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What’s Your Best Advice on Hitches, Glitches, and People Who Don’t Show Up?

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(Updated in 2020)

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Even Big Hairy Audacious Goals Get Stuck

What makes me think that everyone has been here?

We get an idea. The concept seems whole, simple, brilliant. We can’t wait to start. So we set a dream on the horizon, and we go for it. Enthusiasm, drive, and determination propel us.

We set a plan.
We get to work.
We talk about what we’re doing.
Things are rolling
until …
a hitch, a glitch, someone doesn’t show up.
Now what?

Gotta Get a Big Hairy Audacious Goal

Putting a dream on the horizon and moving toward it is a start, but it isn’t quite enough. We need to make it a Big Hairy Audacious Goal.
Suzie Cheel and Glenda Watson Hyatt live by their Big Hairy Audacious Goals. Lots of folks believe in BHAGs. Tim O’Reilly and Rosa Say blogged about their value. Geoff Livingston wasn’t shy about explaining what he why he thinks big hairy audacious goals make things happen.

When they name the BHAG, marching orders crystallize. It’s messy and non-linear, but voracious. Just the ticket for a little magic. The Buzz Bin

I agree. Big hairy audacious goals are messy and nonlinear. The very “big, hairy” name makes it clear that they’re likely to offer deadends, detours, and doers who don’t do what they said they would. Those big hairy interruptions are when too much thinking can get us stuck.

It’s the thinking … questioning?
Is it us?
Is the goal too big and too hairy?
Are we up to the struggle?
That’s the danger. The goal didn’t change, nor did it’s value. What changes is our resolve. Enthusiasm, drive, and determination fade into black and we’re left with voices saying we might have misjudged.

Hitches, Glitches, and People Who Don’t Show Up

I said I’d tell you about the barns and bridges project as things moved forward. It’s been a week since then.

Here’s what’s going on.

  • Hitches: People are asking how to help and I don’t have a system for answering them.
  • Glitches: Bad code stole time from the project and other work needs to get done.
  • People who don’t show up: My designer has gone into the code cave. I think I need to find a new one.
  • What’s on track: conversations with possible sponsors are moving forward, I’ve got help forming the message and the documentation they’ll need to see the project clearly and know their part.

As my friend, Lorelle, often tells me, “You’d be brilliant for other folks, now’s the time to be brilliant for yourself.” With that in mind, I’m offering these plans for now.

The next few days, my free time will be about: keeping the sponsor conversation alive; planning out how to get 2 or 3 key volunteers committed to help manage the project for 2-3 hours a week; start the quest for a new designer; finish the details left open by my computer mess.

Action has always been my best response to making sure a big goal doesn’t get stuck. That’s my advice for me. What’s yours?

Here’s the keys. I hand it over to you …

What’s your best advice about hitches, glitches, and people who don’t show up? What action steps should come next to keep this Big Hairy Audacious Goal of Raising Barns and Building Bridges moving forward? What good things have you been doing that we don’t know about?

Looking forward to what you write in the comment box.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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

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

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Field of Dreamers and Barn Raisers

For quite a while, I’ve been working with businesses who have or are preparing to build or expand a web presence or social community. They ask me to help focus their strategy and to help bring people to their communities. They want to attract, impress, and ultimately engage fiercely loyal participants.

If you’ve been online for a while, you’ve probably noticed that a percentage of new arrivals get a key strategic point of community sites out of order. Field of Dreamers are sure if they build their idea their way the people will come. Except the people don’t necessarily see the same thing.

More strategic folks 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.

A Barn Raisers Guide

Here are 7 ways to leave a field of dreams and get people to help you build a thriving reality.

  • Look for similar dreams and listen to everyone who knows about them.
    Ask, search, and explore to find every reality that has the slightest things in common with your dream. Spend some time at each site you find. Meet the people there and see how they use each site. Hear every other guy’s dreams, wishes, needs, and point of view. Get curious. Ask questions constantly. Wonder about what people think of what’s old, what’s new, what’s in every space in the market. Have some ready questions such as this one: If you were going to build a space for people who like to imitate frogs, what features would consider important to include?
  • Turn your dream into promise to do one thing better than anyone else.
    Be able to articulate exactly what that is, why it’s important, and how fits in to a person’s life. Check back with those you spoke to and tweak your promised offer until the folks you’ll serve say it’s relevant to them and fits their lives.
  • Plan from conception to launch.
    Invite people from your outside usual circle to check in on what you’re doing along the way. Weigh their comments for value, sort them, and remember to put the good one to use. Thank everyone of them.
  • Turn your promise into a space for conversation, interaction, creation, and sharing.
    Build a connection conduit. If your promise becomes a blog, keep it sleek and without barriers. Make it easy to see and interact with you. Offer variety in resources and multimedia. Find ways to interact through events. If you’re building a community site, go easy on bells and whistles, execute your promise clearly, and better than anyone has before. Then use extra resources to find more ways for people to converse, interact, create, and share while on your site.
  • Be obsessed with easy.
    If you think something is easy, make it easier. When you’ve done that all you can, ask your grandmother or someone who’s never seen it to try using it without directions. If they don’t breeze through it, go back to the drawing board to make it easier.yet
  • Ask visitors for feedback and ideas on new ways to use the site.
    Let the rule be that everyone gets to pick their best way to do things. That develops into the kind of space that has the climate for relationships.
  • Build ways into your site to link out to and to celebrate your participants.
    Showcase your heroes. Begin with the folks who help you build the site. Give away five great referrals every morning and five more in the afternoon or evening. People notice folks who appreciate others.

