Forward thinking and positive attitude

Often times when facing grim circumstances, its easy to get caught up in the problems at hand. Instead look beyond the current situation to the solution that lies on the other side. You have the ability to overcome.

Use technology to get ahead

Regardless of your state in this economy, its important to recognize the simple fact that paper and pencil are less popular. You should have some form of digital presence or website if you’re going to compete.

Set goals and plan for the future

It’s naive to think that the economy is going to improve over night or that it won’t effect you. Take the steps necessary to ensure the quality of living you’d like to retain even if you lose your job or business.

Avoid the easy way out

Right now is the opportune time for someone to take advantage of you. Don’t buy into a service that is sounds easy and promising. Make a point to investigate and consult with someone that has your best interest in mind.

Surround yourself with positive people

We all know that times are tough, but if you focus on the problem, it just seems to get bigger. Avoid getting caught up in the poverty mentality by surrounding yourself with successful and optimistic people.

Starting a business without Capital Investment

It’s easy to say that it can be done, but it’s a whole different story to actually execute. Like I mentioned before, take notes from the Getting Real plan. Start your business by moonlight.. don’t quit your day job and jump right in (of course we’re hypocrites saying this because we jumped in, but I wish we had moonlighted first). Either negotiate with your employer to work part-time for a while or start your business at nights.. that way you have the income still to support your bills, but you can start planning and developing your business. Begin networking with other businesses in your field and going to seminars on weekends, because one of the greatest tools in starting a business is connections.

Along with the moonlighting, establish a budget. You may not know all of the costs to operate your business, and you may not be able to prepare for every road block or pitfall. What you can do, however, is give yourself a cushion. Depending on your liabilities (bills), you may want anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000 saved up before you quit you job and go full-time as a business.

[podcast format="video"]http://thinkclay.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/business-sense-with-a-few-cents-desktop.m4v[/podcast]

About our Web Company

This post is based on our opinions and testimonials with starting our Web Company. Thinkclay is a blog by Clayton McIlrath based out of Lansing, MI. You can find more us by searching: Lansing Web, Powered by WordPress and Graphic Design Portfolio

Defining Success

Before you learn HOW to be successful, you need to define WHAT success really means to you. Many define success based upon income, net worth, popularity, global effect, lasting impressions, etc. When defining success, you should sit down and really think hard as to what success is to you and why. You’ll find that your own views of success are simply a combination of the views that other people have shared with you. The problem with defining success is that you must first define yourself and what makes you truly happy. I won’t dive deep into what happiness is or how to find it. You need to build yourself internally and do some Self Discovery before you can effectively use those principles externally.

Discovering the Process

Randomly, when I was young, I used to sit and ponder and dream about the strangest principles and fundamentals to life. One principle that I developed was to change my thinking of how the pyramid of life worked. I realized that many people live their lives according to an upside-down pyramid: reacting to the effect of situations rather than reacting to the cause. I figured that my foundation and success in life would stem from my subconscious, self-image and thoughts before I could even use the tools (education, capital, social, etc) that I may posses. I immediately wrote down (on my bedroom wall at the time) a principle that I wanted to follow for my life.. this is what I wrote:

Thoughts become Dreams
Dreams become Premonitions
Premonitions become Reality

This life (and perhaps the next) are structured upon the building blocks of what we think, not what we know

The crazy part is, I came across this EXACT same principle in this book, with very little differences in wording:

Thoughts lead to Feelings
Feelings lead to Actions
Actions lead to Results

Motivation

After you’ve done some self-discovery, you’ll need to do more. Find out what you’re passionate about and what motivates you and then brainstorm some ideas to use your passions towards your own business or investment. This is one of the most important tools to being successful. Make sure that you separate your motivation from anger, fear or the need to prove yourself, as these are motivations that will die out because you’ll never succeed by your own standards. Instead find motivation in purpose, contribution and joy! These are the motivators that will make you successful.

