How to run for Florida Office
I ran for board of education and it was an amazing experience.  I went door to door in my small town, talked to hundreds of people, showed up at every town event wearing my blazer and nametag with "candidate for board of education".  No BOE candidate before me had spent money on lawn signs - but they had to after me.  I gave speeches, raised money, bought voter lists from the county and loaded them into our Oracle database at work (into my own DEV schema, of course, this was before I had cheap MySQL hosting) to identify the folks most likely to support me, used Google Maps and other mapping tools to map them out for personal visits.<p>And then I lost, and it was crushing.  On election night when I stood in the election office and heard the precinct numbers come in one by one, I realized I'd never failed at anything significant before.  But I'd do it all again - I will once my kids are older - it was one of the best experiences of my life.