Dancing, Construction & Fear

Giving my try

2011-03-26T13:32:00.000-07:00

I said "I'm listening" and God told me to sit down on the floor, on a pillow, with a glass of water. I need money and I wanted to sit in front of the computer and formulate a plan on where to get that money.

But instead I found myself sitting on the floor.

God started talking and I started talking right back and I couldn't make out anything being said, so I asked both sides to stop and asked for forgiveness and really started to get into how sorry I was. God told me that was enough and to take a drink of water. I stopped and drank.

I am the living the water.

He told me that just because you would never thirst again does not mean that you would never drink again. Rather, just like the eight cups of water I've been trying to drink a day we must continuously drink in the living water.

He told me to take another drink. I told him I was listening.

He showed me my two year old who when she doesn't want to eat her dinner, and she is called out on it, frantically grabs her drink and say's she can't eat because she is drinking. God told me I need to stop drinking milk sometimes and move to the solid food. That drinking his water can be good, but we must put down the cup and take action.

He told me to take another drink. I told him I was listening.

He didn't tell me anything, so I argued back and yelled "Hey, I took and drink and said I was listening!" He told me he had told me enough.

I took another drink for me.

I said, that's not enough, I will not let you go until you bless me. How am I supposed to accomplish continuous drinking of your living water and taking action when I am a wretched failure. The reason I need a cure all right now is because I know I cannot follow through and so even if there is a perfect solution that takes a year to implement it is, for me, impossible.

He then told me the solution.

Failure.

He told me that failing was the only way. Continuous failing. That my commitment was not to succeed but to try. My commitment was not to reap but to plant. My commitment was not to have a life overflowing but to give my tenth. The simple quiet act of giving my tenth, it is giving my try and asking in return for his all.

brain washing

2010-09-01T19:42:00.000-07:00

New show concept -

A group of friendly bears, named the Christian Bears, travel around spreading the gospel to people with large cross medallions embroidered on their chests.

But there is a twist!

There is a bear out there who doesn't want to be a Christian Bear, but that can be fixed. The Christian Bears struggle with him, it is a hard fight because the other bear is small but uses the giant machine of the entertainment industry to fight the Christian Bears.

It all works out in the end though, because the Christian Bears overpower the smaller bear and force him into the religion which is what is really best for him anyway.

This is offensive to even me.

Only Fear

2010-08-24T19:21:00.000-07:00

I've had some time away. First the construction ended, then the dancing. Now all that is left is the fear.

All of my hopes and dreams were in those things, and although I could have done more, tried harder and spun my wheels faster, nothing would have saved either business in the long run. Nothing should have saved them either. In four years of devouring business reading I never came across an author or speaker who said a perfect execution of a broken business model equals long painful failure.

I also did not read about the recovery process after the first shovel full of dirt hits the casket. I lost my identity, I lost the hope of recovering my money, the hope of building a future, the hope of resurrecting my image of myself.

Maybe these were all good things, maybe I won't have the courage to post this after I'm done, but right now it still hurts and I want it to be over. Right now I'm angry and sad. I thought I was just starting a business; that is what I was most wrong about.

I have heard it said that failure builds character.
That is a lie.

I have no more character now, in fact I'm sure I have less. I want to lay down for a few years and do nothing, I want to run away to another state, I want to change my phone number and delete my facebook account. Character may be best built directly after failure in the giant chasm that is left in your being, but it is not built in the failure. Character is built when character is built.

So what happens tomorrow? I'm not sure, but I'll be here. Let's discuss how to build character. How to let things die. How to generate motivation from dust. How to guide anger and resentment. How to care most about what is happening right now. But most of all, let us talk about how to take that giant, gaping, painful hole inside of us and fill it with character.

Sales etc.

2010-05-02T05:57:00.000-07:00

We don't like some salesmen, some pushy I just happen to have the perfect, some well only for you, salesman. We do like buying though. Buying somebodies passion, buying somebodies excitement about a product that simply is not exciting.

I was once at a state fair and was stuck at a booth for five minutes watching a guy sell a broom! He loved it, he wasn't faking it, and he was putting on a great show (which is why you go to the fair right?).

I also recently read an article by an internet marketer who "proved" he was a good marketer by how many marketing products he had sold that month. sigh.

Don't do a presentation on presentations, and don't sell selling. Do something, even if it is just sweeping with a broom, if you are passionate we can tell and we want to hear about it (and buy it).

Form and Context

2010-04-27T10:10:00.000-07:00

Form and context are best explained in this video (30 min) or by massively understating that:
Form = The perfectly rippled sand in the desert
Context = The wind blowing, the sun, etc.

In nature context can dictate the form, add all of the context together and you get the form of a tree growing around a fence and leaning towards the sun.

When we design from scratch we decide form from our understanding of context, which is why there are so many poorly designed things (ie. the Apple app. store or a two party political system). These are derived from a poor understanding of context.

Humans are a mixture of both. Context decides if we have scars or are malnourished (and thus small) or if we are abused as children. Form designed from scratch is what job we choose to work at, what neighborhood we live in (as adults), who we marry, what religion (however, often chosen by context needs to be chosen by form) how many kids we have (as of the last 40 years), etc.

When was the last time you sat down and figured out what is form in your life that you are letting be designed by context (your diet?). And when was the last time you struggled designing something your context has total control over (your past?).

Theory of Everything

2010-04-24T13:54:00.000-07:00

I've heard it said that Einstein was always most interested in discovering the theory of everything, one theory that tied all the different sciences together. This is intriguing in theology because I've always thought that something that is a belief should be backed by another belief. Just keep following the belief trail about different assumptions and it may lead you to a rather shaking foundation etc.

Business tends to run this way as well, you see giant companies acting foolish and receiving a fools reward vs. other companies that seemed to have figured out their business theory of everything, basing all of their products off of it. Southwest - no frills, cheap air travel. Starbucks - high end, coffee related daily rewards. Nike - be you but better.

It's all around, one day is the world spinning once on its axis, one year is the world spinning around the sun as an axis. An eight pound baby is born and yet contains all of the essential organs and body functions that a two hundred pound forty year old adult does.

This is why truly smart people are interested by everything, because everything is one thing and one thing represents everything. Einstein new this about music, Richard Branson knows this about each and every person, he has filled up seven hundred pocket notebooks with other peoples thoughts from everyday conversations he has had throughout his life. Robert Gelinas knows this about jazz and Christianity.

When you figure something out, relate it immediately to everything else in your life and see if you are not enlightened by yourself. And if you are having trouble with something, retreat to an area of expertise and search for the answers there.

Completely...

2010-04-14T11:34:00.000-07:00

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Completely aware, and acting on it.

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Dead already

2010-04-07T11:09:00.000-07:00

It's in style to talk about all of the sheeple out there living in suburbia who are dead already, the sleep walkers.

Lincoln said, "Most men die at 20, they just aren't buried for another forty years". The underlying theme in the film Zombie Land (gory and wonderful). George Ivanovitch Gurdjief stated it as "A considerable percentage of the people we meet in the streets of a great town are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead."

But this is where it has stayed, hundreds of years we have been warned about sleep walking, becoming the zombie, dying on the inside. Stop the warnings, bring on the solution, and while we're at it let's take this theory to the next level.

The Solution

Wake up and stop being a loser who does what their shown/told.

The Next Level

Death on the outside. How about living a life on the outside that is repugnant to those who are dead on the inside?

You know those people, those people in little matching boxes driving little matching boxes trying to save 100k to send their kids to little matching boxes so finally at 70 they can finish the royal flush by sliding quietly into rows in... little matching boxes.

Live a life that looks like death to those people. Live a life where a company doesn't market to you because you are not a demographic.

Happyness

2010-04-06T06:24:00.000-07:00

Tim Ferris once said that the opposite of happiness is not sadness, it's boredom. This statement alone can change your thinking, but let me take it a step further. What is the opposite of sadness?

Stability.

You have a friend that has just found out their mom was in a car accident, would you invite them to a day at the amusement park to lift their spirits with a few roller coaster rides? Of course this seems silly, you would tell them to find out if their mom was ok, get some information, if she was close by to go visit. All of these things are like little pillars around this person creating stability.

You can run pretty far with this. If you are financially traumatized, don't try and get rich, just get your feet under you until things settle. If you are going through health issues, don't train for a marathon, just start eating healthy and getting fresh air every day. Relationship problems, sit and have a quiet meal with your partner, don't try and recreate your honeymoon.

Lastly, if you are unhappy, get out and do something. You will not find happiness in a slightly newer car, a slightly bigger house, one more outfit, a vacation in Europe instead of Florida. All of these things represent leveling up your comfort and stability. Instead, push yourself. Maybe you do need to train for that marathon.

Pulling the Trigger

2010-03-19T14:31:00.000-07:00

Decision making is hard. Climbing the whole mountain is impossible.

Decision making becomes much harder when we only make monumental decisions that we have to marry for the rest of our lives. As some call it, pulling the trigger.

The issue is that most of the time we should be making tiny decisions that we can undo just as fast as we did them. We make a hundred tiny decisions and they all add up to create a mass and momentum that are what we were truly trying to achieve all along. We never pull the trigger.

Pulling the trigger fires the gun, you can never unfire a gun. Pulling the trigger can kill something. Pulling the trigger is terrifying, so why do we continuously put ourselves in the position to have to?

Want to get in shape, lace up some shoes you already own and go for a walk, don't pull the trigger on a $500 gym membership. Want to change careers, go volunteer for a day doing something you might be passionate about, don't pull the trigger on your job.

So go out there today and don't make a big decision, just dip your toe, it's a lot easier than jumping in.

Running to the noise

2010-03-12T06:49:00.000-08:00

In a world completely thrashed with noise I find it interesting that we so often run towards more noise. When we go shopping we head to the mall. When we go on vacation we head to Vegas. When we want to eat out we find crowded, popular restaurants downtown. When we wish for entertainment we run towards television which spikes twenty minutes of commercials into our face for every hour of couch time.

If you watch 1 hour of television a day (stop lying, 5 maybe) then you watch 560 minutes of commercials a month. If you bought Netflix for $9 a month and streamed those shows you would save over nine hours. Next time you get on a plane and they ask, "would you like to upgrade to our flight that takes one hour less for $1", smile, shake your head no, and then stare at the back of that seat for an hour watching your life filch away.

Stop running towards the noise. Start searching, spending, working to get towards the quiet.

100% of this post was stolen from my fantastic wife Kelsey, come on Kelsey, lets escape the noise and get out of here soon.

Frankenbusiness

2010-03-09T12:09:00.000-08:00

Today we are going to play a little game where we hook up the neck bolts of our company to a lighting rod and bring the ugly thing to life. The game consists of two questions and it if you follow me to the end, or cheat and jump to the end right now... welcome back cheaters, this post will relate to everyone. I played this game with Dance Core:

1)What would your business look like if it where a real person?

2) What do you want your business to look like as a real person?

