Monthly Archives: November 2007

Giving Back - Who to Help?

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Posted by Ed on November 16, 2007 – 10:15 am
Filed under In the Queue, Information

 I recently came across an interesting site. That site is Daily Miracles. They serve as a common meeting place for people who need help and people who want to give help. People needing either services or money post their story on the site. Volunteers check the board and can offer to help those people. This site is merely the connection between the two. Currently the site is not fully operational. They have an introduction video and a sign up form. On the confirmation e-mail they state that they will be up and running on January 2008. I hope so. I just signed up and have only gotten that e-mail. It looks like a good idea. I wish them luck. Sign up with them and we’ll see what develops.

Www.dailymiracles.org

        Quest On…

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Paris Hilton steps up to support Drunken Elephants

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Posted by Ed on November 13, 2007 – 1:00 pm
Filed under Commentary

A recent article on MSN reports that Paris Hilton recently made several statements highlighting the problem of drunken elephants in India. The wild elephants drink farmer’s homemade rice wine and go on drunken rampages injuring people and damaging property. Apparently this is a real problem that has been under reported.

After her recent jail experiences, Paris has been making statements that she is going to start working for charity causes. People of course laughed about this because of her past history as a party person. People generally like to belittle celebrities and Paris’s past choices have not always been very noble. Because drunken elephants are seemingly a minor problem, I’m sure that many of them will belittle this act as well. I am not one of these people.

I salute Paris for taking this stand. Great quests start with a single step. You have to start somewhere and if Paris has been touched by the plight of these elephants then good for her. Making changes often requires a lot of courage and small steps are still progress. I look forward to see what develops from this and what other causes she supports.

So, have a look at your quest today and take a small step. Many small steps will be needed to make it to the end of your quest. Good luck.

Good for you Paris…..

Quest On…..

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Some basic guidance for reaching financial quests

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Posted by Ed on November 10, 2007 – 12:11 am
Filed under Business, In the Queue, Reviews

I’ve started reading Loral Langemeier’s ‘Cash Machine For Life’. I like her attitude and the simplicity of her advice. I read her earlier book ‘The Millionaire Maker’ and thought it made a lot of sense. Her new book appears to build on the advice in the earlier one. Her basic idea is to do a careful analysis of your situation and then work with her system to get you to your financial goals. She’s not the ordinary financial planner. Unlike a lot of other financial planners, she is very entrepreneurial. She’s not someone who says save 100 dollars a month in a mutual fund and in the far future you’ll retire with a million. She doesn’t think that anyone should have to wait thirty years to be financially independent. Her advice is to develop businesses that get you the money you need. So, if you want to invest your way to wealth, she is not the adviser for you. She expects you to work for your money. She takes some of the scariness of creating businesses by calling them cash machines. She starts you out with putting together an easy small business and then works you up to bigger ones. She doesn’t suggest you stress over finding the perfect business either. For the first one, she says look at your skills and figure out the fastest way to make money. Your ultimate businesses might be your quest business, but she wants you to first get experience and make money fast. As you learn and get some capital then you can make some dreams happen.

I like that attitude. Getting to your quest is a journey. Loral gives you good advice on getting on the right path. She also has the expected training courses and coaching at her web site if you want more help. Taking action and getting some early success is key to finding your quest.

Loral’s web site: www.liveoutloud.com

Quest On…..

 

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Is this why you are where you are?

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Posted by Ed on November 6, 2007 – 12:16 pm
Filed under Commentary

I got some disturbing information on an old friend the other day. I knew him well about twenty or so years ago. Life being what it is I lost touch and haven’t spoken to him in years. I got an update on him a while back. He must be in his late forties by now. I hate to say that about anyone that is younger than I am. If you looked at his life twenty years ago and his life now, you would find only minor differences. He’s doing his hobbies, seeing the current movies, and keeping up on the job. That was his life when I knew him well. He was a student just getting by. Now he’s an older guy just getting by. What happened in twenty years? What happened that caused him to remain in status quo mode? What happened to him to make him stay where he was?

What would you have to believe to spend twenty years without any goals to better yourself? You’d have to believe some really negative limiting thoughts about yourself to be so stuck. It’s easy to condemn someone for being stuck that way. But don’t be so smug about that. What do you believe that is holding you back. Are you too old or too young? Do you not know the right people? Do you need money to make money? Would you have to go back to school to be taken seriously? Are those things true? What’s keeping you where you are now?

I have my limiting ideas as well. I discover them all the time and try to overcome them. They are so much a part of my basic programming that it’s hard to find them, let alone change them. They as much as anything are the obstacles between me and my quest. I’d bet you have yours haunting you as well.

I wish I had the answer to getting rid of yours and my limiting beliefs. I run into them from time to time and try to deal with them then. Knowing you have them is a start but you have to do the work to clean them out.

So ask yourself some hard questions along. Question the reasons that you can’t solve the next task on your quest. Are your limits real?

Quest On…..

 

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Wisdom from a chance meeting

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Posted by Ed on November 5, 2007 – 3:36 pm
Filed under Business, Commentary

I had a talk with Duke Okes of Aplomet the other day. Duke is a business
consultant with a background in quality. His title is Knowledge Architect.
He’s been guiding companies for a long time. We were talking about finding
your niche and he had the following advice. He suggested the easiest way to
find your niche was to grow into it. That if you took on all manner of
tasks that were in your range of skills, you would eventually be drawn into
a specialty. It puts the marketplace in the loop for helping you decide on
one. I thought about this and it seemed like a good idea.

He emailed me this weekend with an article he wrote on the topic of planning and being flexible. I think that this speaks well about the need to chart a direction for your quest but still watch the situation to see if you need to adjust your direction for an opportunity. We should always be ready to accept a better option if the universe choses to provide it. Here’s the article.

A Dual Strategy Doubles the Chances of Success

Strategic planning is the process of reviewing where one is, identifying where one wants
to go, and developing plans to get from the current to the future state. Hopefully most
business professionals and organizations know and do this.
However, there’s another aspect of strategy, emergent planning, that needs to be
leveraged. Emergent planning is paying attention to what the market is telling you,
regardless of whether it supports or is different from your strategic plan.
Why is both strategic and emergent planning necessary or useful? Because strategic
planning gives us a vision and roadmap … a way to guide our day-to-day behavior
towards the future. However, emergent planning is the process of recognizing that our
business world (and the society within which we live our personal life) is a complex
adaptive system.
Here’s an example. As a consultant I develop an annual strategic plan, identifying which
products/services I would like to provide to which market niches, and lay out activities to
develop, market and deliver according to these plans. However, often the marketplace
has come to me and asked me for something I hadn’t planned to offer. In nearly every
case this new opportunity has turned out to create a dramatic growth in my business.
You might wonder, then, why bother with strategic planning. Why not just wait till you
get one of those emergent gifts? One obvious reason is that you never know whether or
when they’ll come along. For another, because the strategic planning process helps you
identify/clarify your core competencies, and when an emergent opportunity arises, it’s
much easier to know whether or not you should consider it.
In effect, it’s all about being clear about what you want, but being flexible for what the
universe brings you. Who knows, it may be much more than what you expected!
© 2007 Duke Okes

Duke’s Site: www.aplomet.com