Month: January 2005

Well thanks to Curt Rosengren and Steve Pavlina, I’m going to take Curt’s suggestion of play with Steve’s reminder of values and goals to create a play date for finding and assessing my values. I have goals set, but no values to help them out. I think I have an idea of why I’m having troubles with this independent venture. As Steve said in his article “If you fail to focus your energy on the goals that are truly important to you, some of them will slip away, and that’s a heavy price to pay.” To make things a little harder what happens when the goals you have complete conflict with the values? Well that’s what I’m hoping to find out today. I’ll keep you posted on the outcome.

A quick thought, organizations should go through this same process. Most big organizations and corporations have a way of creating and reviewing goals, but what happens when those goals conflict with the organizational values of the corporate culture? Probably not a good thing either.

Sitting down and figuring out your values, assessing them and ranking them is definitely an interesting activity. Not one to go through everyday, but definitely a tool to help you in the right direction. So the outcome is:

Before:

1. Self-Understanding
2. Inner-Peace
3. Creativity
4. Success
5. Love
6. Intimacy

It took some time to even get this far. Originally my list was huge, but most of it was synonyms. Now the tricky part, if I’m going to be an entrepreneur, then I need to skew these a little. Look where “Success” is! That’s definitely not where it needs to be. And where is “Health” in there? I don’t even have it on my radar, which it should be. So….

After:

1. Success
2. Creativity
3. Health
4. Love
5. Intimacy
6. Inner-Peace
7. Self-Understanding

Read an interesting post on Curt Rosengren’s blog about the need to play: Play your way to your best work.

The idea that “work is called work for a reason” and that “work isn’t meant to be fun” is so deeply entrenched in our collective cultural psyche that it actually ends up being a big roadblock for many when they look at pursuing their passions.

It is also, of course, complete nonsense. The only thing that committing to a life of work as a four letter word will do will be to slowly, bit by bit, drain away both your energy and your productivity. A career filled with fun and meaning, on the other hand, can unleash the amazing potential we all have.

I’ve been going through this little energy drain myself. It started to come out in my previous post. Nothing blatant but when you’re having fun, why do you need a trick at all? You see, here I am trying to find ways to “work” when in fact, maybe, I should be finding ways to “play”.

So, thanks Curt for not only giving me a little reminder of things lost, but also introducing me to Bernie DeKoven. I think I’m going to take his site for a quick stroll.

And they do it again. Apple is on an incredible ride

• iPod Shuffle
• Mac mini

They are finding incredible ways to bring everything to your fingertips, on you fingertips. Nice!

O.k. O.k. As some of my friends have pointed out to me, what good is a blog if you don’t use it. It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here. I kind of put little blinders on and focused completely on working and nothing about actually letting people know what’s going on. Half the fun about blogging is letting people know what’s going on and the discussions. So, when I found out how nice WordPress was, I thought, perfect! So here we go.

I’ve been talking about when I should have something up and running for people to see and play with. But I keep coming back and saying to myself it’s not ready. And at the same time, I’m looking around and everyone has there site in beta, which was a plan that I’ve been thinking of doing. But I’ve dropped that idea from my radar. I’m either going to have a site or not. I’m either going to show people what I’m doing or not. I came across a nice quote which was a great kick in the butt.

You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.

So, I’m going to change that. And I’m going to prove myself that I’m actually going forward.