Happy Holidays

Greetings everyone,

I just wanted to take a moment to wish you all a very happy holidays and thank you for all your engagement and support. Profit+ wouldn’t be the same without all of you and I’m so honored for this opportunity to share my weekly meditations with you.

In the spirit of the season, we are taking a break next week. We will return in 2025 with a brand-new Profit+ edition on January 3^rd and resume our regular cadence from there.

Happy Holidays!

The Not-So-Fake Citizen 

Something funny happened the other day. My wife called me a “fake citizen.” 

For those of you who know my wife, this won’t come as too big of a surprise. She’s not one to mince words or beat around the bush, and over the years, has become particularly good at pointing out all the ways my personal conduct may fall short of the lofty ideals I write about here in Profit+. 

Anyway, we were at dinner with some friends and much to my delight one of my articles came up. My friends were asking about the backstory for the electrical equipment turned public toilet story. I know, not the best conversation topic for a meal but it made for a funny moment.

I was labeled a “fake citizen” because while I had written an article all about it, I hadn’t actually done anything about it.

Fair point, actually.

As I usually do, I took her “constructive” criticism to heart and decided to do something about the situation. Of course, she was right once again and it turned out to be incredibly easy to resolve. 

All I had to do was download the City of West Hollywood app, create a profile, walk down to the scene, snap a few pictures and put in a request for a clean-up. I kid you not, the very next morning, as I scooted by the site on my way to my 6am workout at the Reebok Lab, I saw a city crew there cleaning everything up. I stopped to thank the crew and talk to them a bit. Apparently, this is a relatively common phenomenon in West Hollywood and the city is trying to be hypervigilant about cleaning things. 

This is a classic broken windows theory situation—the idea that visible signs of crime and disorder can lead to more of the same and vice versa—and a validation of the power of a concerned citizen. It’s been several weeks since the clean-up and the site is still clean and the neighborhood is ever so slightly better. Once again, my wife was right.

What can we learn from this story? 

First of all, it is a good reminder that you can make a difference in your community, even with small acts of service. 

Though this small improvement to the community didn’t solve homelessness or address the humanitarian needs of the unhoused individuals in the neighborhood, it has still made a positive difference. This little win left me even more motivated for the work of active citizenship. 

Secondly, smaller might be better when it comes to local governance. 

I live right on the border between West Hollywood and Los Angeles and my non-fake citizen experiences in Los Angeles have been markedly different. I’ve been fighting a local car wash for a few months now that has been using equipment that clearly violates the noise ordinances of both cities. Unfortunately, it sits on the LA side of the border and I just cannot get anything done.  Despite submitting multiple requests to every department I can find—code enforcement, the police, building and safety and others, making countless follow-up calls, and even reaching out to the local city council field office, not a single person has even come to investigate the situation. 

LA is such a behemoth of a city and the various departments so siloed that there’s just no accountability. Each department keeps saying that responsibility for the matter belongs to someone else, leaving us stuck in a kind of almost comical doom loop. Meanwhile, the piercing noise continues. Sadly, it’s so annoying and disruptive for the neighborhood that we cannot just give up in the face of LA’s dysfunctionality. We’ve resorted to hiring a private attorney to see if that can help. Anyway, I will keep you all posted as this story unfolds as I think it’s interesting territory for the Profit+ mission. 

Finally, my wife’s call-out was a good reminder that the work of the citizen is never done. If you find yourself complaining about something, it probably means it is time to start asking “What can I do to make a positive difference here?” We may all spend a lot of time reading and thinking about political issues but, ultimately, what democracy demands is action. 

Cheers to making 2025 a year of action in building wealth the right way, embracing responsibility, and taking care of our communities one small step at a time!

PS. For anyone living in West Hollywood or Los Angeles and inspired to try some civic experiments, here are links to the two apps I’ve been using:

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