TGIF! This in from BJ Gallagher's friend and Chellie, who is featured in It's Never Too Late to Be What You Might Have Been. May it inspire you!
“The world isn’t interested in the storms you encountered, but whether or not you brought in the ship.”—Raul Armesto
The marketplace is unforgiving. People want the goods and services they pay for to be delivered as ordered, on time, and at a reasonable price. They want it to be the best solution to their problem or the best benefit they can afford and work as advertised. If you fail in any of that, they will find someone else to provide it.
They don’t care if you’re sick, you’re in debt, you had a problem with your boyfriend, you’re stressed about the state of the economy, you’re afraid you might lose your house or have already lost it. They don’t care that you were late because there was traffic on the freeway or your computer crashed or your childcare didn’t show up on time. As fellow human beings, they will sympathize and pat you on the back—for a short while. And then they will find someone else to fulfill their needs. They have to in order to survive themselves.
They also don’t care if you are invested in an old business model that is quickly being replaced in the marketplace by a new one. The post office is failing because email has largely replaced expensive snail mail. Newspapers are failing because people can get more up-to-the-minute news from the internet—for free. Too bad if you bought a One Hour Photo franchise – digital cameras have made them practically obsolete. Joel Barker produced a video years ago “The Business of Paradigms” in which he said that “When the paradigm shifts, everyone goes back to zero.”
When Henry Ford invented the automobile, I don’t imagine the horse-and-buggy crowd were too thrilled, especially if they were invested in making buggies and raising and selling horses. They were about to go out of business. When Thomas Edison threw the switch and lit up a building in New York for his investors and formed General Electric, the makers of gas lamps were doomed. Unless they could shift their own paradigm and start making electric lamps instead!
Here are some amazingly blind-to-the-future quotes:
“The phonograph is not of any commercial value.”—Thomas Edison, inventor of the phonograph
“Who the hell want to hear actors talk?”—Harry Warner, Warner Brothers Pictures, 1927
“There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.”--Ken Olsen, President, DEC Computers, 1977
“Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote.”—Grover Cleveland, President of the United States, 1905
So where are you in your thinking today? Are you trying to hold on to a business model that has been replaced by a new one and so is no longer sustainable in its present form? Has all the doom and gloom in the news got you complaining about the way things are and what’s happened like a Tuna instead of looking to the future and figuring out how to make something new happen like the Dolphin you truly are? While so many of the big publishers today are struggling and trying to figure out how to maintain their business in this new day of the internet, my publisher, Sourcebooks, led by the amazing Dominique Raccah, has embraced the new media. They are creating e-books out of all their backlist, and adapting them to smart phone apps. As a result, they are more profitable than ever before!
So instead of moaning about what’s lost, embrace what’s new! I declare the recession is over - for all of you who are my Dolphins. Yes, change is hard, and you may have gotten hurt by all the turmoil in the financial markets. Hey, me too, but so what? Crying about failure isn’t going to get you where you want to go. It’s time now to return to optimism, invent new products, services, and strategies for achieving your dreams. It’s an exciting new world – embrace it!
Seth Godin, author of “The Idea Virus” and many other books, writes in his blog:
All the evidence I've seen shows that positive thinking and confidence improves performance…it's been shown over and over again that it improves performance over negative thinking.
Key question then: why do smart people engage in negative thinking? Are they actually stupid?
The reason, I think, is that negative thinking feels good. In its own way, we believe that negative thinking works. Negative thinking feels realistic, or soothes our pain, or eases our embarrassment. Negative thinking protects us and lowers expectations.
In many ways, negative thinking is a lot more fun than positive thinking. So we do it.
If positive thinking was easy, we'd do it all the time. Compounding this difficulty is our belief that the easy thing (negative thinking) is actually appropriate, it actually works for us. The data is irrelevant. We're the exception, so we say.
Positive thinking is hard. Worth it, though.
Spend no more time crying over the lost paradigm - the one you were comfortable with, that made you a comfortable living…in the past. The world has changed, and there are customers waiting for you to bring in the new ship. Don’t waste any more time longing for the ship that has sailed. Ship #1 sank, so go build Ship #2 – or 5 or 20! Build new ships and send them out. There are still riches and happiness galore for you to find!
People are praying for you to show up with something that will meet their needs. Create it and find them. That’s your business.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Friday, September 11, 2009
Dean Ornish praising The Fatigue Prescription!
Foreword for Linda Hawes Clever, MD's The Fatigue Prescription
Like many people, it’s a continual struggle for me to find the right balance between doing good work in the world and enjoying my life. The irony was not lost on me many years ago when I locked myself in a room by myself to finish writing a book, Love & Survival, about the healing power of love and community… The book was overdue; they’re not called “dead-lines” for nothing.
Ultimately, I realized that this is a false choice. When I take care of myself, I can be much more useful in the world. You can’t give what you don’t have. The first organ that your heart pumps blood to is itself so that it can then take care of the rest of your body. And if your heart fails to nurture itself, your survival is impaired.
Dr. Linda Hawes Clever knows this from her own experience. She was inspired to write The Fatigue Prescription because of her own hard-won wisdom. Dr. Clever’s life experience emboldened her to help others avoid fatigue and the hardships that accompany it. “Physician, heal thyself” and she did.
