A Moment To Focus on What Really Matters

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Gorgeous and I are heading out of town for a while, taking a much needed break. This year we decided to mix it up a little so instead of spending a day braving our nation’s air travel industry we are driving. From Savannah to Wisconsin. Here’s to hoping for good weather!

We decided to drive this year because we are both such busy people and sometimes it seems like we are going in two completely different directions and only meet for brief snippets at the coffee pot in the mornings. Spending 22 hours or so in a car together will give us some much needed quality time together.

But the whole thing has got me to thinking lately about what is really most important as we all work hard to grow our businesses. When it comes to money they say you can’t take it with you and from what I can tell they are right about that one.

I wrote recently over at Successful-Blog how death is one of the great equalizers in this world. And it is true.

In the entire history of the world, with billions of test cases already complete, the ratio of people who die compared to those who are born is exactly 1. We are all going to die one day. And none of us know exactly when, either. It might be today, or it might be decades from now. Read more

CREEating Value - 26 December 2006

Today we are going to launch a new feature as we get ready to move into 2007. It’s called CREEating Value. What I’ll be doing is going through my feed reader and sharing with you some blogs (or sometimes individual posts) that bring value to you as a business blogger.

So without further fanfare here are some links for you of folks that are CREEating Value this morning.

Enjoy!

Ramblings From A Glass Half Full (feed) - Starbucker is a man who loves his coffee and does a wonderful job of sharing his positive take on the things he sees going on around him.

Problogger.net (feed) - Darren Rowse is an Australian who has established himself as one of the leading authorities of how to earn money via blogging. His blog tips and pointers ad value to the conversation and are useful to help all of us become a better bloggers.

Drew’s Marketing Minute (feed) - Drew McLellan is a marketer who gets blogging. With Drew you get the best of both worlds.

The Christmas Stories

We’re going to shift gears for a moment here at SuccessCREEations because Christmas is one of those holidays when many folks travel to see family. Generosity is a little more acceptable during the Christmas season than at other times during the year. All kinds of interesting things can happen to folks along the way.

New stories are happening to folks all over the globe. And I’m not just talking about one of my favorite Christmas movies either.

Even though I looked a little like Ralphie as a kid with my blond hair and glasses, let the record show that I never actually wanted an Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle. Probably only because I didn’t know such a thing existed. If I had, I’m sure I would have wanted it.

Christmas today is seen as a Christian holiday. But the truth is Christians kinda annexed a pagan holiday, changed the name, flavored it to taste, and made it their own. We really don’t have any idea when Jesus was born. Sure the experts and Bible scholars have their theories and opinions. But in the final analysis we can’t be sure of the exact birthday.

In spite of our lack of precise knowledge on the subject of when, we do know a great deal about what happened that first Christmas season.

You hear people talk about the Christmas story. They may even read some words out of the Bible and tell you that’s what happened.

But they often leave some parts out.

Did you know that the Christmas story is really many little stories all playing out at the same time some 2,000 or so years ago in that little backwater corner of the Roman Empire and woven into the tapestry of the greater story?

That first Christmas is not just one story but many. Here are a few you might be less familiar with. Read more

Joining The Good Blogs

I’ve been hearing a lot about a relatively new blog cross promoting service lately called The Good Blogs. I first heard about it nearly a month ago when Mike Sansone mentioned how much he was digging having the widget on his blog (that’s a lower case digging. )

Since then I’ve noticed Ben Yoskovitz has become part of their community over at the Instigator Blog and has the widget in his side bar. Carolyn Manning used the The Good Blogs widget on her thoughtsphilosophies.com to find a few treasures to add to the z-list meme.

Ben Yoskovitz took an even deeper look at the company and service when he posted his interview with Vernon Lun, one of the co-founders of The Good Blogs over at Startup Spark at the beginning of the month.
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Facing the Fighters

This past Monday (a day that will hence forth be known here at SuccessCREEations as Black Monday because of our server crash) I posted about Business Fighting Styles. In the discussion that followed a couple of cool things happened.

First Grigor Ćorić suggested someone I’d left off my list, the Fight Promoter. Go check out what he said about that one. Good stuff.

Then Andrew Wee (after helping me out with a little spelling challenge I had) asked a very good question.

Any specific techniques on dealing with these various warriors?

Well I was taught that you should always bring a potential solution with you when you point out a problem. That’s always the challenging end, isn’t it? I mean any schmoe can point out a problem. But coming up with a solution… Now that’s bringing value to the equation.