Interesting question here and it could be answered a couple of different ways. Maybe you imagine taking your business to a holiday party and look at it through the eyes of the guests. Is your business sexy? Did your business get drunk and make out with a stranger? (mine sadly did but we are getting over that, at least there aren't many pictures) Does your business talk softly telling stories or loudly yell jokes? Is your business a man or a woman? Does your business brag, are they well kept or could they use a haircut and deodorant? Is your business confident about itself or does it cower behind you?

We may not have control over our business all the time but much of that we can decide. More accurately in tune with parenting we can lead correctly and hope for the best instead of just sitting back while your business lives in your basement smoking pot.

So how does this apply to everybody? Well, replace the word business with career, house, hobby. You would not go to a party with a guy wearing a piano tie, so why are you letting your resume out dressed up like that?

Seth Godin and Steroids

2010-03-03T06:12:00.001-08:00

If you click on the title or here you can read Seth Godin's post from this morning. The interesting thing for me is to take his idea a step further and say that trying harder is a race to the bottom. Take the baseball pitchers. Throw the ball really fast and you succeed. So everyone starts working really hard at throwing a ball faster. Then they start changing training techniques. Then they start changing their diets. Then they start taking steroids.

Roger Clemens (steroids) was 6'4" and 240 lbs, at 47! He hit the wall of work harder, and then realized there was still another step. Where Seth leaves off is sometimes working harder is actually not the end, but the end is even worse.

There is another pitcher in baseball aptly nicknamed "The Freak" who is 5'11" and 170 lbs. Seventy pounds less then Roger. Five inches shorter than Roger. I promise you, that if Tim Lincecum had tried to beat Roger by working harder, changing nutrition and shooting steroids, he still would not have won. And yet he did, best pitcher two years in a row. Sometimes you need to stop working harder not because there is nowhere else you can go, but because there is no where else you should go.

Before you lose a leg and have a wheel leg like the maid from the jetsons

2010-03-02T05:36:00.000-08:00

I once read a book called "Good Calories Bad Calories" back in 2008, great read, a thousand pages of technical insight on the long road of how we got to where we are when it comes to our view on calories if my memory serves me. Here's a note I jotted down after reading it.

Enter Ben 2008 -

Just putting in junk hours is like eating carbs, it makes you think that more will help and in reality you are just getting fat and closer to death. But meat, meat satisfies and solves, meat is tightly held in one package that includes everything, meat is neither sweet or bitter or sour, but rather, it is meat.

Something had to die for you to eat meat, does that register?

What dies when you put in meat hours?

1200 cal of junk carb's make you lose little weight and feel like your starving, 1200 cal of meat makes you full and healthy (check out the Inuit's). A cool thousand bucks can buy you a big tv and leave you feeling starved: Forty hours in a week can make you believe that you need to put in another forty just to break even. Or you can spend one hour a day tutoring a child so they can graduate high school: Spend a thousand bucks on giving a needy family a furnace. We spend all week at work snacking on hours, and then we take the money we earn there and spend it on more empty calories. Now we wonder why we have emotional and financial diabetes?

Re-enter Ben 2010 - I think relating this thought to time = money is important because both sides of the equation can vary so greatly. Not all time/money is created equally, dump the empty calories/time/money from your life and start consuming smaller amounts of quality. Did you know that our bodies can get most of the nutrients we need from meat even though they are in tiny quantities compared to fruits and vegetables. This is because carb's force our body to work overtime (and create to much insulin) and we don't absorb the tiny but sufficient nutrients such as vitamin D.

Money CAN buy happiness

2010-03-01T06:20:00.000-08:00

There was a great article here about money and happiness. An aggressively interesting part is when they discussed the concept of what we are buying.

"Part of the problem is that happiness isn’t necessarily what’s motivating us when we reach for our wallets."

This is interesting because most of us work eight to twelve hours a day for money and then think long and hard about how we are going to spend our money. We then bemoan that money can't buy us happiness when in fact that is not what we were trying to buy in the first place. What if somebody close to you spent a year saving money, took twenty thousand dollars in cash and went and bought a beautiful car with it. Three months later they come to you and complain that the car was not giving them the the benefit of retirement security that they had hoped for. It is not that money can't buy you retirement security, that's just not what you bought.

So read the article and then go out today and buy yourself some happiness or stop complaining that your money is broken.

Time = Wealth

2010-02-27T06:44:00.000-08:00

If we believe the concept that time equals wealth then we must take a step back because it means five life altering things -

Each morning we all have the same amount of wealth
At any given moment we all have the same chance of losing all of our wealth forever
It is a type of wealth that can only be utilized when spent, today's wealth will mold the moment you go to bed tonight
We consider wealth to be security, so how do we handle the notion that we have wealth (yay your alive) with the fact that there is zero security (lookout for that truck).
Lastly a question: Does the act of hurrying, multitasking, utilizing, going as fast as possible actually decrease the value of any given moments in a day?

The village idiot

2010-02-26T06:06:00.000-08:00

There used to be a village idiot, somebody who did not fit in, which is mostly because everyone else fit in. The shoemaker fit in because when he was ten he started working for the old shoemaker and learned how to not be an idiot. The school teacher fit in because she went to school and then left for more school and then brought that school back.

Then along came entrepreneurship, this hard to spell endeavor, that said that you can succeed with an idea and passion. And oh by the way, it helps if you don't fit in, it helps to stand out and be a purple cow and a lone wolf and a leader (but early on nobody will follow you because you're a trail blazer). The problem is that now you're the idiot.

I became the idiot because I started a small business without the realization of a couple things, here are just five, out of order and importance:

It takes decades to start a cool business and decades past that to mature a cool business.
You don't get rich just because you start a business.
You have to do things you don't like and that make you uncomfortable.
I really do not have very much knowledge/intelligence/insight/etc.
Ideas do not win, implementation wins.

But do you know the real reason I became the idiot, because the people who are not the idiot are filling a role that already exists and doing it well. Furthermore, the idiot tends to think that everybody else is an idiot (or sheep, or sheeple, or cog, or drone). But those cogs, those drones, took years (remember the shoemaker starting at 10) to get good at becoming normal, how much harder (and more difficult) is it going to be to create a movement and lead that movement.

The world is moving so fast now that we forget how long it takes to become something, except the village idiot, with the right moves you can become that overnight.

Failure spiral

2010-02-24T04:57:00.000-08:00

A documentary on the south pole, shot by renowned film maker Werner Herzog, follows a group of people taking the mandatory upon arrival survival course. They do a drill called bucket head, where they place (you guessed it) buckets on their head to simulate a white-out snow storm that kills your eyesight completely and muffles your hearing. They then have to leave the building to go find somebody lost a hundred feet away. As they leave the building, guide rope in hand to help them find their way back, they yell out numbers - "One out the door", "Two out the door" etc.

They start out well but then begin a circle back on themselves and get tangled in the rope. The instructor turns to the camera, as we watch in the background a bunch of bucket heads bumping into each other, and says "This is really important, we want to see if they will realized their mistake and return to the building to formulate a new plan or if this will turn into a failure spiral where one mistake leads to another mistake which leads to another and never ends".

1) I've been in a failure spiral for a couple years now, it's interesting when your in it because you spend so much time trying to figure out your next move when your really need to go back to the building. What gets really wild is that each decision you make seemingly makes it so much harder to make the decision to go back, we're this far now why restart?
2) I don't know how they picked guy #1 but he acted like guy number one, leading by pulling on the rope and yelling, and guy number three acted like guy number three, following, bucket on head, collecting a paycheck (only kidding all you paycheck junkies). The moment you are lost you have to realize that guy #1 (also known as Ben in many examples) got you here and all power is shifted to the last person in line, the one holding the rope that leads directly back to the building.
3) Realizing that there is a bucket on your head is paramount, the same rules don't apply as in regular life. Sometimes you have to restart, sometimes you have to slow down, sometimes the person at either end of the rope has to take control.

Crack Addicts

2010-01-09T08:17:00.001-08:00

Quick thought on customers and crack addicts.

Customers tell us at the dance studio and the construction company regularly that they can not afford our services. I recently had a customer tell me they were leaving for a few reasons (we were far away etc) and at the end just threw on "and financial hardships of course..." They just emailed and dropped they were attending a studio much closer to their house, that studio is more that 200% what we charge.

This is where the crack addicts come in.

Crack addicts will tell you all about financial hardships, but they will never tell you they do not have enough money for crack. Gambling addicts will tell you they have financial hardships but they will never say they wish they had more money to gamble. The reason, possibly it is faux pas to say you wish you had more crack, or maybe it is that you find the money to buy what is most important to you, even at the detriment of the rest of your life.

If you are selling something boring, even if it's needed, you'd better simply get comfortable with people kvetching about financial hardships. The other option is to sell crack. Sell something that people put first.

Lastly as a individual note, I hope we can all stop lying and just say "Your dance studio is really far away and just kind of average for me and not worth the drive." Because otherwise we are going to convince ourselves we have money problems when we can actually afford to pay twice as much for right around the corner, twice as much for amazing, twice as much for meeting all my needs.

Big You

2010-01-08T04:50:00.001-08:00

Spent some time recently thinking about "Big You". For me, Big You comes from a few different points with the basic concept that Big You is really who you are but we spend each and every day letting little you decide where we are going. Big You knows they should delay gratification but little you lets the stress of a car breaking down push you into a new car loan. Big You knows the importance of having balance in your physical life but little you does not want to put their shoes on and go out for a walk/run.

Whether it is the white pebble, whether it is the zen "big mind", or Paul talking about the flesh and the spirit this concept is brought together from a lot of different view points and readings. Maybe this thought process was brought on by news years resolutions, maybe it is just the disconnect between knowing and doing but this has really taken hold.

I am going to try to turn this thought into a manifesto of a little substance and then use that to steer me through this new year. Please be patient as I try to put this all together, for me to get one conscious thought pieced together takes quite a bit of time.

Let us be big people, let us do what we know to do, let us finally realize that the only one that can let us is us, and the only one that can stop us is us.

Addicted to Christmas

2009-12-28T04:07:00.000-08:00

I don't care much for Christmas, if I had my way we might just leave the whole thing alone. But this year I started having a yearning for it, and then I suddenly realized why everybody gets all Christmas Crazy.

Christmas makes you act the way you are supposed to act and it makes you hope that others will too. People give around this time of year in all kinds of ways and that feels good. People get together with family and friends, and even if your family is not your friend it is still something that should be done a little more regularly than most do. People get gifts from others which creates this sense that others were thinking of you, that feels pretty awesome. Finally, people eat food and get drunk and take pictures so they remember it all. Tim Ferriss says one of the keys to happiness is eating a meal with five or more people once a week. Sometimes I'm pretty excited when I can catch a meal once a week with somebody over the age of two.

The point of this is to say that it is a shame that we go in to credit card debt and take some of the precious time we have off acting the way we act when the "feel good" aspects of Christmas can be changed into a lifestyle. When was the last time you gave somebody a gift and said I love you, on a regular Tuesday in March? When was the last time you got together with friends and ate, drank and took pictures, because it was Flag Day in Zanzabar?

