand that. Yes, of course, the blame game has such a narcotic effect on us silly primates, so go ahead if it makes you feel better.

So in backward chronological order, let's go: Obama's deficit spending has brought us to our knees. Bush's tax cuts in the midst of two wars has ruined our future. Clinton's libido kept him from seeing the the looming Al-Quada threat and 9/11.  Reagan wrote blank checks to strangle the Soviet Empire, and now they're all bouncing. Carter couldn't combat stagflation. Nixon took us off the gold standard. And blah dee blah blah blah.

Stop, please stop. The "global economy ate my homework" is getting old. "Terrorism makes for uncertain times" is also old, times have always been uncertain, even before we knew how to tell time.

This ain't about Republicans and Democrats. It's about massive shifts in the global economy, as fundamental as the Industrial Revolution, and about as unstoppable. It's no one's fault that you can't walk out of your high school graduation hall and get a job for 30 years as a union welder. That world is gone. So too is the world that allowed a family to own a nice home, take annual vacations, and send kids to college on one salary. So is the gold watch and the pension. So get over it.

What else is about to go away? The 9 to 5 hustle, get in to the office, see 20 tasks waiting for you in your inbox, the water cooler talk about last night's game, birthday lunches, afternoons filled with sleep-inducing meetings, then the rush hour grind back to home and hearth. Maybe not all gone, but certainly those of you who experience that life as full-time employees with benefits, that's certainly going to be yesterday's dream, just like gold watches and pensions.

For the rest of us, it's contractor land. Freelancer world. Consultantville, where we earn our stripes and badges without benefits or guaranteed salary. In 10 years at this game, I can tell you that the only guarantee is a lack of guarantees. Yes, that's right, as I write this, I'm 3 months shy of a decade's worth of self-unemployment. That's what I call it, because it's not really employment, not in the 1950s Mad Men sense of it. My father and uncles certainly wouldn't see what I do as work, but I've paid off a mortgage and taken a few trips and enjoyed a life that is pretty much mine to schedule.

Yes, yes, I'll often work well into the night, or pull a couple all-nighters in a row. And I haven't had a weekend off in about 3 months. But if I want to go see a movie at 2pm on a Friday and there's nobody burning down the office, I'll go. If I want to go for a run or a swim at 10am, I'll do it. After ten years of that, the idea that I would somehow start working at 9am (after a stressful rush hour commute) and then somehow stop working at 5pm is laughable.

Cool, right? Sounds marvelous. Of course, there's a flip side to all this. There always is. If you're not billing, you're screwed in as little as 30 days depending on your savings. If you're not out there scouting for work, you'll be screwed 90 days down the road. So you need skills, the kind of skills that no one ever told you about in high school, college, grad school, or through most of your years chained to that inbox.

I understand. Your whole life and career have been fashioned by Industrial Age metaphors and thought processes, and here we are in the new age, the Information Age (if you ask Toffler, others call it something else). It's a weird new age and even the crusty old corporations are having trouble adapting. There goes the mighty Borders book store chain, sinking beneath the waves, and yet Amazon.com is surviving and thriving. A decade ago, all the smarty pants were snickering at Amazon's inability to create a profit, but who's laughing now, eh? 

Ten years ago, when I first started out, lots of companies were still spending a million dollars on a dynamic web presence. They would go out and buy a big ass server, and a big ass database to house big ass data, and they'd hire a team of 20 or 30 guys to work for six months for a half million to build a web site that would take orders or some such. Nowadays most of that stuff can be done with a $100 a year Dreamhost account, a copy of WordPress, a $200 license of an ecommerce package, and two guys working for 3-4 weeks using a professional theme.

Ten years ago, companies everywhere were dumping huge amounts of money into broadcast and print ads, because that was the way to go. The rebels and rogues were using direct mail or email marketing. Now even email marketing seems quaint as we move deeper into the social era.

Things change, and the strongest adapt. This is what you need to survive:

1. Networking Skills: You must build strong relationships. A network of trust, if you will. The future belongs to those who can connect deeply and meaningfully with people. It doesn't need to be a LOT of people, but that doesn't hurt either. As a freelancer, consultant, contractor or whatever you want to call it, 99% of your business will come from people who know, like, and trust you. And 99% of the people you rely on to help you get the job done will meet those same criteria for you (but more on team building in a moment). 

Being shy is no excuse. Everyone can connect with people on some level, even if its about your own introverted nature. Right now there are so many fantastic tools for reaching out and creating connections: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. These aren't replacements for actual face-to-face networking by any means, but they allow you to keep loose tabs on what others are doing, and vice versa.

