Clarify Your Win and Be More Effective

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Effectiveness is often a good measure of success. When we are effective we are producing the results we striving to achieve.

Trouble comes when the results we see are different from what we expected. What then? How do we become more effective?

One sure way to be more effective is to Clarify Your Win.

We All Want to Win

Everyone likes to win. People love the excitement when their team is getting ahead. It’s the reason sports are a multi-billion dollar industry around the globe. We are hard wired to crave winning and being associated with winners.

This is also why a team that’s in the middle of a big loosing streak has trouble filling a stadium. No one wants to associate with “losers”.

With sports it’s easy to see who the winner is. One quick look at the scoreboard, or maybe the clock is all it takes. Winning in most sports can be reduced to numbers and guys often memorize an amazing amount of data from their favorite sports teams all with the the goal of figuring out who’s got the best chances to win.

Or sometimes they use their stats to explain why this team won and that team lost. Read more

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Tags: Business, Principles, Success, SuccessCREEations, Win

Lessons at the Watering Hole

Caught this video today on YouTube. It’s a little on the long side. But all the twists and and turns that happen at this particular watering hole over in Africa are worth watching all the way through.

The Battle of Kruger Video

There are a bunch of lessons that jump out at me watching this. Some from the side of the buffalo, others are from the lion’s point of view. Here’s a few to get our minds working. Read more

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Tags: Misc, Motivation, Battle of Kruger Video, Success, SuccessCREEations

Success Principle #15 - Unintended Consequences

Everything choice we make has consequences. And the place we find ourselves in life is simply a direct result of all the choices we’ve made, large or small, added together.

Successful people realize this fact and strive to make their choices wisely.

Many other people instead choose to ignore the cause and effect relationship of their choices and look for something or someone that they can blame for the circumstances they find themselves in. Until they realize that all of us do in fact have choices and that they can start making different choices, their circumstances are unlikely to change.

Unintended Consequences

But here’s the thing. Not all of the consequences of our choices are what we might expect. There are times when unintended consequences might result from our choices.

None of the decisions we make happen in a vacuum. Every choice we make in some way, large or small, affects those around us. And it is quite possible that there might even be a ripple effect of those choices that end up affecting a whole lot of folks.

This principle of unintended consequences is especially evident when governments make policy decisions and change laws for very large groups of people. Read more

Popularity: 7% [?]

Tags: Misc, Principles, Corn, Ethanol, Success, SuccessCREEations, Unintended Consequences

Mega List of Success Tools

You’ve got to check this out.

Char and Dawud (talk about two people with cool names - they might end up there with Sting and Bono one day!) have put together an incredible list of 164 Essential Tools for Online Success.

Take a look at just some of the categories of the tools they’ve found links for:

• Antivirus
• Blog Editors
• Browsers
• Browser Screenshots
• Communications
• Conference Calling
• Feeds & Feed Readers
• FireFox Extensions
• FTP Clients
• Graphics
• HTML/CSS
• PDF’s
• SEO Tools & Key Words
• Social Networking
• Web Statistics
• WordPress Plugins

I even found a new WordPress plugin that I’d been looking for thanks to this list - DigClick. Go check it out. Bookmark it on Del.icio.us. Tell all your friends.

This one is worth keeping in your back pocket.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Tags: Misc, Tech Tips, Char, Dawud Miracle, Success, Success Tools, SuccessCREEations

Business Blogging Success Story - Selling a Dog of a Movie to Hollywood

Gorgeous and I both like Sci-Fi. Our Tivo is set to record the Sci-Fi channel’s Friday night line up of Doctor Who, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Battlestar Galactica when they are in season.

Have been for years.

So when I got the usual monthly (or so) email from Twitter that had a blurb saying Dave Hewlett twitters, I went to check it out right away.

Who is Dave Hewlett?

He’s the actor who plays the geeky scientist Dr. Rodney McKay on Stargate Atlantis. If you are at all into sci-fi you’ll know the character type.