Now, she is sharing her unique knowledge with you in this book. The timing is perfect, as we now live in a world that demands so much of us. She offers the science of self-help, practical, profound, and proven methods for wellness.
The Fatigue Prescription is remarkable because it uses facts, stories, and important questions, to encourage readers to dig deeper and live a life authentic to their own values. What you eat, how you respond to stress, and the quality of your relationships and social support may be as powerful as drugs and surgery in avoiding and treating many chronic diseases and fatigue. Readers who take Dr. Clever’s good prescription and excellent advice will find they are healthier, calmer, happier and have a new lease on life.
Dean Ornish, M.D.
Like many people, it’s a continual struggle for me to find the right balance between doing good work in the world and enjoying my life. The irony was not lost on me many years ago when I locked myself in a room by myself to finish writing a book, Love & Survival, about the healing power of love and community… The book was overdue; they’re not called “dead-lines” for nothing.
Ultimately, I realized that this is a false choice. When I take care of myself, I can be much more useful in the world. You can’t give what you don’t have. The first organ that your heart pumps blood to is itself so that it can then take care of the rest of your body. And if your heart fails to nurture itself, your survival is impaired.
Dr. Linda Hawes Clever knows this from her own experience. She was inspired to write The Fatigue Prescription because of her own hard-won wisdom. Dr. Clever’s life experience emboldened her to help others avoid fatigue and the hardships that accompany it. “Physician, heal thyself” and she did.
Now, she is sharing her unique knowledge with you in this book. The timing is perfect, as we now live in a world that demands so much of us. She offers the science of self-help, practical, profound, and proven methods for wellness.
The Fatigue Prescription is remarkable because it uses facts, stories, and important questions, to encourage readers to dig deeper and live a life authentic to their own values. What you eat, how you respond to stress, and the quality of your relationships and social support may be as powerful as drugs and surgery in avoiding and treating many chronic diseases and fatigue. Readers who take Dr. Clever’s good prescription and excellent advice will find they are healthier, calmer, happier and have a new lease on life.
Dean Ornish, M.D.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
What Makes You Happy?
Call for stories - please tell us what makes you happy!
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
reading for people who never could before!
This company is so cool- I love the story of how they started. Read on! bk
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Monday, August 24, 2009
Work Matters
Our author BJ Gallagher is quoted in the media nearly every day, from Wall Street Journal to the LA Times to everything in between. What makes BJ so appealing to the mass media is her sincerity. BJ thinks about what the journalist is trying to report to readers and gives them a great combination of very good common sense and sophisticated thinking, from her sociologist's background. It works wonders and she has impacted thousands and thousands of people in this way. Here is a great article debuting today on "Work Matters."
BJ is living proof that "It's Never Too Late to Be What You Might Have Been" each and every day! -Enjoy! Brenda
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
rethinking how you're going to live
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
no comments | be the first to comment!
no comments | be the first to comment!It’s hard to look at extremely optimistic titles in this terrible economic time, when we’re struggling with the balance between taking personal responsibility and coming to terms with how many things are really out of our control no matter how painful their effects can be.
While the world economy moves slowly to its new -and hopefully - more useful path, an awful lot of people are also rethinking how they’re going to live. People put their dreams and their lives on hold so they could earn promotions, show their loyalty, send their kids to school, save for retirement and live in great homes; only to suffer the loss of what they’ve worked so hard for.
And now they’re looking at whatever part of their lives ended up in shambles and asking themselves what they really want, often at a time when the question of what they can get hangs urgently in the foreground.
This book, by Southern California author BJ Gallagher, is a useful tool to have as people re-invent themselves. Her own life - a self-described late bloomer - serves up lessons alongside a menu of other people’s experiences and good advice for what to focus on.
For people who’ve lost their place in the working world - whether it was a lay-off, a family relocation or other circumstance, Gallagher looks at how to start with the best parts and useful skills of what they’ve already done and build it into a next career, as an employee or an entrepreneur.
For people ready to walk away from a career where they’ve burned out or have lost interest, or when they’ve succeeded and become bored, Gallagher lays out a road map for breaking the change into manageable steps between where they are now and where they want to go.
Education plays a big role in changing what we do, and Gallagher tells the stories of people who’ve learned to fly, learned to teach and how they’ve made learning work for them. But she also asks the critical questions in deciding whether or not more school actually helps. Are you doing this for yourself or to prove something to someone else? Do you need the credentials to make the change?
Each chapter, including those that suggest it’s never too late to make a happy marriage, become a jock, make enough money or express creativity, ends with a set of useful pointers. Some are gagging with New Age clichés, but others make an awful lot of sense.
It’s only at the end of the book that Gallagher reveals that she wrote the book for herself on the eve of a birthday with zero involved. Hopelessness, an old friend to all of us, suggested that it was too late for her to do the things she hadn’t - find love, wealth and fitness.
So she talked to her friends and gathered the stories of their remarkable growth into the people they wanted to be, that they accomplished well after 40 - including a couple who took up hiking in their 60s. And she shared the notebook with us to remind us that we didn’t stop being capable of the extraordinary even if our lives have become more ordinary than we’d planned.
Read more:http://www.sdnn.com/sandiego/2009-08-19/news/book-report-it’s-never-too-late-to-be-what-you-might-have-been#ixzz0OgDS2vS9
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