Step One Action, Step Three Success!

Last post I discussed developing a passion for your dreams and goals. Developing mental clarity in your goals is a good start. It helps you to visualize success, it builds your belief and confidence, it opens your mental awareness so that you recognize opportunities. But no amount of daydreaming about your goals will convert them into reality.

Faith without works is death.

Here is a three step plan to realize your goals:

1. Take Action. Start. Act. Move your body. Do something. The biggest objection that I hear from people is “But I don’t know how!” When people say that they don’t know how, what they really mean is that they don’t know how to finish. But everyone knows how to start. I guarantee it.

• Want to lose weight? First action step: put on your shoes.
• Want to make more money? Ask someone who makes more than you what to do.
• Want to marry a pretty girl? Open your mouth and say something to her. If it’s something embarrassing, she’ll probably think it’s cute.
• Want to write a book? Find a piece of paper and write. I know something about this. I started writing my book, then two weeks later came up with a subject and title.

There is no point in worrying about the endgame when you haven’t started playing. (that’s probably suitable for tweeting)

The second objection is, “What happens if I come across obstacle X?” You cannot anticipate every setback on a new endeavor. Why? Because it’s new. Yes, some force will try to keep you from changing your life. Most of them are minor problems that are given enormous weight through the fertilizer of procrastination. Remember, often our anticipation of problems is worse than the problems we actually face.

“I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” ~Mark Twain

Which is why you are better off just starting with some activity of any kind. As you progress and run into a problem, face it there rather than battling an imaginary future phantom. You cannot beat an imagined problem.

2. Adjust. Evaluate. Aim. Once you start, you develop momentum. Once you have momentum, you don’t stop and re-aim. You simply adjust and improve along the way. Now is the time to seek advice and counsel from qualified people. And the simple fact that you have already started gives you much more credibility.

If you seek advice from an expert in any field, they will have more respect for you if you say: “I’ve started doing X, what do you think…?” than if you can only say: “I’m thinking about starting X, what do you think…?”

Why such a big difference? The world is full of people that have thought about doing something. The expert knows that if you’ve already started–even if you’re going about it in a sporadic, disorganized, possibly crazy method–you’ve already overcome the hurdle that stops most people.

3. Persevere. Keep going. Continue. Never quit. If you move towards your goal, if you adjust your path along the way, then you will reach it as long as you do not stop.

My favorite quote on the subject of perseverance:
Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. ~Calvin Coolidge

The good news is that once you reach a certain point (I’ll go ahead and say 21 days), inertia begins to work in your favor. When you first start out, passion is the driving force that gets you moving. Eventually your daily activity becomes a habit. Once you have a habit, it requires less and less energy to keep going.

Yes, people still quit after 21 days. If you feel your energy and enthusiasm waning, then it’s most likely because you stopped doing the thing that motivated you to start the process. Revisit your goal. Are you still thinking about it and talking about it? If you are, you’re not becoming weary. Slogging along for the sake of activity is just being stubborn. Slogging along to achieve is rewarding.

Remember, all of this began with thought. Guard you thoughts because your thoughts become words. Your words become actions. Your actions become habits. Your habits determine your character.

One final observation, if you will turn your attention to the white board. When you change your character, your thoughts will change. Achieving goals itself becomes a habit. Once you are on a track to success, it becomes a track that leads to continual success. There is a reason why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Everyone participates in this process, whether they know it or not. We are always in the process of growth or decay, and the thing that determines the direction we are headed is our thoughts.

Have you made a conscious decision anytime recently to grow in some area of your life?

Passion Overcomes Complacency

A human being will not take positive steps to improve their life for one simple reason: it is easier not to. All improvement requires change, and all change meets resistance. The only time there will be a change in the status quo is when desire overcomes fear and laziness.

Today, I’m writing specifically for those people that have a vague idea that they would like to improve their life in some way, but have not yet taken proactive steps toward that idea. Either because they are scared to attempt it, or not motivated to try. These are five steps to develop a passion to overcome complacency.

1. Have a goal. When you create your goal, be specific. Not: Lose weight, make more money; instead: lose fifteen pounds, earn an extra $1000/month. Not: Be more social; rather: meet two new interesting acquaintances. Little goals are fine. Start small. Everything worthwhile begins with small improvements, and the idea of a “quantum leap” to success is largely a myth.

