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Fred W. Black

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Recent Entries

Anorexic Mouse Bagged with Hair-Trigger Marketing Techniques!

Marketing Lesson from the Homeless...

When Good CSS Goes Bad

The Honest-to-God, Unvarnished Truth About Success

Are you Fishing with Bird Seed?

Why Do Smart People Sometimes Find Success So Difficult?

Using My Software to Determine Why a Site Ranks Poorly in Google

Toilet Paper Millionaire!

Freds Inverse Law of Marketing Intelligence (the cream, as well as, the crap rises to the top)

Are You Failing Miserably or Miserably Failing?

Know Yourself

Are You Putting Cash in the Trash?

Behind Bars: Could the New FTC CAN-SPAM Rules Land You In JAIL?

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When Good CSS Goes Bad

Marketing Lesson from the Homeless...

Anorexic Mouse Bagged with Hair-Trigger Marketing Techniques!

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Anorexic Mouse Bagged with Hair-Trigger Marketing Techniques!

August 26, 2008

Anorexic Mouse Bagged with Hair-Trigger Marketing Techniques!I started to title this post: "How to catch a skinny mouse", or, "Hair-Trigger Mouse Trap for Anorexic Mice with Eating Disorders". Either way, it reinforces the fact that there are lessons all around us as we go through life, all we have to do is be observant enough to learn from them.

I hate having a mouse in the house, but it happens. I'd like to stakeout the kitchen in camo, automatic weapon in hand, and a Rambo like grimace on my face, waiting until the little trespasser showed his furry face so I could put a M60 slug through his tiny little mouse heart... I didn't do that. I wanted to, but I didn't.

Instead, I went to the store and bought a pack of 97 cent mouse traps. I baited the traps with peanut butter (as suggested), protected my fingers and gently placed the traps where the mouse had obviously been.

The next morning before breakfast I checked on the traps.... the little varmint had eaten all the peanut butter from both traps without setting them off. I'm talking licked clean too! Not a trace of peanut butter remained.

The next night I decided to use cheddar cheese as bait. My thinking was that maybe the peanut butter was too soft and using harder bait would result in the mouse tripping the trap. Wrong. The next morning, the cheese was gone; the traps were still cocked, and no mouse in site.

Grrr..
Now I'm getting mad. I'm being had by an anorexic mouse with an eating disorder who does not even weigh enough to trip the mouse trap. Or, perhaps he is just really smart? Or, maybe it's a ghost mouse and he floats above the trap while eating? I don't know but I'm determined to get him!

More determined than ever, I decided the problem was that the trigger arm on the mouse trap was not slick enough to slide out of the little trigger platform easily. I locate some petroleum jelly and proceed to grease each mouse trap. I then baited the traps with peanut butter: this time with a much smaller amount so that the little monster will have to get closer in to get his first bite. I re-cocked the traps and gently placed them in the cabinet and went to bed.

Foiled Again...
The next morning I'm sure I'll have a mouse. Absolutely, 100% sure. There's no doubt in my mind that when I open that cabinet door, there will be mouse number 1 from the mouse most wanted list laying there with his tongue hanging out. I slowly open the door to reveal... nothing but completely empty traps... licked perfectly clean again.

ARRRGGGG
At this point, I have a few choices. I can go buy an electronic mouse trap that shocks the mouse as they step on it. Nope. I'm mad. That's just too easy. I want to get even with this critter and that means only one thing. I want a trap that goes BANG. So the next choice is to modify the mouse trap to have a "hair trigger" that my resident as-skinny-as-Paris-Hilton-mouse will set off. The third choice is to keep feeding the micro-rat until he's big enough to trip the trap as purchased. The third choice will take too long, so it's to the drawing board with a Tim the Tool Man Taylor laugh to trick-out my mouse traps.

Hair-Triggered and Loaded
A "hair trigger", for those of you who don't know, is a trigger on a gun that takes almost zero force to pull. This is usually implemented as a second trigger: when you're ready to shoot, you pull the first trigger and that engages the second or hair-trigger which just takes a touch of force to fire the gun. This is a common setup in target shooting rifles, etc. So I study the mouse traps and determine that by simply bending the trigger arm a little at just the right spot, I can create an angle where the trigger arm engages the trigger platform that will probably make it much more sensitive. Indeed, I had trouble just keeping them cocked long enough to place in the cabinet. This time, I'm sure it'll work. I bait them again with a little peanut butter and go to bed.