It’s sort of an “I know I’m a genius and this particular problem is way bigger than any mortal could reasonably expect to figure out if they had years to work on it but I know we’ve only got a few hours before we all die if I don’t get it worked out so I’ll do my best but don’t expect much and it’s been nice knowing you” kind of thing.

And he always gets it done. In his doom-and-gloom, negative, man this is really bad style.

He’s one of those characters I can relate to. Read more

Popularity: 7% [?]

Tags: Blogging, Misc, A Dogs Breakfast, Business Blogging, David Hewlett, Success, SuccessCREEations, Twitter, YouTube

Success Principle #13 - Run Your Own Race

“Two men were walking in a forest, when they suddenly saw a savage, hungry-looking bear. One of the men quickly put on a pair of running shoes. The other guy exclaimed, “You idiot! You can’t run faster than a bear …”

To which the first guy replied, “But I don’t have to run faster than the bear, I only have to run faster than you!”

The Wrong Take Away

In the business world I’ve most often heard that little story told to get the wrong point across. Usually the person relating the story uses it as a spring board to convey some point along these lines.

If you want to be successful you must outrun your competition.

Nope. Wrong. Dumb. Misses the greater truth. Read more

Popularity: 3% [?]

Tags: Misc, Principles, Motivation, race, run, Success, SuccessCREEations

Talking About Success on BlogTalkRadio

Had a great conversation last night talking about success on BlogTalkRadio with Wayne Hurlbert.

We talked about what it takes to be successful. Took a look at what success looks like and how to get there.

And of course we talked about success in blogging and how it relates to business.

If you aren’t a subscriber to Wayne’s show, you should be. He’s had folks like Heidi Miller and Liz Strauss on his show. And perhaps my favorite was the hour he gave us talking with Judith Wieigel.

If you ever toyed with the idea of running off to the circus as a kid, go find that episode! Too funny.

Wayne’s got a great way of making his guests feel comfortable. Once I got over my nervousness and settled down a bit we had a great time!

Thanks Wayne! I had a blast.

The rest of you head on over and subscribe to his show!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tags: Blogging, Misc, BlogTalkRadio, Business Blogging, Success, SuccessCREEations, Wayne Hurlbert

Evidence that Business Blogging Works

Tris Hussey over at One By One Media points out today that one of their Bloggers For Hire business clients was mentioned in an interview with a couple prominent bloggers. Here’s the post, Freight and Shipping mentioned on Net Concepts.

Congratulations guys!

But the nod of some free recognition is not what jumped out at me in this post. Tris goes on to say something in, what for me, is an attention grabbing paragraph. When talking about their client, Tris says,

Has made huge gains on Google. He’s #1 on many of the terms he wanted. His Adwords budget could be cut by thousands of dollars a month and…he increased his revenue so much that he expanded to have two new offices. Two! Not, oh yeah a couple extra people. Two whole freakin’ offices! That’s jobs for people in Tennessee and Florida. That’s supplies (computers, desks, etc) that are purchased. That’s all those things. Oh, and he’s still busy. Really busy. He told me this week he’s been so busy that he’s slept in the office a few times. Eric attributes a lot of this success to his blog and Jane, our Masters degree holding, English professor pro-blogger.

Did you catch all that? If not read that paragraph again. Seriously. Read it. Read more

Popularity: 7% [?]

Tags: Blogging, Bloggers For Hire, Blogs, Business, Business Blogging, Freight Shipping, One By One Media, Success

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

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Tags: Misc, Motivation, Ben Yoskovitz, Instigator Blog, Passion, Success, what I learned

Success Principle # 11 - Keeping Your Head In the Game

It’s been an interesting ride on this trip to Chicago. I’ve had the TV on quite a bit here in the hotel room. And for the record television is a horrible companion.

But yesterday I caught some snippets of a movie set in Australia. It centered on a couple of competitive swimmers working toward competing on the international level and it had the look of one of those based on real events movies like Chariots of Fire.

Unfortunately I never caught the title of this one.

One of the sub plots caught my attention, though. It was one of those classic stories of a couple of buddies becoming competitors over time. It was interesting how they each dealt with the change in relationship differently.
Read more

Popularity: 13% [?]

Tags: Principles, Focus, Success