Make it count.

I was recently talking to someone and he said that was one of his favorite sayings.

What can you do today to make it count?

The sands of time are falling through the hour glass for each of us each and every day. We only get one chance to make it count.

Make it count today.

Jake

Not sure that it is official yet, but it sure feels like spring has sprung.

Yesterday, I thought of this Jim Rohn recording that I have sent out before.

http://youtu.be/xtglLqBiwGI

Spend the 2 minutes to listen to this and get fired up about taking advantage of this spring.

Make it a great day.

Jake

Stop and thank.

One of the members of the CBO 12 group that Erik and I attend mentioned this as an important thing to do in business.

I have thought about this frequently since then.

I have thought about how hard it is sometimes to just stop. And I don’t mean stop in the same sense that most of us do at a stop sign (the rolling stop), I am talking about a full blown stop. I have been working on finding a quiet time to just stop and it has been much more difficult that I thought it would be.

Zig Ziglar recommends 15 minutes every day in complete silence by yourself. I certainly haven’t found that yet, but can imagine the positive effects it would have.

And thank. We all have so much to be thankful for. Jim Rohn says that being thankful opens up life’s doors and windows allowing all the good stuff to flow in. I personally believe that the “good stuff” in life (however you define that for yourself) goes where it is appreciated.

Take a moment today to stop and thank.

Jake

Below is a short little story to start your week off.

This story reminded me that there are people out there that have it much harder than I do. I have yet to work at a job plucking chickens, and that was the least of the difficulties.

This story also reminded me of turning lemons into lemonade. We all have personality quirks, idiosyncrasies, and personal issues; and we all have the opportunity to turn these into something special. Something that only we can do.

Make it a great day.

Jake

A true short bio – A DREAMER AND HIS DREAM

Let me tell you, Jesse hated this job. And you would too I imagine, if you had to do it. Jesse was a chicken plucker. That’s right. He stood on a line in a chicken factory and spent his days pulling the feathers off dead chickens so the rest of us wouldn’t have to.

It wasn’t much of a job. But at the time, Jesse didn’t think he was much of a person. His father was a brute of a man. His dad was actually thought to be mentally ill and treated Jesse rough all of his life.

Jesse’s older brother wasn’t much better. He was always picking on Jesse and beating him up. Yes, Jesse grew up in a very rough home in West Virginia. Life was anything but easy.

And he thought life didn’t hold much hope for him. That’s why he was standing in this chicken line doing a job that very few people wanted.

In addition to all the rough treatment at home, it seems that Jesse was always sick. Sometimes it was real physical illness, but way too often it was all in his head. He was a small child, skinny and meek. That sure didn’t help the situation any.

When he started to school, he was the object of every bully on the playground.

He was a hypochondriac of the first order. For Jesse, tomorrow was not always something to be looked forward to. But, he had dreams. He wanted to be a ventriloquist. He found books on ventriloquism. He practiced with sock puppets and saved his hard earned dollars until he could get a real ventriloquist dummy.

When he got old enough, he joined the military. And even though many of his hypochondriac symptoms persisted, the military did recognize his talents and put him in the entertainment corp. That was when his world changed.

He gained confidence. He found that he had a talent for making people laugh, And laugh so hard they often had tears in their eyes.

Yes, little Jesse had found himself. You know, folks, the history books are full of people who overcame a handicap to go on and make a success of themselves, but Jesse is one of the few I know who didn’t overcome it. Instead he used his paranoia to make a million dollars, and become one of the best-loved characters of all time in doing it!

Yes, that little paranoid hypochondriac, who transferred his nervousness into a successful career, still holds the record for the most Emmy’s given in a single category.

The wonderful, gifted, talented, and nervous comedian who brought us Barney Fife was Jesse Don Knotts.

NOW YOU KNOW, "THE REST OF THE STORY"

There is a street named for him and his statue in Morgantown, West Virginia, his place of birth.

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. Matthew 7:7

I think I have sent this verse out before, but yesterday I learned something new about it.

Meaghan was telling me last night that she learned that the word in Greek that was translated to seek in this verse could also be translated to crave.

Definitely brings a different perspective on seeking out our goals.

Do you have a craving for your goals?

Does your craving to lose weight outweigh your craving for chocolate?

