Misfit, Inc.

Global Hope Network International is one of the most wonderful NGOs in the world. They are tiny compared to behemoths like World Vision and the Red Cross, but their work is no less groundbreaking or important. They work in some of the most impoverished villages in the world.

When they start working with a village, it typically has no clean water, no sanitation, and little in the way of educational facilties. They roll their sleeves up, jump in the trenches with the villagers and they don’t leave until the village is completely self-sustainable - meaning it has no need for any further international aid. This method is called Transformational Community Development, and it is revolutionary.

In mid-August, one village that GHNI has worked with for the past five years - Gambella, in Kenya - will complete its five-year journey towards self-sustainablity. The last piece of the hard-won puzzle is a windmill that will allow the people of Gambella to properly irrigate their crops all year round, thereby hugely increasing the amount they can grow and sell. Everyone in Gambella, with GHNI’s help, has (to put it mildly) worked their arses off for the last five years to create a brighter future for their children. They deserve to graduate from the TCD programme in style.

GHNI need $15,000 to build this windmill and we are gathering together a very special group of Good Misfits to make it happen. We believe that there are so many change-makers out there just waiting for the opportunity to make their mark on the world, this project is the opportunity to do just that. Each of our thirty Good Misfits will raise $500 each, which combined will bring about a real and tangible change in the world.

This is a personal one for the Misfits. One of our very first social justice projects was in Gambella where we fundraised for, and then physically helped lay the pipe that would bring clean water to, the village. On AJ’s birthday this year, he and all of the Good Misfits that wish to join him will fly out to Kenya to witness the unveiling of the windmill. Good Misfits will even get their name written on the windmill’s blades.

So far, there are independent coffee shops donating 10 cents per cup, a couple of art and photography auctions, a pretty impressive variety of parties, a ‘Yappy Hour’, and a man cycling from Vancouver, BC to Halifax, Nova Scotia under the Good Misfit flag. We have almost filled all the spots, but we need just a couple more people to stand with us to make this experiment in social philanthropy blow up. 

Who’s in?

Calling all bloggers and Shakespeare lovers!

It’s that time of year again… Shakespeare’s birthday is fast approaching and once again, we are giving him the most awesome birthday card we can muster.

For the last two years, we have invited bloggers from around the world to join us in wishing William Shakespeare a happy birthday. Past participants in Happy Birthday Shakespeare have utilised various platforms to offer birthday salutations to the bard. Some wrote poems, some recounted tales of how Shakespeare had touched their lives, some posted videos and some simply tweeted. However you plan on doing it, just make sure to link to www.happybirthdayshakespeare.com so so your readers can connect with the other people involved in this project.  

In 2011, these dedicated Shakespeareans helped us pioneer the Happy Birthday Shakespeare project in partnership with our long-time friends at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. In 2012, Happy Birthday Shakespeare exploded and 188 people joined us in wishing the most famous playwright in history a very happy birthday.

This year we are carrying on the tradition and are inviting you to join the Happy Birthday Shakespeare 2013 crew. If you don’t have a blog, feel free to post an Instagram or a Vine dedicated to Shakey but make sure you fill in the form so we can make sure your beautiful faces are added to the website.

Getting involved is easy peasy, either click on this link to go directly to the form or head over to www.happybirthdayshakespeare.com for more information and fill in the form there.

You can publish your post anytime from the 23rd - 28th April, with the 23rd being ideal as that is Shakespeare’s actual birthday.

We would be overjoyed to welcome you into the Happy Birthday Shakespeare fold.

This weekend AJ and Melissa drove down to Milwaukee from Fargo to meet Tyson Adams, his girlfriend Janelle and their friend and colleague Stacy for Misfit Camp. For those of you reading this who have good memories, you may know what I am referring to. For everyone else though, here’s a quick recap:

47 days after the launch of the Pursuit of Everything, AJ decided to run a pretty amazing giveaway on the site. This giveaway was to help one person with one great idea launch their dream into the world with an intensive three-day workshop with Misfit Inc.

We have a confession though. Whilst we knew this would be life-changing for the individual who won, we had a bit of a hidden agenda for all applicants to this giveaway. It was our hope that in providing a platform which forced people to articulate and flesh out the business idea that had been developing in their mind for weeks, months or years we would be pushing them a little bit further along the road to actually launching that idea. Once you have told someone an idea - however tentatively - it exists, it’s tangible and it was our hope that in forcing applicants to seriously look into the viability of their projects, we might just provide the catalyst to make more than one person take their dream and make it a reality.

