It is easier to keep going than it is to get going.

I am sure someone smarter than me has said this before (and most likely in more poignant terms), but this simple concept popped into my head the other day and I thought I would share it will all of you.

I thought of it in relation to the Daily Attitude Emails.

If you had asked me a year and a half ago to send a couple hundred positive emails over the next 18 months, I probably wouldn’t have begun at all.

But at this point, it is easier to keep going that it would be to get going on this.

Think about the positive habits in your life that you want to expand on.

Exercising once a week? Good start….keep going and add another day or two.

Eating healthy once or twice a week? Good start….keep that up and add one or two more healthy meals in there.

Whatever it is for you, if you have found something positive that you have started on, keep going. It is much easier to keep it up than to start all over.

Jake

I love my job.

Although there are NUMEROUS reasons why I love working at Mavidea, I thought that I would put together a “Top 10” list for today’s Daily Attitude Email. I feel very blessed to be part of this awesome team and here is why:

1. We do the right thing…EVERY DAY. Nothing less, just the right thing. This is evident most often when we perform service for the client. We navigate ourselves with the idea that we are going to do what is right by the client…not based on what is best for Mavidea’s bottom line.

2. We have a diverse team. As we have grown, we have increasingly become more diverse and this will continue as we grow even more. I believe that we have an atmosphere that embraces different perspectives and backgrounds. We are all a team with a unified focus on our clients and each other.

3. We execute. You have heard me say that we are out-executing other firms in our industry and that is the truth. Execution takes focus, hard work, consistency and effective communication. I see all of those attributes daily and as a result, we are moving at a pace most IT firms never experience.

4. We are focused on our culture. Mavidea must be a place that creates an enjoyable lifestyle for each Mavidean. Each one of us is accountable for helping the company enrich our culture and we all embrace that.

5. We love to have fun. We work hard, but we play hard too. This is definitely part of why we have a great culture, but even so, it is worth pointing out. We all know it is OK to be goofy or belt out a song/dance or shoot someone with a Nerf dart when the time is right.

6. We are Go Givers. I have witnessed firsthand numerous scenarios where our Go Giverosity (yes, it’s a word…now) has inspired other organizations to also be Go Givers. In an important way, it is changing our community and touching the lives of so many others outside of Mavidea.

7. We care what people think about us. Almost 5 years ago, we started a company dedicated to serving others. As a result, we care about how that service impacts people. We do our best to generate feedback from our clients as well as our team so that we can continue to improve what we do.

8. We have humility. As a young company, we have had to get out of our own way. We could easily be too proud to make changes or too stubborn to identify and acknowledge our weaknesses. However, we take the opposite approach and genuinely WANT to know how we can improve things within our company. Mistakes are part of the learning process and allow us to get better. We would have never grown this quickly if we had a different approach.

9. We have sooooooooooo much potential. If you think the first 5 years were crazy, HANG ON…it’s going to be a wild ride during the next 5 years. We have built something really special and we will continue to grow and evolve. I firmly believe we can accomplish ANYTHING we set our minds on. Look out, world, here comes Madvideo!

10. Jake’s Daily Attitude Emails. Wow. Can you believe Jake cares about us enough to spend 15-30 minutes early each morning to put this email together? He does this in an attempt to help each of us have a better day and I am grateful. Thank you for doing what you can each day to make a difference. It inspires me to be a better person and work harder myself to make a difference too.

Man, I love you guys.

Everybody Wang Chung tonight…

Erik Barnlund

CEO

Mavidea Technology Group

Security. Stability. Serenity.

www.mavidea.com

erik

Office: 309-829-2000 x104

Toll Free: 888-898-8960

“Don’t crash into that nice lady in the monster truck with the neck tattoos, Brandon!”

This phrase seems to be a daily occurrence around my home. Well, at least a variation of it. I’m someone who likes to play games and find myself constantly making up new ones with my fiancée, the aforementioned Brandon. One of these is “the nice lady” or “the nice man” game.

Here’s how we play:

Everywhere we go, everyone we meet, no matter how gruff or gnarled, we call nice. This could be the lady at Kroger who just rammed her shopping cart in my knees or a guy who cut me off in a yellow, wood-paneled PT Cruiser. Certainly our tone changes (read: laced with irony) depending on whom we mention, but we still try to call everyone nice. In the beginning it resulted in raucous laughter from me, but now the game has taken on a new form: I’m starting to mean what I say.

The thing is, the more people you meet, the more lives you’re involved with, the more you realize how complicated life can be. You never know what someone is secretly going through or what their unspoken struggle is. You don’t know their childhood, their current family situation, or perhaps more simply, the particular way their body is feeling today. Giving people the benefit of the doubt, the clean slate of just being the “nice lady” or “nice man,” is just one way to admit, “yeah, we’re all human.”

Sometimes I find myself hesitating to write in emails, “I hope all this meets you well,” because I can’t see what’s happening on the receiving end of my message. But I do hope that for everyone – even the most difficult of people – things are well.

Let’s keep it up, keep hoping, keep being fast and friendly. Let’s play “the nice game” and wipe the slate clean (even with ourselves). There’s no telling how things might improve.

-BA

No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.

Charles Dickens

Last night I started listening to Zig Ziglar’s seminar entitled "Born to Win" and he referenced the quote above.

