Liz Strauss at Successful Blog

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SOB Business Cafe: 10 Posts that Inspired My IZEAFest Talk

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SB Cafe

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

We offer the best in thinking — articles, books, podcasts, and videos about business online written by the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the titles to enjoy each selection.

IZEAFest Edition

This weekend I get the pleasure of speaking at IZEAFest at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida. What an awesome experience that was and how cool to be among so many Internet friends. You can out more about the experience and how to be part of it at IZEAFest.com

izeafest


My conversation, Navigating and Networking in the Seamless Concrete-Virtual Universe, is about the question How can you leverage relationships to become successful in business? Naturally personal identity, an irresistible offer, conversation, and community online and offline will be important and featured throughout.

The Specials this Week are

Ten posts that inspired my IZEAFest talk.

Internet Fame, Leaps of Faith, and the Truth from Guy

Internet famous isn’t “Oprah famous” . . . not even close . . . and the Internet forgets quickly.

When I asked Internet Rockstar, Guy Kawasaki, about what bloggers should know about blogging as business, he said. …

Enough About Me, Let’s Talk About What You Think

I call him up. He answers.
I say, “Hi, Eddie, how am I?”
He replies, “Oh, you’re fine. What do you think of me?”

Cool Kids, Granny Dresses, and Back Channel Intercoms: How Do You Trust People You Can’t See?

I heard them talk and laugh. They were talking “cool talk” about how cool they were and how cool I was not.

A Barn Raisers Guide: 7 Ways to Leave the Field of Dreams to Build a Thriving Reality

Barn Raisers avoid the risk by building the community as they build the site. They believe that people will help build a powerful idea. Barn Raisers invite collaboration from the people they’ll be serving and so what they build is often a gathering place for people even before it’s fully finished.

Why Play the Game, If We Aren’t Playing for Keeps?

I was in the game, but I wasn’t playing with all that was in me.

I looked around and saw I wasn’t the only one that was holding back.

Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Chris Brogan!

He was instant community. He was kind of like Tom Sawyer. He could smile around a corner.

Is Your Strategy About Winning Opportunities?

Strategy isn’t a plan, a decision, a goal, a destination.
It’s a tool for leveraging who you are, what you know, where you are, the environment, and how people think and respond to each other. Strategy is a system for improving your position.

The Traffic Game, Auditioning Ants, and How Communities Grow

… by the time I came along, the neighborhood wasn’t much more than a huge space that people came to eat and sleep.

How Do You Get a Community to Help Build Your Business?

The beauty of enlisting a social media community from the start is that communities only have time for ideas that will work.

Extreme Hesitation and Extreme Strategy: Are You Willing to Own Your Life?

Because deeply knowing where you’re going is irresistibly attractive.

Sit back. Enjoy your read. Nachos and drinks will be right over. Stay as long as you like. No tips required. Comments appreciated.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Have You Tried Letting the Other Guy See Why You’re Invested?

Filed Under Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 1 Comment

What If You Let Them See?

Change the World!

His name was Michael. He was all of six years old, and he had a crush on me. That was only right I was his first grade teacher and I had a crush on him and every other kid that sat in the classroom with him.

Michael was a beautiful, logical, and thoughtful young student who liked to help make things go the way they should. I was young enough to think I could control things.

Every time we’d go as a class to anywhere, Michael would somehow end up at the front of the line. At some moment he’d get about four feet ahead of me … I’d make a point of NOT telling him where we were going, but he’d still take the lead.

Some days that bothered me. I thought about what that meant about me, about what that meant about him. Why should I care about a six year old wandering ahead of me? But I did. I wanted to lead the line. It was as simple as that.

One day, I stopped the line. I got down on my knees and looked Michael in the eyes with as much gentleness as I could muster.

“Michael,” I said, “How old are you?”
He proudly replied. “I’m six years and 12 days old.”
I said, “Four years is a long, long time, isn’t it?”
He thought and replied, “Yes.” (Four years measured 2/3 of his life. I had him there.)
I quietly put forth this request. “Michael, you see, I went to college for four whole years so that I could lead the line. Would you let me lead the line?”
“Oh yes,” he answered.

He was generous in letting me lead the line from that moment forward. Sometimes solving a problem is as easy as letting the other guy why we’re invested in the outcome.

Have you tried letting the other guy see your investment?

We can change the world — just like that.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

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If you’re ready to change the world, send me your thoughts in a guest post. Feel free to take the gorgeous Change the World image up there that Sandy designed back to your blog. Or help yourself to this one.

Change the World!.

Email me about what you’re doing or what we might do. Let’s change the world one bit at a time together. Together it can’t take forever.

A Question of … Receiving?

Filed Under Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 11 Comments

Receiving Is a Gift of Its Own

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If I gave you a lovely white tulip for no reason, what would say or do upon receiving?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your web presence.

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Beach Art Gallery: Sculpture by the Sea

Filed Under Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 2 Comments

by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

A special local event each September for the past few years has been the Swell Sculpture Festival http://www.swellsculpture.com.au/ . Over ten days, as our southern hemisphere summer is in the wings, we join the throngs of people studying the sculptures all along the shorefront at beautiful Currumbin Beach.

This year, one sculpture which we both thought rather special was Richard Howie’s Wind Totems, made from oxidized recycled mild steel and recycled hardwood. The turning of the timber was absolutely masterful and the balancing of each work superb. The wooden vanes turned slowly, gracefully in the breeze.

windtotems



We loved the harmony of place, materials, artistic vision and execution. Much simpler than some of the other works on display, illustrating the old expression “art that conceals art”.

It’s easy to find complexity, dissonance and stress in the world today. Works like Wind Totems can encourage us to take the knowledge and skills we have in our businesses and our lives and focus our creative and productive energies in the direction of elegant, harmonious, inspiring simplicity.

The other work that appealed to us and had a fun element was Creation’s Heart by Wendy Johnson & Katrina Kelsey.

creationsheart


What inspires you?

Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh

Have You Ever Used the Power of Being an Original You?

Filed Under Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 13 Comments

I've been thinking . . .

about the search for the original idea.

I used to work to find only original ideas. Learning about true originality has be an education in business, self-awareness, and life for me.

True originality –a brand new idea — is rare. That’s probably a good thing too. True originality is expensive and hard to sell.

Original ideas are take time, precious time, to conceive, imagine, invent, and develop. They’re a risk of resources by the very fact that they’ve never been tried before. They’ve never stood a test or built a following.

The more original the idea — the harder it is to explain. Marketing is a huge endeavor — just figuring out how to describe something people have no experience with. How do you relate something that’s never been to what they know? How do you prove the value of something awesomely original?

And if no one has imagined it before me, no one is using Google to find it.

Those times I’ve had what was surely “a never been done before totally original idea,” I realized later that maybe other folks had been there before. Maybe they too had conceived my brainstorm and found that

These days “never been done before totally original” ideas doesn’t interest me.

What gets my attention is an “original YOU.”

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People who know their unique value can bring a unique something to an old idea — they can make something people know more personal, more profitable, and more pleasurable (or less of pain).

Have you ever used power of being an original you?

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