Today is Thanksgiving in the U.S., and instead of spending time with my family, am stuck at the house alone, with just Puffy the Puppy to meander in the way keep me company for the weekend. And while I’m not to thrilled with the circumstances that are keeping me from enjoying fried turkey and pork spare ribs with my wife stealing food off my plate, I am actually thankful for a couple of days of quiet to get a few things done and to clear my head. Being dubbed a ‘serial starter,’ I have a lot of half-baked schemed floating around that are cluttering my head, my inbox, and my office. A day to clear out some of that mental clutter, and even get started on raking the yard, is actually blessing, despite the sacrifice of alone time on a family weekend.
Not only am I thankful for a crummy weekend leading to a semi-productive weekend, I’m thankful for the crummy year I have had. I pledged that 2008 was going to be my year, and then watched 11 months go by full of false starts, letdowns, and setbacks. But this has been a valuable year for lessons learned, and the price paid for most of those were just frustration and a little time lost. Not a lot of money and definitely no lives or relationships. In fact, some relationships were made stronger do to the strain of a lack of success, and some new ones where created that have the potential to outshine any other.
I am not thankful for the large loss of financial capital I had this year. I am thankful I lost less than most, and that I still have plenty of years to recover, even if my current projects don’t have much time to recover. I am thankful for the opportunities I didn’t get a chance to take, because it has allowed for plenty of opportunities that I am glad I didn’t miss.
And I give thanks to God for lining up all the opportunities and responsibilities that lie ahead that I truly don’t want. Only through them will I get to the opportunities and responsibilities that I actually want. I am especially thankful to have just enough wisdom to know they are all opportunities and responsibilities that I AM SUPPOSED TO HAVE.
I’m thankful to live in a country that gives everybody the day off to eat, and I’ve got to get to cooking. Happy Thanksgiving, America.
Even with the news of more and more layoffs, you CAN NOT lesson your professional goals.
If you are showing up for work with the sole purpose of trying not to get fired, you are selling yourself and your company short.
I work for a company that isn’t doing so well at the moment, but our mission is pretty clear, at least locally. Come to work today, learn a little more, innovate a little bit, keep kicking the competition’s ass, and chances are we’ll get to do the same thing tomorrow.
It IS NOT show up, lay low, and take home a check at the end of the week.
My personal goals are insanely high. That in itself is a personal problem with failure at times to reach expectations...
…but if my only expectation was to show up, lay low, and take home a check at the end of the week, what kind of existence is that? It’s not worth my time, and probably not worth the money my company or personal clients pay me. And they currently aren’t paying that much
I have recently finished the book Fire Your Boss by Stephen M. Pollan and Mark Levine, where the authors pretty much smack you in the face with the notion that your job is your job because they pay you, and you have every right to leave a job if someone offers to pay you more. But what’s going to motivate anyone to pay you more…or let you stay and keep your current paycheck. Marginal effort or massive effort?
This is a trick I learned from a farmer friend of mine. This person has learned to log everything--and I mean just about everything--attached to growing his crops. He says it’s a lot easier to do today than it was twenty years ago, with computers able to automatically record things as minute as soil temperature and weather condition from his tractor, but the result is the same as if he were taking a pencil to his ledger in the 80’s.
Because he records just about everything, the farmer ends up with an incredible amount of data. Much more that the farmer would seem to need for the normal season. Until he finds himself facing a problem with a growing crop.
Once the farmer stops getting a decent yield from a crop, he goes back to his logs and studies the data. Piece by piece, line by line, step by step. If there is anyway possible to correlate one factor that is not being done that could be the difference in his current yield, this farmer will find it. Just about any good farmer would find it, because they have plenty of examples and information to test to make sure you were doing it right in the first place.
From this example, I’ve come up with the suggestion of a different kind of journaling. I have brought up the power of a journal many times before, and often steal a phrase from Tony Robbins, ’any life worth living is worth writing down.' This time, I am proposing a mostly 'work' journal that will take a good bit of effort, but can save you time in long run in back research, and may prove to be the perfect tool to save you from a CYA situation.