It really struck me, especially in reference to Zig’s train of thought at the time. Zig was talking about how each of us is valuable and how we should never talk down about ourselves.

And the simple framework offered by Charles Dickens in this quote clarified this thought for me.

No one is useless who serves someone else in this world.

Think about yourself and your life.

I guarantee that each of us serves someone else every day.

At the very least, we work at Mavidea, a business built around service.

What an opportunity! We have the opportunity to be useful every day, and we get paid for it.

Make it a point today to find someone to be of service to. Look for those opportunities to be useful in your life and you will be amazed at what you find.

You will find a son or daughter needing their father or mother.

You will find a husband or wife that needs your love.

You will find friends and family whose burdens could be lightened.

You will find customers and coworkers that need to see a servant heart in another.

You will find strangers seeking for others to show them that this world isn’t quite as cold and heartless as they supposed.

You will find yourself, serving and becoming something bigger and better every time you seize an opportunity to serve.

Make it a great day full of service to others.

Jake

"Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see."

CS Lewis

Zachary Dale Warmbir was born yesterday to Jamie and Charlotte.

As I thought of them yesterday I was reminded of the daily attitude email I had written previously when Erik and Bridget had Rowen.

I thought I would send it out again as all I could think about yesterday was the miracle that is a new life coming into this world.

Congrats again to Jamie and Charlotte.

Jake

Control.

It seems to me that one of the odd paradoxes of life is our ability to control nothing and everything at the same time.

We have no control over all the external things in our lives, yet we have complete control over ourselves and our attitude and this attitude is what attracts and brings about the external environment we desire.

I suppose that life is a balancing act between mastery of our own mind and letting the rest of life happen.

Below is a list of “to let go’s” that I found when searching for a topic for today. Maybe one of them will inspire you to let go of something that is holding you back.

Make it a great week.

Jake

To let go does not mean to stop caring, it means I can’t do it for someone else.

To let go is not to cut myself off, it’s the realization that I can’t control another.

To let go is not to enable, but to allow learning from natural consequences.

To let go is to admit powerlessness, which means the outcome is not in my hands.

To let go is not to try to change or blame another, it’s to make the most of myself.

To let go is not to care for, but to care about.

To let go is not to fix, but to be supportive.

To let go is not to judge, but to allow another to be a human being.

To let go is not to be in the middle arranging all the outcomes, but to allow others to affect their own destinies.

To let go is not to be protective, it’s to permit another to face reality.

To let go is not to criticize, or regulate anyone, but to try to become what I dream I can do.

To let go is to fear less, and to love more.

I have recently been listening to Good to Great by Jim Collins.

I wanted to share one of his concepts from the book about taking personal responsibility.

He called it the window vs. the mirror.

He explains that great leaders look out the window when seeking to apportion praise and adulations for things accomplished. Even to the extent of crediting "luck" when not finding something specific out that window to give the credit to.

This is in contrast to those less successful leaders that looked out the window when seeking to apportion blame or to understand how and why things didn’t go there way. Again, these people blamed "luck" (the bad kind in this case) when they couldn’t find a specific cause, person or issue to affix the blame to.

When poor leaders looked for the place to apportion credit or offer the proverbial high-five, they looked in the mirror. They looked to their own egos and accomplishments when looking back at how their company performed.

In stark contrast, the successful leaders looked in the mirror to apportion blame. When asked why something went awry, they blamed themselves and took personal responsibility for those things that didn’t pan out according to plans.

I don’t think you have to be a management guru or notable author to figure out that these principles apply whether you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or if you are a homeless beggar on the street.

Next time you have some blame or reward to dole out, just picture a mirror and a window in your mind’s eye before you do so.

Jake

Mowing the yard is not on my list of favorite things to do. But, while mowing the yard the other day, I got a pleasant surprise.

I was mowing along and then happened to look up at our front porch. I saw two little girls and their mom cheering me along as mowed.

If you know our two little ones, you know that they can get excited over virtually anything, so this isn’t an email to explain how praiseworthy my mowing skills are.

The point of today’s email is that we all need a cheerleader sometimes. Sometimes you just need a little pick me up from someone in your life cheering you on towards your goals.

Having my own cheerleading crew certainly lifted my spirits.

Think today about whose spirits you can lift.

Who in your life needs a cheerleader?

Who needs someone jumping up and down in excitement for them?

Find that someone in your life and cheer them on.

Speaking of cheerleaders, I couldn’t resist sending out this clip:

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/Cheerleaders-Cold-Opening/1355399

Jake

“A poor sailor blames the wind.”

I heard this quote the other day and it stuck in my head.

Kind of self-explanatory, so I won’t write much about it.

Today is a more of a reminder.

If you want to be the best you can be, you must not blame the circumstances of your life, you must learn to turn them into positives.

You can’t blame the wind.

Jake

Today is officially tax day for this year in the United States.

I am going to suggest that we all work toward becoming happy taxpayers.

We must learn to gladly pay the prices for living in this great nation of ours.

Think of all the good things paid for with your tax dollars:

· Sidewalks

· Streets

· Firemen

· Policemen

· Armed forces

I think we should learn to take it as a point of pride to help pay for those things that make our nation so great. Being able to participate in such a system (with all its imperfections) is a blessing.

Make it a great day.

Jake