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The Ability to be Amazed Takes Play
Do you ever wish you could be judged on your intuition, and not on your knowledge of previously researched facts? I do. While I know there’s a name for everything, I also know a lot of the time I don’t know it!
Recently my seven year old son built a magnetic structure out of those building components, Magz. My whiz-bang husband told said son it was a “spin lattice” magnetic structure and added, “If you can understand this — mathematically– you will make a lot of money someday.” Sometimes this is how education is imparted in our family, as in life. Dangle the carrot and see if anyone bites. After all, it’s a rare kid who really wants or needs to understand nuclear physics. Incidentally, we’re just as happy if one of our kids can dance or weld or shoot…
Ok, so I’m the language counterpart; my job as writer/mom/storyteller is to encourage seeing the strong structure that can be built from small components and then explaining how the choices you made while building, made the thing strong. Sort of like trying to make sense out of what you did after playing and making it up as you went along. I think that’s a valuable way to learn at any age.
Son Henry can’t explain why magnets do what they do, yet begins to understand polarity just through play. He also knows that he can set any toy he owns on top of this structure and it will not crumple. Good enough. Eventually (if he wants to) he will learn how to describe and explain this phenomenon.
I often believe that it is important to understand and impress others with facts (I myself am impressed by them); that is how you earn street cred. BUT…it’s also important to act on your intuition. If you see something that will support what you know to be true, then go ahead and use it, build it, sketch it out…even if you don’t completely understand it. Sing it from the mountains, even if you can’t explain it…
Pretend you’re seven. Play when you can. Keep the faith. Let the facts fall in after…
Mother Theresa’s 100 Years
100 years ago, Mother Theresa of Calcutta was born.
I have a little book in my home office called Meditations from A Simple Path, with the words of Mother Theresa throughout. What is striking about this book is that is truly simple.
Each page contains a few words, short and sweet and, as the title suggests; simple.
Why not take these two pages to heart today?
“We have a sign on the wall of the children’s home in Calcutta that reads:
TAKE TIME TO THINK
TAKE TIME TO PRAY
TAKE TIME TO LAUGH
IT IS THE SOURCE OF POWER
IT IS THE GREATEST POWER ON EARTH
IT IS THE MUSIC OF THE SOUL
TAKE TIME TO PLAY
TAKE TIME TO LOVE AND BE LOVED
TAKE TIME TO GIVE
IT IS THE SECRET OF PERPETUAL YOUTH
IT IS GOD’S GIVEN PRIVILEGE
IT IS TOO SHORT A DAY TO BE SELFISH
TAKE TIME TO READ
TAKE TIME TO BE FRIENDLY
TAKE TIME TO WORK
IT IS THE FOUNTAIN OF WISDOM
IT IS THE ROAD TO HAPPINESS
IT IS THE PRICE OF SUCCESS
TAKE TIME TO DO CHARITY
IT IS THE KEY TO HEAVEN.
Become a Small Business “Outlier”
Malcom Gladwell, in Outliers, claims that very successful people in any field all share a common trait: >10,000 hours of practice.
Deliberate practice, with the intent to do better, is a more reliable factor of success than talent, heredity, personality, money, upbringing, etc.
Three hours a day, every day, for 10 years.
Now, I have to wonder what area of my life is the closest to accruing that level of my attentive pursuit. I have some ideas, but worry that my highest culmination of success will be driving — without losing sanity — a van with children inside it between the hours of 3 and 7 pm weekdays. (That’s my work-from-home-mom persona banging around; let’s just ignore her.)
In all seriousness, here’s the deal: You pile on hours and voila! You’re at the top of your game.
Any game. Just choose one.
Ahh, now we’re getting to the heart of it. What in the whole wide world would I choose to do every day for 3 hours?
Of course there are successful people who would declare that they never actually chose their specialty. IT chose THEM. In other words, their love/obsession drove them to practice like crazy to become better at X. The rest of us…well, we strive a bit less decisively.
Now, turn your sights to your business. If you’re like most, the luxury of focusing on just one thing is rare. Small business people juggle hundreds of details all within the parameters of an entity (the business) that ultimately exists to make money. How do you practice making money? You can’t; not really. Profits are a byproduct of a successful business, but successful business practices run the gamut. Oh yeah, and you have to make sure these practices all get done simultaneously.
There are many “sub-goals,” if you will, to a business besides the goal of monetary profits. Included may be:
- Delighting your customers
- Building a great team of employees
- Making a name for your business in your community
- Paying down a loan
- Passing a health inspection, etc.
Wearing a lot of different hats; that’s just part of the job, and hopefully the end result is plenty of money in the bank. If you’re like me, sometimes I find myself running in a certain direction just long enough to accomplish a small nugget of success, only to change direction when another need arises.
Finding the parts of your business that you love to do and then dedicating yourself to them takes commitment, but it’s probably worth the effort in the long run. If it means giving up on another “love,” or learning to rely on others for a job that you are more than capable of performing, letting go some portion of your business takes a curious concoction of self-control and dedication. It’s okay.
One of the steps I know I have to take to become the mature businessperson I want to be is to search for and find that “one thing,” that main ingredient that sets me (my role within the company) apart from anyone else who could do this job. AND to define the specific flavor of products and services that Charting Dreams provides.
Sometimes you don’t just stumble upon a niche. Sometimes you have to carve it out yourself.
A theory: small business success parallels personal success. Practice really does bring perfection.