Does your craving to save money outweigh your craving for some new clothes?

Does your craving to get smarter and better outweigh your craving to watch TV?

If we can find a way to crave our goals and what we want to become more than we crave some of the short term satisfactions of life, we can accomplish our goals and build a future filled with success and happiness.

One last point. This is an area that is a great candidate to "fake it until you make it". Find some way to trick yourself into craving your goal more than the alternative long enough to actually build up that craving.

Make it a great day.

Jake

Today we are starting off with a mid week toe tapper:

http://youtu.be/MSXlpGpepiM

Maggie picked which version of the song to send out…

I thought of this song this morning and was thinking that a lot of goal setting and wanting to be your best comes down to respecting yourself.

Having a respect for the unique, talented and special person you are and were created to be is a first step in doing your best to maximize all that you can be.

If you have this deep down respect for yourself, you won’t let others or circumstances get you down. Why would you? You are special and there is nothing anyone can do to take that away from you.

If you have this deep down respect for yourself, you won’t quit or set easy goals for yourself. You will push hard and set harder and harder goals for yourself.

Make it a great day.

Jake

Below is a story I found online about perseverance.

A great reminder to never give up and that no matter how dark things may seem at any given point, be hopeful for the future.

Make it a great day.

Jake

Things Change

Alex W. Miller

For most people, graduation is an exciting day – the culmination of years of hard work. My graduation day… was not.

I remember that weekend two years ago. Family and friends had flown in from across the country to watch our class walk across that stage. But like everyone else in my graduating class, I had watched the economy turn from bad to worse my senior year. We graduates had degrees, but very limited prospects. Numerous applications had not panned out and I knew that the next day, when my lease ended, I would no longer have a place to call home.

The weeks ahead weren’t easy. I gathered up everything I couldn’t carry and put it into storage. Then, because I knew my small university town couldn’t offer me any opportunities, I packed up my car and drove to Southern California to find work. But what I thought would take a week dragged into two, and then four, and 100 job applications later, I found myself in the exact same spot as I was before. And the due date to begin paying back my student loans was creeping ever closer.

You know that feeling when you wake up and you are just consumed with dread? Dread about something you can’t control – that sense of impending failure that lingers over you as you hope that everything that happened to you thus far was just a bad dream? That feeling became a constant in my life.

Days felt like weeks, weeks like months, and those many months felt like an unending eternity of destitution. And the most frustrating part was no matter how much I tried, I just couldn’t seem to make any progress.

So what did I do to maintain my sanity? I wrote. Something about putting words on a page made everything seem a little clearer – a little brighter. Something about writing gave me hope. And if you want something badly enough… sometimes a little hope is all you need!

I channeled my frustration into a children’s book. Beyond the River was the story of an unlikely hero featuring a little fish who simply refused to give up on his dream.

And then one day, without any sort of writing degree or contacts in the writing world – just a lot of hard work and perseverance – I was offered a publishing contract for my first book! After that, things slowly began to fall into place. I was offered a second book deal. Then, a few months later, I got an interview with The Walt Disney Company and was hired shortly after.

The moral of this story is… don’t give up. Even if things look bleak now, don’t give up. Two years ago I was huddled in my car drinking cold soup right out of the can. Things change.

If you work hard, give it time, and don’t give up, things will always get better. Oftentimes our dreams lie in wait just a little further upstream… all we need is the courage to push beyond the river.

If you are going to kill time, work it to death. Earl Anderson

Earl has said this to me several times and every time I hear it I like it a little more.

When you look at how you spend your time, how much of your time are you killing? How much of your day slips through your fingers never to be seen again?

We need to find ways to stop killing, spending, and wasting time and begin investing it.

Invest your time in relationships.

Invest you time in building your skills.

Invest your time in working on yourself.

The second part of this quote that I like is that it involves work.

If you have time to kill, find something to work on. Find something productive to do instead of just letting those minutes and hours float right on past you.

It is easy to think sometimes that we can avoid the hard work part of turning ourselves into a happier person. We see others who appear to be not working hard but still seem happy and think it is that easy.

I’m convinced that most of the important things in life require hard work. So we need to embrace the hard work in front of us.

Make it a great week.

Jake