For the last few months I have been preparing to run my first marathon.  Two weeks ago, I had terrible training run.  I was at mile 10 of 16, and I felt just plain bad.  I was hot, tired, thirsty, and just plain spent.  In my head, I was asking myself “Why not just quit for today?”  ”Why not just stop running, walk home, and try again another day?”  I wasn’t injured.  I was just in a funk – lacking energy and looking for excuses.

I kept running.  I was afraid…

In my head the marathon itself is just the culmination of all of these training runs.  If I can complete them, I should be fully prepared to run 26.2 miles come October.  The race won’t be easy, but if I persist in my preparation, it will be attainable.  However, if I start quitting now – if I give in to the fear now –  I make that an option on race day.  Fear can’t win now and it can’t win on race day.  I am finishing that race.  The joy of finishing is going to be great, but it is the fear of not finishing keeps left foot following right and vice verse day after day and run after run.

I beat my fear that day, and I will beat it on race day.  I know it will be right there with me on every step between now and then, whispering in my ear, tapping me on my shoulder, wrenching through my muscles, aching in my joints… I will not let fear win.

Do I always beat my fear? Sadly, no.

I have plenty of 1/2 written songs, unfinished blog posts, unexplored ideas, and other casualties of my lifelong battle with fear.  At times in my life my fear has kept me from quitting some really wasteful, stupid things.  On other occasions fear kept me from starting or staying with some of great things.  Fear is ruthless.

The good news is, over time, I am learning more about my fear.  If I let it, it can be my worst enemy.  If I own it, it will push me to succeed.

What role is fear playing in your life?  Is it pushing you forward or holding you back? What will you do about it?

Take a moment and answer the following question: “What do you want to become?”

What did you answer?

Do you want to become smarter? Healthier? Happier? More financially stable? A better parent? A faster cyclist? A marathon runner? A more loyal friend? A more valuable employee? Whatever your answer, this is an important question to periodically ask of yourself, because the answers serve as the guide for all that you do. Time on this planet is limited, and guess what – you don’t even get to know just how limited it might be. So, it is vital to think long and hard about what you want to become and then examine your actions to figure out what to do about it.

As human beings we have an incredible power to become something more than we are at present. We have the creative capacity to envision a reality different from the present state of things. Like no other creatures, people have the ability to dream.  What often separates the dream from reality is simple choices. These choices determine our actions. To consciously evolve into something new requires sacrificing some of what we are in order to become something new.

You could leave life up to the universe – going where the world will take you, living completely without regard for the future.  You could intentionally do nothing and then blame the universe, or God, or an infinite number of other things for your failure to become. Or you can define a vision of what you hope to become and choose actions that move you in the right direction. Step by step, day by day, and choice by choice you have the power to evolve into something new.

If you want to be a doctor, you have work to become one. If you want to be a runner, you have to get your ass off the couch and run to become one. If you want to be successful in any endeavor in life, you have to go through a process of becoming. That process is tough. It requires a willingness to dream and a relentless drive to achieve.

Again, answer the question “What do you want to become?” Follow that by looking at your recent activity, your daily actions, and your upcoming plans. Are the things you are doing helping make your dreams become your life?

No one else can dictate the path you choose. Decide what it is you want to become and act to make it happen.

I believe this theory has some interesting implications for marketing professionals.  As we move into a digital world, there are so many things we can measure about people.  What they say, who they are friends with, what games they play online, what they “like” on Facebook, what they Tweet about, where they check-in on Foursquare, and on and on and on.  This data opens up immense potential to understand more about people.  The data that is being gathered and analyzed is producing mind-boggling insights about our collective and individual behavior.  This data is extremely valuable, and represents the future direction of business.  Yet it is not perfect, and never will be perfect.  Like subatomic particles it is simply impossible to measure and predict what humans will do with 100% certainty.   The greater emphasis that is placed on one single motivational factor, the less certain you can be about others.  You can assess probabilities about what will happen, but the reality is you never know.

Although you can’t be certain, that does not mean you should just blindly guess or abandon measuring all together.  Measurement is a critical part of marketing, and one that is rapidly getting easier and much more useful.  You can now have a better understanding of what to sell, what price point to use, what channels are most effective, what people love and hate about your brand, and so much more.  You can monitor opinions, gauge performance, and collect sales information in real time from all around the globe.  You can learn a great deal from data – but you can’t learn everything.  You can never completely eliminate the risk of the future no matter how much you measure.  Yet everyday businesses regularly find themselves in a state of paralysis by analysis, searching for the perfect answer instead of actually acting on a probable outcome.  They are unwilling to take risks until the course of future is seemingly certain – which, of course, is an illusion.