But I'm Too Anxious
After about 30 minutes in bed, I get up to check on the mouse traps. I took a flash light and peered into the cabinet. Guess what's looking right back at me! Yep. The little cursed varmint that thinks he's smarter than I am. He didn't even run, he just turned and walked off to hide. Confident in my modifications (no peanut butter was missing at this time) I went back to bed.

BAM!
This morning I had one dead mouse, trapped by one highly modified mouse trap! Insert another Tim the Tool Man Taylor laugh here!

Why is this important?
There are some good parallels between this story and marketing: like not giving up. There's also the constant modification of the bait and mouse trap to finally catch the mouse. You should always monitor your marketing, sales pages, etc. to make sure that you're not letting the mouse (sale) get away and that you know what combination of things actually bagged your mouse (made the sale). Stay tuned to this blog for future articles on how to do this. Only then will you turn your marketing efforts into a hair-triggered sales machine.

Until next time,
Fred

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Posted by Fred on August 26, 2008 | Printer-Friendly


 

Marketing Lesson from the Homeless...

August 18, 2008

Marketing Lesson from the Homeless...You've heard that experience is the best teacher. You've also heard that there are lessons everywhere if you only look for them. So what can you learn about marketing from a homeless person? Plenty.

In my town, the local churches help the homeless. They help some of them get jobs selling the Sunday paper at busy intersections. These "vendors" as they're called prefer to stand in the middle of the road on the concrete medians at intersections. There are only a few intersections around town that are busy enough to warrant this. You have to have a lot of respect for these people, they're out there every Sunday - the same ones - no matter how cold or hot, in freezing weather, snow, rain, or blazing sun.

In the last few months, this has become a legal battle between the newspaper and the city. The city council decided that the newspaper sales created a traffic hazard - although no accidents or injuries have occurred, and passed a local ordinance against such sales. The newspaper said that the new ordinance violated their 1st and 14th amendment rights. The newspaper has a pending lawsuit against the city, but in the meantime, this problem has surfaced in other towns because the N.C. Senate passed a bill making it illegal to prevent the sale of newspapers on roadways. Governor Mike Easley signed the bill on Sunday, August 17th, so I guess this coming Sunday we'll see the vendors in the medians again.

The local ordinance that was passed in my town did not prevent the sale of newspapers from sidewalks, only from the medians. After the ordnance went into effect, the vendors tried selling their papers from the sidewalks at the side of the road, but after a few weeks we didn't see them very much. I wondered why they stopped selling the papers, I just figured that they were frustrated by the legal issues and were waiting until the pending lawsuit was settled.

You may be asking yourself what's the big deal. And that's where the marketing lesson comes in. Why do you think the vendors liked selling from the median in the center of the road? Because when people stopped at the intersections, they were right there beside the driver's window. They could walk up and down holding their papers and sell them: a lot of them.

There is an article in this morning's paper about the Governor signing the bill. In the article, the reporter states that the sales of papers from the eight vendors at intersections before the ban went into effect averaged about 800 papers sold on a given Sunday. After the local ordinance went into effect and the vendors tried selling from the sidewalk, some vendors sold only 13 papers in 6 hours. That's why they stopped selling from the side of the road. And that is the marketing lesson.

The homeless vendors quickly learned that to maximize their sales they had to get out in front of their potential customers: i.e. the middle of the road. This is directly applicable to Internet sales as well. Buying cheap ads just because they're inexpensive is analogous to selling papers from the side of the road. You should not decide to run an ad simply because it's the only one you can afford. You should decide where to place your ad based on where it will be seen by the most people who are likely to purchase your product or service. If you can't afford those locations, then don't run the ad. Search for the next best place or location. Simply running an ad in an inexpensive location because you can't afford a location that's a good fit for you or your product is a waste of money and a foolish way to run your business.

Until next time,
Fred

P.S. This goes for any type of exposure, free or paid: blog widgets, banner exchanges, etc. If it's not exposing you to a good, solid source of potential customers then it's not worth your time.