If you invite folks to be part of a powerful idea, you’ll find that you suddenly have a knack for making spaces where people collect, connect, and start conversations. It might have something to do letting people help form the environments that they’re going to inhabit. It’s like painting a house that we’re going to live in — pride of ownership.

Barn raising has always been a brilliant strategy — building the relationships while you’re building a site.

It takes a little practice. And it takes leadership to let go enough to get the good stuff without getting the chaos. The best results always calls for the best from each of us.

I’m hoping as we build barns we might bring some Field of Dreamers to work with Barn Raisers on a community site. I thought maybe they might like the process. Do you think the two together would have a chance of success?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

It’s Time to Reach Our Best Hand Out to the Folks Coming In

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Did You See the Discussion?

Yesterday’s discussion about playing for keeps was a peek at a the idea it’s important to our best selves to what we do. The best people connections in life and business happen when our inside values are visible on the outside. Or as John Haydon said in the comments:

… whenever I am being honest with myself and authentic with others, I don’t even have to ask if I’m walking the walk.

Why Here? Why Now?

Each wave of new bloggers and social media practioners finds a different socialsphere. They arrive a little further from where it all began. The information, tools, and practices change and move from hands to hands. People find new uses for the tools. People use the tools and application in unintended ways.

The socialsphere changes a little with the integration of each new group.

It’s getting harder to tell the authentic practioners from the frauds. One cause could be that not enough of us are clear about the expertise we offer or how competent we are.

Soon the waves will be larger — more in the form of companies. The companies will come with goals / plans, money, and their own traditions and histories. Some wlll learn the tools, join communities, and understand the cultural shift the tools were made to facilitate. Some will learn the tools, but succeed by applying them in old culture ways. It’s likely some will try the tools and fail miserably.

And a new generation is arriving who’ve been using and testing the tools while they get their degrees. What changes will they bring?

We want mainstream arrivals to succeed and to grow what we started rather than accidently knock it down. Yet, it’s almost as if we’re the company and they’re the customers now. Like customers responding to a product, they’ll decide whether social media works for them.

Mainstream definition of social media and its success or failure will define the culture of the Internet.

In an apprentice environment such as this, new arrivals are only as good as the one who teaches them. It’s natural for people to study the folks they connect with most quickly and trust the most. That would be the first people who look competent, who talk with intelligence and confidence, and if at all possible, who already know their friends.

Right here. Right now.
It’s time to reach our best hand out to the folks coming in.

4 Steps to Raise a Barn and Build a Bridge

The plan that is unfolding begins with this model project. It’s planned to be the first of many projects for many people on the Internet. If you have a dream project on the shelf, you might start yours and track it alongside this one of mine.

This project that I’ve named “Don’t Tell ’em, Show ’em” involves bringing out the best of this blog, of myself, of the SOB list, and in a second part, help for others to do the same. It’s a barnraising and a bridge building endeavor that has these four traits.

  • The project is a business and community idea.
  • It’s a barnraising in that the community is invited to participate in building the space made for them.
  • It’s a bridge building in that businesses and individuals offline and outside the community are invited to participate. It’s a natural way for new arrivals to learn culture of the social web.
  • The project will have a date upon which it will be complete so that everyone gets the payoff of feeling and seeing success.

Then the folks who can will raise more barns and build more bridges on the next projects.

The process will be open. I’ll keep you in the plan as it unfolds. I’ll tell you what’s happening. I’ll ask for help when I get stuck. I plan to get attention, raise the bar, and show the value of what we’re about. If you have ideas how to do that better, faster, louder, or more efficiently — where to go what to start — if you have skills to volunteer, or if you want to track a project of your own, I’ve a comment box below. C’mon let’s talk.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

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

Time to Check Social Media Return on Investment

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Infinite Room Is NOT Infinite Time

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We live in a world of Social Media, where we can choose from a seemingly unending list of new universes — places where any small group suddenly finds we can join up to be our own majority. Like-minded thinking is one of the pleasures of getting together on any social site.