Here's what you shouldn't do: don't be like my friend Mary (name changed etc). The only time I ever hear from her is about every 18-24 months. Yup, every time she's about to face a layoff at her new job, she sends out a flurry of emails to everyone she knows with the same subject line: "Let's do lunch!" When I see that, I know she's scared, but I also know she doesn't care one bit about me. I don't ever see her at networking events, nor do I ever know what's happening in her life because she doesn't share otherwise. (Yes, yes, I could do a better job of keeping up with her, I'm guilty. But that fact still doesn't remove the awkward lunchtime conversation.)

2. Team Building: You're not gonna make it alone. This is related to networking skills, but goes deeper than that. You have to build an A-Team, a group of like-minded bad ass mofos who will help you succeed. If you're a copywriter, you need to team up with a PR pro and a designer. If you're a strategist, find a few execution people who will help you build all those neat things you pitch to clients. 

This is about building alliances, about bringing people together who complement each other, who can refer business to each other, help each other out with advice sometimes, maybe just be a shoulder to cry on when things get bad. Not if things get bad, but when. Remember, it's self-unemployment and there will be days when you lose a key client or a project goes haywire and all you want is a drink or five. I realized very early on how useless it was to try to explain my troubles to a gainfully employed person -- they would just say, "Well, just go get a job, this sounds really complicated!" Nope, I needed someone around who understood just how sucky it was to have an invoice go unpaid for 90+ days.

If your network is your sphere of influence, think of your team as your inner circle, the people you go to first, the ones who will never let you down. Not only is it good for you personally and professionally, but having a great team in place also makes you more valuable to the client, who can then do less shopping. Your value will increase in their eyes because you've brought along some other quality people to address the client's problem.

3. Negotiation: You will never ever get the things you deserve, only the things you negotiate. If you're in a sucky project with sucky terms or sucky pay or have to deal with sucky people, then it's because you either negotiated your way into that situation, or didn't know enough to negotiate better terms. Simple as that.

The art of negotiation is a very complex domain, much more complex than anything you've ever encountered in your life, and very few people are good at it. After ten years, I still find myself on the short end of the stick more often than I care to admit. It's okay, because every time you get screwed, you learn a little. That may sound harsh to your delicate ears, but it's the truth.

Get a good lawyer. Draw up a good, solid contract. Learn how to tell people what your rate is with a straight face, no stammering, no backpedaling. Lay out your terms, then shut the f*ck up because the next person who talks loses. And know that every time you stray from your negotiating points you're going to burn. If you swear you'd never do another favor for a friend, you'll end up doing one and get burned. If you swear you'd never cut your rate for a non-profit and then you do, you'll get burned. If you swear that never again will you work for a realtor or lawyer or dentist no matter what the fee, and one comes along with a bucket full of gold bars, you'll burn if you take the job.

The question is, do you like to burn? Some people do, they live for the fire. Others learn and move on.

4. Self-Promotion and Sales: It's a funny world we live in. On the one hand, the only way our capitalistic society works is if we build things worth buying and then sell them, but just about everyone you meet turns their nose up at the selling part. Yes, yes, there's a big difference between selling tractors or insurance plans and selling yourself, but if you're unable to convince me that you are good at something (or hell, you don't know what you're good at and can't articulate it in any way) then I'm just not going to go to all the work of figuring it out for you.

The world is moving at ludicrous speed, so help me out here. And don't be all vague about it, either. It's been years and years since "I'm a copywriter" actually moved the needle. The key to survival is specialization, and that's true in the natural world or your life right now. You need a niche. I hope you're not a copywriter, I hope you're a medical technology copywriter. You're not a PHP developer, you specialize in Facebook applications written in PHP. 

Well, what happens if a non-Facebook application comes your way, do you take the job? Sure, if you can handle it. Doing the work and talking about yourself are two somewhat-overlapping-but-not-completely-congruent things sometimes.

The second half of this involves the nuts and bolts of self-promotion. It's a fine balance. No, it's not a good idea to flood your Twitter and Facebook streams with constant links to things that promote your expertise, but on the other hand, I'm a busy guy and I often forget what it is you do for a living. And even if I remember, I might be in a client meeting and they need an expert in X and it doesn't dawn on me until a week later that you might be an expert in X, but too late I've already hired someone else, dammit. And I REALLY WANT TO WORK WITH YOU!