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Posted by Fred on August 18, 2008 | Printer-Friendly


 

When Good CSS Goes Bad

August 12, 2008

When Good CSS Goes BadIt was a dark night, very dark. It had been raining and was steamy hot and muggy. Veronica was a little nervous walking through this part of town alone and at such a late hour. She clutched her purse close and tried not to make eye contact with anyone. She could hear footsteps behind her that seemed to keep getting closer and closer, almost matching her steps, as if they were trying to avoid being noticed. She kept wishing she had remembered her cell phone this morning. As she approached a narrow alley she had an uneasy feeling, she slowed down a little but didn't want to stop because of whoever or whatever was behind her. So she kept walking. Just as she got to the alley, someone stepped out in front of her and she felt a hand on her shoulder from behind. Luckily she had some pepper spray and unloaded it on the two culprits: CSS and HTML.

That's where I come in. I'm a P.I., a Private Investigator. I find the answers people think they want, but usually after they get them, they wished they'd never asked. It's a dirty business, but someone's gotta do it. Veronica hired me to find out why she kept having trouble with CSS and why CSS that had helped her so much in the past had now turned bad and was cheating on her.

When she first appeared in my office, I ask her: "What's a classy dame like you doing in this part of town?". She confessed that although she was created with classes, they just didn't seem to work anymore. It even got to my jaded, calloused heart when the tears welled up in her big baby blues as she admitted that even though she still had some style, she had lost her class...

So, like the sucker that I am, I took the case... and here's what I discovered.

First let me give you some background information.
CSS = Cascading Style Sheets
HTML = Hyper Text Markup Language

Both are used together to create web pages. CSS is not required but is used to define how something on the page looks. HTML is the source code behind a web page. For example, if you use your browser's menus to view the source that makes up this web page, you'll see a lot of HTML code. CSS allows you to remove as much of the styling of a page into a separate file vs. having it mixed in with all the parts of the page. This has a lot of advantages and I have a previous post that talks about that: Learning CSS Makes for Better Web Sites. With CSS you can define default styles, or how something looks, to paragraphs, images, headlines, etc. This includes font sizes, colors, and the actual font definition itself.

So where does class come into play? A class is a named set of styles that you can apply to page elements. For example, you may define a class in your CSS that's named checkout and you could apply it to a part, or all, of the checkout page.

You can learn more about HTML and CSS with my free course: Web Site Design Course: HTML, CSS.

The other thing about CSS is that it is cascading, hence the name, cascading style sheets. Cascading means that, for example, if you apply a paragraph definition at the page level and then deeper in the page you apply a different paragraph style to a page element, that page element will be rendered with the formatting of new style and all the formatting of the page-level style that's not defined by the new style. In other words, the page-level style could define the margins, font-size, color of text, and background color, and if the new style only changed the font size, then the new paragraph would be rendered with the same color as the main part of the page but with a different text size.

Another part of cascading, where a lot of people get hung up, is that you can define the same style multiple times in your CSS definitions, but the last one is the one that counts. And it's easy to overlook that fact and edit something over and over wondering why it's not working, when several lines down in your code you have the same style, and it includes the same element(s) you're trying to alter.

Well, that's how it's supposed to work. Now let's get back to my case....

It turns out that Veronica has some pretty complicated pages. A dame that looks like that is always complicated! Her pages have DIVs and Tables nested one inside another. Now that shouldn't be a problem if it's laid out correctly. But she could only go so deep before the style classes would stop working. The problem usually happened on the 5th level deep. Parts of the class would apply, for example font color, but other parts would default to the parent element's style, for example font-size. This occurred in all the browsers I tested it in too: Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Firefox, and Opera.

I fixed several small problems that I just knew would fix the larger problem, but it made no difference. Nothing I could do fixed it. I hate to admit it, but this went on for days. I made all the normal rounds looking for answers, even going a few places I don't like to go these days, but no one knew anything. Nothing.

Then it hit me. Maybe CSS classes, even though they have names, don't really work by name 100%. So I rearranged the CSS file and put the classes in order of hierarchy as they appeared in the HTML file. Bam! It worked! Problem solved!

So Veronica left a happy, satisfied woman.

I'm still scratching my head wondering why order made a difference and why the problem only happened past a certain level. But that's how it is. Sometimes you solve the case but end up with more questions than you started out with!

Until next time,
Fred

P.S. Ok, so I made most of this up... CSS is pretty boring by itself, I thought it needed some help! The problem and solution are real. I recall the T.V. show Magnum, P.I. where Thomas was trying to pick the lock on the Ferrari after Higgins had taken his keys. He kept repeating to himself "pick the lock, don't look at the dogs, pick the lock, don't look at the dogs... woops, I looked at the dogs!". There's a lesson there!

