You agree?

This quote from Ira Glass encourages me.

What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me…is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

I see irrelevance all around me.

It’s trending in my sphere.

Without a doubt.

Here’s a couple of excerpts from Maurilio Amorim’s post titled Legacy Christian Organizations and the Irrelevance Spiral  (You should read the whole thing.  It’s good.):

Most legacy Christian organizations in America suffer, not from a lack of vision and mission, but most of them suffer from a communication crisis. Often they know what their missions are and, for the most part, they know whom they are trying to reach. Their failure, however, lies in communicating with their target audience in way it can receive the information. After decades of existence the tendency in these organizations is to communicate their story, purpose, and mission in the language and images of their founders. Seldom I see a legacy organization change the way they present themselves in a format that reflects new societal values and attitudes while remaining true to their calling.

While I’m not advocating changing your heart to appeal to culture, I am a big fan of contextualizing your message so it’s heard and understood by society (emphasis mine).  Every successful missionary has learned this lesson: you must speak a language your culture understands and can response to.

The focus of his post is on Christian organizations, but I think it’s bigger.

In my opinion, contextualizing = building trust.

These principles apply to leadership.  If you only relate superficially with those you are leading, don’t expect them to follow you blindly.

These principles apply to friendships and marriages.  If someone doesn’t trust you, don’t expect them to be there for you in a time of crisis.

Your message must be built on trust.

Not analysis.

Not research.

Not personal enrichment.

Not saving face.

Not impressing people.

Trust.

Do you have the personal credibility with your audience?   If you don’t have it, stop expecting to be successful.  Gone are the days of blind loyalty and successful fear-mongering.

Here’s Simon Sinek on this very subject.   Awesome.

This seems like such a novel concept.  

Why don’t we get it?   What’s holding us back?

(click here if you can’t see the video)

This is definitely a tension I feel in my work.

I thrive in environments that values imagination.

My primary role is developer, but I’m far from a robot.

How about you?

(h/t adamhann.com)

Been getting back into reading Seth Godin’s blog again lately.  I heard him speak at the Chick-Fil-A Leadercast a couple of weeks ago.  Pretty challenging stuff.

Some of his over-simplifications bother me sometimes, I must confess.

Not this one, however:

Either you’re focused on maintaining the legacy features or you’re focused on figuring out how to replace them. Driving with your eyes on the rearview mirror is difficult indeed.

In a world of little competition, legacy features are something worth keeping. No sense alienating loyal customers.

But we don’t live in a world of little competition. The faster your industry moves, the more likely others are willing to live without the legacy stuff and create a solution that’s going to eclipse what you’ve got, legacies and all.

I guess I’m just at that point in my life.

If it’s not working, stop doing it and create something new.

Appreciate and respect the hard work from others that got you were you are today, but, good grief, take some risk, move on and be OK with it.

Twenty minutes well spent.

(h/t matt carlisle)

The makers of hand sanitizer are making a killing right now, don’t you think?  That stuff is everywhere.

Surely it can be used for some other things, too:

1. In a pinch you can use it for wire pulling lubricant. They both have the same snot-like consistency.
2. Starting a campfire or satisfy your inner pyromaniac
3. Who needs the cold ones at the tailgate before the game anyway?
4. When I need to clean the whiteboard I always think hand sanitizer first.  not really.
5. Hair treatment?  I’ll pass, thanks.

I don’t think they should bail them out because … obviously something’s not right in the way they’re running their business, and why should the American people have to bail them out if they can’t figure out how to do it right?

– September Quinn, the busy waitress, said after the lunch rush at the Inn Between.

Well said, IMO.

1. Insert copied cells — Seems like such a small thing, but I need to do it all the stinkin’ time.
2. Fill down with a double-click — This is an Excel trick that I use heavily.  Not so in Spreadsheets.
3. Sort by multiple columns — Can’t do it.  sorting in general is very slow, IMO.
4. Autofilter — Can’t do it.  There’s a gadget that attempts this functionality, but it’s buggy.

Google Docs

1. Bullets, ordered lists & outlining — indenting and unindenting gets you in a mess real quick.  It’s frustrating to have to either a) edit the HTML or b) clear formatting and redo all of the indenting.
2. Outline view/pane — I use this a lot in Word — it builds a hyperlink view of your document based on heading styles.  I wish Google Docs had something similar.  The new Table of Contents component is nice, but I need something that helps me jump around inside long documents.

I don’t know of any Harley owner that doesn’t exhibit the same zealous loyalty that Apple fanboys do.

Agree?