Sometimes I dislike Christmas because of how people act, but mostly I dislike Christmas because it shows us how we could be the rest of year.

I'm Ruined

2009-12-16T06:08:00.001-08:00

Last night I'm cooking a really nice cut of organic beef and as I shuffle through the fridge I realize that I am out of A1 Steak Sauce. I run up the road to 7-11 and, although I went there specifically for that, I was mortified to find out they actually carried steak sauce.

Much akin to my belief that placing people in a welfare state ruins them to ever be self sufficient, we have put ourselves in a consumerist welfare state. We expect everything we could ever desire to be available twenty four hours a day just in case I'm cooking a great steak at ten at night and don't want to drive an extra two miles to the all night grocery store. Shame on me, but lordy that was a good steak.

Worst Parent award winner

2009-12-11T04:11:00.000-08:00

My daughter falls down a lot. She flips, flies, tumbles and takes naps in between. Her head must be heavier than I give it credit for because there seems to be a gravitational pull between her coconut and table corners, walls, dressers, etc.

The other day we are visiting the grandparents and my father in law goes to grab her from heading down the stairs. I say that she is really good with stairs and he looks at me like an idiot (ok he just looked at me like he normally does, but as I said). She cruises down the stairs, gets to the last one, trips, flips off the edge, hits her head on door jam. My father in law screams. Screams like when your watching a youtube video and someone is dancing stupid and you can't figure out why it has four million views and then whammo they get hit by a car. She looks up and can't figure out why people are screaming, shrugs her shoulders and heads off to go play, no whimper, no cry, like I said she falls down a lot.

My father in law says "See, I told you, you can do whatever you want at your house but here I'm going to help her down the stairs!" I shrug and tell him "That's fine, but you either have to be on her all the time or teach her how to handle things. If you choose to not let her on the stairs alone than God help you if she ever gets away from you. You can either baby proof the whole house and helicopter or help her learn how to navigate." My father in law looks at me again.

The point here is that we either have to figure out how to navigate our lives or protect ourselves from everything. If your a parent at some point you've got to let go. If you believe in God, at some point he lets go of you. If your a business owner, at some point the business needs to figure out that if you smack a two your old twice your weight your going to get knocked down and stepped on (when I refer to husky two year old's I speak of the government of course).

It is nice to be needed, but at some point we all want whatever we are putting our lives and love in to take off and be an individual. Don't go for needless risk, but let yourself fall down a little. Let yourself learn. Don't be afraid of the world, I can head up and down stairs like a champ now and feel pretty good about myself, thanks mom.

PS. I spent many hours working with her on how to get up and down stairs including one instance where she threw a fit mid way, flung her head back, hit one stair lower, bounced up in to the air but now upside down, and I caught her, mid air, upside down, by a leg. Oddly enough I never saw her throw another fit on the stairs again. She now scopes out the area, finds something soft, then screams, runs over to it and throws herself down in agony, seriously.

Your more dead to me than your dead mother

2009-12-05T05:32:00.001-08:00

I just went to nfl.com and opened an article. Up popped an add for a truck I think. The add was floating and moved up and down with my screen. It talked to me. It did not appear in the first half second to have an X button on the top right corner. I closed the entire window and will never go back to the nfl.com, and I freakin love football.

Imagine opening a newspaper and getting slapped in the face. Imagine turning on your television and right in the middle of your show they run a little commercial over Tony Danza's face. Imagine your waiting for a bus and instead of a smelly, possibly drunk, talkative citizen the bench itself won't shut up and you can't turn it off. Don't offer me free and then be rude. Don't entice me in and then punch me in the nads.

Why I'm a raging conservative feminist

2009-12-04T05:10:00.000-08:00

In college I discovered I could take film classes as English literature electives, this winding road of work avoidance placed me in "Feminist Film Theory" where I found to my surprise I was the only conservative male (there may have been a conservative female, but if there was she really hung me out to dry). Three man hating months later I got a B, which would have been an A but I tanked one paper. The professor called me in to her office and told me it was a fabulous paper but written extremely off topic, I told her the topic was boring and I was Superman's chest to the boredom bullets of the world (ok, except the Superman part).

I just finished watching a two TED videos, one on passion from the eyes of a feminist author, the other on purpose from the eyes of uber christian author Rick Warren. It makes me sad that so often the conservative movement and progressive feminist movement fight and diminish their own good in a blood bath of differentiation.

Feminist usually side with abortion, which at its root, is the powerful killing the silent. Conservatives often side against environmentalism, which at its root, is the individual taking responsibility for their personal power and making the world better for future generations. Now are feminists right that we should not allow male governments to decide what women can do with their bodies? Sure, but what about when you are harming a beautiful baby girl in the process of your personal freedom. Should conservatives hold firm that people are in fact more important that plants and animals? Sure, but it is difficult to ruin an environment without hurting its inhabitants.

If we stop thinking with bullet points and start assessing. If we stop taking whole ideologies because they come as a package deal and start asking "what about this individual situation?" We should help every person who has no voice, whether they have not formed vocal chords yet or they are in a brothel in Africa. We should be good stewards of our money, personal talents, and the air flowing to and from our lungs.

The question was once asked, what could we expect from Thomas Jefferson when it came to slavery? Almost everyone owned other humans then, Jefferson disagreed with it, was that not enough? The retort to this was "Sure he was acting like the average Virginian of his time, but do we build statues of the average? Do we picture the mundane man on our money?"

Don't be an average feminist. Don't be a mundane conservative. I hope I see a statue of you someday.

Environment

2009-11-25T04:26:00.000-08:00

A philosophy that seems to hold true under many situations is environment is a greater factor than almost any other individual thing. If I am an alcoholic I will take a dry environment over being surrounded by alcohol and relying on my will power.

Environment > will power

If I want to succeed at business than I will choose to work for/with a successful company over trying to increase my drive at a floundering organization.

Environment > drive

On any given day we are surrounded by different environments. Our work, our home, our place of relaxation, our car, our minds. Consider that as you go through each day you are a part of, or a piece in, somebodies environment. When they consider work they are considering you. When they think about coming home they are coming home to you. Ever wonder why people are the way they are? It can be very hard to change your environment. It is easy to be the changed environment.

Environment = You

Thou Shalt Blog

2009-11-24T04:09:00.001-08:00

Growing up my father was a pastor, and nary a weekend went by that we were not in church. I've heard a lot of preaching from a lot of different preachers in my life and this past Sunday I realized that bloggers have a world to learn from preachers.

1) Bad preachers are preachy. I know you are on a stage behind a pulpit but don't talk down to me. I know you have cool pastor hair but please don't be suave (or worse slimy).

2) Good preachers are not all the same. In my book there are a number of different kinds of preachers including but not totaling: Fire starters, teachers, story tellers, scholars.

Fire Starters - Tend to get yellie, and I like it. They preach in an upward slope reminiscent of googles growth. When their done I feel bad for the unsaved person who is loitering outside because they are going to get religion faster than an NBA player who just got a DUI. Tim Ferriss is a fire starter, you leave his blog looking to hold your breath for ten minutes or throw away everything but ten pounds of possessions.

Teachers - These preachers just want you to leave knowing more than you came in with. They appeal to logic and usually talk a little quietly. John Jansch is a teacher who loves marketing. He likes you sure, but he's really happy you show up so that there is somebody to teach.

Story Tellers - The story teller wants you to relate everything they are saying back to your own life. They tell stories from themselves, from their friends, from books, wherever they can find inspiration. Leo is a story teller with a congregation of 100,000+ readers. Tell a good story around a warm fire pit and people will come to you.

Scholars - Teach with passion, they implement much in terms of story telling and teaching but more than anything else a scholar wants to make a new connection. Between you and a peice of knowledge, between two pieces of seemingly unrelated knowledge. Seth Godin is the ultimate scholar. In a short burst every single day he implores his readers to go on a search with him for connections. He looks at everything and pulls it together.

So as a blogger what kind of preacher would you be. If you don't know you now have goal number one. Preachers like bands succeed from a sound not a song, find your sound and then write some songs. Don't talk down to me, don't pass the offering plate around six times a post, you have more leeway with your hair but don't celebrate it. Guy Kawasaki has been telling us for years to be evanglists, so go out, grab your blog pulpit and save the internets soul.

swallowed alive

2009-11-23T04:32:00.000-08:00

I'm tied to the front of a freight train hurling through the countryside at breakneck speed. I should be terrified, I should be afraid about what is around the next bend, I should be horrified of getting hit in the face with a goose like Fabio, but instead I'm just sitting around waiting, passive.

What happens when you get swallowed alive by your life's passion? People always pontificate about finding your passion and losing yourself in it, but what if you really lose yourself. Not some self help doctor Phil moment either. What if you wake up in the morning and outside of work have no idea what to do with yourself. Ok, so I've given up TV but my eighteen month old is a terrible conversationalist. I've read all of the right business books. I have a blog. I'm trying to be a better manager. I'm in shape. I eat well. I have good oral hygiene.

Well, I'm done. I'm over it. I'm over me. Like the last scene in "Fight Club" this whole world is my creation and my fault. I've been fighting an imagination. So I can't live in suburbia, but I also can't live in a self created chaos fighting my alter ego (who is oddly also Brad Pitt).

Welcome to results oriented life. Welcome to grabbing the dream out of the sky and putting it to work generating income instead of floating along giving itself a foot message while reading "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People". Welcome expectations. I don't care about giving it my best, I care about achieving and giving whatever I need to give to achieve. There is no gold medal winner for practice. There is no Grammy for the artist who tried really hard. No sales bonus for wanting something real, real bad.

It is almost 2010. I have a child. I've been in a stable relationship for a decade. What's with the preteen angst? What's with the "What should I do when I grow up?" I'm already grown, the real question is, what am I doing?

What are you doing?

Must be nice...

2009-11-20T06:10:00.000-08:00

While cuddling up with my RSS feeder this morning I stumbled upon this gem.

First, it is an absolute great read on time management and not letting the world suck your brain out of your head via your nose circa "Total Recall".

Secondly, this blog has a very active comment section and I will sometimes peruse these as a kind of thermometer for what others thought. This is when out of nowhere I found a great line from the seventh commentor bemoaning his job and how he cannot do time management but must take continual abuse or get "canned". He kvetchs on and on about how people in general do not have this much freedom and then says "...if you do, well, it must be nice." Pardon me while burst into flames.

1) It is nice, that's why he is sharing it, because his life is nice and your life should be nice too.

2) I once went to Las Vegas with Kelsey for eighteen hours (4pm - 10am). The flight was free and the whole trip cost under $200. It was the first time we had left Teagan or the business overnight in eighteen months. We got back and somebody said "Must be nice". This two day weekend person. This get home at 5pm from work person. This personal bills and nothing else person. Come on, really?