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Posted by Fred on August 12, 2008 | Printer-Friendly


 

The Honest-to-God, Unvarnished Truth About Success

August 7, 2008

Scene from the movie Facing the Giants.  The Honest-to-God, Unvarnished Truth About SuccessIf you're reading this blog, you probably fall into one of a few groups... (1) you want to have a profitable Internet Business, (2) you're searching for information on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or some other topic I touch on and landed here for that reason. I can tell you that most visitors probably fall in the first category. I can also tell you that around 95% will fail.

That actually goes for most anything, not just Internet Businesses.

What do the 5% know, do, or have that makes them winners? It's simple: they believe.

As human beings, we tend to make things way too complicated. Complexity gives us a false sense of security and gives our egos a boost. It makes us feel like we belong to a secretive, exclusive club if we understand the complexities of life, even if we royally screw up reality in the process.

Can success really be as simple as believing?
Everyone wants to believe in something. Jews, Protestants, Muslims, Christians, Agnostics, drunks, drug addicts, couch potatoes, democrats, and yes, even Atheists... they all believe in something. They may not admit it, but they do. The weak follow the strong. It's been happening since the dawn of time and it hasn't slowed down one bit.

The problem is that most people think they believe, but they don't. Or, like some religions, or denominations of some religions, they make their beliefs so complex it's a death sentence instead of a saving experience.

Jesus didn't hand out a complex list of rules and regulations that sounded like tax code. How many times in the Bible did he heal or help someone simply because they believed? When a blind person ask Jesus to make them see again, he didn't have them fill out a 36 page form and make an appointment for sometime next month. No, he healed them right then and there.

Belief = Action
Did you catch the important key in the last paragraph? The blind person believed. He or she took action by asking to be healed. They were healed. Simple. Plain and simple. If you truly believe you will take action to achieve.

Facing your Giants:
In the movie "Facing the Giants", Coach Grant Taylor thinks he believes. He's a good guy, a Christian, but like most people, he's struggling and just getting by in life. He's never had a winning football season, in fact he's had six loosing seasons, he can't father a child, and his car is a pile of junk that he can't afford to replace or repair. The parents at the school want a new coach. His best athletes transfer to other schools. As he comes face to face with his shortcomings he turns to his faith. He changes his focus from just trying to win football games to something much larger. The most moving scene in the movie comes as Coach Taylor is trying to get Brook Kelly, the captain of the team, to believe in himself and his abilities. Brook is the player the other players follow. Coach Taylor knows that if he can get Brook to believe that they can win, the other players will believe too. He gets Brook to promise to give everything he has, to not leave anything on the field, to go until he has absolutely nothing left and then to reach deep down inside and find one more last bit of strength. As Coach Taylor is working on Brook, and the other players, he's also working on himself. The strength of his belief is contagious and spreads to those around him. As he turns the team around, he turns his life around.

Coach Taylor didn't focus on winning games. He didn't focus on being a father. He didn't focus on winning the state championship, and he didn't focus on getting a new vehicle. However, in the end he achieved all of those things. He focused on beliefs, both in God, and in his player's abilities. It was not some complex system he followed, just simple belief.

You have to believe.
You can't just half-way believe. If you're a Christian, then you're either a Christian or you're not. Don't go to church on Sunday and leave everything the Bible says about how to live life at the door as you shake hands with the preacher on the way out. You either believe or you don't. If you truly believe you will take action based on those beliefs.

You have to believe. You can't just half-way believe. If you want your son or daughter to grow up to be a great person and a successful, productive adult, you have to believe in them and believe in being the best parent you can. Don't expect the school system, teachers, or anyone else to raise your child. You have to put your child ahead of some other things in your life. You have to give until you have nothing left to give and not leave anything on the field as a parent.

You have to believe. You can't just half-way believe. If you want a successful and fulfilling marriage, then you have to believe in it and your spouse. You either do or you don't. Even the best relationships can be trying at times, especially with a house full of kids. You dig in, you believe in each other, you put each other before other things, you give until you don't have anything left to give and then you reach deep inside and find the strength to give some more.

You either believe or you don't.
If you believe then there's no doubt, no question, no room for failure. You can't achieve success by just trying something half-heartedly. You will never succeed. Most people who try to change their life fail. It doesn't matter if it's loosing weight, getting in shape, building up a physique, paying off debt, stopping smoking, getting a better job, quitting drugs, starting a business, finding someone to love, etc., etc., etc., failure is probably going to be the outcome.

