Category: New Business Development

Research has shown that
people that consistently experience
and practice gratefulness
are 25% happier.

They also have stronger immune systems,
take care of themselves better,
sleep longer and are more refreshed,
have more positive emotions,
feel more alive and energetic
and are more outgoing, compassionate
and feel less lonely.

Ashley Howe, relationship expert,
suggests
writing down “five things
first thing in the morning
that you are grateful for.”

That’s it.
She has a list of other things you can do
but really crafting that list of 5
is sufficient.

Boosting your happiness level,
your energy level
(and what entrepreneur
doesn’t need her energy level boosted?)
is as easy as that.

I achieve results with
only one item on my list.
I once went through a very dark place.
I told myself if I ever went a day
without finding something to be happy for,
that would be my last day.
I would search for that one thing
and I’d always find it.
It became a habit
and I know I’m a happier person
for this habit.

That dark time became
the best thing to ever happen to me.

Search for reasons
to be grateful!

November is
National Novel Writing Month
(NaNoWriMo).
Writers challenge each other
to write 50,000 word novel in a month.
It is a fun competition
with great results.
Writers write more
BECAUSE they’re competing.

If competing pushes artists
to perform,
it can definitely push business teams
to perform.

Leading Blog discusses
Mark de Rond’s book
There Is an I in Team

“Without internal competition,
teams may underperform.
Too much harmony can hurt team performance.

“A healthy level of internal competition
can help get the best out of high performers.”
Citing Timothy Gallwey, De Rond explains,
“each player tries his hardest
to defeat the other,
yet not for the sake of beating another player,
but merely to overcome the obstacle
he now presents.””

Can you add a healthy competitive factor
to your workplace?

Odds are..

You didn’t become an entrepreneur
to do the same thing,
have the same life,
think the same thing,
as everyone else on the planet.

You became an entrepreneur
to change the world,
to be different
and make a difference,
to be FIRST.
You’re a renegade.

Amy Jo Martin,
Author of
Renegades Write the Rules,
shares

“Renegades experiment and fail early
so when everyone else
jumps on the bandwagon,
their best practices are being polished
while others’ are just starting to fail.

Sometimes it’s not about
being the best or smartest;
it’s about being the first to try
and the first to learn from failure.”

Be first.
Be different.

I work from home
for and with people I’ve never met.
They don’t know how old I am
or what I look like
and they don’t care.
All that matters is what I produce.

THIS is the type of working environment
that is possible now
thanks to the internet.

Chris Anderson,
author of Makers: The New Industrial Revolution
shares

“The Web allows
people to show what they can do,
regardless of their education and credentials.

It allows groups to form
and work together easily
outside of a company context,
whether this involves “jobs” or not.

And these more informal organizations
are much less constrained by geography;
talented people can live anywhere
and shouldn’t have to move to contribute.”

Can you use the internet
to find the best talent for your company?

Our writing group was fortunate
to host an acquisitions editor for a major publisher.
We had two short hours with this editor
and she had focused her talk
around a story characteristic
she felt passionate about.

Fifteen minutes in,
a hand shot up.
An author disagreed with the editor’s preference
and proceeded to share her opinion
for half an hour.
The editor sat down
and waited for her to finish.
She didn’t care whether she talked or not.

The audience members did care, however.
We didn’t attend
to hear this author talk.

I wasn’t angry with the author
or with the editor.
I was upset with the host
for not tabling the author’s concern.

When an event with an expert is held,
there will ALWAYS be a competing expert
in the audience.
A good host decides in advance
how to deal with this competing expert.

I write humorous romances.
If I could write any other tone,
I would
because humor is very personal
and doesn’t sell well in romance.

One of my writing buddies,
a writer who crafts wonderful angst-filled romances
readers can’t read enough of,
told me yesterday
that she has sold a romance spoof
to her publisher.
This will be published under her existing pen name.