2. Write it down. And keep it posted someplace where you see it every day. More than one spot is fine as well. The bathroom mirror is a good spot, because it is usually the first place you see yourself in the morning. So is your car dashboard if you drive every day. Your refrigerator door if you eat every day. Keep a copy in your purse or wallet.

3. Think about it all the time. Visualize yourself having already achieved your goal. Experience the emotional satisfaction in having achieved it. If you have to set aside an alarm clock to remind you to think about your goal for fifteen minutes every day, do it. All I’m asking you to do is daydream; even the most fearful and lazy person could do this step.

4. Self-Talk about it. First you should talk about it with yourself. When you are looking at your bathroom mirror first thing in the morning, you should say to yourself “I will lose fifteen pounds,” “I will earn an extra $1000 a month.” But the next step is the most crucial and the one which will eliminate most people from progressing any further.

5. Talk about it with people that matter. This is the first step that involves anything resembling risk, because someone may tease you. If your passion to achieve your goal is not greater than your fear of being teased, then your future is sabotaged right here. That’s why you should only talk about your dreams and goals with “people that matter.” Who are those people? People that can help you and people that will encourage you. Avoid negative people like lepers. If someone has an attitude that you don’t want to catch, stop associating with them. Period. Does that sound harsh? Perhaps, but why would you want to hang out with someone that belittles your dreams? Small people want everyone around them to lose so that they can remain comfortably losers themselves.

I stole this quote from a businessman named Bob Kummer:

“The Bible states that Samson killed a thousand enemy soldiers with the jawbone of an ass. Every day, hundreds of people have their dreams stolen from them by that very same weapon.”

These are baby steps for developing a passion towards positive change. The more you think about it and talk about it, the more your goal begins to focus into a crystal clear image. When it begins to move from your head to your heart, you will develop a desire to achieve it; and when that desire–your passion–is great enough, it will give you the courage to overcome fear and the urgency to overcome laziness.

All achievement is accomplished twice. First in the mind, second in the body. So talking and thinking and imagining your way to success is not a waste of time. It is in fact a vital first step. Once you’ve gotten this far, you are literally halfway towards fulfilling your goal (and further than any of those negative “friends” have ever gotten).

Next post, an Action Plan to convert your goal into reality.

How Do You Like Them Tomatoes?

When I was in elementary school we had a garden (interesting side note, no matter what you plant in Hawaii you will yield mostly eggplant). My dad took care of it and I, being a kid, I carefully avoided it. From high school until today I’ve only lived in a town house with no lawn space, and have had no particular interest in potted plants so I’ve never grown anything.

A few years back I had the urge to start an herb garden (when I had a turkey and basil leaf sandwich that was really good). And since I haven’t had a normal 9 to 5 job in quite a while, a few months ago I thought I’d try it out. I got some plastic trays, some soil, some seeds and started flexing my farming muscles.

Basil is easy to grow, so those seeds sprouted quickly. Then I decided that fresh basil tastes gross and let them die.

I planted some Rosemary seeds, most of which never broke the soil surface. When one of them finally did I was overjoyed. My next discovery was that a kitten will eat a newly sprouted Rosemary plant right down to the roots.

That brings us to today. Check out my tomato plant:

Not bad for someone that never grew anything in his life. When I actually get my first tomato, expect a five-part blog detailing the process from harvest to sandwich-eating.

Why am I rambling about my mini-garden? Here, I’ll quote from David Schwartz in The Magic of Thinking Big.

Most of us have friends who grow things for a hobby. And we’ve all heard them say something like “It’s exciting to watch those plants grow.”

I’ve read this book several times before but glossed over that section because I never had any personal experience with it. In this particular season of my life though, it was pertinent to me so it jumped out at me.

Now let’s take a look at the next paragraph (of the book and my blog)

To be sure, it is thrilling to watch what can happen when men cooperate with nature. But it is not one-tenth as fascinating as watching yourself respond to your own carefully administered thought management program. It’s fun to feel yourself growing more confident, more effective, more successful day-by-day, month-by-month.