So in my effort to bring value rather than just poke holes, here are my suggestions for how to deal with some of those difficult people at work. Read more

A SuccessCREEations Christmas Thank You Gift

We’re a relatively young blog here at SuccessCREEations. While I started blogging a while back, S-C didn’t come into being until the Get Started post on 23 August which, if my reckoning is correct is almost exactly 4 months ago.

We’ve come a long way in that third of a year.

First the boring stuff. From a statistical perspective, in that time we’ve had 10,304 unique visitors who looked at a combined 117,561 pages. We’ve gone from nonexistent to a Technocrati ranking of 60,370 (out of 63.2 million blogs currently tracked) with 176 links from 55 different blogs. Today our Alexa Ranking is 41,893 with a three month average of 125,787.

All that happened with 93 posts and 336 comments. Oh, and let’s not forget the 1,088 spam comments so far that Askimet has spared us from viewing.

These four months also included a significant amount of self discovery and a nearly 3 week long hiatus from blogging with two whole weeks of no posts at all. Talk about a traffic killer!

We’ve completely refocused SuccessCREEations in that time and made a significant course correction from exploring personal success tips and strategies to helping businesses fuel growth through blogging.

And that brings us to the good part: the people. Here at SuccessCREEations I’ve met a whole bunch of new and wonderful people that I didn’t know four months ago. New folks have stopped by, left a comment or two, or even become engaged in some lively discussion over the months.

This post is for you.

The idea came from Kirsten Harrell’s thank you post yesterday. Talk about a lady who gets what blogging is all about!
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Great Charity Idea

The holidays are a wonderful time to celebrate with friends and family. We go to all those get-togethers and parties. We indulge way more than we should and set ourselves up for a couple New Year’s resolutions that we most likely won’t keep.

But the holidays are also a time for giving. After all, isn’t that the reason for the season anyway?

Well in that vein, I found out about a tremendous charity idea this morning that I wanted to share with all you success oriented business blogging types out there.

The folks over at Gifter.org have come up with an amazingly simple idea to leverage the power of the blog into a massive charitable giving campaign.

What they’ve done is set up the Million Dollar Blog Post. They are working toward getting a million comments on one post. Each person who chooses to, comments about their single biggest wish for the world.

Each comment represents $1 donated to charity. In the true spirit of giving they don’t even care if the donations are given to their organization or somewhere else.

I went and left my comment.

And they can count my wife and I in for a donation too.

Go check them out. Make a wish. Spread the word.

Surprise of the Night

OK. This is a new one on me.

It’s evening and I had clean up detail. Fortunately tonight all that was required was to scoop up the Zaxby’s boxes from the coffee table and toss them in the trash. We’ve had a long run this week and Gorgeous stopped off to pick something up on her way home. Yummy.

But the dinner clean up pretty much filled the trash so I decided to just take it out and be done with it. Savannah being the pleasant place it is in the wintertime I walked out around the garage in the dark barefoot wearing jeans and a t-shirt. A little chilly if I was going to be standing around. But I like it cooler. Besides I wasn’t going to be out long.
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Life Lessons From 2006

Ben Yoskovitz has a group writing project under way over at the Instigator Blog asking the question, “What did you learn this year?”

Whew! Talk about a big question!

I mean I learned lots of things this year.

Some of them were relatively insignificant yet very practical. For example I learned that you shouldn’t put stop leak into the overflow reservoir of your 2001 Buick Century instead of into the radiator because it will gunk up the plastic reservoir tank, cause the sensor to turn on the “low coolant” light steady, and cost approximately $360 to get someone who actually knows about cars to fix. Oh, and it won’t stop the leak that way either.

Other lessons had a little bigger impact. Read more

There’s a New Meme In Town

A while back, Joe over at Working at Home on the Internet included me in on a new meme that has been going round. It was started by Mack Collier of The Viral Garden as a means to get deserving bloggers up the Technorati charts .

Of course, because of my recent server meltdown (and some other issues) it has taken me a bit to get back to this. And in the mean time I’ve been tagged by folks such as Ben Yoskovitz, Starbucker, Robyn McMaster, Jodee Bock, and Kirsten Harrell.

My favorite tag in this meme so far came from Ellen Webber who told a great story along with the meme. I love snowmobiling and I can relate. (I mean not that I do much of that here in Savannah. But I grew up in snow country.) Read more

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