In the anticipation of the arrival of a new tax deduction baby to our family, my wife and I have been doing some writing to present to the our child, who sex has not been determined but we have already settled on the first name Kendall (although the wife is starting to waver on the name with about seven months to go). She is keeping a diary of things that happened in the year of his/her arrival, I am writing some of the life lessons I have absorbed to eventually but into book form and hopefully guilt some of you out there into buying to help pay for baby supplies (I am an entrepreneur after all). As I work on pieces I will post them here, looking for as much honest feedback of its usefulness, and a little conversation on just how hard it was for y’all to learn these lessons yourself. Assuming you have actually learned these lessons.
Please leave comments as they come.
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Book Of Kendall Rule #4: Most Of Your Life Will Be Tied Up In Doing Things You Don't Want To Do
For most of my life I wanted to find a way to make a very good living off of my words. While you can debate my level of talent, you can not debate my love of words, both written and spoken. But as I got older, the problem wasn’t necessarily the increasing amount of talented wordsmiths in the world, it was the decreasing value of the words themselves. So while I did my best to eek out an article here and fill-in on radio talk shows there, I slugged through a long list other things that my employers had put on my job description to bring home a paycheck to take care of the family.
Any thing worth doing in your life will take time, and that time will be worth it. But that time will be precious compared to the myriad of things that you will find yourself having to do that take away from what you really want to do, many of which you will truly hate to do.
So as you grow up to ask your mother and I if it is really necessary to make your bed every morning, learn Algebra II, or not detour when we send you to the store, you will quickly pick up on the mundane life necessities that allow for you live, grow, and survive in this world, even if they are not particularly amusing to you personal.
There are also plenty of things that you will have to do that you won’t be very thrilled about that have a direct effect on the things you actually want to accomplish in life. My want for a professional sports career was severely limited by my desire to not practice. On the flip side, I haven’t fully embrace the need for criticism as I continue my quest to make more money by producing more words, it is a necessary evil that I tolerate in hopes that It makes my work that much better.
Make sure you cherish the pain and toil of the things you must do, as they will lead you down a path that will hopefully allow you to get to do more things you want to do.
In the anticipation of the arrival of a new tax deduction baby to our family, my wife and I have been doing some writing to present to the our child, who sex has not been determined but we have already settled on the first name Kendall (although the wife is starting to waver on the name with about seven months to go). She is keeping a diary of things that happened in the year of his/her arrival, I am writing some of the life lessons I have absorbed to eventually but into book form and hopefully guilt some of you out there into buying to help pay for baby supplies (I am an entrepreneur after all). As I work on pieces I will post them here, looking for as much honest feedback of its usefulness, and a little conversation on just how hard it was for y’all to learn these lessons yourself. Assuming you have actually learned these lessons.
Please leave comments as they come.
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Book Of Kendall Rule #3: If There Is A Problem, First Make Sure It Is Not You
You will come across plenty of trouble times in your life, many will oddly enough be of your own making. The way you handle yourself in these situations are going to determine your next steps in you life, and ultimately, the limits to which you will actually progress for your entire lifetime.
You use a troubling time in your life as way to gain experience and grow. But you don’t have to create your own trouble. There are plenty of people in the world will gain extreme pleasure in creating more trouble for you than you can ever imagine.
You’ll be able to handle it. But not if you are spending too much energy creating you own problems. There is no fun or profit in creating trouble for yourself. Stepping up to a challenge is one thing. Stepping into a burning building after soaking yourself in gasoline and stuffing your pockets with dynamite is asking for problems with consequences to major to overcome. If you find you have a problem, and the problem happens to be you, fix it immediately.
While the drawbacks of getting sucked into reading seemingly random inputs from seemingly random people you follow on Twitter are pretty obvious, the possibilities for focused input, or even a true focus group, are amazing.
When I was an Acquisitions Officer in the Air Force, I worked for about 8 months on a program that processed security clearances and was given a team to work all the data on how fast the process was going, and presented daily metrics to the government agency in charge of the program. The words my boss told me when he gave me the duties, “The guy who reports the metrics can prove just about anything he wanted to,” turned out to be so truthful it was a little frightening.
The experience has made me a numbers and info junky on par with die hard rotisserie baseball geeks. And Twitter is filling that addiction to information like no other analytic tools ever has.