My motivation for success:

• The freedom to help others in need by donating my time and money
• The flexibility and freedom to spend quality time with my family
• The knowledge and wisdom to share with others and help them succeed

Self Discovery

I think the most important aspect to starting a business is knowing yourself. This phase should have the most time spent on it, and should never be considered “complete.” Self discovery is an ever changing process and is needed in nearly every situation when it comes to business. Here are some keys to consider when doing some self discovery that are specific enough to business:

Passion

It’s such a short and simple word, yet can mean everything. Passion is the heartbeat of a business, and if it’s not beating strong, the business has little to work with. When you’re considering starting a business, ask yourself why. If you’re answer doesn’t fall along the lines of, “it’s what I love to do,” than reconsider. Passion can come in many shapes and forms, and people don’t often get to choose what they’re passionate about. Look at me for example.. I simply stumbled onto web development by chance while in college for graphic design, and my passion overtook me and drove me to succeed and grow in unmeasurable ways. Once you have passion, you have the main ingredient and should move on to goals and motivation… because passion can fade without them.

Self Discipline

Passion by itself is a strong tool, and provides ambition, but without direction and discipline its hard to focus and accomplish what you NEED to do. At times passion doesn’t cover every nook and cranny of a dream, and it takes self-motivation through discipline to accomplish those petty tasks. For example, with Chosen, I had the dream of starting my own Web Development company. My passion for web design and development are enough to motivate me in both, but starting a business is more than just design and development. I’ve had to learn more about taxes, been the consultant, salesman, project manager, etc. I’m not passionate about all of these tasks, so I must discipline myself to accomplish the tasks that need to be done just as much as that tasks that I want to do.

Goals

Many studies have shown that roughly 97% of the people in the world do NOT have goals, and that the other 3% that do almost always succeed in meeting them… this statistic is so true and I can testify to it. People often ask me how it is that I was able to start a family (wife and kid at the age of 20) and still purchase a new home, renovate it, buy new computers/toys/frig/etc all in the same year, while only having been a year out of college. No, I didn’t have any help from any family. I did this on my own by setting goals. I started Chosen by setting goals. They’re very real and they work wonders. I could go on and on about goals, but I think it would be best for you to simply read my post about goal setting.

Consider this
Gas has been cheaper in the last 3 months than it has been in over 2 years!
Produce sales haven’t escalated beyond normal scale
Inflation hasn’t risen dramatically

So what really is the source of this recession?! It’s all negative media. Like I said, recession has become a buzzword.

Let’s face it, people tend to be negative. What do you search for on youtube when you’re bored? I bet it’s not world causes or positive messages and uplifting words. No, you’re probably looking up worst car crashes, fights, celebrities at their worst, etc. This is what people want.. drama, and the media has fed us exactly what we’ve been craving for years.

But we’ve had too much…

People are getting sick of hearing the word recession. Business and families are being dramatically influenced and people are hurting. The only way to get rid of the recession is to reverse our thinking. Our thinking towards spending, and what we soak in from the media on a daily basis.

I’m making an effort to stand for something greater than myself.. will you join me?

[podcast format="video"]http://thinkclay.com/wp-content/uploads/podcasts/against-recession-hype.m4v[/podcast]

1. What’s the rush? A lot of times impatience is set in because you’re in a hurry. Force yourself to slow down and try to figure out why. Are you trying to multitask too much or have a pressing deadline? If you’re overwhelmed, try cutting something out or re-arranging your task list before reacting how you normally would. Try to spread out your tasks so that you’re focused on one thing at a time, this is easiest with task manager.
2. What’s your trigger? Find out what really sets you off, impatience is often masked by other emotions such as anxiousness, anger, bitterness, etc and needs to be identified in order to be fixed. Find out the events, people, or circumstances that cause you to snap and then try and trace it to impatience.
3. Do you have attitude? At times, we just have bad attitude that causes us to be impatient. Sometimes, you have to simply force yourself to cool down. I recommend learning some anger management techniques as these generally apply to being patient and understanding as well. Learning to calm yourself in a frustrating situation is one of the most valuable and important assets you can have, especially when it comes to customer or client relations
4. Are your thoughts organized? Getting organized can greatly reduce impatience almost as soon as you start. When you sit down and spend time to refine, collect and re-arrange your thoughts you begin to let go of the other emotions caught up in your impatience and can logically analyze and resolve conflicts.
5. Are you making the same mistakes? One of the keys to solving your impatience is to identify and correct patterns in behavior. Look for patterns. Being aware of your impatience also gives you a chance to learn from it and perhaps uncover a relationship or circumstance that is simply not healthy or constructive, and that you may have the power to change. Figure that out, and you can then think logically about the problem issue and decide whether or not your impatience is warranted or helpful. It usually isn’t, but when it is you can then figure out ways to fix the root problem rather than simply feeling stressed about it.

