When you’re discussing what you’re making, it’s tempting to try to seem perfect all the time. But revealing your flaws can be just as compelling. Imperfections are real — and people respond to real.

In “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,” Michael Pollan discusses what made Julia Child so popular and brings up the famous show where she drops a potato pancake.

When I asked my mother recently what exactly endeared Julia Child to her, she explained that “for so many of us she took the fear out of cooking” and, to illustrate the point, brought up the famous potato show…This was a classic live-television moment, inconceivable on any modern cooking show: Martha Stewart would sooner commit seppuku than let such an outtake ever see the light of day.

The episode has Julia making a plate-size potato pancake, sautéing a big disc of mashed potato into which she has folded impressive quantities of cream and butter. Then the fateful moment arrives:

“When you flip anything, you just have to have the courage of your convictions,” she declares, clearly a tad nervous at the prospect, and then gives the big pancake a flip. On the way down, half of it catches the lip of the pan and splats onto the stovetop. Undaunted, Julia scoops the thing up and roughly patches the pancake back together, explaining: “When I flipped it, I didn’t have the courage to do it the way I should have. You can always pick it up.” And then, looking right through the camera as if taking us into her confidence, she utters the line that did so much to lift the fear of failure from my mother and her contemporaries: “If you’re alone in the kitchen, WHOOOO” — the pronoun is sung — “is going to see?” For a generation of women eager to transcend their mothers’ recipe box (and perhaps, too, their mothers’ social standing), Julia’s little kitchen catastrophe was a liberation and a lesson: “The only way you learn to flip things is just to flip them!”

Great story. Most people today would edit this out. Yet it’s exactly the thing that endeared Child to so many. A Washington Post reporter commented:

It wasn’t that she could do no wrong; rather, she made doing wrong so right. The more she faltered — dropping the entire side of lamb on the floor, failing to make a dent carving the suckling pig, unmolding the mousse with a splat — the more viewers loved and trusted her.

The lesson for anyone trying to pick up fans/customers: Don’t be afraid to reveal those little mistakes everyone faces.

This is especially true if you’re a little guy. Being open and honest about stuff like this is something you can get away with. It’s an area that bigger competitors (with their PR teams and slew of filters) can’t match you on.

What you lose in the professionalism column, you’ll make up in the interestingness and intimacy columns.

Above: Can’t find the potato incident online but here’s a clip of Child preparing omelets.

The US Army’s Special Forces teams are 12 people. Despite their small size, these teams can equal the fighting power of a light infantry company. The capabilities of one of these teams:

Plan and conduct Special Forces operations separately or as part of a larger force; infiltrate and exfiltrate specified operational areas by air, land, or sea; conduct operations in remote areas and hostile environments for extended periods of time with a minimum of external direction and support; develop, organize, equip, train and advise or direct indigenous forces up to battalion size in special operations; train, advise and assist other U.S. and allied forces and agencies; plan and conduct unilateral SF operations; perform other special operations as directed by higher authority.

The small team size comes with a bunch of advantages: They’re self-contained, can work swiftly and quietly, don’t have the presence of conventional military troops, and are able to operate without a big infrastructure.

Big can be powerful. But even the Army realizes small can be a great way to get things done too.

The problem with selling your product to big companies: Middle men. The people who buy your products aren’t the same ones who use your products.

That disconnect is terrible for your business. You wind up making and selling products to appeal to people who aren’t using them. And that means you aim to impress the wrong people.

Let’s say you’re a gym owner trying to sell memberships. When you sell a big corporate client, you’re dealing with one individual at that company – and that may be a person who never even works out! So you impress this guy with nice dinners, tickets to the big game, fancy talk, brochures, lists of your equipment, and promises of low prices. You sell him on the sell, not on the product.

On the other hand, when you sell individual memberships to one person at a time, you sell your product. If your treadmills are always broken or your instructors are lame, individuals will go somewhere else. If everything’s great, people will stick with you and tell their friends. Your success is linked to the quality of what you make, not how well you wine and dine some guy in purchasing.