3) Lastly, I do not know anybody who actually has problems and uses this phrase. People who have cancer don't use this phrase about those of us who don't. People who have to take care of sick parents. People who have special needs kids. People who have physical disabilities.

My guess would be this commentor makes a comfortable living and is afforded the advantage of having poeple decide his life for him so he doesn't have to think for himself, must be nice.

2009-11-18T05:06:00.000-08:00

I was speaking with a friend who has been laid off from their job and is planning on selling a Corvette they have as a third car. He informed me that he only drives it every six months or so and that he and his wife only bought it because of a youthful desire to own a vette. He continued on that when he was working he could afford to just have the thing sitting around for his enjoyment twice a year. Let me tirade here: not against my friend but about me and you.

1) How often do we buy things only because we wanted them at a different point in our lives. We have taken selfish to an entirely new level when we wish to feed all of the desires of our past even if they no longer exist in the present.

2) How often do we say we can afford to be wasteful because we have excess. He could afford the car (which was no less wasteful then rather than now) when he was making excess money. We can afford to goof off in college when we have excess time. We can be generally dummies when we have an excess of safety warnings.

3) How come we do not do simple math in our lives (and I never passed a math class in my four years of real college, sorry community college, we both know your not real). Take the $10k he can sell this car for. He is making $10k in extra payments on his other car, at 10% interest that is $1,000 a year, or $500 for each use of the Corvette (2x per year).

Point of the story, it stinks when we have to get laid off before we make good financial decisions. It stinks when we have to get divorced before we realize how we treated our spouse. It stinks we are so afraid our kids are going to make the same mistakes we made we try to hide the world from them and in their ignorance they turn out just like us. I'm going to try and just breath and make better decisions now, while I'm still married to a wonderful woman, while my child is still young and innocent, while I still have a business that put's food on the table.

Connect the dot's

2009-11-17T04:33:00.000-08:00

This is the third installment of a series about how I've figured everything out. It probably does not make all that much sense yet as you read each installment but it will come together faster than a pee wee soccer game with the coach screaming "spread out!". Right now I would like to simply introduce some thought's and theories that have heavily influenced me over the last few years. One of the strongest is Steve Job's graduation speech at Stanford.

Jobs lay's down a number of thoughts that can change your life if you choose to let them. One small thought is about how he looks in the mirror everyday and asks if he were to die at the end of the day would he be satisfied with what he was doing. After a few to many "no's" he realizes he has to change direction. This is extremely important for people who are heavily tied into something and then one day look up and realize that ten years has escaped them. They are spending everyday doing something they do not enjoy at best, at worst doing what they hate. I am twenty six and do not have a lifetime of experience under my belt, I do not have ten years of wasted time to look back on but I know that I lost all of my 25th year of life and I'm terrified to loose any more. The year of 2008 started with me working at Southwest Airlines throwing baggage trying to figure out how I was going to survive a failed business partnership. My wife was pregnant and spending almost thirty hours a week in the class room teaching dance while working another thirty to sixty hours a week just trying to juggle all of the administrative and secretarial duties. We are and were grinders, make it through the day, and we made it through 365 days in a row somehow, one stretch saw just over 90 days without a single day off. During that time I was not looking in the mirror and asking myself anything because I knew the answers. I'm thankful however, that I saw this video and started asking before one year of grinding turned into a life that had eventually ground me down to dust.

Secondly, and to me more importantly, is the notion that in life all of the dot's connect but you can only connect them looking back. Job's says that we must stay attentive to everyday because we do not know how the dot we are in today will connect to both past and future dot's. Let me tell you a story.

Mark, co-owner and sole talent holder of the construction side of me, is wandering through Lowes late one afternoon finishing up a job. An employee asks if he needs anything and they strike up a conversation. The employee is the regional manager in charge of forty stores. The reason they strike up a conversation is Mark is wearing a shirt that says "Home Depot" on it, the company he worked for previously but was tragically laid off from when they downsized his entire branch of bathroom installations. This manager informs Mark that Lowe's may be looking to bring in a bathroom instillation company to fill a vacant need.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of this, when Mark was working for Home Depot's install team they were doing around $105k a week in sales! Also known as $5.4 million dollars annually. And this is just the front range of Denver and surrounding metro area.

Now whether or not we turn this into a life changing experience let me throw some dots at you about how this ball got rolling. We had already made fun of Mark that morning because he showed up to the job site all shaved and put together like he was better than the rest of us, as it turns out he really is. Secondly, Mark had focused immensely on the dot at hand when he worked for Home Depot by understanding how they did business and paying close attention to their books even though he was only an installer. Finally, both Mark and I had already seen this potential opening in the market and spent a few meetings putting together a game plan for what a company would look like that was solely built to fill the need that we knew Lowe's had. So off the cuff, Mark had the research already in his head to sound extremely intelligent.

If we get this we will be an overnight success. An overnight success that spent years working inside of Home Depot spending time and energy to learn things that did not matter at the time. An overnight success that just happened to be in a Lowe's store late in the afternoon working a job forty minutes away from home because as Mark say's "the harder I work the luckier I get". If we end up making millions off of this single deal I will write a book that will be long enough to justify the $20 tag but will in fact boil down to work hard, the dot's will connect. Don't float through life but also don't grind through life. Live as if what you are doing now is going to be worth a million dollars some day, even if it really looks like a job working for a poorly organized company. And then inside of this hard work and focusing on the now, check the mirror each morning, in the face of your own mortality does now matter?

Fear

2009-11-14T05:09:00.000-08:00

Second day in a row with no installment from the "Everything Figured Out" series. Follow me on this you belligerent Saturday blog readers because it is short and sweet like Greenday songs used to be. It is 6am, I've been up for an hour and a half and I'm headed off to Dance Core to clean the studio before classes start. There is no fear in the daily grind. I can do this all week long. Wake up at 4:30, work till 3, hang out with an 18 month old till 9. Drink four to eight cups of coffee a day and rinse and repeat.

I've been doing this for literally years now and I'm not old enough to say stuff like that, but you want to know what fear is? Fear is stepping out of the grind and putting yourself out there. Fear is writing and having people judge you who do not even know you. Fear is the publish button at the bottom of the page. HIT THE BUTTON PEOPLE. And then tomorrow, hit the button again. Do not become a grinder, there is no glory in working harder than everybody else so you can hide behind your work, I've been doing that for too long. Get out there and work hard, but do not stop hitting the button, do not hide behind your work, make your work get behind you and push you where you want to go.

Watch a Tony Robbins video if you have to, imagine those giant banana hands wrapped around your neck while he yells at you to DO IT! And then after that, actually go out and do it, face the fear and make the grind worth it, come on, we'll go together :)

The least you can do?

2009-11-13T05:25:00.000-08:00

When did the least we can do turn in to nothing? People used to say, "No, please, it was the least I could do" when they did something nice for somebody or went out of their way. We used to hold doors open as the least we could do. We used to give people change at the grocery if they were digging around looking for a nickle. We used to pick things up for moms when their hands were full and their kids flung their keys.

I hope we can get back to a point where the least we can do still includes doing. Go out today and do, even if it's the least.

(I'll get back on my series soon so stick around)

Everything Figured Out: Part 2

2009-11-12T04:02:00.000-08:00

Sutherland -

Rory Sutherland is an ad man, and in my humble opinion a sort of pudgy, funny marketing genius who refers to NPR as "National Pinko Radio" but then refers liberally to Darwinian beliefs in his subconscious marketing techniques. He states here that our deep desire to be worth something sometimes drives us to do things that actually harm us. Not that it is our first effort to harm ourselves, but sometimes we set into motion the needed actions and those actions must simply be left well enough alone. Jacko and Elvis both had full time physicians and yet both died to young, Sutherland explains that it must be extremely difficult to have your full time job justified when you are looking over a fairly healthy person, so you continue acting. I find this crushingly true in business.

When a small business first takes off there is a whirl wind of activity that keeps everybody frantic. Frantic, one of my favorite words. I like to tell my construction guys that the level I am looking for is just below dangerous and just above sane and this cool little existence is called frantic. You can't do anything wrong inside of frantic, your rushing around, your fixing problems, your not thinking or analyzing just doing-doing-doing. If you are lucky enough that your small business gets off the ground however, then there is this awkward time you must not be frantic but rather calm, you must sit back and let the good things that you started percolate, like delicious life giving coffee. This is hard to say the least. As a business owner it makes me feel lazy and worthless sometimes and this is usually when I figure out I AM LAZY AND WORTHLESS!

I'm lazy because I should not be taking action on things that are already set and in motion but I should be taking action on the un-urgent/important matrix if your a Steven Covey fan. I should be helping my people do what they do but better. I should be making sure that as things progress as they should I'm moving furniture out of the way and opening doors even if I'm not actually carrying the couch. To take it back to private doctors they should simply be observing their patients and figuring out what they should not being doing (crack or speed would be a good start Dr. Jacko) to increase their health rather than giving their patients even more medication. These doctors should be stepping in and saying "we are going to go for a one hour walk during our visit today instead of me prodding around a body I just examined yesterday". Is this cool? No. Is this cutting edge? No. But we should be doing the same thing, we do not need to be cool or cutting edge. Like a parent who figures out their model for discipline we need to then take that model and run with it for eighteen consistent years with tweaks instead of total overhauls.

So yesterday we found out that satisfaction comes from working and the only reason we have leisure time is so the man can squeeze our hard earned money from us. When I say the man I speak of Henry Ford and I mean it as both "THE MAN!" followed by a high five in an intimate moment between bro's and as "the man..." followed by a slow sip of coffee and a raised eyebrow from hipsters. Getting back on track, we find pleasure and meaning in work and yet today I'm telling you do not overdue it, leave well enough alone, step back and let things flow. What could this all mean? Relax, I've figured everything out and this is only part two. Come back for more so you too can figure it all out.

Everything Figured Out: Part 1

2009-11-11T04:51:00.000-08:00

Introduction

As an elementary school librarian my Mom tells me that intelligence is often how quickly kids can connect something they've learned with something else they've learned. I've also heard it said that our minds our a giant wheat field with pockets of knowledge and as we learn we beat down a path between those pockets, how romantic. My mind is a backyard of crabgrass with bald spots where my dog of learning stopped and marked his territory. Today I would like to share with you the culmination of a number of those bald spot, so watch your step for landmines as we go on a little adventure through the backyard of Ben's brain.

This post is my dear hunter, it is the culmination of a life's work that started over a week ago. I've put at least four hours into this instead of playing with my daughter and for some odd reason she's seems more emotionally stable than she did last week, connect the dots.

As of now this post has six parts, these parts all hit me hard when I first heard or read them individually. Now, connected I feel like they have pulled together to create a state where satisfaction comes much easier, where enjoyment in the mayhem is achievable, where consumerism is put to rest, where my mind feels peace instead of a continual search for the moving target that is happiness.

Think of these subsequent post's as not a destination showing you that I have found the answers but rather a sign on the trail that reassures you your heading in the right direction and if a change is needed it is there for that too.

