Doing the unexpected

It might not rank high on the “career success” ladder of must-do’s, but it should.

“Do the unexpected.”

Be remarkable. Be patient. Go out of your way to find a solution. Don’t just pass the problem onto someone you think will be better. Be that person yourself.

One of the tricks I used to use when confronted with an angry customer (telemarketing/inbound) is to pretend they were a good friend of mine that I wanted to “do right by.”

I enjoyed doing the unexpected – going above and beyond – being better. There’s something remarkably satisfying in knowing that you’ve set the bar for those around you.

Try it.

12seconds.tv

Some people call it an “elevator speech.”  12 seconds to get your point across.

Now it’s called “12seconds.tv” and it’s better than YouTube.com. Love YouTube. Love 12 seconds more. It’s like visual tweeting.

Robert Scoble loves it too.

The 12second founders make a great point – charging for services. They charge 99 cents for their iPhone app that lets users take three photos and send them to 12seconds – where the photos are synched, Ken Burns effected and made into a video. Their point – that 12seconds will stay free, but that services like the app need to be monetized, is right one.

“It’d be great if this was a big ole love and hug fest,” as one of the founders says, but “It’s nice not to have to wear the same clothes every day and buy dinner too.”

It’ll be the next big thing – if it’s not already. Try it.

Why I buy the cheap baloney

$1.49. But that’s not why I buy the cheap baloney. I buy it because it is thick, spicy and meaty. And it has a red band around it which must be removed before consuming. It is the ritual of preparing it. It is white bread. Mustard. Miracle Whip – the blue collarness of it that feels so comforting for some odd reason. A connection to my roots.

It is NOT the Oscar Meyer $3.49 a package, thinly sliced with lower fat and turkey by-products. I buy the cheap baloney. I know it is artery clogging, but stomach satisfying. Proust had his madelines. I have baloney.

I stand next to a tiny black woman in the grocery.

“Oh lawd. Look how prices have gone up.” She shakes her head and reaches for the $1.49 package. She remembers, I learn, when it was only 69. cents a package. Prices, it seems have almost tripled since she was my age 30 years ago.

Back when she was buying baloney at .69 cents a pound, I was just learning to eat it. I must have had baloney sandwiches as a child, but I don’t remember them.

The first baloney sandwich I can recall was when I was 22. I was working construction and a co-worker, whose stories I remember, but whose name I forget, shared half his sandwiches with me. White bread, a thick slab of baloney, Miracle Whip and mustard and two crunchy leaves of lettuce. It was heavenly.  Ft. Collins, Colorado on a warm spring day. Trees were budding and it was the best sandwich I have ever tasted and I don’t know why. Maybe because I was hungry and broke and he shared his lunch. Maybe it was the baloney itself – going for .69 cents a package. Maybe it the Colorado Rockies and something in the water. To this day I can’t eat baloney without remembering.

“Do you like it fried?” she asks.

“Oh yes!”

“Me too,” she smiles, then starts laughing.

“Fried baloney and greens,” she giggles.

“I like it better than anything.”

How I got hooked on Twitter

How can you really know people until you read their Twitters? I want to be the gearshift in their Volkswagon. Do they even drive a Volkswagon? Or at least the skull on their bookshelf. Something about Martin Whitmore just screams skulls on bookshelves. Or something. I want to be something in Megan’s World so I can hear all their Twitters – like those I got yesterday. And you wonder why I got hooked on Twitter?

“You don’t even know where we’re going. I have a penis. I’ll get us there.”

Marty: “You mean to establish a routine we actually have to DO the things in the routine? On a regular basis? I don’t like this.”

Daddy Warbucks: “Well I decided then and there that one day I would be rich — very very rich!” Annie: “Good idea!”

I can’t have profound existential validation until everyone I friended on Facebook friends me back. Until then, my life is totally over.

“What if we… [horrible gross suggestion for project]?” “That’s really gross, Marty.” “So it wins. That’s how we play this game, right?”

All you people without the Dr. Horrible DVD are SO INCREDIBLY jealous of me.

from http://twitter.com/worldmegan.
Hey. You can follow them too.

Then there’s Daniel Pink. He’s Al Gore’s speech writer and has a great book called Johnny Bunko, a manga (comic book) about business. I’m one of three finalists in his writing contest for the seventh lesson in Johnny Bunko’s world. Now you know where the name for this blog came from.

Does America need a Secretary of Culture? http://www.nytimes.com/2008… or how about:

The rest of the afternoon will be devoted to setting up Time Capsule. You see, I work so Steve Jobs doesn’t have to.