You want your success to be aligned with the quality of your products, not the quality of your promises. And the best way to do that is to build for small companies (1-10 people) or individuals who aren’t aligned with any company — freelancers, independent contractors, people building their own business during nights/weekends, etc.

This weekend the New York Times published a piece called Using ‘Free’ to Turn a Profit. The piece focused on Evernote, a web-based and smart-phone based application for taking notes, snapping pictures, and storing stuff you want to remember later. The following critique isn’t about Evernote (it’s an impressive product which a lot of people love). It’s about the incredibly low bar for “success” in our industry and how the tech-business press perpetuates the perception. (ugh, did I just turn into one of those who blames “the media”? Yes, on this one, I did.)

Let’s erase one claim right off the bat. The headline, “Using ‘Free’ to Turn a Profit”, is misleading and downright false as it relates to the subject of the story. Near the end of the piece Phil Libin, the chief executive of Evernote, says they are generating about $79,000/month in revenue. Then the article goes on to say “By January 2011, Mr. Libin projects, the company will break even.”

$79,000/month and they won’t break even until January 2011. So every day they’re losing money until 2011. And the title of the piece is “Using ‘Free’ to Turn a Profit”. What? How can the Times let a headline like this slide?

Then yesterday a piece pops up on Gigaom called How Freemium Can Work for Your Startup. This piece references the “Using ‘Free’ to Turn a Profit” New York Times piece. Om Malik says “And it in reading Damon’s article, the qualities of a successful freemium product finally became clear to me.” Then in the next paragraph Om acknowledges that Evernote doesn’t generate enough revenue to turn a profit. Later he says “I’m sure there are many more ways to build great freemium applications, but one [Evernote] has stood out for me above all the others.” The product may be excellent, but until their business cracks a profit I don’t see how Om can say it’s a model for how to build a freemium application (or a business).

This pattern — “success” based on forecasted future success instead of current success — shows up all over the tech-business press. Instead of metrics like “they make more money than they spend” we see stuff like “user count growth” and “followers” and “impressions” and “friends” and “visits” qualify success. Whenever you see someone piling big numbers into made up metrics, it’s a diversion. They want you to think that this time it’s different. But like Judge Judy says, “If it doesn’t make sense it isn’t true.”

Don’t agree? Would you take your next paycheck in page views? or users? or followers? or visitors? or eyeballs (remember that one from the 90s)? Go down to the corner store and plunk down a million impressions for a gum ball. They’ll probably call the cops.

If there was an airline that flew more passengers than anyone else, but lost money on each one, would we call it a success? If there was a restaurant that served more people than anyone else, but lost money on each meal served, would we call it a success? If there was a store that sold more product than anyone else, but took a loss on each one, would we call it a success? Would the business press hold these companies up as business model successes? Would anyone? Interesting, maybe. Promising, sure. But successful? Then what the hell is going on with the coverage of our industry?

What’s the rush? Why not wait until their business is proven? Wouldn’t the Evernote story have been 10x better if they’d actually been able to say “We’re making money with this model. It works.” Wouldn’t the New York Times be doing its readers a service by providing insight into a proven model with a proven example? Instead, we get an article titled “turn a profit” about a company that is over a year away from meeting that definition. There are thousands of interesting internet-based businesses that are actually turning a profit — and I know of dozens running the freemium model that are deep in the black. Pick one and write a great true story. Why all the fiction?

It still blows me away that David’s talk at Startup School 2008 was met with such enthusiasm (I know David was surprised too). The talk was simple. Come up with a product, charge money for it, make more money than it costs to run it, and you turn a profit! This is the formula that’s been in place since business began. Yet in front of a group of new tech entrepreneurs it seemed like a revelation, a brand new story never told before. David said people were coming up to him in droves after the speech thanking him for opening their eyes. Who closed them?

So I guess what ultimately bothers me most about this New York Times piece, and many other pieces just like it (see TechCrunch daily), is the example that’s being set for the next generation of entrepreneurs. They’re seeing business success defined as “the projections say we’ll profitable later”. They’re constantly being exposed to excuses. They’re being taught that profits are these things that only happen one day far away. That’s just wrong.