We can’t measure the future.  What we can do is continuously use data to be reasonably confident in probability, realistic in expectation, and responsive to the results of our measurements.  We look for trends.  We address the obvious.  We dig deeper where appropriate.  But we realize that we can’t ever be certain.  Perhaps you can simply use the teachings of Heisenberg to move you from waiting for the perfect answer, the ideal scenario, the one big chance to accepting the uncertainty of the universe and choosing to make something happen.  You never know what might happen.

Sound familiar?  These things happen to presenters all the time.  With so many different versions of software and hardware, permissions and capabilities, versions and restrictions, there are a lot of things that can ruin a presentation.  It is always good to have a few tricks up your sleeve to avoid unnecessary presentation disasters.  Here are a few of my favorite tips:

1. Save Your Presentation as a PDF File – This is a very easy way to avoid problems.  By saving your presentation as a .pdf file you avoiding using PowerPoint all together.  By doing so you eliminate the worry of font compatibility, versioning, chart rendering, and other common issues.  This is especially useful if you are presenting using equipment other than your own in instances where you use unique fonts or more complex graphical images.  Just open the presentation in Adobe Acrobat Reader, put it in full screen mode, and go.  To the audience, there is no difference on the screen from PowerPoint. This trick is also great when you need to email your presentation to someone else, as the .pdf version is usually considerably smaller than it’s PowerPoint counterpart.  The only drawback of this method is that you can’t use the Presenter Tools and Speaker Notes that are included in PowerPoint.  Ideally, this is a great “plan B” option for a presenter.
2. Multiple PowerPoint Formats – You can easily save a presentation as a .pptx .ppts .pps and .ppt file – one of which should be able to be read by PowerPoint.  Check to make sure that charts and graphs created in newer versions of PowerPoint were not mangled in the conversion process.   Additionally, check to make sure that fonts and other elements were not modified.
3. Thumbs Up – In addition to saving copies of your presentation on your computer, save your presentation on a thumb drive or an external hard drive.  This is a simple way to make sure that if you are unable to use your own laptop for the presentation, you can still get access your presentation.  This is also helpful if your presentation files got lost by the organizer of the presentation, who asked you to email them in advance.
4. Email Yourself – Send multiple versions of your presentation to a web based email account like Gmail.  I have been to places where thumb drives are outlawed, and where I was not able to use my own computer either.  Having a web based back-up allows you to have easy access the files.  If you can get to the internet from the computer you are using for the presentation, you can simply download the most appropriate version.  If you can not get access to the web, you can use a mobile device to forward the presentation to someone who can access the files and help.  Additionally, this makes it very easy to send the slides to anyone who requests them.
5. Share & Share Alike – Upload your presentation to SlideShare.com where you can either present directly from the site or download the presentation and present it.  Both are viable options for a presenter to fall back upon.   Not only that, people all around the world can view, share, and comment on your presentation – spreading your message, building your reputation, and improving your content.

You can’t prepare for everything, but hopefully these simple little tricks will help ensure the success of your next presentation.

What tips and tricks do you use to eliminate presentation problems?

Social media and technology are similar. Once upon a time (like 3 years ago), just having a blog was noteworthy. Not so long ago just being on Facebook or Twitter was fascinating to people. It was experimental. It was new. It was fascinating that real people could really talk to one another. However we are quickly moving from an initial experimentation, past fascination to a time where social technologies are an expectation. Just being there is no longer enough to raise a lot of eyebrows. Being there is like color television – an expectation.

Now, we are starting to ask “why?” when a company lacks a social presence on the web. Businesses with no social presence look more and more like black and white television every day. Meanwhile, our fascination with just having colors on a television is being replaced with actually paying attention to the shows that are on it. A couple of years ago, if your company decided to actually talk to customers publicly on the web, people would talk about how innovative your firm was. Now, not being there is what people talk about. Seems crazy, but the world is evolving very rapidly these days, and those that can not adapt will struggle.