The etiquette rules haven't been entirely defined yet, of course. There are some in this brave new world who will shut you down at the merest mention of anything that even sniffs of making money, but these people are tools. We don't live in some Star Trek wonderland without money. Money makes life possible. 

On the other hand, there are people who bombard their social streams non-stop with offers and other effluvia, and that's like getting direct mail offers from your aunts and college friends. It's like my friend Mary, reaching out only when it might benefit her. It gets old, and it doesn't help with the connecting bit, or the knowing/liking/trusting.

We're all going to find the right mix together, and the hell of it is, those of us who have been on Twitter for a while (for example) have a head start. And I'm not sorry about that. What it comes down to is marketing the way you feel the most comfortable and that allows you to connect with as many possible potential buyers as you need to make your life work.

5. Old-Fashioned Business Skills: Ten years ago, during the dot-bomb, nobody cared about money or profit. That was all silly. It was all about taking investor money and building out a huge infrastructure or creating channels or whatever the hell the catchphrases were. You see the same thing happening now with all these newfangled social companies. Nobody cares about making money it seems, they want to build brand equity.

That's all terrific, but it has no meaning for you. You've got to get down to basics, and unfortunately, the old-fashioned basics are not only out of style, they seem to have been wiped out of our memory banks. Here are a few: profit is an idea, but cash flow is king; stay small and agile; everything is more expensive and takes longer than you think.

Once you're running your own show, you realize pretty damn quickly that you can't do squat with profit. Profit happens at the end of the year, when the accountant plays around with the numbers. If you want to pay less in taxes, he'll show less profit, and so on. But month to month, you gotta pay bills. You've got a mortgage, a couple kids going to college maybe, medical expenses, or you want to take a trip. That takes cash flow. 

How do you build cash flow? First of all, take deposit money up front. Second of all, charge a high-enough rate that lets you not just survive, but thrive. Third, find clients you can charge a monthly retainer fee. Fourth, build products that will bring in other streams of revenue not tied to your silly ass billing hours. And so on. The basics, see?

Staying small and agile is so important, but so overlooked. When we got started, we were small, but I had the big dream of the big agency, and soon we ramped up employees and contractors and took on all these jobs, but then I realized how much I hated managing people. It was an important realization. I wanted to do the work, not be an HR guy. 

So for me, agile and small meant going back to being a lone gun, and I'm happier this way. When I don't have $20,000 or $30,000 a month in obligations (paychecks, for example) I can make better decisions. For example, I don't have to take on that really gross client just because I need the money to stay afloat. That was a horrible feeling, let me tell you, and it's actually better to stay in a job you hate for a paycheck then to build a business around clients you loathe.

Everything takes longer than you think, believe me, and everything is more expensive. When I hear a client say a job is small, that it might take a few weeks, I double it. The same goes when I hear an estimate from a contractor I'm hiring. Sure, it looks simple, but once you dig around in their web site or code, you find a cancerous tumor in the heart of their business operations, and suddenly it all goes sideways.

Of course, that might just be the business I'm in (software), but I doubt it. Everywhere I look I see business people either getting bit by this problem or adjusting for it so they don't get bit. It's bad news if you tell a client you think something will take 10 hours and then it really takes 15. So pad things a bit, and that goes for schedules too. It's way better to tell a client it will take 2 weeks and deliver in 8 days, then vice versa.

6. Ownership Mentality: I'm not just talking about legal ownership. Yes, you own your own little LLC or S-Corporation or Sole Propietorship, and you have business cards and a PO Box and a web presence, hooray. That's just the beginning, though. 

See, you have to own everything else, too. Made a bad hire? You own that. Have crappy clients? Own it. Had a bad year with very little money in the bank? Own it. Yes, there are always factors (the recession, a terrorist attack, rising fuel prices, blah blah blah) but you have to adapt to bad situations--that's on you. Not adapting is bad leadership.

Now here's the flip side of ownership: the good times. If you land a big client, you own it. If you have a really fat year, you own it. Yes, people in your network might have given you a solid lead, and your parents paid for your expensive education, and maybe God gave you the talent (if you buy into that notion, it's okay if you do) but the hard work and the application of the education and talent was all you. So own it.

There are other skills, of course, but by now this thing is turning into War and Peace. My point at the beginning of this screed was simple, and it still holds true: the American Dream is still there, but it's a slightly different iteration of the dream that your father and his father understood. To unlock the dream, you're going to need new skills, skills that nobody has taken the time to teach you. It's not too late, though.

If you're still reading this, and are interested in talking about these skills needed in our screwed-up world, leave a comment. 

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