Here are my insights taken from my recent experiences in farming and reading:

• First, Dr. Schwartz sums up nicely the reason that I am so passionate about personal growth. It’s fun. It’s challenging. And when you are growing yourself, it is significantly more rewarding than having a fresh tomato. (See my past blog on Always Choose Growth)
• Second, you should always re-read books in your success library. Certain phrases and principles will speak to you more strongly in different phases of your own life. Compare what you highlight in a book today to what “college-You” highlighted the first time you read it. It’s a great yardstick to see how much you’ve grown.
• Third, great things come from tiny seeds (I mean, just look at that photo! That plant is like 5 cats tall!) Metaphorically, words are seeds. Ideas are seeds. Thoughts are seeds. My life’s ambition is to spend it planting good seed and yielding a great harvest in the form of adding value to people’s lives.
• Fourth, good seed is timeless. This book was written in 1959, but the wisdom in it is as valuable today as it was then. So is the wisdom found in the Bible. Seeds discovered in Egyptian tombs were found to still be viable after thousands of years. The same is true for principles of success. Policies change. Techniques change. Popularity is fickle. Principles endure.

These points seem a bit scattered to me, so let me try to bring them all into focus with a few questions:

Do you have principles in your life that you value? Of course, everyone does.

What are you doing to reinforce those principles in your life? In your child’s life?

What good seeds can you plant now to yield a great harvest in the future?

The Giant Yellow Spider Trilogy

(This isn’t the sort of story I usually post on my blog, but it’s a true story and deserves to be told.)

Part One:
The first incident happened on my way to theater rehearsal during my Theatricus days. As I was stopped at a red light, a giant, yellow spider started crawling down the front of my windshield. When I say giant I mean it had about a leg-span of about three inches with great, big, fat legs and huge fangs. I kind of freaked out, but only a little, because after all, I was safe in my car… for now (not-so-subtle foreshadowing). After unsuccessfully attempting to dislodge the giant yellow menace with my windshield wipers, I reached the freeway and got my car up to 50 mph. Finally, the beast flew off. Hurrah, no more giant yellow spider.

When I got home I spent a good two hours Googling terms like “giant yellow spider hawaii” and searching through mug shots trying to find something resembling my car spider. I found nothing close to it. And everyone from Hawaii reading this has probably never seen anything like it either.

Part Two:
Eight months pass.

I’m driving on my way to a club meeting and crawling down the front of my windshield along the exact same path is the same freaking huge, yellow spider. Two thoughts shoot through my brain:

1. “no way, it’s the same freaking huge, yellow spider”
2. “oh crap, my windows are rolled down.”

Sure enough, giant, yellow spider makes a bee-line for the passenger window and crawls into my car, disappearing on the far side of the passenger seat. This is not okay by any stretch of the imagination.

So I pull over at a service station and spend fifteen minutes searching (tentatively) through my car for the giant yellow spider. Can’t find him, and I’m late for my game, so I get back in and start driving. Once I start driving again, I see the giant yellow spider in my rear view mirror crawling along the back window (to which I remark, “man, that sucker is fast”). I pull over again to try to find him and hit him with a book. Once again, no spider.

I finally reach my destination, driving on pins and needles the whole way, and recruit Luke to help me look for the spider in my car. All we find are a couple strands of web in the back. So I figure, if we leave the car alone for a while, mutant spider will try to build himself a web, then maybe I can catch him out in the open and hit him with a book. Besides, I’m like twenty minutes late already.

Fast forward two hours.

No sign of the giant yellow spider.

My friend Dave needs a ride into Waikiki, despite my warning about the current spider situation. So we get in the car and I start driving. Ten minutes later, something touches the left side of my neck. So after I perform a very manly scream and do a full-body spasm, I can no longer feel anything on my neck and Dave is laughing at me. After assuring me that it was probably just a leaf that blew in through the window, I half-heartedly agreed. So, I drop off Dave, return to my neighborhood, and as I’m getting out of the car, I find a strand of web connecting my shoulder to the dash board.

This time, I spent closer to eight hours on Google trying to find some kind of giant yellow spider in Hawaii to figure out what exactly I am dealing with here. If a mongoose is the natural predator of these things, I am prepared to catch a mongoose and lock it in my car until one of them is dead. But I find nothing like my car spider in the entirety of the internet.

Every day for the next three weeks I spend a good ten minutes searching my car before getting into it. But I never see it again.

Part Three
Three years pass.