We had hundreds of applications and the winner was chosen by our secret council of misfit Jedi. The winner was Tyson Adams of LiveGlocal, a young philanthropist and entrepreneur who had fallen in love with the country and the people of Laos and dreamed of building a coffee shop which would stand at the heart of a laotian community whose proceeds would go right back into the community it served to fund education and clean water projects.

This weekend, Tyson, Janelle, Stacy, AJ and Melissa worked their asses off and managed to birth the Jhai Coffee House into existence. (Jhai means ‘from the heart’ in Lao.)

A huge shout-out goes to the generous folks at the Hudson Business Lounge in Milwaukee for providing the team with the perfect space to make this creative explosion happen and to AJ Bombers for keeping the team suitably inebriated. 

We could not be more excited for this wonderful crew of people as they move out to Laos to start work on building Jhai Coffee House and we wish them all the luck in the world. 

Yesterday was a huge day for Misfit Inc.

The first and last days of a Kickstarter campaign are always the most important and the countdown on our campaign ended at exactly 8pm EST on Thursday March 21st. This is what we closed out on:

Yesterday we all united in one last push and were shocked and humbled by the level of support we received from Misfits everywhere. By the end of the day we had succeeded in adding a further $8,000 to the already mind-blowing total.

Looking back to this time around 6 weeks ago, when we were having a Misfit team meeting about the launch:

I remember all of us saying how much we hoped we would hit the target, we all agreed that we could just about do it with a superhuman effort. AJ was more freaked out about this project than pretty much any other project we have worked on in the last 18 months that I have been at Misfit Inc.

When he posted this on the Facebook Pursuit of Everything page on January 31, this was the project he was referring to:

Thank the stars that he did have the courage to press forward into the mist. When you bare a part of your soul in a project like this you leave it open to be embraced or rejected by your peers, and it is honestly one of the scariest things in the entire world. It is so much easier to hang back, put the project off, tell yourself you’ll be up to the task next year. But if you do that, if AJ had done that when he was freaking out about whether anyone would give a shit about his art, none of the amazing events of the last month would have come to pass. We would not have experienced the euphoria that comes with watching as 447 people collectively back your art to the tune of $38,289 over 30 days to pre-order over 1000 copies of this book.

We would not have seen the campaign fully funded in 5 hours and 200% funded within 24 hours. We would not have received literally hundreds of messages of support and love flowing into our inboxes from people who saw what we were trying to do and were excited and inspired by it. 

On behalf of all of the Misfits, a huge, huge thank you to every single person who was involved in any way with this project. It has been truly wonderful to witness misfits around the world stand with us in affirming that you don’t have to wait for someone to choose you, you can choose yourself.

To the eye of the observer, it may sometimes seem like us Misfits spend our lives sitting behind our computers pushing out projects left, right and centre. However, we simply would not be able to keep up our momentum if we didn’t take advantage of our digitally nomadic lifestyle and travel to pastures new both literally and figuratively in our spare time.

Whilst we are an extremely productive bunch, we are also all adventurers at heart and new experiences are like our Misfit fuel. Last weekend, we all realised we were all up to particularly fun things and so I just wanted to share the stories of our respective weekend with you.

AJ and Melissa were at South by Southwest (SXSW) last weekend, a marvellous annual event in Austin, Texas when an absolute shit load of people in the digital space come together for a weekend of craziness. AJ and Melissa spent their time with some great friends checking out all the fun things SXSW has to offer and generally enjoying some much-deserved down-time. 

Breakdancing in the street:

Cuban sandwich time:

GoToMeeting SXSW party:

Hanging out in the Pegasus:

Dino spent his weekend with his lovely girlfriend Karen. Dino and Karen are both adventurers and bonafide foodies. They love hopping in Dino’s version of the Pegasus and exploring the countryside before sampling the food and drink of other cultures. This weekend they hiked to a waterfall and ate Korean bibimbap, drank Japanese sake, and hung out with an Ostrich.

Waterfall times:

Bibimbap:

Sake:

Chilling with an ostrich:

Matt and I went down to Seattle to see a trip-hoppy/electronic genius called Emancipator (who you should definitely check out if you haven’t already). We explored Fremont, drank craft beer, stayed in the cutest little cottage in the whole world, met a troll and hitched a lift back in a classic Volvo. 

We walked up a garden path to this:

Yes it does:

Seattle skyline:

The Fremont Troll:

Our sweet ride home:

Jerome, multi-talented Misfit that he is, devoted time this weekend to learning Minuet 2, Minuet 3, Muzette and Hunter’s Chorus on his violin:

So, there you have it. A little peak into a weekend in the life of a Misfit. We hope you all had a fantastic weekend, wherever you were and whoever you were with.

May this inspire all who read it to do one adventurous thing next weekend. :)

I think we can all safely say that, even by Misfit standards, last week was crazy.