You need to look past your goal to something bigger in life.
You need to believe. If you want to make a lot of money because you can't pay your bills, I understand that. There are a lot of people in that same boat. But in reality, that's a pretty small and petty problem. Sure it can practically drive you nuts and cripple your ability to do anything with your life. However, you need to look past that situation to something larger and more important. Think about what you could do once you pay your bills off... think about how you could help others by having the means to do so. Look beyond yourself and believe. Once you have that goal in mind, give all you have to get there. Give 100 percent. Don't leave anything on the field. Give until you can't give anything else, until you don't have anything left to give, and then find the strength to take a few more steps, to give a little more.

Success lies in those last steps.
Anyone can get half-way there; it takes belief to go all the way. Like Brook Kelly doing the "death crawl" down the football field blindfolded with a 160 pound player on his back, you can go much, much farther than you ever thought you could. Brook would have stopped at the 30 yard line (from the starting end zone) without the blindfold. But when Coach Taylor blindfolded him and kept telling him to give his all, to keep going until he had nothing left, to work past the pain and find more strength, Brook make it all 100 yards. 70 more yards than he believed he could. That was the turning point in the football team's season and in Coach Taylor's life.

Unless you have unshakable belief in yourself and in something bigger than yourself, you will fail. If you believe, and never stop believing, and never stop trying, you will succeed. And that my friends, is the cold, hard, honest to God, unvarnished truth.

Until next time,
Fred

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Posted by Fred on August 7, 2008 | Printer-Friendly


 

Are you Fishing with Bird Seed?

July 29, 2008

Are you fishing with bird seed? (image by Lee Hinshaw, see link in footer)Getting customers for your business is analogous to fishing. You put some bait (advertising) somewhere you think people will see it and hope for a nibble and then a bite. You'd be surprised how many people try to run a business by fishing with the wrong bait or by fishing in the wrong places. In business, the bait is usually viewed as everything and anything you do to generate business.

I don't care how good your bird seed is, you're not going to have much luck trying to catch a fish with it. If you want fish, you'd be better off to use a worm or something else fish like to eat. Just as important once you do start using the correct bait is where you put the hook: you'd better have your hook in the water (that's where fish swim), not up in the air somewhere (where the birds are).

I remember going fishing with my Grandfather. That's about the only time I ever caught any fish! He knew exactly where to cast and what bait to use. How did he know that? Simple. He was smart and loved to fish. He remembered where he had been successful before and what he used to catch the fish he'd caught. He'd also been fishing long enough to know the relationships between temperatures, seasons, lay of the land, and other conditions and how that may or may not affect how the fish bite.

A good fisherman studies everything about the lake, the land around the lake, when the fish bite, etc. etc. The same applies to business. If you never learn anything from your successes and failures you're just fishing blind.

If your town's like mine, there's a growing side of town where all the new stores locate. Where new strip malls seem to pop up over night. Yet, perfectly good buildings stand vacant in other parts of town. Ever wonder why? Because these businesses are choosing to fish where the fish are located. It's more profitable to pay the expense of shutting down an existing store, building or leasing a new building, and moving across town than to try and lure the fish to the current location. I don't necessarily like it, but it's true: I would prefer to see the trees that used to be there! You've heard the old saying: location, location, location. It's true. Big businesses study demographics and population growth to determine where to put or move their stores. Do you think they care if Bambi's bedroom gets paved over by a Wal-Mart parking lot? No. They pinpoint where the fish are, or will be, and that's where they drop anchor.

It's very easy to setup shop on the internet. Getting your internet bait to the correct fish is not so easy. There are hundreds of services and sites that will claim to help you get your site listed with the search engines, exchange banners (although that's getting kind of old now), PPC (pay per click) advertising, text link advertising, or other forms of getting traffic to your site. It's confusing and hard to know which ones are necessary, which are simply a waste of money, which are legitimate, and which are scams. You can burn through a lot of money before you figure out that you can't catch fish with birdseed.

The problem is that on the internet, it's much harder to see what or who you're inviting to visit your site than it is in a brick and mortar situation. Or is it? Unless you're walking around and specifically handing prospects a flyer, both situations are just as prone to targeting errors. The real problem is that new internet marketers don't understand enough about how to target their advertising messages. It's naïve of new internet business owners to think that they can just buy an ad here or there, pay for a few PPC ads, and have an overflowing success on their hands. Just as those big businesses employ people or consultants to study where they should locate their stores, internet business owners need to study where to place their ads and what to put in those ads.