I suspect this will be a disaster.
It will lower sales
of her backlist.
It will significantly change
her brand.

But I said nothing.
Why?
Because the deal was done.

As difficult as it is to do,
I have to sit back,
watch this mistake happen,
and then help her however I can
to recover from it.

Sometimes you have to allow
other people to make mistakes.

I’m working
what I only half-jokingly call
the world domination plan
with my writing.
I’ve put a lot of time
into crafting it.
I tweak or re-examine it
when I receive new news.
I’m as confident
as an entrepreneur can be
about it eventually working.

A writer I admire
looked at the same information I did
and
yesterday, took the first step
in a very different plan.

I immediately had doubts
about my own plan,
even though it remained solid,
even though nothing really had changed.

And that is normal.
It is human.
It is okay.

What is not okay
is throwing out all of the work
I had done.
What is not okay
is changing my plan
just because someone else
has a different plan.

Just because someone else,
a mentor
or a partner
or a competitor,
has a different plan
doesn’t mean your plan is wrong.

When I worked in product development
at a quick service restaurant,
store managers saw two types of employees.

There were the folks
who came in
and did the bare minimum.
They were there merely for the part-time pay
and they never progressed past
burger flipper.

There were also folks
who came in
and gave their all.
They were determined to be
the best damn burger flippers
our company had ever seen.

These driven folks didn’t last long
at the restaurants.
Managers, seeing their potential,
would tell head office about them
and these employees would be stolen,
given better paying jobs,
and put on the career fast track
(one of these ambitious burger flippers
ended up as CEO).

Same job, two very different results,
all due to passion.

Kevin Liles,
founder and C.E.O. of KWL Enterprises,
shares

“I’ve always felt that whatever I did,
I owned it.
I mean, call it arrogance.
Call it passion.
Call it taking the weight of the world.
Call it responsibility.

The point is,
you were not going to outperform me
at something that I felt I owned.

It’s a mentality.
It’s a way of life.

If I’m the intern,
I’m the president of interns.

If I’m a regional manager,
I approach the job like
I’m the president of regional managers.

But that’s every day in anything I do.
I don’t get involved in things halfway.”

If you in a role,
strive to be the best in that role,
even if you don’t want to stay
in that role
long term.
People WILL notice.

Yesterday, we talked about
how small daily improvements
could significantly improve
our odds of personal success.

This thinking also applies
to businesses.

Jason Jennings,
author of
The Reinventors
shares

“When Howard Schultz retook the reins
at Starbucks
he took 10,000 workers to New Orleans
to build homes for victims of Katrina
and told the assembled group
that Starbuck’s wasn’t as much about coffee
as it was about them and their futures.
He added that the only way
to have a bright future is to grow.

In the following 18 months
the company made a dizzying 150 small bets,
including new store design,
the testing of wine and beer sales,
a new logo,
mobile payments,
a dessert line called Starbuck’s Petites,
Via Instant Coffee in supermarkets
and even oatmeal.

Schultz’s small bets paid off.

The incremental revenue generated
brought Starbuck’s profits back to where
they’d been before the slide
(allowing for organic growth to kick in),
the shares more than doubled in value
and Schultz was named
Fortune’s CEO of the year.”

Can you make a ‘small bet’
on your business?

Matthew E. May shares

“The late, great basketball coach
John Wooden
maintained that,

“When you improve a little bit each day,
eventually big things occur.
Don’t look for big, quick improvement.
Instead, seek small improvement
one day at a time.
That’s the only way it happens
— and when it happens, it lasts.””

And this is a great thing
because if we’re working full-time
(and more)
for an employer
or starting a business
or juggling a thousand different things,
we don’t have the time
to achieve the big improvements.

All of us, however,
have the time and energy
to improve one thing by a little bit
each and every day.

Eventually, we become experts
and eventually, we’ll surpass our competition
because unfortunately
not that many people focus daily on improving.

Do one thing a bit better
than you did yesterday.