Archive for the 'Success' Category

I love my iPod. I’ve had numerous models over the last few years and each one of them has filled a unique niche. My video iPod has seen the most duty as my main conduit for audio books. The large capacity and small size of this unit make it ideal for taking audio along in the car.

I have found that listening to audio books while I’m driving is a great way to learn new things in an otherwise unproductive time. I’m a Kinesthetic learner (hands-on) by nature so the actual motion of driving (steering etc) makes it easier to learn things from these books than just sitting in a chair or lying in a bed listening.

My smaller iPods (mini & nano) have been very useful while exercising and on outside walking trips. Nothing makes a walk more enjoyable than invigorating music or a stimulating audio book. The small size of these units make them ideal for the high motion of physical activity. The Nano is especially useful as it is based on Flash memory which is not prone to skipping when the unit is jostled around.

Over the last year I’ve listened to over 60 audio books while driving or exercising. This has been an amazing experience as I have fulfilled my goal of participating in a successful Personal MBA program. Audio books are more limited in their selection, but there are hundreds to choose from in the business and personal development areas.

One of the new developments that represents a huge opportunity for parents is the new lower cost iPod shuffle. You can now get a 1 gig unit for $49 which will hold multiple audio books and uses flash memory that is perfect for the high activity lifestyle of kids.

Now you can get each child their own iPod and download age appropriate audio books. They can listen while walking to school or on the bus. The really cool thing is that many of the books that school age children are required to read for class are available in audio format.

Now your kids can literally do their book reading homework while in the car or out riding their bikes. This small iPod shuffle is the most bullet-proof of the iPod units and the light weight means they can take it almost anywhere.

Whether it is Huck Finn for the younger kids or Steinbeck for the older crowd, the audio version makes a great addition to the written book. I know when I was a kid that my reading sometimes meant skimming the book on the way to class. With audio books they will have heard the entire story through and will easily be able to go back and give a detailed book review.

The nice thing about the Apple iPod versus other units is the bookmark function. If you pause the audio at any point the iPod automatically puts in a “bookmark” which makes it easy to come back to exactly the right spot. Many other MP3 units do not offer this feature which makes studying the audio book much more difficult.

In short, the new less expensive iPod shuffle can help your kids learn while they play and get better grades too. If they should happen to drop the unit, it will most likely survive unscathed because of the lightweight design. And in the unlikely event they lose it, you’ll only be out $50, instead of hundreds for the other units.

Audio books are widely available through Amazon.com or from direct download from Audible.com or iTunes.

I’ve worked as an IT professional for the past 12 years. I’ve seen lots of changes and lots of updates. I used to like updates. Hey… they usually made things better… usually making things load quicker, giving me faster throughput and making things more reliable.

The problem is that most of my time now is spent with some kind of update. If I leave my laptop off for a few days and boot it up, it will take 10-15 minutes to get the latest Microsoft or Apple updates… download them and then want the usual reboot. This is before I fire up iTunes or other software that needs an update.

And just when I think I’m done, a little tray icon will pop up and remind me that Flash, Java, or Acrobat is feeling a little outdated and needs some attention. A few clicks, a download, an install and a reboot and I’m finally ready to get to work.

Ahh the silence of a spun down hard-drive… but wait… now that things are silent the background notifications are starting to work… It’s the dreaded e-mail that there is a new Wordpress blog software upgrade that should be installed right away. This little chore takes about 15 minutes and now I’m ready to start working.

Ooops… not so fast says the Wordpress dashboard… a slew of updated plug-ins are now available and some of them are really important… another 20 minutes this time and now I’m surely ready to get started writing.

I start to type and upload my first draft to the web and I notice that my site is suddenly down. How could this be… I wonder? So I login to the site status web site and notice that my web host is doing a 12 hour maintenance. Thanks for letting me know I mumble under my breath.

I start to write in my local blog editor and now I’m starting to get mad. I take a vacation for a couple of days and I come back to this update hell… arrgh. But wait… now that I have to wait 12 hours for my blog site to come back up I can download the new Vista Service Pack 1 and load it on my computer.