We all sat in our team meeting two weeks ago wondering whether or not we would hit our Kickstarter goal of $10,000 in thirty days. Of course, we all hoped that we would, but we were genuinely unsure.

I went to bed at 5am on Wednesday morning, leaving AJ and Melissa, who had been up for a solid thirty-six hours, still working. All five of us had worked our asses off in preparation for the launch and all we could do was hope that we had done enough.

Nothing could have prepared us for what happened on Wednesday.

I woke up at around 9:30am PST and by the time I got online, to my shock/disbelief/full-blown euphoria, the project had already surpassed its goal and was well on its way to being 150% funded. Although we all do bits and bobs, I am generally the one who handles social media at Misfit, and I could tell from the constant buzzing of my phone that twitter was exploding. The day passed in an absolute whirlwind, we reached the top spot on Kickstarter’s most popular projects, and the next thing we knew we had doubled our goal within twenty-four hours.

I am not articulate or eloquent enough to properly put into words what this means for us at Misfit Inc. To know that there are fellow misfits around the world who stand in such fierce support of the company you work for and love and believe in is overwhelming.

Last week, I stepped back into a dance studio and took a dance class for the first time since I left home at eighteen to go to university - where I promptly replaced ballet with partying. On the bus home, tired but very happy, I reflected on why I had chosen to return to this great love of mine after seven years. I concluded two things: one, on April 21st I will reach a quarter of century in age and this means that I will not be able to rely on my ‘fast metabolism’ for much longer; and two, working for Misfit Inc makes me feel like anything is possible and the gamble you take on making bold choices can return more than you can imagine. This week, that feeling was strengthened a-hundred-fold; and so I sit down to write this blog post having just returned from playing my first netball match since I was fourteen years old - when I decided that I preferred looking cool in front of boys to playing sport.

On behalf of all the Misfits, I would like to say a huge thank you to each and every person who sent messages of support, shared the story with their friends and gave their hard-earned money to our campaign. We will never, ever forget it.

This post was written by Jessie, Princess of Organising Chaos at Misfit Inc

Stratford upon Avon, 2011

I was still adjusting to life back in England following some extensive travels around Australia and India in the summer of 2011 when I was introduced to an American couple through my boyfriend and his wonderful mother. I had been told so much about these ‘amazing’ and ‘inspirational’ New Yorkers that I rather expected them not to live up to the hype.  I suspected that the meeting may well be like going to see The Dark Night at the cinema all over again, and that afterwards I would be left feeling a little confused as to what all the fuss had been about.

I could not have been more wrong.

It is now almost two years later, and AJ & Melissa continue to impress and inspire me every day. The point of this trip down memory lane is this: during one of those early meetings, AJ mentioned to me that he had a book deal with a big publisher who wanted him to write about being a digital nomad. I exclaimed my congratulations and patted him on the back but he seemed withdrawn and quiet, embarrassed even. Not the usual emotions of someone who is proud of what they are telling you. I probed him a little on why this was and he said to me, “I know this is a big deal, but I am not sure if I want to write this book.”

At first I thought he was batshit crazy. A writer that does not want to write a book that a publisher is willing to pay him in advance to write?! But the more we talked about it the more I came to realise that AJ was embarrassed because he believed that by writing this book - which would have been a sanitised version of the one he really wanted to write - he was selling out. He had agreed to the deal because of the very instinct that initially led me to believe he was batshit crazy. The instinct to be chosen and to be accepted by The Powers That Be. One of the most impressive things in a sea of impressive things that I have seen AJ do in two years of knowing him was to walk away from that deal.

One of the other most impressive things is this.

By self-publishing The Life and Times of a Remarkable Misfit, he is proving to the world (and to various versions of his younger self) that you do not have to wait to be chosen to write the book that you dream of writing. You can choose yourself.

We worked through the night to ready ourselves for the launch of this absolute project of passion and we will all finally go to bed tonight with huge grins on our faces knowing that our community believes so deeply in what we are doing that they have made it possible for us to not only smash our target but to double it within 24 hours of pushing this project live.

Whether you support us by pledging $2,000, or by sharing our Kickstarter page with just one friend, you have the eternal gratitude of the Misfits. We are so blessed to have such a loyal and generous tribe.