Email Marketing and the Golden Rule
Yesterday, after stumbling on a very good article on Entrepreneur’s website, I got to thinking about how a good practice in one area almost always translates superbly into other aspects of your business. Marcus Erb wrote about building and leveraging trust with your employees to get through hard financial times; he proposed the following points:
- Create and share a positive vision of the future
- Practice active, positive, and honest communication.
- Cultivate a sense of ownership among employees by giving them a voice.
- Build a sense employees can rely on leaders.
In a sense, these suggestions all hinge on communication.
Sam and I will be conducting a short class on email marketing (communication, indeed!) in a few weeks. We saw a need for an overview of email marketing for the thousands of small businesses just now emerging on the Internet. The class Email Marketing Boot Camp is a three-week (about one hour per week) evening webinar scheduled for Tuesday evenings Sept 14 through 21.
As I was reading Mr. Erb’s article about employees, I thought, “This is precisely at the core of our email course! What a coincidence.”
Of course, not a coincidence at all, just a realization that all people gravitate toward friendliness, a positive outlook, respect, and personal interest. Once again, The Golden Rule holds true, and no more so than now, in the age of this untamed Internet animal that we all ride each day.
People will gravitate and respond to the companies they feel confident in dealing with. Email is a great way to accomplish that challenge in times when information pelts the consumer and businessperson with thousands of messages every day. If it’s done well using the Golden Rule – “Treat others the way you would like to be treated” — email marketing can help you build your business through mutually beneficial relationships between you, your business, and your customers.
If you’re interested in Email Marketing Boot Camp, call us at 1-888-611-2043 and either Sam or I will tell you more.
What Do Big Biz and Dinosaurs Have in Common?
Today I got a call from a company that was asking my opinion of “Super-Large Insurance Company” (not its real name) and that is what set me off. Ok this post is going to be a whiny post; I am telling you upfront.
But first let me tell you a story about one of my kids who is fun and loves to laugh. Last week she was making some strange sounds, and she told me that they were the sounds of a velociraptor (dinosaur for us simple folks). She was so proud of herself for making that sound that she was teaching others how to do it. Silly I admit, but we all know she has no idea what a dinosaur really sounds like.
Now to my complaint: as many of you know, in addition to Charting Dreams, I also own a small apartment complex (48 units, so it is really not small). I have anywhere between two and five employees, depending on the season. I keep workers comp insurance through the super-large insurance company which I mentioned above. (Worker’s Comp Insurance a smart practice, and it also happens to be legally necessary in the state of Texas.) Like so many super-large companies, they target small companies…and I’m okay with that. In fact, I am sure I chose them because they told me they focused on small businesses
Well that’s the rub. This super-large company says it focuses on small business, but in fact they are clueless when it comes to understanding small business. Let me explain.
The way worker’s comp is in this state is this. We pay a percentage of wages as part of our insurance rate, and of course the maintenance guys have a much higher rate than my bookkeeper and that makes perfect sense. But what happens is that we complete a full year with them and then we have to prove we actually had the payroll that we said in the beginning of the year that we were going to have by the end of the year. Make sense. Of course we are paying each month based on the estimate, and have a true up after the audit.
The yearly audit runs from June 1 to May 31 of the last year and the actual audit happens in July, at which time I must provide copies of the last four Federal Employer’s Quarterly Tax return and or state return, and Unemployment Wage report for all states covered on the policy and all 1096’s and or 1099’s as needed.
Well the rub is that the audit starts June 1 and on the form it says “from June 1 to June 1.”
The Federal government and the State of Texas unemployment are quarterly returns, so I have to in fact copy five returns for two government agencies. And since “June 1 to June 1” made no sense, I had to call during the day to ask them what they meant. “Oh no, just go June 1 to May 31st, you silly business owner,” the super-large company’s service person told me. (I put “silly business owner” in there myself because that is how I felt I was being addressed.)
Both the Federal and the State reports are about five pages each, and each is in a different folder, so I have to dig into my files to get the actual returns. Are you starting to see how said super-large insurance company is willing to waste my time, (even though I really do like staying up late after business hours to do these forms) because of their odd audit dates, which even they cannot even give me a reason why this odd period exists.
To top it off, in the survey the nice man says so excitedly that they were working on getting an on-line version so that in the future we can do it on-line; and would I use it? I said no, and the poor person on the other end of the phone asked me why. Finally, I got to say my piece (my peace?) and told him that they, (super-large company’s management) really did not understand us small businesses at all. And here’s yet another reason why. (You knew I was going to tell him.)
One of the things that I do not have as a small business owner is a lot of fancy business gadgets. Maybe if all my businesses were under one roof, I would; but the sad truth — and I know I’m not alone here — is I do not have a scanner that converts to pdf. Granted I would love to own one, but there’s really no need for it in an apartment complex after all; except for this once-a-year jobbie required by my super-large insurance company, which probably has these scanners on every floor of their building.
If it were required to do the audit on-line I would end up running around getting all of the documents put into pdf versions before I filled out the form. Just one more thing to do.
Back to my daughter and her dinosaur sounds. So often big companies claim to understand small business and they hire, I am sure, fancy consultants to help them. Unfortunately, from the small biz perspective, the big companies do not understand what we go through.
Just like my daughter does not really know the sounds a velociraptor makes, large companies have no idea how a small company runs.
Hear the small business man roar.