Don’t like how I think?
Click on.
No harm. No foul.

The infinite Internet has room for everyone.
It’s not hard to find like-minded thinkers anymore. As the number of Social Media sites grows, we can’t keep adding to our lists.

We don’t have infinite time to spend.
We need to know that time we’re spending is time well invested.

Time to Check Social Media Return on Investment

It’s easy to get comfortable on a social media site, especially if we’ve never fit so well anywhere before. But, now that the choices are so many, maybe we should check to be sure that the time we’re spending is time is adding something, not wasting away.

Here are five values to check the return on your time investment. Maybe you’ll find some time to save.

  1. What’s the big idea? What do people do there? Do they exchange information, look for jobs, act like schoolkids? Is that focus important to you? Do you look forward to time spent there?

  2. Who’s there? Are the people there friends, fans, or contacts? Are they there for relationships or information or votes? Are there people to learn from and people you aspire to be more like? Can you see them? Can they see you?

  3. What are they saying? What do you take from the conversation? What ideas are on offer? What ideas directly apply to what you do? How often do you see real value?

  4. What’s the time/goal orientation? What do the people focus on? Do they come to achieve; then leave? Do they hang out for conversation? Are their goals in line with yours?

  5. What is the payoff? Is this site redundant with another place you visit? Can you accomplish the same thing in a better way? Would more time here return more value? Would more time somewhere else make this site a non-starter? What do you get there that you can’t get anywhere else?

I quit visiting certain places, got back that time, and have suffered no loss. Well, actually, I’ve gained. The folks I interacted with in those places are in all of the other places I’ve still visit. So I’m trimming my social media portfolio to only those that work for me and my business.

What about you? Time to rethink your Social Media Investments?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Holiday Shopping 2007: The Business of Matching Hot Gifts to Cool People

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Buying Is a Business Skill Too

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They call today, Cyber Monday, the busiest shopping day on the Internet. Folks in the US, returning to work after the Thanksgiving holiday, realize that the shopping window to the holidays is limited and that the sales have officially started.

We seem to be getting the hang of this online shopping thing.

Forrester Research says this year’s sales are projected to be up 21%. Consumers report that online hot spots that are taking off include jewelry, apparel, and accessories. As a buying group, we also getting more interested in free shipping and turning down “extras” in the form of gift wrap and overnight delivery.

Matching Hot Gifts to Cool People

Beyond the sheer fun factor, the ability to match a well-chosen gift the right person is a fabulous business exercise for any person who serves other people . . . bloggers who write for readers, folks who who work with clients . . .
at the heart of great gift giving is the passion to deliver something folks really desire or need.

That, of course, means starting with the people we’re “serving.” With that in mind, I’ve organized this list by the people not the gifts.

For the “IN” Crowd

Be they 5, 50, 500 years old, these are the folks who hang with the coolest crowd. They know what’s “in” often before we’ve even heard it exists When we shop for them it’s good to keep in mind one rule: Timing is everything. What they want will be in short supply. Buy their dream gift early in the season.

Watch the popular searches, if you’re not sure. At the moment, these are the predictions for what will be hot this year.

PS3, Wii and Elmo were among the top 15 product searches on Yahoo! Shopping, according to Chris Saito, the company’s vice president of products. Elmo placed at No. 13 on the list. — CNN Money

For the Musical Kids in All of Us

Toys that work with our MP3 players. C’mon they’re not just for kids.

Mattel Singing Barbie

Singing Barbie is a diva. Yep she’s a diva with all of her hair. This Barbie will answer her cell when you put it up to her ear. I’m sure some human divas don’t do that or do that well. The doll will perform three prerecorded tunes or will “lip sync” and dance to songs on your MP3 player.

Mattel’s “I Can Play Guitar System” takes Guitar Hero to a new level. Plug the minature into the TV, match the color-coded song notes to the color-coded finger position buttons along the shorter strings. Earn points and move up through the levels. $99.99

Hasbro’s “Power Tour Electric Guitar,” is made in partnership with Gibson. This minature electric guitar has 4 play modes, 12 preloaded songs, and can plug into an MP3 player.

For That Favorite Techie

To know a techie is to love one. To love one is to know that they have precise tastes. When in doubt, let them pick what they want.

Take phones, for example, a blackberry user wouldn’t be caught with an iPhone. Jeremiah suspects the Nokia could lighten his equipment load because of it’s 5 megapixel camera. It’s often a matter of individual needs and preferences. Buying a phone these days is like buying a car. The research takes 53 times longer than the purchase.

The Flip is popular, especially among nontechies– like me — trying out video. Emily Price is an expert on camcorders. I’m not even going to pretend to know more than what I’ve already said on the subject so far. Michael Carr at About.com discusses digital cameras in every price range. Digital Photography Review can keep you up to date on which cameras are popular.