Part 1

Henry Ford created the assembly line, eight hour work day, five day work week and the color black but took a little creative licensing with the last one.

As middle class Americans we have the full spectrum of riches (I say riches instead of wealth very pointedly) and yet we feel so unsatisfied. Henry Ford moved his workers from six ten hour work days down to five eight hour work days because he believed that unless you gave workers recreational time they would not be consumers. Ford was a genius for this but the next step that he did not take is that once you have turned somebody into a consumer the best way to move them up the ladder to consuming more is to make them unsatisfied.

We live in a culture of choice, just wait around and something better will come or buy but be prepared to buy when the new one comes out. We stand in front of a shelf at Walmart staring at thirty choices for pillows and no matter what we grab there will be a certain amount of dissatisfaction due to how much we had to turn down. Have you ever searched for something really specific, went from place to place until you found a store that carried just one of what you were looking for, this is true consumer satisfaction. Consumer satisfaction is bad because you will replace or upgrade that thing very soon or very easily.

So what is the lesson here, it is said that "Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another" Anatole France.

If we have the ability to not be working all of the time we must do a number of things during that off time. First, realize that relaxation time was created for you to spend your money. Secondly, relaxation from work is best found in work. Work you love. Work that helps others. Work that creates. Work that inspires. Work that is fun.

This is just part 1, come back for even bigger and better life changing lessons in part 2 through who knows. If I used Henry Ford as my opening band, image how big this could get!

Drive and Fear

2009-10-29T04:10:00.000-07:00

Somebody told me that I tend to write a little like a monkey on tennis enhancers (crystal meth) and misuse "your" and "you're". Fair enough, I see how it is, let's be all professional about this, what have you done that's so great Mom.

Why Are You Awake -
Continuing on, what got you out of bed this morning. Serious question. I bounced up at 4:30am in terror going from laying flat on my back to a tense and perfected kung fu stance at the foot of my bed ready to roundhouse kick the world in the face. But that's just how I wake up. It's what got me out of bed that I'm thinking about on this snowy and cold morning in the Rocky Mountains.

Fear -
Dancing is for Dance Core, construction is for Metro Contractors, but the fear, the fear is all Ben MacLeay. I worked for two years as a baggage handler for the venerable Southwest Airlines during a really difficult time in my life. To the best of Southwest's knowledge I was never late to work, although towards the end I stopped punching in so that on the off chance I was ten minutes late nobody knew the better. My giant schisms in character aside, what got me out of bed and to the airport (a twenty minute drive but an hour of security screens that an entire Al-Qaeda cell could get through if they were willing to waste an hour of their time) was fear. Everything in my life was falling apart and the only thing I had was that job. We had lost our home, we had one car, the dance studio was flaundering on good days and I was opporating terrified.
So I got up at 4 or sometimes even 3:30am to get to work on time and kill myself for $10.18/hr. In snow and rain I was outside by 5am loading freight and bags into the underbelly of a glorified flying public transit bus on my hands and knees.
Then in July I got the opportunity to quit, my brother assured me that I could make $2k a month minimum in the construction business and so on July 31st 2009, I accepted a tiny buyout from Southwest and took my fear to a whole new level.

Fear and Self Motivation
Today when I took my deathly wushu stance at the end of the bed three seconds after the alarm went off a cold shiver coarsed through my entire body and I thanked God that I did not have to go outside for the next seventeen hours straight and take legalized abuse in front of a disinterested row of spectators peaking out tiny windows eating peanuts and judging me. Waking up at 4:30 sucks each and every day, but I had to do it before, now I get to do it.

What do you get to do? What pain do you get put yourself through to change everything? do you feel the fear and one inch punch the world in the brain?

Act your Wage!

2009-10-28T03:43:00.000-07:00

"I want to scream and poop, maybe at the same time!" I veered the car strongly as my head bounced off the steering wheel in a fit of laughter so ferocious it is actually illegal in many Muslim countries. This was the answer my wife gave to the question about a new blog post called act your wage. We played around a number of thoughts and then I said "Yah, but what do you do when your a freakin sweet entrepreneur and your wage is roughly nothing!" Below I've added a few impressions of said answer by popular bloggers:

Seth Godin -
A little note on screamers and poopers.
1) Not all screamers where created equally
2) Most poopers where created equally
3) Only your most gifted customers can scream and poop, create a product FOR them, create a purple poop.

Hugh MacLeod -
Just doing a little thinking on screaming, pooping etc. Pooping scales, people don't.

Johnny B Truant -
My oldest is five, but six years ago I'm reading a book called "Everybody Poops", and suddenly it hits me that me and Larry Fishburn are the same because we both poop pure F*$#@G INSPIRATION! (then I Johnny create this weird sensation of laughing at my own jokes while working with a silent medium, amazing).

Back to Ben, I will spend a little time in future post's digging into this idea acting your wage but first I have two critical and unrelated points to make.

1) You better have somebody in your life you can laugh that hard with when you actually are making zero dineros an hour (seriously, right now I am making roughly $0 at a brick and morter business with $10k in monthly bills, losers refer to this as a learning experience).

2) If you are not driving home at 8pm on a Tuesday night talking about your next blog post and up at 4:30am the next day writing it early because you have to rush off to work your backside off for nothing but hope, you need to watch Brogan's videos again.

3) Related to #2 I feel an inspirational post coming on that's going to be epic, but as Tony Robbins says "Inspiration is like a warm bath, sit in it too long and you just get cold and slimy and your wife tells you to get moving and what's wrong with you so you just slip down deeper in the bath until your ears are covered with water and it sounds like your inside a delicious fourth of July layered jello desert." Ok, Tony only said the first part but it's true, so go do something amazing and I'll write you all something inspiring afterward, like the M&M's I use to keep my two year old respectful.

P.S. I'll also be touching very soon on why on Thanksgiving Day I'm going to shoot my brother "American Gangster" style during the middle of the day in the streets of Harlem (also known as my parents upper middle class suburban house) to make a point and hopefully bring the whole family closer together but with me in charge.

TRiBES

2009-10-24T05:32:00.000-07:00

David Logan drops an absolutely awesome speech at TEDxUSC, you can see it by clicking on the title or traveling back in time and then to California which views itself as ahead of everyone else so depending on which time theory you adhere to (mine is Back to the Future II) this speech may actually be happening live as you watch it.

There are only 2% of the people in the world on either end of the spectrum of great and terrible. Logan states that people can only move up or down one level and that half of us or 2's and 4's (on a 1-5 scale 1=Hitler 5=Rhianna or Nelson Mandela). The dangers and hopes of society are then based on how well the 1's are at getting all of the 2's in the world to unite while Rhianna is trying to get all of the 4's together to fight said forces of evil.

The other thought is somebody like Ghandi (or Gandhi or Ganhdi or Gandih, I'm terrible with silently H's) took an entire country of 2's and brought them to 3's even though he was a 5.

So what do you do each day, try and make your 2 customers into 5's and get nowhere? Go out there and change the world, but understand the world you must before change it you can (say it in a Yoda voice, it will resonate better).

Turn your blog into a flushing toilet

2009-10-22T05:36:00.001-07:00

Ride your own wave. It's that simple. Create content, any content (blog, vlog, glog, ok i made up glog but do it anyway). Create more of that content. Do it every day. Don't try to write a book tomorrow just pound out another post.

Underestimate what you can do tomorrow and over estimate what you can do next year.

As a kid I was dirty poor. The rest of my family was fairly well groomed and sanitary but I've always been an all out individual. The richest of my friends had those four foot deep above the ground pools. I used to love to get a couple people in one of those and run in a circle until the entire pool was a giant flushing toilet sucking us down into the great abyss. I can still feel how hard those first few steps where. I can still feel that rush that you thought you were finally just running along and you stop to take a break and your swept away by your own current.

Go out there today and take a hard step. Sure your chest deep in water and your feet are slipping on the bottom. Sure your poor and just wearing a pair of underwear as a bathing suit. But at some point in the near future your going to be tired of running and if you have built your own wave (or flushing toilet but that's not quite as motivating) you will be able to simply ride along. As a kid the push was as much fun as the ride, as adults we've grown to hate the push. Love it. Do it.

How to be a good drunk driver

2009-10-21T04:41:00.000-07:00

Photo Courtesy of: Bistrosavage

I had a friend growing up who was an idiot. I had a lot of friends growing up who were idiots. My mom actually home schooled me until we moved out of that town because she said "This whole school district is full of idiots!" (with a smile as only an old librarian can). This particular idiot (not my mom, she's not an idiot, just a poor and unclear antecedent, the first friend idiot I talked about) told me once:

"Dude, the best way to drive home drunk is take your hands, put them on the steering wheel at like ten and two, hold your thumbs up and then line your thumbs up with the lines on each side of your lane. Then all you have to do is keep your thumbs on the lines and you'll make it home fine."

1) The "best" way to drive drunk?
2) Every cop I've ever given the double thumbs up to instantaneously pulled me over and tasered me faster than an 80 year old woman.
3) I tried this sober once and killed six puppies.

What's the point dummy, your asking? In fact, your probably not asking that at all because nobody reads this blog but there is a point here. Stupid information exists and should not be used. Looking directly into my friends frigtarded eyes I understood he was wrong the moment he said it. But imagine if this was coming from a snazzy presentation or inside of a book that was in the business section at B&N. Imagine you had just paid ten dollars for this ebook and figured you needed to at least give it a try.

Are you good at spotting idiots? Are you good at NOT taking advice?

Chris Anderson is wrong

2009-10-17T08:03:00.000-07:00

Free is not the new economy, free is the new marketing.

If P&G spent $500 million on advertising twenty five years ago now they must spend that much money (time?) creating great content that works instead of interrupting people.

To get a book off the ground thirty years ago an author needed a publisher and distributor to spend the money to advertise and get books on the right shelves. Now an author does not need to give away the mass majority of their book profits but instead they have to work for three years writing a blog for free before publishing an ebook, selling it to ten times fewer people but for twenty times the margin.

Are you spending as much time on creating great free content as you would expect an ad agency who you cut a check for hundreds of thousands of dollars to?

If you are a large or mid sized company, should you fire your ad agency and hire full time content generators?

Can an individual become a content generator for any company in the future just like ad agencies work for multiple companies?

What have you done since 2005?

2009-10-14T04:51:00.000-07:00

photo courtesy: jonssen

Food for thought: Youtube did not exist in 2004. I consider myself to be pretty young but even that was just yesterday for me. Courage Fail or any of the other 400+ videos on fail blog have me laughing at humanity and wondering how God watched this stuff all by himself until now. Two stats about youtube have jumped out at me in the last month. First, Youtube hit one billion videos downloaded in the month of July for the first time. Second, they recently broke the one billion videos watched per day mark.

One Billion per day. with a B. 24 hrs.

January 1st 2005 they had roughly 0,000,000,000,000 videos per day.

In late 2005 I was starting to think about getting a dance studio off the ground. I was 22 and thought I was pretty cool and a go getter. Today we have 182 "users", not exactly a billion but doing ok.