I was at the Food, Lodging, and Hospitality Expo where some two hundred vendors are there hawking their wares. As it happens, there was a Terminix booth there, so as I was chatting it up with an exterminator, I remembered about the giant, freaking yellow spider that used to haunt my car. The exchange went something like this:

Matt: “Hey, maybe you can help me identify this giant spider that used to haunt my car, and tell me if it was poisonous.”

Terminator: “Okay.”

M: “It was slightly bigger than this cane spider” (indicating the cane spider pinned to his display). “But the legs were twice as fat and it was bright yellow.”

T: “hurmm…. Was it hairy?”

M: “No, it had smooth legs.”

T: “It didn’t make any webs did it?”

M: “No. Well, actually I found a couple strands of web.”

T: “hurmm…. It sounds like you have a Brazillian Wandering Spider.”

M: “Are those found in Hawaii?”

T: “No.”

M: “…”

T: “What most people don’t realize is that ALL spiders are venomous. Since they don’t have teeth and they don’t have jaws, their only way to feed is by injecting their own stomach acids through their bite, which liquifies muscle which they then drink. Of course some are more deadly than others.”

M: “Okay…”

T: “A Brazillian Wandering Spider is very, very, very, very, very, very lethal.”

M: “Oh… so I probably should have set off a bug bomb in my car right away to be safe…”

T: “That probably wouldn’t kill it.”

M: “…”

T: “You should probably get rid of the car.”

Back to my Google-fu. Of course now that I know the name of my spider, the very first web search pops up an image that causes me to proclaim “That’s it! That’s the spider!” Even though the Wikipedia photo wasn’t a yellow one, like my car spider, I would recognize those giant fangs anywhere.

How close to death was I with this critter on the side of my neck? From wikipedia:
“The Brazilian wandering spiders appear in Guinness World Records from 2010 as the world’s most venomous spider.”

I think that’s good enough to qualify as yet another of my infamous near-death experiences.

Always Choose Growth

Consider two farmers. Farmer John has a thousand acres of land that he inherited. But because he neglected his crops throughout the year, his harvest wasn’t quite enough to cover his expenses, so at the end of the year he sells one acre of his land to farmer Mike. Farmer Mike only has twenty acres of land, but because he produced a bountiful crop, at the end of the year, he used his extra cash to buy another acre from Farmer John.

Which farmer would you say is a better influence on young, impressionable, farmers-in-training? Farmer Mike, right? Go back and read the last paragraph if you forgot which farmer is which.

Even though Farmer John is worth 50 times more, everyone wants to be a farmer, own a business, or play basketball like Farmer Mike. That’s because of the success principle: “where you are is not nearly as important as where you are going.”

We really only have two options. Growth or decline. Stasis is a myth. If you are not moving, you are like water that is not moving. You become stagnant. If you do not use muscles, they atrophy. If you do not use your brain in a regular and stimulating way, it begins to decay.

When we are infants, every experience in life is brand-new. Every muscle movement, every sensory input and every emotion is something that we are learning for the first time. As youngsters, we are placed in an environment where we are assigned reading, math, history. We are learning through our school years. Even when we get a new job, we need to learn new skills, new routines, a new driving route. When we stop learning, we start losing our mental edge. We get bored. We get lazy. That is when we start getting older.

That is why even though Farmer John is worth 50 times more than farmer Mike, we view Mike as the more successful of the two.

Always choose growth. As an adult you have to be intentional about your own growth, since nobody is assigning you learning material anymore. No matter how dismal your current circumstances, if you’re always in the process of growing, you are more successful than someone with much more money that is stagnating.

Stop staring at your feet, start staring at the horizon. <– Tweet that.

What are you doing today, to grow you to a new level a year from now?

Let the Music Match Your Words

According to the world’s foremost expert on the subject of leadership – John C Maxwell – integrity is the most important aspect of leadership. Integrity means that your words match your actions, that your character matches your words, that you do what you say you will do.

For you to lead people, they need to trust you. Trust is an incredible fragile thing. One dishonest action and trust is lost. Two or three perceived dishonesties or questionable acts will cause people to question whether or not they can trust you.

