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What is important in life tends to escape us in the busyness of our complex lives and I wonder how many entrepreneurs have the time to think about meaning—not only the deeper meaning of their business but also of their lives. Contemplating the deeper reasons for what we are doing gets in the way of the doing and we all know how much there is to do.
However, uncovering the greater meaning of why we are doing what we are doing has immense value and deserves attention. I’d like to propose that you find out what motivates you to do what you do. If your investigation leads you to the almighty dollar or to a desire to impress others then one day you will wake up and look around and wonder who hijacked your life.
What is at the inner most core of ourselves? Yes, this question will lead you down a rabbit hole into yourself and hopefully once you get to your hidden onclave you’ll find that your business is aligned with what resonates most deeply within youself—and if it doesn’t, get out and get into what does. Life is too precious to waste it living someone else’s dream—those of your parents, friends, or society—what is unique in you needs, deserves, must be set free—your life depends on it, literally.
True success in life isn’t measured by the amount of money you have in the bank nor the number of possessions or toys that you have accumulated, success is a result of letting that passion that lies at your heart of hearts into the open where the sprouts of yourself can be set free to dance among humanities song of uniqueness.
Go back to the flip chart of yourself before you sit down and pour over those spreadsheets and sales leads and ask yourself a few fundamental questions.
- Why did I start this business?
- What am I most passionate about in life?
- Am I doing what I truly want in life?
- Is my most authentic self alive in what I am doing?
It’s never too late to change your life—in fact, nothing in life is static, learn to move with life, learn to embrace change, and when you get comfortable you’ll find that life has its own rhythm and will knock you out just when you thought the bell had wrung. Get up, brush yourself off, smile, and charge ahead towards the unknown with courage, positivity, and humility.
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Very!
Creating an opt-in page in your sales process is perhaps the most important aspect of on-line marketing. Check out this video of the Master Mind System that details the importance of the opt-in page in a simple—yet informative—way.
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Ok, so your grandmother doesn’t have a twitter account but she might have one soon (Opara, Shaq move over).
The reality is that we all have different groups of people that we virtually touch each day and you might want to create multiple twitter accounts (or profiles) to feed various forms of information to different groups (recipe to grandma and a bikini shot to your beer drinking friends should go out on different profiles). Here are a few software tools to help you manage your tweets, broken into two type: (1) on-line tools (which you can access from anywhere) and (2) downloadable tools (that you need to run on your machine):
(1) Online
Easytweets: lots of tools, stats, keyword search, dashboard
Hootsuite: simple, keeps all accounts on one page, free (my personal favorite)
Matt: clean and basic, but does what is needed, tweet to multiple accounts
Netvibes: easy plug-in to admin twitter accounts, and mash up lots of web stuff
(2) Download
Splitweet: for mac and pc, follow contacts and monitor your brand
TweetDeck: nice interface, slick and effective (resource heavy)
Twhirl: connects to multiple networking accounts and manages various profiles
Ok, that should be enough to get you started, download or sign-up for a few and take a test drive. I like Hootsuite the best among the online applications, mostly becaue it keeps all my accounts on one page and I can scan and manage my content easily and blast off a tweet to the profile I want with a quick tick of the icon. TweetDeck is my choice among the downloadable applications, it has lots of bells and whistles and allows for filtering ‘out’ or ‘in’ feeds so that you can follow lots of people but perhaps only interact with a selected group.
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It is amazing how many free tools you can find on the internet these days (see my list of 150+ internet tools), I simply love stumbling across something that makes my life more productive—productivity doesn’t have to mean that you do more (though it often does) it might just equate to being more organized, thus enabling you to effectively meet and exceed your obligations (I really hate that word) which frees you up to do the things you love.
Your work tools don’t have to be super complex to be useful either and this post is about a tool that I started to use a few weeks ago that I have found to be MOST EXCELLENT.
Like most people in today’s world I am on-line constantly and I use multiple computers daily in several locations and thus everything I do and record needs to be accessible from, well, everywhere (pray to the gods that the connection doesn’t go down). My virtual tool chest includes a cornucopia of on-line software programs, as an example I use many of 37 Signals software including Highrise CRM to track customers (see “What is a CRM” ), Project Path to manage an assemblage of projects, Vitalist to organize my GTD matrix—the software manifesto goes on and on—my problem had been that I needed a place to easily capture information quickly (while on a phone call, tidbits of emails, jott down a quick thought, etc) that I could later feed into the appropriate tool—like virtual post-it notes.
Of course someone has created virtual post it notes and I’ve been using them for a few weeks now and I love the interface and simplicity. They are called Webnotes and signing up couldn’t be easier (you actually don’t even sign-up, the owner just lets you use the service for free—don’t you love the internet?). Create a workspace with a unique word and start using your custom url in seconds, access it wherever and whenever you need—simple and sweet. You can also share your notes with others by providing the workspace name (or url) to a friend.
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A few months ago I started using Jott’s new voicemail to text feature, it saves tons of time because it gives you the ability to read (usually a quick scan) your voice messages in an email or on your phone via your mail account. I thought Jott’s service was very cool until I got their first bill and realized how much they were charging me for the service (after they lured me into the FREE trial period)—though I do feel it was a justified expense for the increased productivity I was gaining, it still hurt when I got that first bill.
At the end of March 2009 Google launched Google Voice, which does the same thing for their current Grand Central Accounts (Grand Central is a Google 
phone service that Google bought a few years back, it makes a digital file of all messages and drops them in an in-box for review). I love Google Voice, the transcripts are much cleaner than Jott’s and have less errors, the interface and dashboard are designed in that classic no nonsense approach (which screams functionality and simplicity, or maybe whispers it)—but the best part is that it is a free service. Here is some Googlespeak from the GV website:
“Google Voice is a service that gives you one number for all your phones, voicemail that is easy as email, and many enhanced calling features like call blocking and screening, voicemail transcripts, call conferencing, international calls, and more.”
Google Voice has some other cool features too, like listening in when people leave a message or recording a call and saving it online, “you didn’t say X, in fact I’ve got it recorded, you want to hear?” You can block numbers (nasty creditors, old girlfriends), create SMS, and even route calls to multiple numbers (including your Skype number (ditch that landline). In a digital nutshell, Google Voice is the future of communication and is one more reason to love Google.
If you don’t have a Google Grand Central account you can sign-up to be INVITED to Google Voice here.
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