A few clicks and a 20 minute download and I’m ready to go. I fire up the update and now it says that my computer will be unavailable for at least an hour and will reboot multiple times… well hey… I’m not doing anything else…

The computer grinds away and the screen goes blank multiple times… I grab some refreshment and watch a little TV. After an hour of a mindless reality show I come back to a computer that is just finishing up… now I can start writing, I say to myself.

One last reboot and the computer is ready… ready for a defrag since a huge amount of files had been installed and moved around. I click off the defragmentation notification and I set it to defrag overnight and go to bed… knowing that everything will be better Saturday morning.

I wake up Saturday morning, ready to go. I click the mouse of my computer and the screen comes up and notifies me that the defrag is done… I’m on my way now. I fire up my web site and get ready to post… but the dreaded “site unavailable” message appears.

What!!! My site is still down??? I login to the site status web site and notice that the screen is bright red with urgent notifications. It seems my current web host had multiple problems overnight and the 12 hour window may have to be extended… This is actually funny as I had just moved my blog over to this web host because my other host had had continual problems since moving my site to a new server in December. Double arrrghhh!

So here I am writing this post, waiting for things to come back up. I did read a great message this morning on Copyblogger about Three Sure-Fire Steps to beat the Boring Content Blues. This post is a result… Hopefully it’s not boring. I’m now starting on another new post for later in the week.

Hey… someday we’ll all be updated or die trying

Ooops… hang on… Now Microsoft is alerting me that there are updates to the service pack… will it never end???

One of my favorite books is “On Writing Well“, by William Zinsser. The big takeaway that I get from his book is that… Writing Is Hard. I couldn’t agree more. The longer that I am involved with this online writing thing called blogging the more I realize what Zinsser says is true.

Putting words on paper is easy, but refining them and massaging them into something coherent and meaningful is a real task. I’ve been blogging for almost three years and it still takes a lot of time and effort to get the words out.

But just because something is hard doesn’t mean that it is not a worthwhile activity. To the contrary, the harder something is, the more potential reward there is at the end.

In the spirit of Blogging Well, here are three timely resources that I found over the weekend that you should bookmark.

1. The Top 100 Productivity and Lifehack Blogs is a list compiled by Amy Quinn of CollegeDegree.com . This is a well organized and exhaustive list of productivity resources that are just a click away. She has organized them into eight helpful categories.

1. Most Popular
2. Life Organizers
3. Productivity in the Workplace
4. Expert Advice
5. Personal Growth
6. Prioritizing/GTD
7. Personal Finance Hacks
8. Miscellaneous

I am humbled to say that this blog made the list under Life Organizers. The category listings make it easy to find helpful and specific information in just seconds. You don’t have to be a college student to find this list useful.

2. On Reading Well. Joyful, Jubilant, Learning has a great series going this month with reviews of great books. It is called a Love Affair With Books and has some amazing entries.

Current entries include…

• The Dream Manager reviewed by Andrew Rondeau 
• Thanks reviewed by Sara Orem
• Thick Face, Black Heart reviewed by Dwayne Melancon

Be sure to check out this site and add some of these books to your must read list!

3. Make It Great. My good friend Phil Gerbyshak is celebrating a birthday this week. Phil has been Blogging for Three Years and has helped hundreds of bloggers around the web to Make it Great on a daily basis. Phil is an author and was instrumental in putting together the amazing bloggers conference, SOBCON07.

His three year stats are pretty amazing…

If you want to take your blog to the next level, read some of Phil’s popular articles on networking and personal marketing. Have a Great Birthday Phil!

I read an interesting theory the other day in an investment guide by Jason Kelly. He sites a 1979 study by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky that looked at the following scenario…

Subjects were told to choose between these two prospects…

Prospect 1: A 100 percent chance of losing $3000
Prospect 2: An 80 percent chance of losing $4000, but a 20 percent chance of losing nothing.