Lets say you did not have a blog in 2005, you would have been in the same shape as Youtube. Lets say you did not have strong online social community in 2005, you would have beaten youtube which had none. Let's say January 1st 2005 you were not even a senator in the United States, well now you are President and Nobel prize winner.

What have you done since 2005?

More importantly, what do you plan on doing by 2013, because just maybe the next President has not been in the national spotlight yet, just maybe there are a billion somethings waiting for you to give them an outlet.

Meferral Marketing

2009-09-23T07:50:00.001-07:00

Holy coined term Batman, today I would like to put my stamp on Meferral Marketing. Simple yet elegant. Ok, so the term is a little dumb but the lesson is magnificent.

Referral marketing is something we all know and love because it is so good to us (small business's). I live and die off of referral marketing, at Metro Contractors our marketing budget so far has equaled roughly ZERO for the life of the company; excluding Starbucks gift cards and thank you notes. But referral marketing and all of the sexy reading that goes along with it can only take us so far. Not so far in that it ends, but so far in that as a small business owner sometimes we sit back and do nothing (as far as marketing) because we are trustafarians living off of our own trust fund of referrals. Here comes Meferral POW!

Meferral Marketing - two Big Boy examples

Starbucks - You go in and get a latte and they get you to buy that devilish blueberry muffin as well. Fine and dandy, that is called a cross sell or upsell and it's wonderful. Then during checkout they hand you a receipt (now colored yellow so it jumps out from all of the other receipts stuffed in the ashtray of my car) that offers a $2 iced beverage after 2pm that day. WHAT! They did not cross sell me, they turned me into two customers. They referred a customer to themselves, MEFERRAL. They turned me from a once a day customer to a twice a day customer, they just created a customer out of thin air and the best part is they can still cross sell and upsell to that new customer (the 2pm me).

For a while this was my only example, then I was reading a Jack Welch book and I came across this.

GE - In a nutshell, GE Power Systems builds and maintains power plants. GE Capital handles money and finances. GE Power Systems realized that power plants were having a heck of a time handling all of their finances and accounting in house, sent them over to GE Capital and WHAMO! GE just created two clients out of one.

These examples are vastly different in that one company had two offerings and got one client to buy them both (again not upselling in my opinion becuase the two are not related whatsoever) the other company has one offering (my daily d.a.b, delicious addicting beverages) and turned a single client into a repeat client (repeat repeat because I already went once a day).

So what about you, do you (individual or small business) offer two totally unrelated things (life coaching and website design) or can you take your current customer and turn them into two? I bet you can and then you can join the ranks of your best referrers (that one is tough to say!) and starting hitting homeruns with Meferral Marketing.

The idea guy loses again

2009-09-09T07:01:00.001-07:00

Image Courtesy of: totalAldo

I was reading a blog about getting systems in place to organize my... whatever (life, business, brain, it's all so generalized and boring). Any way, the blog touched on getting a voice recorder so when something came into your mind you could simply get it out and get the river that is thought flow running again. I went out, bought a tape recorder, and let the torrent loose. To my demise, I realized something much worse than the roadblock that was my mind.

Idea guys love the roadblock because clarity brings prioritization and prioritization brings action. But I'm lazy!

Cleaning out the mess that is my mind is like finally having the perfect studio for a painter only to realize that they were more successful fighting the outside world than pulling from the inside world. I read so much crap about organization/productivity/goals/garbage that I realized I felt productive when I read about productivity. This is screwed up people.

So relating back a few days, screw productivity, I'm in search of passion. I'm going to follow what Seth said and his hierarchy of success. Productivity and organization fall somewhere between five and six and I have not cleared up #3 much less approached 1 and 2.

Attitude
Approach
Goals
Strategy
Tactics
Execution

So join me, we will beat the down the feeling of being disorganized by doing, by realizing why we are doing and how we are doing what WE have stated as our goals.

Kill your enthusiasm

2009-09-09T04:04:00.000-07:00

Photo Courtesy of: Jeremy 白杰瑞

I'm built out of enthusiasm, it bubbles in my veins and shoots out my orifices like sunshine out of a unicorn. However, even I believe it is a bit too enthusiastic to refer to this economy as a great opportunity for entrepreneurs.
It seems that everything we read and many commenter's (it's a word because I just used it) are basing their thoughts off of this notion that this economy is such a great chance for people to get out and start companies on their own.

I've got an awesome guy working for Metro who was laid off from his job and works for us now trying to get more refined at his trade. His previous job was as a land surveyor and after getting laid off he said he realized that his company was twenty years behind when it comes to technology and the program they were working with.
He went out and spent a few thousands dollars out of his own pocket to buy the newest program and is educating himself so that he can get back in the field.
If people actually commented on this blog they would say things like "He should learn the program and become a freelancer" or "What a great opportunity to get out on his own with his newly acquired skill set".

Just because your screwed and you've got no better options does not make that a great opportunity.
A great opportunity was ten years ago when you could be mediocre, ten (or more) years behind on technology, under trained and still hold down a job for 60k. Newsflash, if working yourself to death and self educating work now they would have worked ten fold in a flourishing economy.
Starting out on your own when you are not even worth your salary to an existing company is not a great opportunity, it may be your only opportunity and I'm glad something got you moving, but come on.

Go out and kill it today, do something great today, but realize that in five or ten years when the economy has turned around and homes are going up in price every year and everyone is a stock investing genius, that is a great opportunity.
Great opportunities are usually surrounded by a bunch of good opportunities, vary rarely does everything fall to pieces leaving you only one option that just happens to be great.
Do what you have to do, but don't settle for good because at that point you are turning down great.

Every kid is smarter than you

2009-09-08T04:39:00.000-07:00

image courtesy of jrorci

Sit kids down and have them play a board game and they will all do a number of appalling things. Monopoly as the example, when a child lands on a property and they want to buy it they do not sit their bemoaning how great it would be, how they would finally be able to relax if they had it, how it would solve all of their cash flow problems, they simply pull their wad of money out, count it, look around the board to see if others are jealous, and buy the property. If they don't have the money they don't buy it (gasp!).

Second, ask a kid how to earn money and they will tell you that you either have to go around the board for $200 (this is called a job) or you have to buy properties to collect rent (these are called assets). Done. How many of you have a job which you earn real money to buy assets? Assets earn you money, your car is not an asset, your home is not an asset, your golf clubs are not assets. If you ask a kid the benefit of owning a property so if they land on it they don't have to pay rent they won't care, kids care about earning the cash not faux assets, real assets that put cash under your leg (if you happen to be playing on the floor).

Lastly, if kids lose the game they don't sit on floor crying about how Johnny had such an advantage because he got great rolls and they got screwed or how Susy had so many more purchase opportunities during great markets. They hash out that Berny can't be the banker anymore because he steals and they get back in the game. It's rough out there, maybe you got knocked out of the game. Maybe you had some assets mortgaged so you could pay rent to others. Get back in the game. Do work, for money. Buy assets. And for the love of God enjoy the time you get with others.

How to increase productivity with no organization

2009-09-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

So you want to be more productive, you find yourself at the beginning of the day feeling lost and overwhelmed and at the end of every day you make a vow that tomorrow will be better, you are going to use tomorrow to conquer the world. Me too.

I've always viewed this as a productivity problem. Maybe if I had a tape recorder to collect my thoughts. Maybe if I used Outlook. Maybe if I read GTD like everyone else. Maybe... But now I have a new perspective, productivity is simply a product itself. Productivity is not a state of mind but rather a state of energy. Stay close because I'm going to move quickly on this one.

If you run around a crowded city center slapping people for an hour that is extremely productive, towards what end you ask? Doesn't matter. You just slapped a lot of people in a short amount of time, you got a lot done. But why would you do this Ben? You just answered your own productivity issues.

Productivity is not what we are searching for but rather purpose. If you have a reason to do something you will find a way. If you have a deep burning desire to do something you will be very productive.

Two side notes: Productivity does not automatically mean efficiency, this is easily explained by reading The Four Hour Workweek, Secondly, if you are sitting in a gray cubicle moving one step closer to trying to be a poorly functioning robot you exactly who I am talking to.

You are replacable

2009-09-01T07:27:00.001-07:00

As an entrepreneur I'm regularly engulfed by my own prowess. I stand back at the end of the day and wonder how I did all that work and surely nobody else could have kept up. I finish a project and believe whole heatedly that nobody could have done it in just that way.

Let's do a quick case study in how replaceable ANYONE is -

Journey was voted in a public opinion pull to be the #5 rock band, ever

Journey has sold 80 million records world wide, the number 26th best selling US band, ever

In a nine year period Journey had SEVEN consecutive multi-platinum albums

In 2007 their lead singer was replaced by a Filipino cover artist who was ten when Journey went multi-platinum

Arnel Pineda had been working in the music industry since 1983 but was eventually discovered because of a Youtube video

Moral of the story, even the unique vocal cords of a platinum winning artist can now be found in a flat world through the wonders of Youtube. Pay attention to how replaceable you are, realize that it is what you do that matters, not how unique you think you are. Realize that even though you may be a middle aged Filipino cover artist, Journey is watching your Youtube videos so start creating your own personal long tail and treat it like it is as important as it will end up being. Lastly, if you are part of an aging rock band that was once the pinacle of the music world but has since lost their lead singer three times over, go find what you need, and keep on moving forward. Journey finished a tour in 2008 that had net proceeds of $35,000,000, not bad for a cover band.

Hugh MacLeod

2009-08-17T19:52:00.000-07:00

Congrats to Hugh for getting to number one with his new book, as an ode to him I shall embark on a new post venture:

I just found a perfect place for my paper towels (I buy them in 8 packs and realistically can only keep one on the counter), right behind some pans that only take up half the cabinet. Finally I've found some meaning in my life etc.

Keep at it Hugh, an overnight success after only 8 years and a lifetime of pain, if it were only that easy for the rest of us etc.

I've got something you've never even thought of....

2009-08-12T20:28:00.000-07:00

Dance Core's Declaration Of Independence

Dance Core's number one concern is greatness. We do not want to be the greatest dance studio in the United States because of anything short of simply being the greatest. Starbucks, McDonald's, Walmart, Ipod's all have in common that even if you do not use them and even if you hate them you know they are the greatest in their field. I do not want everyone to love us but when somebody is going to open a dance studio inside of the United States I want them to either be happy that we are not in their area or size us up as their number one competitor.

We do not create products and we do not create markets, we simply refine products to perfection and take market share control.

We cheat by paying teachers less than the industry standard in hourly wages but give them both tangible and intagible exterior benefits. These benefits include: extremely efficient operations, health benefits, job security, multiple locations to teach at, opportunity for advancement, positive environment, percentage ownership for directors, adult companies to participate in. We also cheat by getting extemely good lease rates because shopping centers need reliable business's that bring in steady, repeat traffic. We cheat because we have the capacity to do our own buildout. We cheat by having a manual that shows exactly how each and every job is accomplished creating a well run studio from day one and whenever there is turnover. We cheat by undermining what other dance studios are built around which is compitions and the better the product the higher the price. We cheat by continually looking for new ways to cheat.

