Happy Birthday Successful-Blog

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Liz Strauss over at Successful-Blog is having a blog birthday tomorrow. In light of that she is having a little contest where entrants must describe her blog in 25 words or less.

Talk about a lady who understands success principles! Liz has built a tremendously successful community which has placed Successful-Blog in the top 40,000 websites world wide on the Alexa Traffic Rankings. No small feat! (To give you some basis for comparison, SuccessCREEations is currently ranked 740,898, our local Savannah News Paper, SavannahNow.com is ranked 39,125 BP.com is ranked 15,773, CBS.com is ranked 1,379, Google.com is ranked 3, and Yahoo.com is ranked 1)

Since I’ve started hanging out at the Open Comment Night that Liz hosts every Tuesday night I’ve gotten to know her and have come to consider her a friend. I nearly had the opportunity to meet her when my work sent me to her home town of Chicago, but an unfortunate change of flights by my company got in the way.

Liz is a passionate advocate for Net Neutrality and her Net Neutrality pages (page1 and page 2) are an invaluable resource where anyone can learn more about the controversy.

The Tuesday night Open Comment Nights are often a highlight of my week. There bloggers from all around the world hang out for a while, bounce ideas around, build friendships, and sometimes even get a little silly. The only real rule that Liz strictly enforces is that everyone must be nice.

Liz is a master at building community. We could all learn a thing or two from her example.
So without further ado, here is my entry for the contest:

With Successful-Blog Liz Strauss has built a friendly community where writers and bloggers can come together, share ideas, and grow better at what they do.

Happy Birthday Successful-Blog! May you have many more Successful-Years!

Tags: Misc, General, Liz Strauss, Successful Blog

Putting the World On Notice

“You can’t get something for nothing”

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch”

“The sluggard craves and gets nothing, but the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied.”

Proverbs from the wisdom of the ages. Yet so many of us expect that the world somehow owes us and that prosperity and success will come to us without any effort on our part.

Somehow we’ve lost touch with age old wisdom, gone off after a newer, better way that will get us rich without having to do any work. Maybe we will win the lottery. Or maybe we can sue someone and collect an obscene damage award by successfully blaming someone else for a complete accident, or worse for our own lapse in judgment.

Nowhere have I been able to find where it is written that life and success will be easy. In fact the only places where I seem to see promised quick, effortless success, are from people who are selling something.

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Tags: Motivation, Principles

The Path to Prosperity

We live in an instant messaging microwave oven society. There is a prevailing mentality that success is a result of luck. In our lottery culture, people who work hard are often seen as “suckers” who don’t know the score.

But hard work alone will not lead to success. The masses of mediocrity are full of folks work themselves almost to the bone, but never seem to achieve success. The proverb above points out that the path to prosperity is a two step process.
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Tags: Finance, Principles, Prosperity

Negative Thinking Power

I was having a conversation with my friend Todd Beeler the other night and somehow we got on the subject of motivation. Now Todd is definitely someone I would call an expert on the subject. He makes his living training sales and marketing folks to become more successful. He has published an audio book on CD, The 7 Hidden Secrets of Motivation (which will be formally added to my library as soon as I add another category for Motivation because without successful motivation there we’ll never be able to achieve lasting success in any of the other 4 areas.) The audio book is in the same “Your Coach in a Box” series with the likes of Denis Waitley, Gary Null, Joan Minninger, and Barry Neil Kaufman.

Todd’s a good guy to have as a friend.

Anyway back to our conversation. I don’t even remember how we got on the subject. But we started talking about positive thinking as a motivating force.

Now I’ve read Zig Ziglar’s book, See You at the Top, which is all about how powerful positive thinking is and how it alone will propel you to the highest levels of success. Zig is a brilliant man and his book has sold thousands upon thousands of copies. I’m not in any way disparaging him or saying he’s wrong.

But positive thinking alone hasn’t yet worked for me. I figured I was just defective, maybe not destined for success somehow. Or maybe I was just not smart enough to figure this whole success thing out (but too stuck on positive thinking to allow myself to admit it!)

So when Todd said what he did, it got my attention. And here is what he said:

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Tags: Motivation, Thinking, Todd Beeler, Zig Ziglar

Into Every Life A Little Conflict Must Fall

Yesterday I had to make a difficult phone call. There were a lot of reasons I didn’t want to make the call. It was the kind that addressed some one else’s performance. And dialing the phone was sure to lead to some conflict.

I promise I didn’t want to dial the phone. It was tempting to not take ownership of the problem. My day certainly would have been easier yesterday if I didn’t address the issue. I had a zillion other things I would have rather been doing at that time, many of them useful necessary things.

The thing is, I knew that not making the call, and not addressing the situation was going to likely lead to greater friction and conflict down the road. And the longer the situation goes unaddressed, the longer the everyone else has to deal with all the little mini-frictions along the way which drag down the entire organization. In the long run we would not see the level of success we could have as a team were the situation left alone.
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Tags: Principles, Relationships, Conflict

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