Minding Your Own Business an Introduction of Sorts

April 22nd, 2018 - I am excited to add Steemit to my social media mix. I hope it will become the focal point over time. (We’ll see how it pans out.) I am looking forward to introducing myself around and connecting. Let’s start here...

So - Who am I and why should anyone care to follow me?

My Steemit plan is to post on #business related topics and share over 30 years of #technology #business-ownership, #startups, #entrepreneurship and work within fortune 50 companies with the Steemit community. Hopefully I can save you from making the mistakes I made along the way (teaser: be careful of #business-partners, who you take money from and staying sane in a large corporation)

You can check out my LinkedIn profile here if you want the career run down however I will say that is designed for a slightly different audience. I will be writing posts on #LinkedIn strategies where I will explain more.

The business posts here will dive deeper into #strategies and #tactics of #consulting, #sales, #marketing and #public-relations with strong attention to virtues and values within your business process. In other words, we should be working for more than just money. With that, you will find posts on #philosophy and #psychology.

For example, I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance years ago, when I was 20. A book that still holds up today that everyone should read.

The author shares a story about the South Indian Monkey Trap to illustrate how rigid our values can be.

The basic premise is that the local villagers periodically need to rid themselves of pesky monkeys that steal food and create all kinds of Jumanji like havoc. Being monkeys, they are fast, hang out in trees and generally hard to hunt. Over generations the South Indians learned to used the monkeys values, namely an easy meal, against itself. The villagers take coconuts and carefully hollow them out creating a small hole in the top and chain the coconuts to poles that are planted deeply in the ground. They then place sweet rice inside the coconuts as bait. The monkeys eventually climb out of the trees reach inside the coconut for the food.

The secret to the trap is that the hole in the coconut is big enough to get a monkey’s hand in however when their hand is full of rice, making a fist, they are unable to pull it out. They are stuck. The villagers then walk through the jungle collecting and disposing of the monkeys.

At any time the monkeys can free themselves from certain death if they would just shift their values, if only for a moment and relax their hand.

We can’t expect higher level thinking from a monkey but the story illustrates the same tendency we have to trap ourselves in situations. Sometimes, we need to let go of things we value and perhaps even those things we value the most to save or advance our lives.

We suffer daily in jobs where not only are our talents and virtures are ignored but we are even punished for them. Maybe it’s time to quit?

We get attached to products and service providers we “like” but are just unproductive and unprofitable. Time to explore other options?

We don’t make that next move in career or business because we fight to hang on to our doubt, insecurity or laziness. Maybe we should just take that first step off the couch?

We’ll not think twice about our $100 a month latte habit but agonize at running a Facebook ad campaign to test a product idea or take an online business course that could launch a side gig from our day job. Maybe we can make our own coffee and put it in a travel mug?

It's hard work, perhaps the hardest you will ever do, to really look at yourself and your values to see which ones are holding you down. Ironically, letting go is even harder but once your are free you can look back and see more clearly the danger.

Start with small things and see what new things open up to you.

Change is important to business. Gone are the days of "business as usual”. Business cycles are too fast and the pace of technology innovation even faster. To keep up you need to revisit your values from time to time. Important to note, there are obvious values you should never let go of such as honesty, ethics, conscientiousness and integrity. Compromising those leads to a downward spiral and the subject of several other posts.

The biggest value we need to preserve is sacrifice. Those who succeed understand the call to sacrifice in the present for the future… otherwise you are sacrificing your future for the present.

You pay now or you pay later. Like every good parent teaches their children, their are no free lunches.

So, will Steemit be a productive platform for me to invest my time and money in? We’ll see however the value of this platform or any other social platform (online or offline) is what you sacrifice of your time to the community and your audience.

I have much more to share on the above topics. I am honored that you took a few minutes of your time to read this.