Life’s too short to…

I’m sure you’ve heard that hundreds of times – maybe a bumper sticker or quick comment about the quality (or lack of quality) of a beverage.  “Life’s too short to drink bad beer!”.

If you think about it, it’s a pretty deep thought (maybe not Jack Handey deep, but thought provoking).  I was meeting with someone last week and they had an interesting business related take on it:

Life’s too short to work with people you don’t like.

What a great (and powerful) way to point out the values that are really important to you.  Imagine a small but pointed list of rules that you followed because life is too short not to follow them.  So with that in find, I brainstormed a potential list for you to start with – some of them are mine, some of them came when I did a finish the sentence exercise with a couple of my Peer Group Advisory Boards – let me know what I missed:

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I had a great opportunity to speak on a distinguished panel last week for a Business and Economic Summit put on by the New Landings Job Club here in Kansas City (and before you ask, I don’t know why I was on the distinguished panel either…). 

This wasn’t just any panel discussion, not only were there 10 9+1 sharp panelists – there were 400+ in attendance and focused for 2+ hours!

The purpose of the discussion was to talk about what’s going on in Kansas city with jobs, the economy and what job seekers should be doing and looking for as they work to get into their next opportunity.

There was a lot of great discussion (it was primarily a Q&A format) and I believe the job seekers got a lot of great ideas and good advice…what was interesting to me was how much of that great information and advice also applied to business owners.

We talked about the importance of stalking (done the right way), relationships, professionalism…lots of great points – here are the highlights that I took away:

(photo by Jesse757)

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I continue to be surprised with some of the cool applications and sites that pop up… a lot of free stuff and generally pretty innovative!  From a business standpoint, free may not be the best way to go, but I think the developers are in a tough situation.  If you want people to find your stuff, try it out and talk about it, your best bet is to make it free and get it out to a lot of people.

So that’s what I’m doing here – talking about 3 interesting, useful and free sites that you should check out today.

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Picture this – you’re in the middle of a 10 day vacation at a cabin in a beautiful resort area.  There’s no cell phone coverage, the weather is great and you haven’t even turned on the TV in days.  You are in a stress free state – nothing you have to do right now, nothing to think about, nothing to remember…you’re practically floating.

What if you could take that feeling into your day to day work filled world?  How much more productive would you be if you were truly focused only on the task at hand?  Not thinking about phone calls you need to make, errands you need to run, stuff that you have to get done…not only would you get more done, you’d feel really good about it as well!

The key to that feeling of relief that you get on vacation or when you’re mind is empty because you’re concentrating and ‘in the zone’ is getting all of the stuff out of your head!  You need to clear your mind.

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photo by photos8.com

A lot of people are looking at Social Media marketing as some kind of ‘silver bullet’ for their marketing woes.  As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, there’s good news and bad news when it comes to marketing for Business to Business opportunities.  The bad news is that Social Media is no more of silver bullet for small B2B business owners than any other single marketing tactic that’s out there.  The good news is it can be a very effective tool for helping you get found or established – especially when it’s used in conjunction with other marketing ideas.

In Part 1 we talked about using new media tools as a great way to establish expertise by creating content.  Today we’ll look at couple of other ideas that might be a better fit if you’re not into publishing as much.

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