How to survive Great Depression 2.0: Come up with a product idea as brilliant as Baconnaise http://tinyurl.com/3vcep4 (I have Daniel Pink to thank for my discovering Baconnaise)

I’m OK because you’re not. (Via Pink Blog and NYT) . . . http://is.gd/dHC9
from http://twitter.com/DanielPink

Then there’s http://twitter.com/devijvers. The man is writing the most awesome book. He is inspired. Brilliant. Gifted. He inspires me. Why is it taking him so long to finish? I have to wait until January. But then I’ll post the link. Once in blue moon such vision comes along. How can someone this young be so aware? I will post pieces of his book here and it will be eye candy so sweet your teeth will hurt when you read it. I promise. I have seen the future and Steven is a force in it. If you absolutely can’t bear the wait. Read it yourself, HERE.

It didn’t take long. Wasn’t painful. Was delightfully funny. Try it yourself.

The stories we tell each other

“It was a UFO,” she said.
“I’ve never seen one before, but I swear that’s what it was.”

She must be at least 80. The dog at her feet is an ankle biter.
The dog has spindly legs, a big belly, bulgy eyes, a pink rhinestone collar and a red nylon leash. Except for the leash and collar part, so does Margaret.
She has stopped me as I dump the week’s trash, bagged and heavy, with a thump on the curb.
“Where?” I look upward.
“There,” a gnarled finger points as the dog sniffs my garbage.
I look.
“It’s gone now.”
She looks at me and back up into the trees, then nods.
Her dog is squatting, leaving an anklebiting size pile of dog feces beside my garbage.
She looks away as if she doesn’t notice. I make a mental note. When I’m 80 I’ll ignore my dog squatting.
A neighbor who has just pulled into her driveway across the street sees us talking and joins us. Me. The crapping dog.
“Hi Margaret,” she says, ignoring the dog.
Margaret nods and continues recounting a movie she saw once about abductions and anal probes. We all look up into the wet, black limbs of the oak tree on the corner and past it into the night sky.
The glare from the street light is all we see.
No aliens here.
Yet another couple stops and looks up with us.
What is it?
“Aliens,” the elderly woman begins her story anew.
We all nod solemly.
And for the next ten minutes we recount our own first UFO sightings. We have bonded over the sharing of a mystery.
We all check the tree once again to ensure the UFO hasn’t returned and become lodged there while we were talking.
The dog is finished and kicking ankle-biting sized pieces of wet grass over his deposit.
“Well,” she sighs, looking first at her dog, then at the tiny pile beside the garbage bag.
“I’ll get it,” I say.
She smiles.
The walking after dinner for the exercise couple laughs and strolls off.
“No aliens tonight,” Margaret says, and totters off.
My neighbor watches her walk away.
“Do you really believe she saw a UFO?” she asks.
“Of course.”
She looks at me for a minute, her eyes narrowing.
“I don’t know if I do or not.”
She crosses the street and gets in her car, backs up and stops for a minute to let the traffic go by before pulling and backing in so she can pull directly into traffic in the morning.
I turn to walk back in when the lights in the sky catch my eye and I stop.
There. And again. I rock back and forth, back and forth.
If you stand just right there are UFO’s – the reflection of the neighbor’s car lights on the windows of the unlit upper story house behind the tree.
The neighbor pulls back out and the lights disappear.
I watch them disappear into the night.
The stories we tell each other.
Oh, the stories we tell each other.

Can I get there from here?

Can I get there from here? It was a plaintive question. From the tone of voice I could hear he’d been lost for quite some time.
“Can I get there from here?”
She nodded.
“You’ll have to go back the way you came,” she said, counting out change and thumbing through a stack of bills. She handed him his money and a receipt and watched as he sipped nervously at the fresh cup of coffee he held.
He winced.
“How far back?”
“About 40 miles.”
He blew loudly on the hot liquid – more from frustration than to cool it.
“Turn left on 72. That’s if the sign’s still up. If it’s not, it’s where the old Sears store used to be.”
His eyes glazed over and he sighed.
“Another 20 or 30 miles and you should see the interstate from the stop sign.”
He nodded, pocketed his change and left the store.

I stopped him out in the parking lot with a smile.
“Follow me. I’ll show you a short-cut. I drive it every day.”
He looked at me for a minute, then nodded.
“I’ll pull over once we get to the last road.”
I watched him set his coffee in a cup holder, put his seat-belt on and start his car.
He looked at me expectantly and I waved him on.
Off we went. Eight turns, four stop signs and two country roads later he was only five miles from where he needed to be…and only 18 miles out of his way, not 30.

Funny isn’t it? We make the wrong turn, end up miles away from where we hoped we were going and then depend on the kindness and knowledge of strangers to help us find our way back. No matter how well-intentioned they are, their advice may delay us more. It may get us there faster. It’s almost impossible to tell who is really giving us the best directions – so it’s better, I’ve learned, to listen to the ones willing to go all or part of the way with us.