Some folks just like to know where they are . . . Check out GPS devices.

One Laptop Per Child Laptop

Though someone told me yesterday he wants a Macbook Pro and another said she was looking at cool laptops. Before you buy me either, I’m wondering whether I want to wait for Tablet.

Still most everyone agrees, you could do worse than this Give One Get One laptop deal.

For Folks Who Love Low-Tech Too

Low tech can be incredibly elegant.

Which of the moleskines is your favorite? I’m partial to the tiny cahier ones that fit in my back pocket without discomfort.

An elegant writing instrument can make what we say seem more important. A note written with a beautiful pen seems to have more meaning.

Levenger Leather Shirt Briefcase

Anyone with too little space or a collection out of control might be turned on by elegant organizers.

That graduate in that first career job might like something elegant to carry and use in business situations.

Then, of course, there’s tickets to trips, concerts, plays, games, and special events.

For Folks Who Don’t Treat Themselves

Some folks seem to have everything they need. For these folks, why not try a twist on the usual to offer them some luxury they wouldn’t get for themselves?

Instead of a new bathrobe . . . the most expensive, luxurious bath towels. Every day will feel like a royal stay at a fine hotel.

J Crew cashmere scarf

Instead of gloves, and hat . . . a cashmere scarf. When they wear it to the grocery store, they will feel as if they are going to an oscar-award event.

Instead of a new blanket or sheets for the bed . . . a fabulous new pillow or a feather bed. What better gift than beautiful sleep?

Think smaller, but more luxurious.

Holiday gift giving is a perfect time to practice Steve Farber’s Extreme Leadership philosophy, Do what you love in service to those who love what you do. It’s a great philosophy in business and life that fits any time, anyplace, anywhere.

How will you match the perfect gift to each person on your list this year?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Be sure to check the Wall Street Journal for more information on perks Online Retailers will be offering this holiday season.

How to Think Like a Millionaire and Be What You Want to Be

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Congratulations! You’ve Won!

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How would do if you won lots of money?
Most folks who win the lottery don’t do so well. The headlines shout out their stories.

Most lottery winners are bankrupt in 5 years. Why is that?

Millionaire Thinking

Google the search string think like a millionaire [without quotation marks], and you’ll find that exact phrase still shows up on page 35 of the search results. Obviously, the idea that millionaires think differently is accepted wisdom.

Suppose your goal is to retire a millionaire. What would it take to get yourself there?

Becoming a millionaire takes the same passion, focus, drive, and vision as any job goal you might set.

Whether you aspire to be the headmaster of the school where you teach, the top research biologist, or an Olympic gymnast, without incredible luck, you just won’t get there, unless you . . .

  • a. believe it’s possible.
  • b. decide that nothing will stop you.

World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov didn’t get to be the best by thinking that he would never be at that level. Nicole Kidman didn’t become an A-List Actress and the highest paid public speaker in history by waiting for chances to come to her. Ian Fleming wasn’t dreaming about who’d play James Bond when he wrote the first book in the series.

All three of them knew where they were going and they got there.

“If you want to achieve something you have never had before, you must become someone you’ve never been before.” –Jill Koenig in her book, How to Become a Millionaire.

Let’s follow her thinking a little further.

“I am not talking about ‘fake it ’til you make it.’ I am talking about redirecting your thoughts, energy and actions into the type of person who would absolutely manifest that Goal.”

So what does Jill say that she did? You can find it her article with the same name as her book, How to Become a Millionaire.
This author who has become a millionaire and an expert in the field of strategic goal setting lays the path in plain language. To become a millionaire, she paid attention to millionaires whom she admired, using their actions as models. The path Jill Koenig took is set out plainly. You could do and so could I.

7 Traits Millionaires Have in Common

  1. Millionaires rise early, show up, and keep their promises. Hard work doesn’t scare them.

  2. Millionaires invest time in motivational activities and personal development.

  3. Millionaires keep a regular routine — one they know keeps on their “best game.”

  4. Millionaires keep their heads and hearts point toward their destiny.

  5. Millionaires see opportunity, not obstacles.

  6. Millionaires know how to say “no,” to a negative influence.

  7. Millionaires are people other folks want to do business with, or they could never have become millionaires.

Go ahead, replace the word millionaire with any goal or role you might long for. Those traits define peak performance and people we like to work with.

Any peak performer owns his or her goal. Don’t just wish. As Ghandi said, “Be the change.” Make your goal your identity. Once you do, people around you will start to agree and the support will move you toward where you’re going.

Be a millionaire or be something even better. If you are willing to become your goal, you’ll get there. You’re the only one who can talk you out of it.

It’s a matter of being willing to win.

Can you think like a millionaire?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!