Every disruptive new technology changed the market simply through its mere introduction and adoption. The car killed the buggy whip. The telephone killed the telegraph. Early adopters who figure out new applications for new technology often reap rewards, but once everyone adopts it is not an advantage in and of itself. It is just another expectation. My first sales job required me and my colleagues to use pay phones frequently. When I got a cell phone, it made me faster than them… for a while. Then they caught on, and it became an expectation. The same is now true with smart phones and mobile devices that empower us to be productive anytime, anywhere. It becomes an expectation, and the playing field levels. Results were driven by the adoption of technology, but really had more to do with just being good at sales. Technology can drive efficiency, but it requires effectiveness to create real results.

I am not smart enough to claim to know what platforms will be most successful 2 years from now, nor am I dumb enough to lie about it. There is still a significant amount of experimentation going on in the space, driving continued fascination for me and others. What I do know is that regardless of where you do it, openly engaging with people is becoming an expectation. Get over your apprehension. Do some experimentation. Move beyond fascination, and get busy with going far beyond the new level of expectation.

Bottom line: Figure out how technology can improve your processes and empower your people. Use it to be more efficient with things and more effective with people. Make it easy for people talk about the amazing things you do for your customers, and not just the fact that you are using technology.

It is the same challenge, day after day. Get up and go or sit on the sidelines. 100% up to me. If it is the morning, do I hit the snooze bar 10 times or get out of bed, lace up my shoes, rub the sleep from my eyes, and go. If it is the evening, do I put the kids to sleep and plop down in front of the television or do I head out the front door and run. One decision. One small step. One choice that will determine my fate. If I say yes. If I take one simple stride, all that follow come very easily. It all starts with the decision to take the first step.

Why is this so? I suppose one could look to Sir Isaac Newton’s first law of motion which says that “every body will persist in its state of rest or of uniform motion (constant velocity) in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed on it.”

It is always easier to do nothing. To find an excuse not to run. To put it off until tomorrow. To make the decision not to move. Getting yourself in motion requires you to exert considerable force. However once you have taken that one tiny step to overcome inertia, it is incredibly easy to keep going.

Whether you want to run a marathon, improve your community, learn to play guitar, start your own business, create a blog, write a book, go back to school, find a new job, spend more time playing with your kids, whatever… realize that you are probably just one little step away from making it happen. Just one step can change everything.

It’s just one step. Take it.

Isaac Newton, The Principia, A new translation by I.B. Cohen and A. Whitman, University of California press, Berkeley 1999.

Image R.E.D. by sling@flickr.com

Without question the cover of the book would have featured none other than the famous statue known as Big Butter Jesus (also referred to as Touchdown Jesus.)  Sadly, my dream may have gone up in smoke last night, as Big Butter Jesus went up in flames after being struck by lightning.  No big statue = no book.

I must admit that I am a little saddened by the news of the statues demise, and not just because it puts my little project in jeopardy.  The statue, though strange, was something I grew to enjoy over time.  While it was not fine art, it was fun.  My kids have grown up using it as a reference point for how far we are from home.  It was also a great way to describe where I live to people from other parts of the country – “I’m just a little north of the Big Giant Jesus Statue on I-75.”  This often cued up an immediate recognition of where I was describing, and usually led to a fun discussion of the statue.  I suppose if the measure of art is it’s ability to start conversations, than this statue was about as good as art gets.

I offer my condolences to the congregation of the church who lost their beloved statue and to the people of Southwestern Ohio who have lost one of our most interesting and entertaining landmarks.  Meanwhile I pray for an eventual resurrection of both the statue as well as my fun little book project.  Amen!

Well economics aside, all this World’s Fair talk takes me back to a sweltering day in the summer of 1982 when my parents loaded up the Ford Fairmont wagon and headed off to Knoxville, Tennessee for The World’s Fair.  Here are some of my fond memories of that excursion.

• Being the youngest of 3, I was lucky enough to ride in the back of the station wagon by myself with the luggage and the endlessly squeaking Styrofoam cooler.

• We actually made the trip to Knoxville from the mountains of Western North Carolina, where we were staying with family.  While this was a shorter drive than going there from Springfield, Ohio, it was also a considerably more adventurous ride.  My dad, who grew up driving in the mountains, was more than comfortable pulling a few g’s racing around curvy, narrow, gravel, mountain roads at high speeds.  Meanwhile, the rest of the “Draggin Wagon” passengers were passing around a bed pan so that we could vomit without having to stop the car and jeopardize our chances of “making good time.”  This made the way back, devoid of windows that opened,  smell wonderful.  Nothing like being packed in with luggage, staring off into the abyss of a mountain valley, wondering if this would be the last time you ever got to hold a plastic pan of vomit.