In Hawaii, there was a local musician named Brother Iz (Israel Kaʻanoʻi Kamakawiwoʻole, yes I had to look that up). His most famous song was his remake of “Somewhere Under the Rainbow” peformed on the ukulele. But one of his other songs was a song called Johnny Mahoi. It’s a song about a bright young boy that falls in with the wrong crowd, joins a gang and gets killed in a fight. Tragic story, right? The problem, is that like most songs played on the ukulele, it is a happy, upbeat tune. The words do not match the music. Because of that disconnect, the message of the song is not particularly impactful.

It’s the same way with people. If your words don’t match the music behind it, you are seen as lacking integrity and people will not trust you. When you genuinely care about people they can tell. When you talk negatively about people behind their backs, they can tell. Because the music in your voice doesn’t match the words you are speaking.

If you are a boss and you tell your employees that they need to be at work on time, but you are routinely late, you lose integrity in the eyes of your employees. Some of them will comply, some of them will not. The ones that do not will feel justified in being as late as you.

If you tell your children to be honest, but they witness you lying to somebody, this will almost certainly cause them to rebel.

Once you lose integrity, you lose trust. Once you lose trust, you lose the ability to influence positively.

Some very simple yet profound words to live by: “Say what you believe. Do what you say.” In fact, you should go and tweet that right now.

In addition to integrity, what else would you consider to be a vital aspect of leadership?

Easter Egg Hunt Failure

One year I had to explain the concept of an Easter egg hunt to a foreign exchange student. But I was a little sparse on details. Actually, I just handed him a basket of plastic eggs and told him “hide these.” He immediately went to the bank and put them in his safety deposit box. Then the hunt began. Twenty minutes and eight crying children later, I found out what he did with the eggs. That was an Easter egg hunt failure.

That story happens to be fictional, but there is a point to it which I will get to in about ten paragraphs.

A modern urban definition of “Easter egg” is something hidden in a movie, story, or painting. An Easter egg in a movie would be a prop placed in the background or foreground that has nothing to do with the plot, but may have some hidden meaning to the audience.

An example of an Easter egg in a comic book could be something like this:
Spider-man in his civilian identity gets onto an airplane and hears the pilot making an announcement: “this is your pilot, Jordan Ferris, along with copilot Hal Carol.”

There, did you see it? If you didn’t, it’s only because you’re not an enormous geek like myself. The Easter egg there is a little play on names for comic book fans. “Hal Jordan” is the air-force-test-pilot-secret-identity of Green Lantern. “Carol Ferris” is his boss/love interest. Take their names, scramble them to avoid a lawsuit, hide them in plain sight to excite the geeks like me, and presto: Easter egg. Also some would interpret that as a slam from Marvel comics against DC saying that Green Lantern is only fit to be Spider-man’s chauffeur.

A more historical example, since I do have a BA in art, is the painting “Ambassadors” by Holbein.

See that weird shape at the bottom of the painting? Click on the image to see a larger version, then look at it from an angle, so that you’re looking at it from the top right edge of your computer’s screen. I’ll wait while you try that… (Insert Jeopardy theme song here).

If you look at it just right, you should see a human skull. A near-perfect human skull, so you know it had to be deliberately painted. Also the painting was commissioned to be placed to the left of the doorway, so that as you exit the room, the last thing you would see is a glimpse of a skull following you. This may be the first official use of subliminal imagery by an artist in history.

So what is the point of these Easter egg examples and that story from paragraph one? I have been placing Easter eggs in my blog now for several months. Mine have been in the form of funny/goofy messages hidden in the images on each blog that you can read by hovering the cursor over it. Nothing hilarious mind you, just me showing I can be clever if I want to. Nobody ever bothered to comment on one of my sub-captions, but it didn’t occur to me that it was because nobody ever found one.

Until last week, when I hid a “golden egg” in my post. One with a contest and a prize. Even if nobody wanted the prize (a free eCopy of my first book) I’m sure that somebody in the world would want to answer the three questions correctly, just to show how smart they are. That’s when I figured out, nobody is participating in my Easter egg hunt.

I think one reason is that I was hiding the eggs in my safety deposit box. I am old school when it comes to technology. I realized, looking at my blog on an iPhone, nobody can see the Easter eggs on a mobile device because they cannot float a cursor over the image because they have no cursor. I am also guessing, that people that subscribe to RSS feeds may have a similar problem. I can’t say for sure, because I have no idea how to subscribe to an RSS feed myself.

