Posts filed under 'Lessons Learned'
After finishing Malcolm Gladwell’s amazing book, The Tipping Point
, I decided to take another stab at Michael E. Gerber’s E-Myth Mastery. I have gotten to the chapter entitled, “The Discipline of The Enterprise Leader”, and the something resonated with me this time that hadn’t before—Michael’s idea that discrimination will set a leader apart.
All too often, small business owners find themselves caught up in the minutiae and trivia of everyday work activities and spend equal amounts of energy and time on tasks that have vastly different values in relation to the goals or vision of the business. Discrimination and learning to do it actively is an important lesson to take hold of. Allowing ourselves to quickly decide whether activity is of high value or low value and focusing on the high value will, I am sure, move you more quickly to toward your end.
My exercise for the next week is to discriminate and evaluate everything in relation to my vision.
What can you do next week to move you to make your business become truly world class?
February 3rd, 2007
A while ago–okay a long while ago–I posted about my search for a desktop Feed Reader application. I thought I should give an update since the situation has changed.
New Years and a Hard Drive Failure Brought the Winds of Change
Beginning in the new year, after the release of IE7 and FeedReader’s latest version (3.07 at the time), I noticed a significant performance slowdown with FeedReader. It was taking painful amounts of time to load posts and render them for reading as well as their being a change to the interface. Since I read on average 50-100 posts each day it was taking longer and longer to do this in FeedReader and eventually I gave up. I stopped reading and stopped getting current and new information on the fields that I crave information on.
My New Solution
My new solution is Google Reader. I had at one time decided that hosted feed readers were too slow and not as convenient as using a desktop client but after my problems with FeedReader my hunger for my feeds returned and I remembered that Google Reader was part of my Google Account features and decided to give it a whirl.
Faster and Functional
Whirl it does! Not only can I read posts faster, I now have the ability to tag them, forward, star and save them. Google Reader is not only fast but an all around great application. And, if I have another hard drive failure, I don’t need to worry about losing or having to somehow restore the desktop client database (who knows how tricky that might be). I now spend far less time reading many more posts and can send posts of interest off to friends.
Getting Even More From Google
One further enhancement has been to use a Google Gadget to display my GMail, GoogleReader and Calendar all on my Customized Google Page so I have that set as my “Home” page in FireFox and I never am more than a click away from an excellent control panel.
The next step?
I am likely going to move my domain email (via Google Apps) to GMail so that I can read, manage and post all messages using GMail instead of using my local email client, Thunderbird. Again, if another hard drive failure comes my way and I can’t recover my email messages, I won’t be stuck seeking old copies etc.
On a related note: Yesterday I talked about my quest for an Integrated, Hosted Contact Management System.
February 2nd, 2007
One of the things I have figured out over the last little while is that I have to focus on a few things at a time. I will most certainly not be able to run two blogs, build up my web development and design business, help take care of my 7 month old and keep on top of the regular day to day things that just need to get done.
It is a long time coming but focus is my new focus. I will reduce the clutter in my life. One of the first things that will happen is that this blog will be placed in hiatus until further notice.
It has been weighing on my mind and I have been reading other bloggers like Guy Kawasaki, Steve Pavlina, Yaro Starak, and others and have found that I need to get other things in order before I dedicate time to blogging on business and my experiences in it.
I look forward to coming back to this with a new lightness and understanding.
For now, all the best.
May 4th, 2006
“I had pretty much given up on you…”
That is a phrase I won’t ever hear from a client again. His words are real and honest. It is an expression of frustration. My saving grace is that he did in fact express them at all.
The reason my client is rightly upset and nearly gave up hope is that I failed to communicate, failed to keep promises and failed to handle simple time-management and prioritization. I have learned though that those are merely surface symptoms of a greater ill — ego and sef-centredness. I didn’t give my client the respect and time that I would expect from others for me. I pushed work onto the back burner and rode my hobby-horse projects far too often.
As someone who has worked as an employee for most of his life, I faced being the boss — being in charge of scheduling, being in charge of time-management, being in charge of when things got done and in what order. It was difficult to admit that I wasn’t in charge of anything. I found that I was not only ignoring and disrespecting my clients but also jeopardizing any of the good that I was doing in the process.
Lesson Learned:
Treat people better than I would expect from them. (Hmmm… sounds familiar.)
I wish to show the journey to becoming a successful entrepreneur — the entire journey. What most people leave out from their story is all the stuff they do/did wrong. The acknowledgment of failures and misteps is the only way to move past them and to become a better person and better in business.
March 16th, 2006
As I mentioned in my last post, I may have jumped the gun on this “Name the Blog” contest. I have decided to just go ahead and name it later today. If I get a name entry that I like better, I will award the prize whether or not I rename the blog.
Lesson Learned: The launch of a new blog is insignificant. The launch of a new blog that provides meaning to people is worth talking about. See Guy Kawasaki’s Let the Good Times Roll.
Back to you soon.
March 14th, 2006
So I have this little contest going — well I have posted a contest to Name This Blog. It seems that I may have put the cart before the horse here as I assumed that my non-existent network of readers would find me and post suggestions.
This is the first of my Lesson Learned posts:
I assumed people care about me. I know that this is not true — what reason would they have. People may come to care about what I have to say and begin to care about the person behind the message but I need to provide you — them — with something of value in exchange for attention, contributions and, ultimately, care.
March 10th, 2006