A post by Jessie, Princess of Organising Chaos at Misfit Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, Misfit Inc is overjoyed to present:

Misfit Conf: Fargo is the first and only one of it’s kind. It is the first of its kind because, well, we’ve never actually produced a conference before. And it is the only of its kind because, as you can probably tell, we are all about the unique and the handcrafted. Everything about this conference will be lovingly put together by our own Misfit hands. It will be created for a very small group of very special people who will come together on May 31 and June 1 in Fargo, North Dakota, to conspire to change the world. Needless to say, Misfit Conf will never be held in the same place twice. There will only be one Misfit Conf: Fargo. And it will only exist in that moment, for that group of people. If you are not there, you will never be able to recreate the experience. This conference will be truly sui generis.

The Attendee List

Other misfits hellbent on changing the world.

What will be going down in Fargo town?

Too much cool stuff to list, but basically: awesome speakers (fellow bonafide Misfits), speaking and workshopping on a variety of different subjects which will all be tied beautifully into one theme - helping you to make the biggest dent in the universe that you possibly can. You will also meet the other people who were adventurous enough to think, ‘hell yes’ when they saw this, or this, post; as well as plenty of other creative, fun, bold and non-traditional activities that will definitely not include shit food or shit coffee.

The Why

We believe that getting a small number of people who seriously desire to make a positive impact on the world in a room together is a recipe for something pretty amazing.

Check out Misfit Conf host, AJ Leon’s post announcing this over here, or just visit the Misfit Conf: Fargo site to find out more.

Looking forward to hanging with you in Fargo.

By Jessie, Princess of Organising chaos at Misfit Inc.

Post by Princess of Organising Chaos, Jessie White

Today I would like to show some love to a project that we handcraft designed and developed with the Citrix Online team.  That project is Videoconferencing.

Videoconferencing seeks to ‘promote video communications as part of a modern lifestyle’. Whether that means using Skype in your personal life to catch up with Mum, or GoToMeeting to strengthen communication within your business or organisation, video is becoming an intrinsic part of the way we make connections in the world. Videoconferencing pulls together the stories of individuals and businesses that are already using video as a resource for those who are taking tentative steps to move their organisations into brave new worlds.

As you can imagine, here at Misfit we rely on video meetings on a daily basis. See this post that I wrote for Workshifting for more on the way that video features in the running of Misfit Inc, or watch this video by the amazingly talented Misfit Chief of Staff, Melissa Leon featuring the Misfits in Thailand. (Please note how hard we are all rocking the Rudolph nose.)

Misfits in Thailand from Misfit, Inc. on Vimeo.

Check it out and embrace video. It’s the future, but that future is already here. 

This post was written by Jessie, Princess of Organising Chaos at Misfit Inc.

Today I want to tell you about a dinner that we threw a couple of months ago for a few members of the Misfit/Pursuit of Everything tribe in Vancouver.

It was a chilly day early in November when Melissa pinged me to tell me her and AJ wanted to throw the very first Misfit dinner when they arrived in Vancouver and they wanted me to organise it. I am, after all, Princess of Organising Chaos *and* I happen to live in Vancouver, so far so dandy. The only thing was, Melissa and AJ arrived on Saturday. It was Thursday. “How many people?” Asked I. “Oh, around 10.”

This kind of request is precisely why I just love working at Misfit Inc. You never know what you might be asked to do, but whatever it is you can guarantee it will be really cool. So, I hopped straight to it, emailing the Vancouverites we had come into contact with through the Pursuit of Everything or Misfit Inc. After just a few hours, the guestlist stood at myself and Matt Owen, Melissa and AJ, Jane Boyd, Teri Conrad, Jacqueline Chong, Tracy Byomen and Jason Baker. Now to find a cool restaurant in Vancouver that had a table for 9 available on a Saturday night that would suit the eating requirements/likes and dislikes of a large group of people that I had never met before. I love a challenge.

After a few frantic hours on yelp, and calling an array of restaurants in Vancouver, I rang The Acorn, a very cool vegetarian restaurant in the trendy area of South Main. “Ah,” said the nice lady on the phone, “we have just had a cancellation for our family table”. “Perfect”, I said, “we’ll take it.”

After a couple of The Acorn’s delicious cocktails:

We all sat down around the ‘family table’ and started chatting. It was an utter joy to share a meal with such an interesting, vibrant and creative group of people. We talked about and listened to the dreams and pursuits of everyone at the table and we answered questions about how Misfit Inc works while AJ and Matt drank all the wine. (Joking!)

The highlight of the night was when Jane presented us with a piece of artwork by her beautiful daughter Emma, especially for the Misfits. It can currently be found, amongst other prized items, on display in The Pegasus.

We drank (Well, I see we… mainly AJ and Matt)

We laughed (see what I mean)

We ate

It was fabulous.

After the dinner was over, we were all left with an overwhelming sense of pride and joy that these wonderful people were members of our tribe, partners in life’s adventures. The world had conspired to align all our paths for one evening only, and what an honour it was.