Okay, I admit it, I drifted off yesterday and had a little dream again about this arts center I'm trying to open here in Chicago these days. Specifically, I was reading the blog of Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn, which I do every day, and he was talking about how he's now convinced another three columnists there at the Trib to start up blogs of their own within the last six months. And I was thinking about this, and about how the four of them were already some of the smarter columnists we have in Chicago, even before the blogs, and definitely with that fine tradition of Chicago journalism that so many of us here are so proud of. And how you could almost see the embrace of blogs by these four columnists as yet another important moment in the history of Chicago journalism, that first wave of journalists here who "get it" and understand just what they can do with a blog that's impossible with their paper column.

And so if the center was open right now, for example, I could simply call up Mr. Zorn (who I've actually met and hung out with a couple of times), and pitch the idea of doing a show at the center all about this - with the four columnists on stage for 90 minutes with me and another moderator, first talking about their own journalistic influences, and then how they got involved with Chicago journalism themselves, maybe some great old horror stories about working for the City News desk, and then a freewheeling discussion about how blogging fits into that long and proud history of local journalism we have here, of how it both relates and clashes to such pillars here as Royko, Turkel, etc. And if Zorn thought it was a cool idea, he could help me convince the other three to do it too; and if I could get a commitment from all four, I bet it wouldn't be difficult to get someone really interesting to be the moderator, too, like Michael Miner (author of the Chicago Reader's "HotType," a sort of outsider's media column about the Chicago media) or even maybe Bob Soirott (current host of WTTW's "Chicago Tonight," and with a whole interesting career himself).

And then, man, you got a show on your hands! And you could easily charge $30, $40 to attend such an event, and easily have 100 people in the city banging on the door to be let in (because 100, of course, will be the seating capacity of the center). And then have the internet radio station doing a free live broadcast of the event, and then available as an MP3 starting the next day for $5, and with a free ten-minute excerpt in our podcast the next day as well. Plus of course such an event would generate such an immense amount of press, because the one thing the media loves more than anything else is talking about itself. And you've gotten all these people into the center who may have not had a reason to visit before, especially maybe older and richer people who are into more old-fashioned things like newspaper columnists. So that's of benefit as well to the center, plus a benefit to all the young bloggers and other tech-savvy members of the audience, to get a chance to mix with these new people and have the new people mix with them.

And this is an especially good example of something to drift off and dream about, I think, because it's very typical of what I want the hallmark of our programming to be - events that are worthy of notice for their uniqueness and ability to fascinate the audience, versus how famous the guest is (since I doubt we'll be able to afford many legitimately famous people), shows that passionately appeal to a select type of audience in Chicago (enough to fill 100 seats, that is, with enough people still clamoring for tickets to cause a ruckus), with plenty of reasons for the mainstream media to care and to want to do a story about it. It is, in fact, going to be the saving grace of the center in my opinion, since realistically we're not going to have the advantages of so many other places in the city - we won't have the money to bring in the people the Museum of Contemporary Art does; the reputation of a place like WBEZ, the local NPR station; the access to a broad audience like WTTW, the local PBS station, has. We'll need to come up with really original ideas, frankly, in order to simply compete with the organizations here that already exist, much less to carve any kind of reputation out for ourselves as a way to stand out.

So that's why my mind always ticks a lot, even at this early stage, around what kinds of shows we could put together that are the like the one just described - that would generate a certain amount of fannish gushing from a certain crowd, and generate a certain amount of press, not just for who we book but in what combinations and with what they've been asked to speak about, in a way that no one else has thought of, but using a severely restricted budget. And this yet again gets back to what I'm always saying is going to be the most important thing concerning this center's potential success - of thinking smartly, and hopefully thinking in ways that no one else in the Chicago arts is thinking, sometimes to the point that others in the arts laugh at us for even having the idea, because that at least guarantees that they won't try stealing it. And then hopefully afterwards it all being a huge success, and with all those other people in the arts smacking their foreheads and saying, "Why didn't we do that?" Which of course they all will, starting the next week; but it will be too late by then, of course, because my center has already moved on to the latest crazy idea they're all laughing at. Well, anyway, in a perfect world where everything went right, maybe you'd see a situation like that.

So that was nice, to have my little daydream about putting together a show like this, if the center happened to be open right now, and what a kickass show that would be and how much fun everyone would have, and how much press it would generate and how much good word-of-mouth. Oh, and I happen to believe what Jessa Crispin has also said to me before about her own live events - that it begins with creating a show that you yourself are personally excited about. That is, I'd love the chance to simply be in the audience for a round-table discussion like that, and if I have to open my own damn center and schedule the show myself in order to do that, I guess I will. The fact that the center could potentially gross, whatever, $5,000 from the event, between ticket sales and MP3 sales afterwards, plus get mentioned half a dozen times in the mainstream media, is all ultimately icing on the cake for me.