We are not concerned with creating extremely large studios but rather extremely efficient studios that scale to an organic size and then break off and open more branches.

We focus on finding teachers from our student base, directors from our teacher base and owners from our director base.

We grow from getting out into the community and making personal touches. We then execute what we do to perfection creating a buzz and a movement. People then sign up through a systemetized word of mouth marketing campaign. We have an extremely strong online presence both on social media sights as well as having a very strong website. We create strong relationships with local highschool teachers and coaches. We utilize our size to bring guest teachers and special shows to individual markets.

We are Dance Core, we are cheaters, we are organizers, we are marketers, we are always putting on an amazing shows, we are continually moving towards greatness.

That's our first draft of our declaration of independence, now it's your turn.

Problems and More Problems

2009-08-06T04:43:00.001-07:00

I've heard it said before that because business's cannot actually pleasure themselves they hold meetings instead. It could be said that meetings are a huge waste of time but I think it could also be said that anything that is classically viewed as "business" is a huge waste of time. Today we will look at problem solving and business needs.

1) Problem Solving

Seth talks today about how business's would rather talk about the solutions than the problems. This concept is extremely damming because on so many levels we realize the benefits today of talking about the solutions and yet we do not have a solution, we simply have a problem.

Let's say you are Serg and I am Larry sitting in our garage talking about how to monetize a web search engine into a billion dollar profit for us. We talk about what cool stuff we can buy with that billion. We talk about how people are going to love us because if people give you a billion dollars they must love you. We work and work and work on this problem, how can we monetize. We put our giant brains together and yet we are still sitting in a garage without a billion dollars. Flip this and take the problem they were solving, fixing and perfecting search engine algorithms, and then realize that the solve came when the problem was solved.

One of my favorite things I've learned in starting a few small ventures is that forcasting is a business term for guessing mixed with hope. I'm guessing about what will happen in something that does not exist and now entails my entire life (thus the inevitable sprinkling of hope). The number one reason it is guessing however, is simply that we do not know what will happen and we have no track record. Taking this to problem solving, if you have solved this problem before than there is no meeting happening about it. If you have not encountered this problem yet then by talking about solutions you are guessing and probably hoping. Don't guess and hope makes a better woman's name than business strategy.

2) Problems Themselves

Taking the new perspective we now have on problem solving we scan over an article Guy wrote about marketing to teens and at the end he throws in this absolute nugget of insight:

"The lesson is that it doesn’t matter what a company “needs;” it only matter what customers are willing to do."

This should cause us to stop everything we are doing and realize that how we decide what problems are may be a problem in and of itself. Let us say that we are all sitting around the big oak table at twitter and talking about the solve to our no monitazation issue. We talk about how cool it will be when we turn each user into a dollar of profit per month, we will all instantly become millionaires, talk talk talk. The issue is that we are not even truly defining what the problem is and therefore, guessing at solutions, but we are also not discussing what the customers are willing to do. Customers are not willing to pay for twitter and thus we are discussing a solution to an undefined problem that has its roots in something completely seperate.

So how about your business, job, church, non-profit, sports team? What are your problems? What are your customers willing to do? Do those lineup? If not, that is your real problem.

Investing in Employees

2009-07-30T06:46:00.000-07:00

Investing in your employees -

Thinking about employees (dance teachers in this instance) and thinking about investing in them physically but more importantly emotionally. Everything a business does with its employees should be based off of #1, once you have that down you just start thinking differently.

1) Our teachers are our brand, we can talk all we want but they are physically it.

2) Must start talking to and listening to our employees. Individual coffee chat once a month is better than a group meeting each quarter because nobody walks away from group meetings feeling energized and important.

3) Write a hand written thank you note, 5 minutes, 43 cents. Less than an hour and less than five bucks per month for all employees combined.

4) Buy flowers or chocolates for all of the teachers and hand them out in front of students, public displays of affection are ok outside of high school.

5) Create a list of teachers strengths, than start to cater jobs towards those.

Simply Changing The World

2009-07-27T04:46:00.000-07:00

Seth Godin had a really interesting video I watched a while back on Ted (here) about what we really do, he says we are simply changing the world. This is both extremely overwhelming (really, what should I do on Tuesday?) as well as extremely freeing (as it turns out that paperwork I always fill out that I complain is useless, is in fact useless).

We should not allow ourselves to get overwhelmed by the idea that we must change the world because we should tell ourselves each and every morning "I get to change the world". I quit my hourly job yesterday and the best part is that now I GET TO change the world. I get to get out of bed early and post this. I get to read some of the greatest minds in the world for free online for an hour while I drink a french press. I get to go work on the problems of my dance studio and my construction business and not just the in your face, huge fire of the day problems but the problems that when fixed make everything work better afterword and add joy and ease into peoples lives.

It is freeing because we have direction, we have a place to go. I would love to be part of a community where people are trying to change the world and then suddenly here I find myself. So often I have lived with a future mindset that it is all building for something, what I am doing everyday is a groundwork for a life I would like to lead. Yet, here I find myself with only partial groundwork laid and totally satisfied. We should all realize that trying to change the world is freeing, wishing we lived in a changed world is shackles.

So welcome to the movement, is this blog really a movement? Sure it is, and what you do everyday is a movement and I am both excited and privileged to part of it. I hope you feel as privileged to live your life each and every day as I feel simply to be a part of it.

I Feel Like Crap

2009-07-24T05:31:00.000-07:00

Great people have bad days when they just don't feel good. This does not change that they are great people. If we build systems so that even when a great person is having a really bad day, either emotionally or physically, then we've created a system of consistency. If a dance teacher is physically hurting and cannot go full out they can still teach a class because the system is in place to move students down a path of benchmarks towards improvement rather than just watching the teacher and imitating. The same holds true for admin work. If our secretary has a headache she may not be a the same chipper person on the phone but she can still take down the appropriate message, get it to the appropriate person and make sure that everything goes through a set of checklists. Things get done no matter how we feel. I know this is the sign of a mature person, is this also the sign of a mature business?

Natural Systems

2009-07-16T08:09:00.000-07:00

Systems -

I'm on a systems kick so just run with me a little. A tree can be any number of different sizes, different trees can differ in any number of ways, but almost all trees have something in common and that is that they mirror business perfectly. Lets take a common look at a tree. It starts out small and grows, it takes in water and CO2, performs photosynthesis and grows. It gains branches supported by a widening truck and grows. It gets hit by a storm and may loose a branch or two but, if it can stand through, it will continue to grow after the storm. Every leaf is almost identical, with almost identical process's happening inside of them, and yet some trees get to be very old and very large. The intriguing part is that even on these very old, very large trees the leaves are still the same size and still performing the same function at about the same level as all of the other leaves and all of the leaves from the past (no matter what size the tree is or was).

Sometimes we build business' that are only leaves, they act like grass and when winter comes they die, each and every year they go completely dormant. Sometimes we build business' that are like cacti, almost all trunk with no leaves, they plod on no matter what the conditions are like but they very rarely produce fruit. Then there is a good healthy oak tree. It weathers winter with a large base and expansive root system even when the leaves are doing nothing for it. It produces copious amounts of acorns year in and year out and is extremely scalable having the ability to grow to massive sizes.

I'm not trying to be all philosophical here, I really want to consider what type of business I am growing. If I need to eat then I need to plant a tree that actually produces fruit. If I have no time to tend to a tree I can just drop in a cactus and whenever it produces something it is a nice bonus. If I'm already sustainable I can plant a crop of grass realizing that I will get a fantastic, quick, return but it will all die as soon as winter comes. It is worthless to curse at a cactus and tell it to produce fruit, it is worthless to curse an oak for not giving out a crop in the first year it was planted, it is worthless to curse grass for dying every year.

What are you growing, do you know the structure, do you know the crop cycle, do you know the strengths and weakness's? It is worthless to try and get a leaf to grow into a tree or get a single leaf to supply for the entire system. What are your leaves? What are your roots? Make sure you know so you can inspect what you expect.

Inspiration

2009-07-10T08:25:00.000-07:00

I used to be a killer. I ran a marathon once. I was an All American once. I sold 40k in insurance in one month. I remodeled a 4,000 sq/ft dance studio in 3 days only sleeping for four hours total. I once did a 360 skiing. Now, now is not a time I will look back on as a "once" moment. Why?

I think I've built my life around being a big moment guy, the problem is that moments come and go and yet here I still am, outside of the moments. I search around for inspiration, reading blogs, watching Tony Robbins, reading Zig Ziglar. The problem is that when I look back on those big moments I was not inspired, I was not fired up, I was simply achieving.

There were no Zig Ziglar inspirational quotes going through my mind when I hit mile thirteen, realized I had just run further than ever before in my life, and simultaniously realized I was only halfway done. I ran it with my brother, we both only trained a handful of times and said we did not care about our time we justed wanted to have done a marathon (dinner parties, interviews, etc.). It was around forty degrees (having warmed up to a balmy ten over freezing) by the end of the race and it rained the entire time. They handed us emergancy tin foil blankets when we finished. My brother pulled the blanket around himself and became very emotional, letting the gravity of what we had just done set in. I on the other hand kicked a trash can over and swore rather loudly in excitement. There was the inspiration, over four hours later. The next day I could harldy walk, my entire foot turned black and blue because I fractured my heal in the race. But when I crossed that finish line I knew I had just completed something and it could never be taken away from me.

Maybe we should all be working on completeing things that cannot be taken away from us rather than trying to find the inspiration to do great things. I've heard it said that we can only give what we have, when was the last time you inspired somebody? It has been a little while for me. I think it is time to go out and create some inspiration for both myself and as a gift to others. I hope you'll join me.

Creatives of the World, UNITE!

2009-07-07T08:56:00.000-07:00

Link posted above about creative and genius. Must watch. Almost brought the dance side of me to tears but the construction side would not have it. Extremely inspirational in terms of how we go about "the process" of being creative. I could bust open a bottle of white wine and spend four hours talking about this one so hit me up with a comment if you dare.

Why Don't We Do More?

2009-07-06T05:24:00.000-07:00

It seems like a question that I ask myself all the time. Why did I just waste an hour when I could be working? Why did I just spend the whole day being busy and got nothing done? Why didn't I exercise today? Why? I read blogs about productivity, I read books about productivity, I build spreadsheets about productivity (nerdy yes, effective no), but I just never seem to hit the end of the day satisfied. I believe there are two reasons for this.