But anyways.. let’s get to the post already!

Effective Communication is…

At Chosen we’ve had our struggles with communication the same as any other business can have. When you’re working with a diverse variety of professionals, each specializing in a unique trade or skill, there can be gaps in how to communicate an idea, functionality, or content. This post aims to identify the causes of some communication gaps as well as solutions for better communication.

The importance of communication

We all know how important communication is on some level, but what works for a small business might not work as that business grows. We experienced that with out own company.. we started out with a group of talented individuals all volunteering and working together whenever convenient. Often times it was a charity or a low cost project which lack of deadlines, strict deliverables, or consequences. We had good communication at the time simply using Google Docs to store information about various clients or meeting notes and we would collaborate and talk via email all the time.

After a short amount of time passed, we started getting more clients and more work than we could handle in our free time. We began to grow rapidly and our communication tactics, which worked beautifully before, crumbled to nothing. By chance, we ended up winning a license to a task manager called Active Collab from a contest hosted by Dev Snippets. Having a free corporate license and a need to use it, we installed our task manager and immediately started using it. This worked wonders for us, and for quite some time we didn’t have any communication issues.

The next challenge we hit was effective team communication in discussions. Our business was doing well with Active Collab, and actually has been since, but we recently discovered that we didn’t have a universal platform for IM. We have users all over the board for IM Clients with myself on Ubuntu, Joe and Ravi on Macs, Nick and Shane on Vista, and everyone else on XP. We all found it annoying that we had to have more than one IM client installed for team communication. Finally we came to an agreement and settled for using Skype as our mandatory IM platform. Skype has rapidly become the industry standard for communication in many businesses, and since it works so wonderfully across all platforms, we knew it would be a good fit. Since switching I’ve noticed a lot better communication among our teams.

The latest challenge we hit was with functional specs. Functional specs are always an issue in communication because everyone writes them differently and they have to be vague enough that everyone can read them and apply them to their portion of the project. For example, if you had a forum that was going to be tied into flash, front-end, php and MySQL each developer needs to know a portion of the spec. Therefore the project manager would have to know each one of those technologies well enough to write a specific functional spec that covered how they were each going to tie together. So what ends up happening is either the PM guesses or writes really vague.

One possible solution to this issue (one in which we’re looking into for ourselves) is in a technology called the Unified Model Language (UML). This technology uses illustrations and diagrams to explain anything from a simple sitemap to a complex OOP Application. In time we hope to find more effective ways to communicate and as we do, I’ll be sure to share them.. In the meantime, feel free to give some feedback.. what do you use to help improve communication in your workplace?

What is a leader?

There are all kinds of leaders, and by itself, the word ‘leader’ means very little. The key to leadership is the specific kind of leader you are and how well you execute your skills and abilities.

Level 1: Superficial Leadership
These are usually self-proclaimed leaders. They brag themselves up and look to themselves to be leaders for the title and authority, but not because they are looking to manage responsibility and truly lead in the best interest of their followers. These leaders are everywhere and some even seem like good leaders because of their self-confidence, but be careful not to confuse arrogance with confidence because arrogance is a bad quality to have as a leader, and almost always indicates poor leadership ability.

Level 2: Average Leadership
So many leaders fall into this second-level category of average leadership. It’s hard to be a great leader, and it takes a perfect balance and blend of good qualities, but many leaders can get buy as average. An average leader is still successful, can still lead people well, and can be very strong. This is where most people fall in leadership as far as family, friends, and business and there’s nothing wrong with that but… if you’re looking to be a great leader, there’s more!

Level 3: Pacesetting Leadership
What separates a leader from average and great pacesetting leadership is their balance in personality and ambition. There are seven main qualities that are key ingredients to becoming a great leader.

The Seven Qualities of a Great Pacesetting Leader

1. Faith-filled Positive Attitude
2. Steady and dedicated Purpose and Mission
3. Goal Oriented Action and Results
4. A Desire to Serve and Labor
5. Strong Management and Communication
6. Commitment to Excellence and Quality
7. A Proprietary Disposition

Have you read my post on the Steps to Set and Achieve Goals? If not check it out!