So, cancel the search, I’ll just hand you an egg.

Here in this photograph, is a picture of Herbert who appeared in my past blog “Actions Trump Intentions“. Herbert is inspired by the Scott Adams character Dilbert. For the first five people who can identify three differences between Herbert and Dilbert I will send you a free eCopy of my first book, It Takes 15 Minutes to Change Your Life. Just send an email to feedthegoodwolf@live.com with your answer.

 

… This is a test of the emergency dictation system

(to test my microphone and voice recognition software this entire post will be composed of me dictating my entire last post. Not including this portion here in the parentheses.)

(Actually before I get into it I would like to point out how impressive it is that the dictation software actually recognize the difference of me wanting to have it spell out the word parentheses as opposed to just including a parentheses.)

… I am experiencing technical difficulties.
Nothing serious, I’ve been scratch that I’ve just been trying to attach a headset microphone to my computer. I spent a good six hours yesterday with a stupid headset mic trying to make it record my voice.
Quick back story: a publisher recommended setting up a workstation so that you could” speak your book” Tatian. I’ve never used a dictation program before, but I figured it would be great for me, since I do most of my writing longhand in a composition book. Not always, but a lot. For example, I am typing this strictly on my computer, since I happen to be sitting here, battling the evil forces of broken technology and have an important update which I am getting to. The downside is that when I type directly on my computer my thoughts tend to derail easily and all go off on a tangent and have to make an abrupt directional change skin jar the reader. Like the talking dog in the Pixar movie”" that would every once in a while stop in the middle of doing something and yell quote squirrel!”
(Scroll back to see what I was talking about before I” squirreled)
… Then I transcribe what I wrote to my computer later. Dictation seems like a great way to speed up the second part of that process. It would also help me to work on my pronunciation and diction, because after listening to my radio interview I realized I could stand to clean up my speaking skills.
Which began the battle of the microphone. I have a love-hate relationship with technology. I love it when it works, and he needed the rest of the time. Windows 7 is friendly enough to tech laggards like myself. But sometimes so idiot proof that it will not allow you to explore additional options. The troubleshooter kept telling me the device is working normally then would shut itself off.” How could you possibly know that without actually trying to record something you pompous adding machine? You are not working!” Tatian
drivers were updated. Reboot. Microphone not microphone not muted, change default audio recording device, make sure the levels are okay, try Windows forums to see if anyone else is having the same problem. So, the microphone itself must be broken. I took it to a friend of mine, plugged it into his laptop and in under 30 seconds handed it back to me and said it’s working here
her.
Still refuses to work on my computer.
So I tossed it.
I have an old WebCam that’s been sitting in a drawer for a few years which has a microphone built into it. I plugged it in and it worked in under 30 seconds, with modern technology is supposed to. Even managed to record myself saying” voice check, testing 12, testing 12, A, B, C…” H and and play it back!
All of this prose is just a quick update to explain that my next post will be dictated to my computer. I really meant this to be about a three or four sentence post, but I just kind of. Period. Squirreled.

(Okay, I’m typing again now. It took me a couple of minutes to dictate that post and obviously it would require a bit of editing and formatting before it would be publishable. I left it in it’s 100% raw form so that you could see what my computer thinks of my voice. I did practice a little bit before this attempt here, so I would know how to include punctuation and whatnot. My overall judgement is that despite the flaws and quirks, this would actually be slightly faster than my normal process of writing->typing->publish. Also, supposedly the software gets better over time as it learns your particular voice, diction, vocabulary and idiosyncratic expressions so that’s something to look forward to. Technology, I no longer hate you as much as I did yesterday…)

Please Stand By…

…I am experiencing technical difficulties.

Nothing serious, I’ve just been trying to attach a headset microphone to my computer. I spent a good six hours yesterday with a stupid headset mic trying to make it record my voice.

Quick back story: A publisher recommended setting up a workstation so that you could “speak your book.” I’ve never used a dictation program before, but I figured it would be great for me, since I do most of my writing long hand in a composition book. Not always, but a lot. For example, I am typing this directly on my computer, since I happen to be sitting here, battling the evil forces of broken technology and have an important update which I am getting to. The downside is, that when I type directly on my computer my thoughts tend to derail easily and I’ll go off on a tangent and have to make an abrupt direction change which can jar the reader. Like the talking dog in the Pixar movie “Up” that would every once in a while stop in the middle of doing something and yell “Squirrel!”