The magic is in its mission statement, a chance for people around the world to instantly share with others what they are doing. It also gives you the chance to look into the minds of those same millions of people, and see what they are doing, thinking, buying, or dissing.
This power is easily seen in the quick Twitter chatter scene during big television events as people who are looking to be a part of the mass experiences fire off snarky comments as an organic commentary track. This power has been most prominent in watching the ups and downs during the 2008 presidential election and the early days of the Obama Presidential Administration.
As a metrics nut, I like to lot watch the Twitter feeds during big events on TV, like new episodes of 24 and live performance shows nights on American Idol. But the real fun has come during President Obama’s television news conferences. Especially the ones that delay prime time television. Instant praise, instant hate, and instant color commentary is available to anyone willing to scroll thought a few pages of tweets.
Any marketer or sales manager can do a Twitter topic search on their company and find out exactly what is being said exactly when people are thinking about it. That was a good thing for the marketing team at Skittles that decided to make their Twitter search page the actual corporate product website, and a bad thing for Motrin after the Motrin moms took to blogosphere over a commercial that didn’t go over so well with them.
Monitoring your Twitter conversation does give you lots of insight into the thoughts of your brand or product. Just be ready to dismiss some of the more silly or snarky comments. After all, we are still talking about people using the anonymousness of the internet (even if it’s getting harder and harder to stay anonymous) to be a little to open and honest, with little regard of the consequences of the words going out to the world.
In the anticipation of the arrival of a new tax deduction baby to our family, my wife and I have been doing some writing to present to the our child, who sex has not been determined but we have already settled on the first name Kendall (although the wife is starting to waver on the name with about seven months to go). She is keeping a diary of things that happened in the year of his/her arrival, I am writing some of the life lessons I have absorbed to eventually but into book form and hopefully guilt some of you out there into buying to help pay for baby supplies (I am an entrepreneur after all). As I work on pieces I will post them here, looking for as much honest feedback of its usefulness, and a little conversation on just how hard it was for y’all to learn these lessons yourself. Assuming you have actually learned these lessons.
Please leave comments as they come.
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Book Of Kendall Rule #2: Don't Fight For The Chance To Be Right
It is easy to see that there are plenty of causes to fight for, and many of them are worth fighting and sacrificing for. But it is never a worthy battle is your goal is just to claim the title of ‘being right.’
There are plenty of things worth spending your energy on than proving you are right to a group of useless non-believers. Being fair, being honest, being just, and just being are just a few things. Sometimes, it might be necessary to throw a fight to save someone from hurt feelings. Sometimes you have to take a dive to enable yourself to save face. The circumstances of your life will dictate which battles are truly important and which once are really just poor sparring sessions.
Save your fury of righteousness for the time you are going to need it. Because there will be times when the fight to prove you are right will be the most important thing for you in that moment. It may even prove to be career or life saving. But it is impossible to 100% spot on correct all the time and a complete waste of energy to pursue the winning stance in every argument.
In the anticipation of the arrival of a new tax deduction baby to our family, my wife and I have been doing some writing to present to the our child, who sex has not been determined but we have already settled on the first name Kendall (although the wife is starting to waver on the name with about seven months to go). She is keeping a diary of things that happened in the year of his/her arrival, I am writing some of the life lessons I have absorbed to eventually but into book form and hopefully guilt some of you out there into buying to help pay for baby supplies (I am an entrepreneur after all). As I work on pieces I will post them here, looking for as much honest feedback of its usefulness, and a little conversation on just how hard it was for y’all to learn these lessons yourself. Assuming you have actually learned these lessons.
Please leave comments as they come.
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Book Of Kendall Rule #1: Don't Take Everything Personally
Not everyone is going to like you. In fact, you will find you may have more than you fair share of people in your life that truly do hate you and have nothing but ill will for you. All the same, you come across more than a few people that you will find totally impossible to hate for various reasons, to include not good reason at all.
There will be battles of will and battles of wits. There will be knock-down, drag-out fights with the people you hate, the people that hate you, and plenty of other people filling various roles in your life.
From your long time friend, to the once in a life time encounter, and back to the people that truly make you blood boil and vice versa. There will be unkind words sent your way, sometimes on purpose, sometimes in innocence, and sometimes in the heat of an emotional tirade that you thought you could avoid.