That’s true with just about anything isn’t it?

Do I deserve this?

It’s a question many of us ask. If not “Do I deserve this?” then we ask, ‘What did I DO to deserve this?” The fact is, the people, things and events are in our lives because of the decisions we made. We can’t control some things, but most of what happens to us we can control. Life is about choices.

Have you ever been angered by the way people treat you? The old adage says, “We teach others how to treat us by our responses.” I read a recent blog by Robert Burns. He asks,

“So why do we have a tendency to respond in such a way that we are treated as we are. When you begin to view this from a much deeper view point it slowly begins to reveal itself and then we realize it stems from early childhood.

Lets think for a moment about how we were raised. Was it with a positive and encouraging set of parents or were we constantly put down with words such as “children should be seen and not heard”. An old and yet influential statement that does not in any way support our self esteem. Many years ago I was conducting a seminar on deserve level and there were 60 to 70 men and women in the audience. I asked how many of them had received a spanking that stung prior to the age of ten.

All of the hands went up. I then asked how many still felt the sting from the spanking and of course, non of the hands went up. I followed with, how many of them had something said to them prior to the age of ten that stung and all of the hands went up. But when I asked how many still felt the sting of what was said to them prior to the age of ten, half of the hands went up. That begins to explain the ultimate power of the words we use and how they’ve affected us during the course of our lives. In my next article I will list many solutions to this starting with a quote from a very well known speaker Zig Ziglar who said “You’re where you are and what you are because of whats gone into your mind, you can change where you are and what you are by changing what goes into your mind. A thought provoking statement.”

Indeed.

More than a lesson, a connection

Who helps their competition? Well apparently at least Ed Brenegar and I do. Both of us are finalists on the Johnny Bunko contest. His “greatest lesson” suggestion for the seventh lesson was, “Say thanks every day.” My “greatest lesson” suggestion was, “Stay Hungry.”

Grand prize – an all-expense paid trip to the 2009 Global TED Conference in Oxford, England. But you know what? The funny thing is, this is a competition – who can send the most emails, who has the most friends, who has the greatest following on Twitter? Or is it? Once I voted I looked Ed up on the internet, found his blog and sent him a message. You’ll have to go here, to read my post to him. I basically invited him to submit a page and his reasons why “Say thanks,” should be the seventh lesson. And suprise! He agreed to! What happened?

We connected. We agreed to “spread the idea.” The idea about what makes a great lesson. Is it (1) Do it Now or (2) Say Thanks Every Day or  (3) Stay Hungry?  I guess it all depends on who you know, or what your business is. All three are great lessons – all three are needed if you really want to be successful. But the third lesson – the lesson that’s really come out of this – is “Get connected.”

Ed and I connected. I invited him to join Seth Godin’s Triiibes.com. And apparently he thought that was a good move. He accepted. Now Ed is bringing his expertise to Triiibes.com and reaching more people. The possibilities are infinite. Want to know why? To see what happens when you “get connected” and “Stay Hungry” and “Say Thank You Every Day,” go to: http://lessonseven.wordpress.com. See who else is hungry.

The Seventh Lesson

It started on a whim. Surfing. A blog somewhere mentioned Johnny Bunko and I followed the link. Following links is like following the Rabbit. How far down the hole will you go and how far will it take you? Red Pill. Blue Pill. It’s one of the undefined hazards of the Internet no one tells you about.

Corporate America doesn’t want you to know there’s life outside of ads. The media wants you spending your precious time on their pages. And so on. But for some of us…life is clicking on the little links buried in the text – hoping for an Easter Egg. I found one.

Johnny Bunko. Six lessons no one ever told you about, and in Manga. Cool.

Wait! There was a contest. What is the “Seventh lesson?” Why not? I fired off my answer and promptly forgot about it…until I got “the letter” from Daniel Pink telling me I was a finalist. Sweet.

Do it Now.

Be Thankful.

Stay Hungry.

I said, “Stay Hungry” of course. (C) on the list of choices. I got the feeling I got in by the whim of fate, the skin of my teeth. But I’m in. Now – do I take part in this popularity contest? Or do I turn it around? What’s more important? For me – it’s not winning..although bragging rights would be cool and so would the trip to the 2009 TED conference in Oxford, England. What would really be cool though is reaching people with the “Seventh Lesson,” and what it really means to keep looking for more. So many people settle. They settle for jobs they hate, careers that bore them, a routine that smothers every creative bone in their body. Why stop at winning some contest? Why not save the world from mediocrity? Why not explain HOW to stay hungry?

I’m on it.