I’d like to see the porn industry exposed and vilified as much as the cigarette companies are.

Let’s just call porn for what it is: the #1 destroyer of relationships in the world

Who calls out the porn industry when:

• a sexual predator rapes and kills a 10-year old girl?
• a marriage ends up in divorce and the kids have to pick up the pieces for their whole lives?
• a college girl gets AIDS after getting conned into doing a porn video?

Famous Dave’s BBQ is a relative newcomer and compared to the rich BBQ heritage of Kansas City, well, there’s no real comparison.

Visitors to the Sprint Center will be missing out if they don’t travel outside of the Power & Light District. There’s lots of good BBQ in the surrounding area, most of which I have tried myself. There are nearly 400 BBQ restaurants in a 40 mile radius of KC.

My only gripe with Famous Dave’s (in my one visit): small portions.

Caught this article on my Yahoo start page this morning. What a great idea!

Twenty shopping carts full. Nice.

SMDC Health System, intends to ship the 18,718 items to the west African nation of Cameroon

The response by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America:

It’s a bit draconian. But the onus is on us now to do a better job of explaining the job and the importance of marketing representatives. Unfortunately there are a lot of cynics in America who want to think the worst.

Draconian? Pffft.

Same needs to be done in Washington. Money better spent elsewhere.

Now if they could do something about the commercials.

Oh, and why is Robert Jarvik the Lipitor guy again?

Looks like Dial wants you to buy less soap, literally.

I noticed the same thing with Kingsford charcoal a while back. They were decent enough to post somewhat believable scientific reasoning on their website.

Same thing with Tires Plus (no links for crappy companies), recently. We bought two new tires after a scary blow out up in MN. Their literature says “Free lifetime tire balancing.” Is it free? No, apparently we didn’t purchase the “Premium wheel balance.” How is that free again? Too bad the marketing isn’t true. Tires Plus won’t have to worry about me being a lifetime customer.

Yes, I really did want to explain to my 11 year-old daughter that sometimes companies use vague and deceptive marketing to up-sell you on something.

/rant

This is an exciting development.

OK, AEG and QuikTrip. If I go to the Sprint Center, I’m still expecting $0.89 coffee.

I ran across this picture a while back and with AT&T’s acquisition of Cingular and the extreme re-branding, it makes me think that the customers are really starting to get the shaft.

Then, I read this article today and I’m even more convinced.

I’ve griped about this before, but rural America is really at a disadvantage in terms of broadband Internet services.   Hopefully the phone companies neglect of country-dwellers will open a large market for the power companies offering broadband over power lines.

Aside from privacy concerns, this is one of the gripes about Google these days — that SEO companies are abusing the system with shady methods for increasing traffic for paying customers.

Take a look if you’re interested.

This doesn’t really surprise me. Good for Lowe’s and Target.

I can’t stand Home Depot. Tomorrow is not soon enough for them to get the Lowe’s built in my town. It’s going in right across the street from Home Depot.

I’ve done a fair amount of work on my house and have purchased well over $3000 of home improvement stuff over the last few years. Nearly every time I go into Home Depot — normally late morning on Saturday, there’s one or two registers open and 10 people in each line. Aside from the fact that there aren’t enough registers open, the cashiers don’t know what the heck they are doing.

Don’t even get me started about the Tuff Shed (which is real nice, BTW) we bought during a Home Depot promotion a few years ago. My wife did a masterful job explaining basic math to at least three people whose only argument was “well, this is what the computer says.” I wanted to rip someone’s face off.

(BTW, it’d be unfair of me to not give some props to the ONE guy at Home Depot that is really helpful. I don’t even remember his name, but you can’t miss him — balding dyed black hair, goatee, big silver loop earrings and some tattoos… you’ll know him when you see him. Last I noticed he was working back in flooring.)

And about Wal-Mart…all you have to do is spend a few minutes reading Behind the Counter and Consumerist you’ll know what I mean.

Oh yeah, they’re building a Target in my town, too.

Only blaming “Big Oil” may not be the best way to explain why gas jumps $.25 right before a holiday weekend. After reading this it helped me get more of a handle on all of the factors involved in setting the price of gas.

Sounds good, but I have a feeling that Wal-Mart is going to have a hard time wooing and maintaining supplier relationships with some of the brand names.   I think Wal-Mart will find it hard to sell certain products. They can’t bully everyone who doesn’t want to be associated with “low prices, always” a.k.a. “cheap and disposable.” Don’t forget about Snapper. Wal-Mart can’t strong-arm everyone.

It’d be really interesting to see their strategy on the supply-side.