This ‘What Worked Journal’ is simple in concept, but is a bit labor intensive. It requires writing down JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING that is relevant about a project as it happened and notating whether it actually succeeded or failed.
And then you let it sit for a while. You add a little more for you next project, and then it sits. New project, new inputs, then more sitting.
The usefulness of the What Worked Journal is the ability to go back to that place in time when you were working on a similar project, and compared what you are doing now to what you did then. If your current project is on a path heading for obvious failure, open up the journal and look back to the past, and see if you can find some step you missed that could have been the critical key to actual progress. If things going a little too well for you comfort, turn back to your similar projects that did end in failure, follow the road map backward, and find a way to not do it again.
Getting ready to pitch your company or organization to some media outlets to drum up a little PR? Try using our Media Kit Checklist to help you gather your thoughts and items needed to pull off the big sell.
Your basic media kit should contain the 7 following pieces:
[ ] YOUR BIOGRAPHY The basic foundation from where all your media cover will begin. One to two pages maximum.
[ ] YOUR PRESS RELEASE A succinct and consumer-friendly information page about your product and/or service. Also one to two pages maximum.
[ ] YOUR HEADSHOT A professional quality photo representing you or the uniqueness of your business.
[ ] YOUR SALES SHEET A quick info hits sheet that covers some of your most asked questions about your business. Example questions include contact information, price points, and testimonials.
[ ] YOUR MEDIA PLAN A listing of your publicity & PR initiatives. Example content includes where you see the business in six months or five years
[ ] YOUR MEDIA CLIPS Preserved copies of press mentions of you and your business. Either laminated or transferred to digitally to a CD-ROM or PDF.
[ ] YOUR PITCH A 15 to 30 second overview about your business, product, and/or service. Rehearsed well in advance.
If you are like me,and have problems with keeping an inventory of your day, a site like Memiary.com will help you track your top five activities... http://www.memiary.com/
Are you not hitting your weight loss goals because of eating? Are you having problems keeping yourself from going to the stove for a second or third helping of food because you are hungry? I've got a secret that will help. A way that will allow you to eat more food. Yes, I said eat more food.
The secret? Well it’s not much of a secret really. It’s eating a salad, and eating and much salad as you would like.
Whole grains, beans, and fruits and vegetables eaten with their seeds and peels contain fiber or protein, both of which help you to maintain a full feeling longer. Protein takes longer to digest that other nutrients and fiber actually remains in the GI track, not being digested at all.
Knowing this, I personally try to eat a salad with dinner every night, and the difference for me is amazing. Along with a concerted effort to eat extra helpings of vegetables and being as strict as possible on limiting but not depriving myself of the things I love (meat, starches and carbs from sides, desert, more meat) eating a salad, (and in my case, a large salad) with meals has allowed me to easily eat more 'food.' I have learned to keep my salads simple (lettuce or spinach plus a few other pieces, like tomatoes, celery, cucumbers, carrots or some beans or peas) and stay a little stingy on my salad dressing to leave the extra food I get to eat pretty close to right as nature made it. I get plenty of extra vitamins and minerals in the form my body is actually supposed to get them from, which is just another added bonus.
So just like you avoid that salad when you go to the all-you-can-eat buffet to save you a little extra room for that third dessert, the use of the reverse of thinking could help you gain control of your eating habits, which is just one more key to achieving your goals for a healthier life.
Go ahead. Try eating a green salad with lunch and dinner. Especially dinner. Every time you have dinner.
Welcome to my new blog. This is where I will chronicle the next phase of mis-adventures of my life. Thank you for staying on the ride, and for you newcomers to the inside of my mental mania, I will do my best to make sure the trip is both entertaining and educational.
Life In Fast Forward: The Blog is still a bit of a work in progress. Keep checking in for new posts and site updates.
About Blog
This blog supports some of the thoughts and interjections from the folks at Fast Forward Business Properties. Our ideas, things we test, and a few random thoughts will show up here.
Name: J. Cleveland Payne
Home: Little Rock, Arkansas, United States
About Me: News is my profession, so it only fits that I am a news junkie. I'm a radio show/segment producer for a news/talk radio station in Little Rock, Arkansas.
