Successful Blog

Paths Crossing and History

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I've been thinking . . .

about paths crossing.

On the airplane coming home from Seattle and Gnomedex, a parade of exhuasted reflections were passing through my mind. They began because the man who sat beside me resembled the business partner I had traveled to the conference to meet. They stayed because of important conversations with important old and new friends like Beth Kanter, Brian Solis, Mark Davidson and Ponzi Pirillo. Mostly faces and important sentences kept crossing my mind. What was striking about them was that they were marking people and moments in my past, new friends in my present, and the future I as I want it to be.

Eric Rice and I couldn’t figure out how we knew each other. We finally gave up and decided that it must have been in some past life or that it hasn’t happened yet that we do. Duncan Riley and I have known each other so long and yet we just talked for the very first time.

Saturday night by a fireplace with Duncan and I talked about the days when we first started blogging to where life has brought us. At some point, Eric Rice happened by to take this photo.

And our paths crossed in time. Now they’re all part of my personal history.

Duncan-Riley-Liz-Strauss-Gnomedex08-by-Eric-Rice

How could I not value them?

Liz's Signature

Does It Have To Be Perfect?

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Beach Notes by Guest Writer Suzie Cheel

gday logo

On our beach walk on Saturday,
I asked Des this question.

Do you sometimes wonder why
you aren’t meeting the goals
you have set yourself and
may have even announced to the world?

Do you get satisfaction from ticking off your daily to do list or do you wonder what happened to the day? Maybe you have have even stopped making a to do list!

If you have fallen down on some of these things I know how you feel.

I looked at my life over the past week and asked “Hey what is going on here?”

I listened to that small inner voice, my intuition. I noticed how my tummy felt.

The answers came. I am great at getting clarity about where I am heading. Even better at setting big hairy goals.

What I haven’t been doing is following through on the tasks that need to done on the way to goals.

I also see my overachiever, Wonder Woman streak is coming out. Wonder Woman needs a holiday while I get on with business.

Putting that another way I have to accept the fact that not everything I do can be perfect the first or even the second time.

What’s wrong with edition 1, then a revised edition 2?

We could all learn from some of the big guns. Take Microsoft, they have made their fortune with getting people to buy version 1.0, then 1.1 while they iron out the bugs.

Do you ever experience the “it’s not perfect” roadblock? What do you do about it?

Find a Moment of Gold

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Put Gold in What You’re Doing Now

Yellow_Lily_by_Liz_Strauss

We’ve all had one — a moment of gold, a moment when the sun shines on us, and we’re something made of success. How we got there was part head, part heart, and a whole lot of determination that knocked down walls as we went.

In a moment of gold, some folks don’t understand what makes that moment so worth celebrating. Ah, to them, what we’ve some seems a small thing, but we know that the distance from point A to point B was not a straight or simple line. Math might always be. Life hardly ever is.

With all of the choices that move us forward, with all of the wishes and plans that our hearts hold, we need to be sure that we savor our accomplishments and celebrate our successes. Those golden moments are what propel us forward to make more spectacular things happen.

Stop a minute. Recall the sunlight. Find a moment of gold from your past.

What can you take from that moment to fuel what you’re doing now?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Managing Painful Situations: Writer’s Block, Migraine, and Trolls

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Get to Know What’s a Pain

Painful situations come in sorts of packages and combinations. Lately I’ve been hearing talk about three in particular — writer’s block, migraine, and trolls. When I think about about that set of pains, I realize that in some ways, they’re the same problem dressed up in different ways.

I know a couple of things about all three. I’ve been a writer since the last century. Been studying migraines since I got the first one when I was 12. And trolls . . . A cyber trolls once invited me to be CEO of his business.

Managing Painful Situations: Writer’s Block, Migraine, and Trolls

Writer’s block, migraine and trolls are a pain. Dealing with them is a management problem. I offer these suggestions that work for me.

  • Study the problem. Get to know the pain.
    Understand when it happens and how it works. Take away all of the personal issues. It’s not “your” writer’s block, “your” migraine, “your” personal attack. Those things outside you are just doing what they do. If you study them, you’ll notice they do the same thing every time.
  • Stop resources that support the situation.
    Your emotional buy in exacerbates the pain. Getting nervous about things, getting mad, insecure, or anxious only adds to the stress and undercuts your ability to move beyond what’s happening. Turn off the negative voices. Don’t feed the trolls.
  • Leave the war zone.

    • Get space to gather resources, rest, and perspective. Take a walk. See the sky. Feel the ground beneath your feet again.

Anyone who’s gone past writer’s block knows that moving away from the computer often allows the answers to come more quickly. Anyone who’s had a debilitating migraine knows a dark cool room works far better than a blinding sunrise to quiet the awful physical pain. Anyone who’s argued with trolls — are they really a pain or just irritants? — knows their words are deflated when left without rebuttal.

August_Sunrise_by_Liz_Strauss

On some days, we all give importance to things that get in our way. Keep an eye out for them. When you find one, just decide that you aren’t going there.

Have you got a strategy for managing painful and irritating situations?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Make Something Good Happen, Make Tuesday an Important Day

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Tuesdays Aren’t for Staying in One Place

Tuesday’s_Flower_by_Liz_Strauss

When I worked in an office, Tuesday got to be “a nothing day.” Everyone wanted to hit the ground running on Monday. We’d get our details and thoughts together before we reported back in. So Tuesdays became meeting days when we talked about what we were doing and as a result not much got done.

Now I work online. I visit social sites and I see that the “Tuesday feeling” happening every day of the week. Conversations about what we’re doing are so inviting that we can get swept into talking our day away without doing a thing.

It’s an easy way to get stuck in one place — in that Tuesday feeling — always talking and dreaming, but not doing. We become like talking plants, rather than people.

Plants, and flowers, and trees have roots that keep them stationary. People have feet that can walk, minds that can think, hands that can make new things. It doesn’t take much to move things forward. All it takes is the effort to make one positive move.

Make a comment, start a new conversation, make something happen in a new way.

How will you make Tuesday a positively important day?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

My Relationship with My Computer and Myself

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relationships button

Last night, my computer got tired, spent, and packed it long before I even had such a thought. It misbehaved in a way that let me know that it wasn’t going to cooperate one second more.

I suppose I’ve been pushing it over the limit. So many things these days are resouces sinks.

I don’t multitask anymore, but I often ask my computer to keep an extreme number of processes running.

Am I fooling myself? After all someone has to check in on what’s going on . . .

Today while my IT husband replaces what we think is a blown video card, I think I might spend some time offline working on my relationship with myself.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!