• We played slug-bug, which is much more fun if you are the older, taller, stronger, more well seated siblings who can actually see outside of the car.
• The Fair was very hot.  My older brother and sister left to go ride rides, have fun, probably meet famous people like Kenny Rogers and do awesome stuff (at least that is what this 9 year old imagined).  Mom, dad, and I walked toward a building that contained an exhibit for Mexico.  We stood in a very long line.  We went into the building, which was very dark inside.  We read about Mexico on poorly designed displays.  We went back outside.  It was hot.  We found another county.  We stood in a very long line… you get the idea.
• I was such a pain in the ass that my mom and dad made me sit on the lawn outside of the amphitheater where they were watching some sort of country jamboree play.  I was not really down with this form of entertainment, and apparently must have just bothered them for so long that I got a World’s Fair time out.  I don’t fully remember the details of that part, but I know that I was told to go sit in the spot on the lawn where they could see me and not to move until they got done watching the show.
• There was a big gold disco ball on an iron tower.   It was called the Sun Sphere.  Apparently it was symbolic of our solar energy future.  How fitting.  You could even eat dinner inside of it.  However, we… did not choose to go up into it, because the line for the cool disco ball restaurant that I really wanted to see was too long.  Instead I think we went to see the Canada exhibit, where we stood in line.
• I scored an awesome trucker hat, which our cat later peed on.  It got thrown away. (the hat, not the cat)

My parents picked up a 1982 World’s Fair coffee mug which is now my all time favorite mug to drink my morning coffee from.  It is pictured here in the post.  I applaud my parents for having the bravery to drag the family to the 1982 World’s Fair.  I am sure that between tickets, parking, food, and other expenses it was not a cheap day.  I am also sure that they were doing their best to provide us with cultural exposure and give us a fun family day to remember for the rest of our lives.  In spite of the fact that the day was not ideal for this 9 year old, looking back I am glad that they regularly did this kind of stuff.  Sorry it took me decades of time and actually becoming a parent to understand.

Now, as my kids complain about breakfast, or getting dressed, or not wanting to do something, I can take a sip of coffee from my 1982 World’s Fair mug and have a laugh at myself before completely losing it.  As a parent, it is about trying to make it work – trying to build memories.  If that day had been perfect, chances are I would not remember it at all.  It is the looking back on the perfect day gone awry that makes us chuckle.

To Knoxville, I thank you for your hospitality.  To Shanghai, I wish all of the 100 million visitors who attend your World’s Fair enjoy it as much, and not a bit more, than I enjoyed my World’s Fair experience.

This year I have been trying to pay a little more attention to my health.  I now find myself exercising much more, trying to get a little more sleep, and paying more attention to the things that I eat and drink every day.  As part of this effort to live better, I have been trying to incorporate flax seed into my diet because of it’s reported ability to lower cholesterol, stabilize blood pressure, fight off cancer, and other assorted wonders.

Something I discovered is that wanting to eat more flax is not as easy as actually eating more flax.  First, it is not something you normally think of as an ingredient, so it takes some intentional effort to include it.  Perhaps the biggest barrier for me was simply that it came in a box, which was stored in my pantry – out of sight, out of mind.  I needed to make it more accessible to use and more convenient to incorporate into my diet.  I needed to make Flax easier.

So how do you make something like flax seed easier to consume.  Well, it occurred to me that the spices and seasonings I use most often are salt, pepper, and sugar.  Is it because these are my favorites?  Nope, they are just the most readily accessible.  All 3 of these things have their own special containers, ensuring they are always within arms reach of any meal.  So why not create a Flax shaker?  That is what I did.

I bought a simple sugar pourer and loaded it up with ground brown flax seed.  As a result I find it much easier to incorporate flax into my diet.  An example of this is at breakfast, where I typically start the day with some yogurt.  Now it just takes 2 seconds to sprinkle a little flax right on top and make my healthy breakfast just a little more healthy.  By using the sugar pourer for flax, I have very quickly converted this into a habitual part of my routine.  In addition to being highly caffeinated, I am also fully flaxinated.  Hopefully, this little switch will make a big difference in my health.  Time will tell.

What little tricks and tips do you have to improve your diet?