Sometimes Stepping Sideways, Is The Best Way Forward

Detouring is not Failing

The expectations and ideas that we have programmed into us are very rarely much use when it comes to making decisions.

Recently I was talking to a young lad who was confused about making a decision regarding his future.

His dilemma was that he had a part time job as a cameraman in a video production company and also a job as a builders labourer.

The company who made the videos offered him a full time job, but the pay at this time did not match the combined income of the two jobs. He asked for my advice and it was quite sad that he was so confused.

I asked him what it was that he enjoyed doing most and as you can imagine he said making the videos. So I then said what is your problem? He said that unless he could get the same income, from doing the videos, as he was from the combined jobs, he was in some way failing.

I pointed out that by taking a sideways step, or even a backwards step, to be doing what you wanted to do, could never be regarded as failing. To which he replied “ Yeah I realise that, but it is what my parents and friends might think.

How sad, he was going to make a decision based on what his parents and peers MIGHT think.

Fortunately, he took the full time job at the video company and it appears that they have already indicated that in the next few months, his income could well exceed what he was earning before.

There are a few lessons here, number one is that it can never be regarded as anything other than the correct decision when you follow your hearts desire,

Number two, never make decisions based on what you feel others might think, it is your life and doing things that make you happy and content, is an integral part of making the most of it.

Number three, fear and indecision invariably lead to regrets, it is mostly what we have not done that we regret most.

Number four, provided that you give 110%, you are guaranteed to get the most out of any situation. In this case the video company appreciated the decision he had made and also realised how good he was and very soon indicated that he would earn in the very near future, an income that would exceed what he was getting before.

It would have been very easy for him to have pushed the video company for more money and because of his feeling of failure, not accepted the job, but the result of that would have been that he would have ended up just working for money, without any real enjoyment or satisfaction.

If you are ever faced with a decision and you factor in what others might say or think about you, have the courage to follow your hearts desire, it will always be the right decision.

[Via http://croztalks.wordpress.com]

Jayashree - Inglorious Basterds

Jayashree walked into the Internet Café to find Raj and Shankar both waiting for her.  It gave her a sense of how important this issue was to them that they would arrive early.  She knew Raj wasn’t upset with her but hadn’t yet spoken directly to Shankar.  “Good morning guys.  I guess this is our first official day full-time on the new job?”

Raj replied, “Happy new job day Jayashree.  And this must be our new office?”  Raj seemed jovial.  That helped the mood.

“Well let me just start,” Jayashree began the meeting as she took her seat and gestured for the waiter to bring her usual morning tea.  “I met with Balamohan for dinner last night and he told me everything.  I was going to be coy but as soon as I said I missed him at the office Monday, he cut me off and came clean.  Not that he expressed any remorse.  He might have even been bragging.”

“Told you he was a jerk,” Raj again.  Shankar remained silent.  “So did he really start up a competing firm based on our idea?”

“Not exactly.  He fed our ideas to his partners, but they have one company and he has a separate business.”  Her tea arrived and she paused to thank the waiter.  “Balamohan is making money by recruiting the Ruby developers.  That’s what he mostly wanted from me – my social network of techies.  His partners might have formed their initial concept on their own, but they fleshed it out based on my blabbering.”

“So Balamohan made recruiting fees?”  Raj again the curious one.

“Not exactly.  He made his recruits purchase a bond to recompense their employers for their training and other expenses to cover their first two years of employment.  He charged a service fee for brokering the bond with a bank and received another fee from the bank for originating the loan.  Apparently he’s been doing this for several years and our venture helped him to go fulltime at it.”  Jayashree projected an incredulous facial expression.

“I’m not sure how I feel about that.  I don’t think it’s illegal because I’ve heard of the practice, but it sounds slimy to me.”  Again Raj with the response.  “He recruit anyone you know?”

“He wouldn’t say but I called 3 friends and they all confirmed he cold called and recruited them.  We can infer from this that their developers are local so we might have an edge on them with our Viet Namese labor costs.”  Jayashree was hoping to get Shankar into the dialog but he didn’t bite.  “My friends told me more.  He hired one DBA but no data mappers or architects.  They’ll manipulate most of the data at the application layer.”