Your feelings will be hurt, but listen to the words being said before you choose to take the words personally.
Yes, you will choose whether or not to take an insult personally. You may even choose to take needed feedback, a careless but harmless comment, and the drop dead honest truth as a personal insult. First, make sure have been insulted, then figure out whether the insult itself is worth the return of your wraith. Sometimes it will be deserved. Unfortunately, sometimes it will not be worth the effort to give the other party satisfaction. And most times the comment you received wasn’t exactly the comment meant to be sent, and isn’t an issue for rebuttal.
I love it when I have a spare 10-15 minutes to sit around and fool with Twitter (where you can follow my seemingly random muses and rants at http://twitter.com/djazzycool1, and blog specific updates at http://twitter.com/fastforwardlife). A quick explanation for those of you who haven’tcomeacrossallthepress on the micro-blogging service, Twitter ‘purpose’ is to answer the question, “What are you doing right now,” and share that answer with a few thousand followers instantly, and allowing those followers to potentially share that answer with the millions that have signed up for the service. Twitter has allowed me the chance to get back into the chat-room experience minus the hassle of chat-room moderation. In the past week I was able to have sustained conversations on the TV show 24, Terrell Owens’ signing with the Buffalo Bills, the Obama stimulus plan, and coffee. In any spare 10-15 minutes I can see what is going on in the lives of thousands of real friends, friends I’ve only met on the internet, and other random people (and more than a few celebrities) who are interesting, entertaining, or informative.
But there is always a con to every pro, and my con for Twitter is that since I am ease dropping with permission on a lot of diverse conversation, I get sucked into skimming through a lot of promotional garbage at times. I ironically also contribute to that garbage with various completely useless random thoughts of my own (@djazzycool1 is threatening to turn on the air conditioner) along with blatant blog promotions. Sure, all those who receive my information have given me permission to blab as much as I want to type. And I have given the same permission to all that I follow to push whatever they want my way in 140 characters or less. I can stop following any overly chatty personality with a few mouse clicks, and plenty of people that get tired of me stop following me as well.
It is only when Twitter is the only means of communication that I have with people, and for some people it truly is, completely dropping a follower becomes a problem. That is the basis for the hate part I have with social media. Other issues:
- Back in the day when I though it might be cool if people would fill out there profiles Yahoo! so that it would be easier to communicate, nobody wanted all that personal information just floating on a server somewhere in California. Now, the only what I communicate with some old friends is thought social networking sites.
- A year ago I asked a friend who was going through a rough path how she was doing. She told me to check out her MySpace status. She said this as she was standing right in front of me.
- I talk to my teenage cousins through MySpace and text messages, and since they only talk/type in text speak, I have no idea what they are saying most of the time.
- I have held hour long conversation with people sitting next to me in IM spaces because it was more convenient.
And so on and so forth. I’m sure you have your own loves and hates with communicating in the realm of social media. But for all of the drawbacks that come with being attached with living on the internet, the positives outweigh the negatives by leaps and bounds.
Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Friend Feed, LinkedIn, and other online connectivity services allow the average person a chance to connect to every single one of the over 6 billion people on the planet. You can ask a question and get answers from experts almost instantly. And the reach of businesses large or small, even with the amount of exploitation that is used, makes it less of a necessary evil and more of a daily annoyance or chore
Which is a long winded way to bring us to the title: promoting versus annoying. You wouldn’t think of driving around your neighborhood, knocking on every door, and announcing that Tuesday is tuna fish day for lunch. But you can do that in your online neighborhood. In fact, it might even be encourage as a way to foster a more community feel.
You would also be hesitant to go door-to-door selling your wares in today’s society. But inbox-to-inbox, as long as you have permission and are not overly annoying, is perfectly acceptable.
But there has to be balance. Unless you’re an entertainer or comedian, you can’t get by with just dropping funny quips. Unless you have the greatest product in the world or truly don’t care home many people you annoy to make a sale, you can’t just pitch links to your affiliate marketing programs.
It is okay to be a citizen, salesman, and statesman to various degrees within your online social networks. But just like in real life, a message can get really old and offensive a lot quicker that one may suspect. Expect to lose a follower or friend occasionally for various reasons, but try not to give them your excessive status yapping as a reason.
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.