First is the issue of happiness and satisfaction. For this I will not say anything whatsoever, just link to a video that really blew my mind recently. There are two videos done by Barry, watch the one on choice. The second video on wisdom is very good as well (link is the title of this blog, the videos are on the right of the new screen)

The video and choice and thinking are all landmines in my mind however, compared to the real reason we don't do more. The real reason is that we do more, continuously we do more. We have more time to work, we have more money to spend, we have more food to eat, we have more of everything. We read more blogs, we create more content and on top of all of it we are in a continuous loop of trying to get it all done faster so we can fit more in. One of my favorite things about our construction group is that we work at a pace that I would consider frantic, just below total mayhem but way above working fast. There is this drive to work as fast as one person multiplied by however many people we have on the job site. It's almost therapeutic to work that hard because it forces you to tunnel in and only focus on what you are doing. My guess is that many people work this way all the time as well.

Ok, so you say "This post is garbage, I read the title and hoped to get more done and now I've read it and your telling me I'm already there, thanks for the mountains of help!". Here is where I hope I can help you. You do one hundred things today and they will all lay flat on the floor and create this newspaper covering that, while it may hide the carpet underneath, is really no monument to the day you just put in. Then tomorrow you get right back at it and lay another layer of newspaper but the problem is that you never get anywhere because the paper is so thin and your trying to build up to the ceiling of your dreams but that ceiling also rises with every given day. So we try to lay more paper down faster and we do but in the end it does not matter. It does not matter because we are not building anything.

If you are a fan of monopoly you know that the only way to win is to build up properties owned, take those properties and build houses, turn those houses into hotels and try and get whole sections owned to guarentee people stop on them and generate passive income for you. Yet in life we are simply trying to go around the board faster, to get a promotion so that we recieve $220 every time we pass go, all the while every time we come around the board there is something new waiting for us in the form of rent, bills, etc.

So reaching the conclusion, my question to both you and I today is are we just laying down newspaper instead of building something up, are we just trying to get more rolls of the dice in on any given day rather than getting our passive income together, are we getting more done each day but realizing that a marathon runner can run the fastest twenty six miles ever run but if it is on a treadmill it does not mean anything. Figure out what you are doing, figure out if it is a building block and then realize that if you only set up one building block per day you are way better of than laying down a hundred sheets of worthless newspaper.

What great taste!

2009-06-28T15:14:00.000-07:00

A few years ago my wife and myself were at a dance recital (as we so regularly find ourselves). My wife had put her purse down and walked away and it was stolen. It had just the usual items in it, my two cellphones (of course at that time I was rocking two cell phones), her phone, wallet, etc. We were obviously upset and went back to my wife's parents to commiserate and figure out what to do. Her younger sisters (whose recital it was) started calling around and found a few shady characters that seemed suspicious. We jumped online and found out that they had already dropped a couple hundred dollars at a music store. Jumping in the car we found ourselves at the store as they were locking up. We produced two pages from a year book and asked the clerk if he recognized anybody. He immediately picked out the two shadesters earlier mentioned. The clerk then went back inside and printed out a receipt of what they had bought. They were only fourteen and had bought some candy and about ten CD's. As the clerk looked over the receipt he handed it across the counter and said "Wow, those are all some seriously great bands and over a bunch of different genres, those kids have really great taste!"

The end of the night we will save for another post, we found the kids, pulled their parents out of bed, had exhausting dialog about the degradation of the American youth etc. The point today is that these kids had amazing taste in music, after my wife looked over the receipt she replied "This sucks! I've been wanting a couple of these CD's for years!"

The question I would pose to you and myself is what type of people are we, what type of people do we surround ourselves with, what type of people are we raising. Do your kids have a great taste in music but will steal a purse if the opportunity arises? Do you have great selling techniques but will bend the rules to get the sale to go through? Are your friends wonderful conversationalists about politics, religion and philosophy but every now and again they use drugs? I hope that in the age of information we do not invest so much time and energy into getting great taste but totally disregard our moral standard.

To get a little off the preachy side and bring this around to business, do you own a business that has immaculate taste but no substance? Do people visit your website and say wonderful things, walk through your front door and incessantly remark on how well put together the space is, but then when they experience what it is that you actually do the comments cease to flow? Lastly, I know I spend hours per day on getting new tastes and refining the existing ones, but how much time do we spend personally and in our business on the tasteless issues, the things that make for a great foundation of a house but that that no one will ever comment on when they walk in the front door.

Grisham and Blogging

2009-06-26T12:36:00.000-07:00

Interesting article on Grisham if you link through the title. I was thinking about authors (almost every author) starts writing and gets a book together and then stumbles through hoards of publishers getting rejected over and over again until they make it big. Grisham was found in Hollywood and then took that momentum to sell 245 million books (6 to me).
The interesting part is that authors have to have a finished product, bloggers don't have to have squat. This is my sixth post, does that make me a blogger like having a final, print ready copy of A Time To Kill in hand looking for a publisher made Grisham a writer. I cannot imagine it does.
The other issue is that Grisham could have stopped writing after A Time To Kill and been more accomplished than most, and yet with bloggers it usually takes a year or more to get momentum from post's together to build a readership and then your work really starts because it is a daily battle to make said readership happy.
My new goal stated to all of you readers (three people stand up) is to get to one hundred posts, if I can get to one hundred posts then at least I have a little momentum behind myself and a little time to hone my craft, until then I am not going to consider myself a blogger. At 100 post I will then consider myself a blogger and start looking for a readership just like an author dare not look for a publisher before a book even exists.
If you are reading this blog now, thanks, and I hope you stick around to see what happens :)

Lighthouses and the Coast Guard

2009-06-20T07:10:00.000-07:00

Lighthouses and the Coast Guard are two ways that ships are protected. In the studio we are surrounded by students who are continually going through different stages of life and learning their way through different problems. These kids need two different things to protect them as they try to navigate the rough seas of life; they need people who are going to act as lighthouses by setting a strong example and never wavering and they need people to act as their Coast Guard so that when things get out of hand there is somebody who will come to them and save the day. The hard part is which one are you?
If you are a lighthouse you cannot leave your post, your job is not to save ships but rather be a consistent landmark guiding them through in good weather and bad. You may be tempted to try and play both roles as a lighthouse but you must remember that there is not just one ship counting on you but rather an entire sea of ships counting on you to always be there. If you are the Coast Guard you must continually be on the lookout waiting to jump into action. You are in a personal relationship because when called to action your only job is to save that one sinking ship, trouble has already hit and saving lives is the only priority. Sometimes you may be tempted to be a lighthouse and stand on the shore and say "I told you so, I told you rocks were there and you hit them anyway." but you must be aware that no matter how bad the decision the Coast Guard will always come to our rescue.
Teachers are lighthouses and parents are the Coast Guard, all to often parents want teachers to jump in and save the day while teachers are all to often tempted themselves to jump in and save one while the rest of their pupils continue in the dark.
As a side note, do you know a lighthouse and are you surrounded by at least one or two members of your own personal Coast Guard?

You'll take what I give you

2009-06-18T05:20:00.001-07:00

Ramit posted an intriguing idea about money is money is money. The gist of the piece can be summed up that if you are making a ten thousand dollar purchase and it is ten dollars more you should think about it the same way as a ten dollar purchase that gets bumped ten dollars. If you refuse to spend $20 but you are willing to spend $10,010 you are making a silly statement about monies relativity.
Have you ever been working on a big project at work and it's getting close to the end but your day is clearly over and somebody say's "Look, just one more hour and I think we can finish this thing out. Come on, we've already put like forty hours into this lets just finish it!". Now imagine you are watching a movie and halfway through it you realize it is sucking everything you learned that day out of your head and replacing it with oatmeal cooked three times over, yet you sit there and watch another hour to the end. Finally you are standing in line at the grocery store, it's a long line and does not seem to be moving, there is something wrong with cash register and no other lines are open. It takes you an hour just to check out, as you walk out you have a few choice words for the manager.
When I was seventeen I was skiing at Breckenridge ski resort and a lift broke. We gently swayed in the air forty feet off the ground for thirty minutes. I was stuck with one of my good friends Adam and altogether the experience was not to bad. When we got to the top we hopped off and there was resort employee handing out Starbucks one free drink certificates whilst apologizing. As he handed me a coupon I snidely stated "I don't want this free drink, I want the last thirty minutes of my life back!" to which he replied very quickly "You'll take what I give you."
To this day, I have a deep fear that I will somehow accidentally work for a company for thirty years without realizing it is happening, just swaying there in the breeze with some good friends. When my end finally comes and they give me a gold watch (do those even exist anymore?) my response will probably be "Keep your stupid watch, I want my youth back" to which I am certain they will retort "You'll take what I give you".
Time is time is time, do not take what they will give you, take time seriously. If you have put ten years in at a dead end job don't justify the next six months because you have spent so much time already there, you would not wait in line a the grocery store for six months would you?

Fear and Faith

2009-06-17T06:01:00.000-07:00

I used to think that faith was believing, but it's not. I used to think I needed faith to take action but I don't. I can believe that what I'm doing in the world is of the utmost importance and still not have faith that, as Steve Jobs stated, all the dot's will connect in the end. I can also have no faith that something will work out, but step out and do it anyway. What I've learned is that the stepping out is the faith. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Now this may be a biblical definition of faith but I think in business we could all act with a little more faith. If I followed you around today what substance could you show me to demonstrate you have faith in what your creating, selling, refining, etc. Could you say to me, "See Ben, see the actions that I am taking, see me working in faith."
Fear is the killer of faith. Fear kills faith not because it kills our beliefs but because it causes us to stop and think, it causes us to question whether we should take action or not. Do you fear the incompetence of your employees or can you show me the substance of how they are empowered. Do you fear your customers or can you show me a blog where you ask them to be honest and you will broadcast it far and wide. Want to offend somebody, ask them if they have faith and when they inevitably respond "yes" tell them to show you. Tell them to take you to there faith, ask to touch their faith, ask to interact with their faith, ask if you can post their faith on your blog and maybe inspire faith in others.
How about you? Can I see your faith? You want me to buy that product and if I do that means I have to show you my faith, it sure would be a lot easier to do that if I could see yours.

The Ready Position

2009-06-14T05:57:00.000-07:00

In any sport there is a position, it may vary slightly, but it follows the same form from ping pong to soccer. That position is the ready position. A running back in football, a defensive player in basketball, John McEnroe before the serve. They have their knees bent slightly, hands are up and in front of them, eyes on the prize. What position is your business in? What position are you in?

Pressure Anesthetics

2009-06-12T06:12:00.001-07:00

When a dentist is working on an individual tooth they may put a rubber band around the base of that tooth with a rubber cloth attached so they can work solely on that tooth without concern for the rest of the mouth. Such a rubber band sits at the very base of the tooth and pinches the gums causing intense pain. Dentists almost never use anesthetics to numb this pain because if you can just endure for a few minutes the pressure of the rubber band will numb the surrounding area. The technical term for this is pressure anesthetics.
How much pressure are you under? Do you find yourself feeling numb and unresponsive. Do you wish you could just jump right into action but you’ve been under this pressure so long you find even the thought exhausting. The scariest part about the rubber band is that when they remove it the pain is just as bad as when they put it on. Pressure anesthetics are good, it allows us to get through some things that would otherwise be overwhelming, but are you living a numbed life afraid of taking off the pressure and feeling reality.