Which would you choose? In the study, 92 percent of the prospects chose prospect 2. The chance of losing nothing, even though it was improbable, was compelling enough to risk losing even more. Prospect one, however, is likely to lose less.

This is an interesting finding and one that contrasts with…

Subjects were then told to choose between these two options:

Prospect 1: A 100 percent chance of gaining $3000
Prospect 2: An 80 percent chance of gaining $4000, but a 20 percent chance of gaining nothing.

Which would you choose? In the study, 80 percent of the subjects chose prospect 1. The guarantee of gaining something was more appealing than the prospect of gaining more. Prospect 2, however, is likely to gain more.

In conclusion the study found that people hate risk when it threatens gains, but they love risk when it could prevent losses. In fact Kahneman & Tversky found that… “loss is painful, on average twice as painful as gain is pleasurable in matters financial.”

This study has wide implications to the whole idea of risk and personal development.

• It helps explain why people stay in dead end jobs instead of taking a risk to find a better one.
• It helps explain why it is hard to get people to speak in in front of an audience and improve their public speaking, when the risk of embarrassment is so high
• It helps to explain why people try to win back their losses in gambling.

This also has some interesting implications for dieting. From the findings it would seem that it would be better to focus on the health benefits of a diet (averting health problems and possible loss of life) versus the gain of a smaller waistline.

One of the conclusions I have come to in this scenario is to ask the negative question that we looked at in our post on risk…

1. What is the worst thing that can happen if I don’t take this risk
2. What is the best thing that can happen if I don’t take this risk

This may help us see that the actual risk might be higher if we don’t do something than if we do.

Something to think about…

Here is a simple exercise.

Take a piece of paper and write down the following phrase…

“What Great Thing Would I do If I Knew I Could Not Fail?”

Underneath the phrase write down five to ten things that would fit the description.

Look at the items and imagine in your mind that you could accomplish them in the next 24 hours.

What one thing sticks out on the list that would have the most impact?

Circle this one thing.

Here is the start of a long term goal.

It is written down. Now ask yourself one question.

Are you are willing to take the first step to accomplish it?

If you are… why not take the first step?

Today…

In our last post we looked at buried treasure, those personal talents that may be hidden or suppressed in our lives. The first step to find our treasure is to find out who we are.

To find out the “who” we can look at three areas.

1. We need to take a look at our strengths and our personality
2. We need to look at our mission field. Who we can help, train, or mentor. Who are our customers, clients, or students?
3. We need to look at our mentors. People that can help us grow and succeed.

In number one above, there are tests that can help us get a picture of who we are. The first one I would suggest is the Strengths 2.0 test by the Gallup organization.

Currently the best way to take this test is to purchase the book, Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath. This book includes a membership card in the back that allows you to login to their web site and take the test. The test takes under 30 minutes and will highlight your top five strengths.

This test is highly informative and each of the strengths is outlined in the book. The book will give you a good starting point to build on your strong areas.

It’s also a good idea to take a personality test of some type. I like the Meyers-Briggs test, but there are many to choose from. Many of these tests can be done online for little or no charge. The most complete way to do this is to pick up a book such as What Type Am I by Renee Baron, which includes the Meyers-Briggs test and informative follow-up material.

Once you have taken the tests it great to write down the results on paper. Make a list of your top five strengths and your four quadrant personality type.

In number two it’s nice to make a list of people that you know, clients that you have, and create a comprehensive database list. A good exercise is to take your strengths list and look how you would be able to help or teach the people on this form. Web sites such as LinkedIn and others provide a good way to keep track of these acquaintances and track their talents and strengths.

In number three above, it can be helpful to identify mentors in different strength areas of your life. According to the strengths finder book, it is easier to improve your skills by focusing on your strengths than your weaknesses. If you identify people who share your strengths, you can easily collaborate and grow by sharing information.

As you explore the different areas of your personal talents, it is helpful to keep a journal and track your progress. We’ll dig a little deeper in the chest tomorrow…