(scroll back to see what I was talking about before I “squirreled”)

…then I transcribe what I wrote to my computer later. Dictation seems like a great way to speed up the second part of that process. It would also help me to work on my pronunciation and diction, because after listening to my radio interview I realized I could stand to clean up my speaking skills.

Which began the Battle of the Microphone. I have a love-hate relationship with technology. I love it when it works, and hate it the rest of the time. Windows 7 is friendly enough to tech-laggards like myself. But sometimes it’s so idiot proof that it will not allow you to explore additional options. The troubleshooter kept telling me the device is working normally then would shut itself off. “How could you possibly know that without actually trying to record something you pompous adding machine? You are not working!”

Drivers were updated. Reboot. Microphone not muted, change default audio recording device, make sure the levels are okay, try Windows forums to see if anyone else is having the same problem. Obviously, not a software problem. So, the microphone itself must be broken. I took it to a friend of mine, who plugged it in to his laptop and in under 30 seconds handed it back to me and said it’s working.

Grrrr.

Still refuses to work on my computer.

So I tossed it.

I have an old webcam that’s been sitting in a drawer for a few years which has a microphone built into it. I plugged it in and it worked in under 30 seconds, like modern technology is supposed to. Even managed to record myself saying “Voice check, testing one-two, testing one-two, alpha, bravo, charlie…” and play it back!

All of this prose is just a quick update to explain that my next post will be dictated to my computer. I really meant this to be about a three or four sentence post, but I just kind of… squirreled.

Actions Trump Intentions

“You don’t have to be a “person of influence” to be influential. In fact, the most influential people in my life are probably not even aware of the things they’ve taught me.” ~Scott Adams

All of us influence someone in our lives. Our friends, our families, strangers that cross our paths. According to one study, even the most introverted person, will influence as many as 10,000 people in his lifetime. So if I were to ask if you were a good influence or a bad influence, how would you answer? 99% of people would answer: good.

Then you would think for a while and realize that 99% of people in the world are not positive influences. In fact, I run into negative people all the time that irritate me and they are definitely a bad influence. Yet everyone thinks that they are good.

Universally most people think of themselves as good. Even bank robbers think that they are pretty good people compared to murderers. And murderers can justify their need to kill and take solace in the fact that at least they didn’t torture their victims first. So not one of us, right down to Charles Manson, thinks that we might be a bad influence on someone.

But very often we are.

In fact, it usually takes something dramatic to bring to light our own shortcomings; to allow us to see what we are doing from outside of that box that we normally live in. Alcoholics call it a moment of clarity.

One successful corporate husband, running along with his wife on a management fast track, one day overheard his daughters as they were “playing executive” in the den. The elder daughter carrying his briefcase said to the younger, “I’m going to be working late tonight. This is company business and company is more important than family.”

That was a wake up call. To outside appearances his family was doing well, living in an affluent neighborhood, climbing the corporate ladder, daughters in private school. But the influence that he was having on his daughters–through his absence–was that his daughters thought they were not as important a part of his life as his boss, his title, his paycheck. All things that a young child could care less about.

People only judge themselves by their intentions. Every one else, they can only judge by their actions. So his daughter saw all the best days of the best years of his life going to a faceless “company.” How could she not think that company is more important than family?

Which is more important, your child or a television? Have you ever yelled at your child to be quiet because you couldn’t hear the television? Just wanted to throw that out there to show that I’m not picking on the corporate guys only.

If we want to influence people positively, we need to do it through actions. And we need to make sure that we are conveying the right message through our actions.

You cannot influence someone for the better through good intentions only.

There is a happy ending to that story about corporate couple X. They left the rat race and started their own business. Even though the hours were equally grueling, this was a family business. Since the husband and wife were now on one track rather than two individual tracks, their efforts became synergistic and before long, she was able to carve enough time out of their schedule that she could home-school their daughters (and have a third one along the way). They were willing to take drastic actions to prove that family is more important than “the company.”

To all you working class folks who want to demonstrate the same thing through your actions, turn off the television in the middle of a program when your child starts telling you a story.

Who has been influential in your life? Do they know it?