In simplest terms, you should start small and test your ads. You have to track what works, which means having some type of reporting in place to tell you which ads result in sales and what percentage of people who see an ad actually make a purchase (or do whatever it is that you wanted them to, such as opt-in to your email list). When you find something that works, you put more resources into it, and when you find something that does not work, you stop using it.

In future posts I'll go into more depth on each of these things and how to fine-tune your advertising to target just the fish you want to catch! In the meantime, start thinking of your advertising and marketing as fishing and always make sure you're using the best bait you can in the best location you can. And keep track of what lands you a fish and what does not.


Until Next Time,
Fred

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Posted by Fred on July 29, 2008 | Printer-Friendly


 

Why Do Smart People Sometimes Find Success So Difficult?

July 24, 2008

Why Do Smart People Sometimes Find Success So Difficult?You're working your tail off trying to create a business that will make a profit. Maybe you're even working smart and not just hard, but yet you constantly feel like you're on a treadmill and not getting anywhere. How many times have you watched as someone else thought up the same ideas as you had, ideas that you could never find the time or money to act on, ideas that you knew would not only work but be extraordinarily successful, how many times have you watched as others took those same ideas and made them a reality, their reality? It's frustrating, very frustrating. Kind of like watching your best friend always get the girls you like.

I've not conducted any study on percentages of people who have this problem, but I'll bet its pretty high among those people who actually try to better their situation in life. What's more, I'd wager that it may even parallel, or track, intelligence. In other words, smarter people may experience this more often than average or even less than average people. Why? I'll answer that in a second, after I make a somewhat educated guess at the cause.

What do I think causes this?

  • Lack of focus on one project,

  • Trying to do too many things at once,

  • Thinking you're superman or superwoman
This causes you to never finish anything, or if you do, it takes you forever. Instead of completing one thing, doing it well, and then moving on to the next thing, you split your time and you split your focus, and by doing so, you loose.

That's why smarter people may suffer this problem more often, because they think they can juggle all their different projects and keep all the balls in the air - they try too hard. A person of lesser smarts may know that they can't handle it and may naturally choose to finish one thing at a time. And they come out ahead.

You think I'm nuts? I'm not. I know a lot of really smart guys who should be rich, wealthy beyond their wildest dreams, but they're not. They have had some great ideas. They have the ability to create and implement. Yet they still just scrape by. I also know a lot of people who may not be as gifted intellectually, yet they have succeeded.

Get your shovel
Picture two people who each have to dig a long ditch. They only have one regular shovel each. The first guy spends an hour or so each day digging and the rest of the time trying to invent a better shovel, or build an excavator out of an old riding mower and spare parts he found laying around. The second guy spends all but an hour or two of each day digging. He spends a little time each day looking around for a better digging device and sharpening the edge of his shovel, but most of his time he spends digging. Who do you think finishes their ditch first? Guy number two wins. Heck, guy number one may NEVER get his ditch finished!

Which type person are you, guy number one, or guy number two?

Guy number two finishes his ditch and by doing so allows water to flow from a pond to his corn field. He now can grow a much larger crop of corn than he could before, enough corn that he has more than he can eat and can even sell a sizable amount. This gives him enough money to plant more corn and some other vegetables. He clears more land, digs more ditches, buys a tractor, buys a pickup truck, and hires a few helpers. The cycle continues until he has created a very successful business and lives a good life. All because he focused on getting one thing accomplished and accomplished well, and then moving on to the next thing.

Each step leads to another and another and another.
I remember going on long hikes in Boy Scouts. We'd always ask the Scout Master how much longer until we're there. If he'd given us the full answer, we probably would have sat down and given up. Instead he would say just over that hill or just up around that bend. It's amazing how much ground you can cover when you're not worried about how far you have to go. By concentrating on small steps you can achieve anything.

While it's tempting to try and act on every idea you have that you think might be successful, it's not the smart thing to do. Write them down so you don't forget them, but, as painful as it may be to let that new idea just sit there, let it. Finish the ditch you're digging now before starting the next one.

Until next time,
Fred

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Posted by Fred on July 24, 2008 | Printer-Friendly


 

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