What great taste!

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

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

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

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

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 their 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

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

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.