26 February 2010

Its you’re brand out their, please get it write

I’ll be the first to admit that my grammar’s not always perfect. In the rush to get things written, sometimes my brain disconnects from my typing fingers and something other than what I meant ends up on the published page. (My brain and fingers have some serious debates about homophones.)
But seriously, folks.
There is a difference [...]

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2 February 2010

The secret to lasting change

You want to make a change. Maybe you need to. You tell yourself that over and over again.
But, neither of those will make it happen. No, the answer to making change happen lies between the two: in what you’re willing to do.
Think about it. Just needing to make a change rarely makes us act. We wait to be motivated. We [...]

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30 January 2010

Bloggers: The new Revolutionaries

Change “pamphlet” to “blog” and see what you think:
Then, as now, it was seen that the pamphlet allowed one to do things that were not possible in any other form:

The pamphlet [George Orwell, a modern pamphleteer has written] is a one-man-show. One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be [...]

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29 January 2010

There is a map. With monsters.

Says Seth Godin in his new book, Linchpin, “There is no map”:
Here’s the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can’t tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there’d be no art, because art is the [...]

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28 January 2010

Use your words

Words hold power. They’re symbols of much more complicated thoughts, symbols we’ve come to collectively agree mean certain things.
But a word is never just a word. It has nuance and subtext that our unconscious minds hear and understand even as our conscious ones don’t.
We get used to using certain words. So used to them, in fact, [...]

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26 January 2010

Never mind the Elevator Pitch,
Here’s the Lobby Pitch

Got your elevator pitch? Good for you. But it means nothing if you never get on the elevator.
These days, you need a Lobby Pitch, too.
The Lobby Pitch
The Lobby Pitch isn’t a tagline (though it could be). It’s two simple things:
1.  What you are.
2.  What you do.
“I’m a __________ that__________.”
“We’re a __________ that __________.”
That’s it. That’s all you get. And If [...]

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19 January 2010

Notes on Seth Godin’s Linchpin, part 2

I suspect Seth Godin really wanted to start his book at Page 101, the section on “The Resistance.” In many ways, the first half seemed like a 100-page run up to that section, one that could be summarized in four words: you can do it.
The book took an interesting turn after that. Here are the [...]

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18 January 2010

Notes on Seth Godin’s Linchpin, part 1

Knowing in advance you’ll be writing about a book changes how you read it. For me, it meant I read Seth Godin’s new book, Linchpin, with pencil in hand , marking ideas I liked (or didn’t) and capturing thoughts and questions as they occurred to me.
But I’m still processing it, my reactions to it, and how [...]

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7 January 2010

Three words for 2010

So I'm a little late on this one, but here they are:

Focus. Definitions 1 and 7.

Balance. Definitions 2, 7, 23 and 24.

Faith. Definitions 1, 4, and 7.
Posted via email from Magpie with a Mirror

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4 January 2010

Contribute or complicate?

Chris Brogan wrote a great post on using questions to stay on target.

Here's one I use all the time:

Will this (whatever it is) contribute to, or complicate, my goals?

Yes, that's very close to Dr. Phil's "contribute or contaminate" dichotomy, but I don't like the implied judgment of that. It's already too easy for us to [...]

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