“Hah, we got ‘em!”  Raj was suddenly very positive.  “Classic mistake, unfortunately made by just about everyone nowadays.”  Raj took on an authoritative tone as he explained.  “This is a huge data integration, or I should say content management, effort.  We built a data warehouse and focused on our data feed framework for the ETL processes.  We’re using Ruby for the front end, but we have stored procedures behind that written in Python.  Not to downplay the importance of the application layer  for aesthetics and usability, specifically the web services for ease of content accessibility; but we’re providing sub-second response time on our queries.  And we’ll scale at that speed for terabytes of data.  They’ll have to compromise on much smaller data sets – probably XML – can you say slow?  Their solution will be completely unscalable.”  Raj laughed and was enjoying himself immensely as he imagined the pending doom of this little competition.

Shankar finally interjected, “Well I should let you all know, our partners are suing us for malfeasance.  They brought forward the suit today demanding we forfeit all our shares to them.  Apparently this little company outbid our investors on a big contract.  And Balamohan has been talking enough to where our investors know more about our culpability for leaking intellectual capital than we do ourselves.  So we’ve got that going for us.”

[Via http://edmahoney.wordpress.com]

Friday, March 5, 2010

I am grateful for Fridays!  A busy week that consisted of a sick child (and thus, a visit to the doctor’s office), a 50-hour work week, six loads of laundry, a house to clean, dinners to cook, lunches to pack, homework to help with, and the metaphorical “partridge in a pear tree…!”

Now, given that I majored in PR, let’s see if I can put a different spin on it…eh-hem…

I am grateful that…

• My daughter is not more sick than she was and that she is better now
• I have a job
• I and my family have clothes on our backs
• We have a beautiful house
• We do not go hungry
• My daughter is getting a wonderful education

It’s easy to get bogged down in the stress of daily life, but if you look at all the wonderful things that are doing “the bogging,” I realize, I’m pretty lucky!

[Via http://allgratitude.wordpress.com]

What grabs your attention?

    A resume is a small part of personal marketing. Very few actually ponder what they are passionate and excel at before putting pen to paper. Prose is not the answer if you want to get your point across, however statistics you can verify go a long way to corroborating your expertise.  You definitely don’t want to have a novel written by a resume writer and go into the interview with your mouth agape at the first question. Here’s a fun exercise, take all you action words and make them opposite and assume that is what you are competing against or are you? So if you write “team player” on your resume, are you saying that you are distinguishing yourself against individuals who only work solo? If you write “accomplished” on your resume, are you distinguishing yourself against a  poorly accomplished individual? Get the point? Simply said, make your words count; you have less than 10 seconds of the employers’ attention. Think about how fast your channel surf while watching TV and tell me what grabs your attention quick enough to stop.
    If you have ever used Twitter and bother to surf through all the comments from the people you follow, what 140 character statement makes you stop and open the associated link, or what makes you send the information to others?  Do you always repost the same individual’s information?  If so, does their brand appeal to you?  Are you trying to capture their attention or worse yet are you schmoozing?
Write down all the words that appeal to you while you are surfing the net, reading a magazine or newspaper.  These words have much to do with your life interests.  Now relate them to your life and see if it is your experience or your interests outside of your current experience that draws you to these words.  This will distinguish what you are passionate about.  Now take your expertise and see if there is a connection.  If you note a connection, you are on your way to creating your brand.  If not, you need to know how to get to the life you are passionate about. 

Cheers to your success!  Diane Rines, Wise Career Move LLC, All Rights Reserved
Credits:  The opposite exercise was derived from “The Art of the Start” by Guy Kawasaki.

[Via http://wisecareermove.wordpress.com]

Green

The grass is not greener on the other side. Because London needs affordable homes, the whole country needs affordable homes, and so they are building on the grass. There is no grass. There is no green.

So you can look over, sure, take a look. Look at those people, looking back. It’s a look off. But we’re not really looking.

Not really. We are seeing but not looking. There is a difference.

When you see, you are in 2D, you are not paying attention, your brain is doing all the work for you. It’s projecting an image.

When you look, well, now you’re talking… Looking. You search when you look, you scan and you assess. You don’t see for a job, see for a girlfriend, see for a new house. You look.

So their life seems jolly lovely. Jolly splendid. Covered in chocolate and strawberries. Yum, give me some of that party.

But really, no. It isn’t like that. It’s as shit as it is here.

The grass is not greener on the other side. It’s not green. There is no grass. On either side.

But you know what? I don’t think much of grass anyhow. I can be happy, here. On my side. In my grayness. In my brown. In my black.

I don’t need to see them. To look at them. I don’t need green, to be green, to envy.