And believe it or not, I actually think it's important to have such daydreams on a regular basis, to simply allow yourself to envision the projects in your life as if they were actually accomplished, up and running, and chugging along as successfully as they could potentially achieve. Which of course is also known as "visualizing a successful outcome" among the new-age set, which is why I know some of you will be tempted to make fun of me for believing in such a thing myself, just like I too make fun of the new-age movement on a pretty regular basis. But hey, you know me, I'll adopt an idea from any original source at all, as long as it can be run through my own hyper-rational, hyper-skeptical mind and come out the other end intact. And the fact is that visualizing a successful outcome to your projects is something that really does work, at least in my opinion, based on the years now that I've been doing such a thing in my own life, and really does bring you closer to actually succeeding at those projects than if you hadn't visualized in the first place.

And really, no quasi-spiritual new-age mumbo-jumbo is needed to explain why visualization works, because there's actually a multi-threaded rational answer for it that can be easily explained in the real world. First, if done the right way, visualizing a successful outcome can help you see that project in a larger scope than you did before, as an overall organism that is affected completely by each of its small parts; and that can help you identify steps to succeeding that you may have been overlooking, or means to achieving success that are better than what you had envisioned before. Second, visualizing a successful outcome keeps you motivated - it reminds you of what you're shooting for, and how cool it really is going to be when it succeeds, in the face of sometimes overwhelming frustration when you're actually trying to implement the project itself. And third, visualizing a successful outcome changes your current behavior and actions, into more efficient and effective ones - because when you see your project in the most optimistic terms possible (that is, with it already having succeeded), it tricks your brain into working on the project as if its success is a foregone conclusion. And this is the same reason, of course, that you're never supposed to go into a job interview in a bad mood and the like, because your overall emotions and attitudes about the world really do have that profound an effect on your current actions.

Now, don't get me wrong - I think it's just as important to have a sometimes very cynical attitude about your projects as well, and to balance these daydream visualizations with long, cold, hard looks at the reality of the situation. And this is where I think a lot of small-business wannabes make their fatal mistake, and is something I've definitely caught myself being guilty of several times already, which is simply not acknowledging the reality of the world around them, no matter how much it flies in the face of what they want to believe about the world, and subsequently having every detail of their business's plan be tainted by this misunderstanding and refusal to acknowledge it.

Within the last year, for example, I've had to admit that there just probably aren't nearly as many people excited about buying MP3s of largely unknown slam poets reading their work live from a stage, as I originally thought there was going to be when first envisioning my center. And that's a conclusion I ultimately needed to make, because that affects the entire budget - that's, what, $10,000 in revenue suddenly gone that I had been formerly counting on, and with me having to come up with another way to make that $10,000, or risk not being able to pay my employees. But see, better to make that realization now, than to have the damn place open and suddenly be standing there on a Friday afternoon, explaining to your employees that you can't pay them because seriously, no one seems to want to buy MP3s of last week's drunken unknown feature at the poetry slam.

To be sure, these drunken poets are integral to the center's financial success - they'll be the ones generating the content we'll be making into gift-store merchandise, the ones dragging all their friends in, the ones creating a legitimate "artist's space" that paying customers will want to be a part of. But it's important to realistically acknowledge, I think, just what each of these public groups exactly can and cannot bring to your company; and in my case, after being urged by my grumpy little buddies at the SCORE nonprofit agency to look at my numbers, I realized that I could count on my audience to buy maybe $4,000 or $5,000 worth of spoken-word MP3s over the course of the first year, but certainly not $10,000 to $15,000. And whoa, believe me, this is just one of dozens of unpleasant little realities about my proposed center that I've had to wake up to in the last year, with it not being over by a long shot.

Still, though, like I said, I think it's just as important to have your little dreams about everything going right as well, and to be able to have a clear, concrete image in your head of just what your project might look like, if everything was running smoothly and according to plan. And hey, David Allen recommends this as well, in his "Getting Things Done" time-management system; because how else are you going to know what all needs to get done, he argues, if you don't first envision it actually done? I first started practicing visualization in the late '90s, now that I think about it - in fact, one of the first projects I remember specifically doing this for was when my old friend Greg Gillam and I co-organized something like 25 daytime and late-night live literary events in four days, as part of 1999's tenth anniversary of the National Poetry Slam, held here in Chicago that year (which was actually quite ridiculous of us, since no other tournament had ever sponsored more than five or six events of this sort - but we had this whole agenda in place, about how we wanted the local poetry community involved with the national tournament, how sick we were of non-slammers getting completely shut out of NPS-sponsored activities). Visualizing those events as a success actually helped quite a bit with logistically pulling them off (by envisioning the mics that would be needed, the tech equipment, what special neuroses of that particular event's host would have to be dealt with, etc); and as a result, surprisingly enough, many of the events turned out even better than the supposed "perfect scenario" I had envisioned in my head, especially the hip-hop open mic which to this day is still one of the best live literary events I've ever attended in my life. So I'm a believer, man, I'm a believer.

Out of space! See you Monday!