[Via http://jonpsevers.wordpress.com]

Morning Grumpiness and Wal-Mart Fondlers

I woke with a stir, hearing voices in the rest of the house… sounded like yelling.  My son was riding his motorcycle slash bike all over the kitchen.  I hear the voices again, its my step-dad trying to wake my sister up to get her to go to G.E.D.  He was on his way out, doing whatever guys do on their days off from work.  I get up out of bed and check my email and realize that my sister might not come home in time for me to do what I need to do today, so I tell her I am going with her.  The next thing I know, after I get dressed and get the kid ready, my sister tells me that he says I can not take the car.  I jump to conclusions, naturally, as I so often do and start to get pissed… infuriated even.  Tears well up and I run outside to yell “I knew this shit would happen, you hold something over my head to keep me here because you are mad about something that I think is retarded.”  And really that is the censored version of what I said, but you get the gist of it.  My sister leaves and then he leaves… and I felt so taunted and laughed at that I began to get even more pissed, trying everything I could to NOT break everything in site.  I think I mumbled a few incoherent words with “I’m to old for this shit” somewhere in the middle.  After walking around the house in a huff, I sat at this computer and couldn’t get into facebook, account unavailable, which made my mood even worse and the tears fell.  Now I do not cry that often, it takes a lot for me to cry, especially out of anger.  So I sat back staring at the screen, my eyes soggy, my son sitting next to me as if he wanted to help but didn’t know how.  Eventually all the torment subsided, and I had a headache.  I sighed a few times and turned cartoons on for my son.  I sat at my computer again and still did not surf the net, digesting all that had happened within a few minutes.  What a fucking way to wake up in the morning.

I can only guess, but I think ten minutes passed and I saw my step dad return.  He came back into the house and sat in the chair in facing me at the dining room table.  He explained to me that it was not what I assumed.  Turns out that my sister has been using me as an excuse to not go to G.E.D. And he was trying to push her to go.  She does not seem to care about her future lately, and I agree.  He asked me what it is that I need to do during the day and I explained.  He understood and made it a point to mention that it was nothing against me.  I said okay. And so we are working out a schedule so that she can go to G.E.D. like she is supposed to, and I can get my shit taken care of.  He then took the opportunity to ask about my sons father and his progress.  He said that he still is not very fond of him, which I can understand why, and that he would like to see more progress.  I explained as much progress as I could without trying to get any sympathy, because I know that if I try to get any sympathy from this man it does not work…  He lives a certain way, was brought up a certain way, and can not sympathize with someone in my or my guys position.  So all we can do is show him that things are getting done… it takes time and we are working on it the best way we can.

On another note, I was at Wal-Mart the other day, standing in line waiting to check out.  I notice a guy in my peripheral vision as he walks past me but took no notice.  Then suddenly a hand comes from behind me and reaches around and holds me, at first I assume its my guy, but I turn to see a complete stranger grabbing me… I almost punched him in the face but then he says “hug me please”  and I could tell that he was mentally challenged.  He tried to hug me and wouldnt let go right away.  I was so shook up all I could do was push him away.. eventually he ran off to probably go hug another stranger.  My one and only thought for that is WHERE THE HELL IS THE PERSON THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO KEEP AND EYE ON HIM???   Someone was not doing their job at all that day.  On top of that, imagine someone walking up to Monk (the character in the show, not an actual monk) and hugging them like that.  I do not like being touched by strangers it FREAKS me out.  The only person that can touch me is my guy, because I chose him to be the one I touch and touches me… other than that… even my family cant touch me without my say so. Imagine that.

[Via http://drusjournal.wordpress.com]

Post Apocolympic....

Yesterday was big deal for Canadians. It was the big rematch of the Winter Games, the Gold Medal Hockey tussle between the US and Canada  . It seemed to be the only topic of conversation for a lot of people. I caught the beginning of the game before I had to leave for work, and the Canadians were ahead by two goals to one when I left. I made it into work to find the TV on in the Break Room and folks glued to it. I had to be down on the shop floor, so I wandered away. Somewhere there was a radio piping commentary of the match into the shop, but Hockey Commentary is a mystery to me, since the game moves so fast and I didn’t know which players were on which team (shocking, I know, but give me a chance, we’ve only been here a year!) Still, co-workers were always passing by and happy to give news of the progress of the game.
“The Americans equalised, just seconds to go!” Big groan from everyone nearby. Then a few minutes after that the tannoy squawked into life:
“What did I tell you, Andy? Canada WIN! 3-2″ Cheers from all around the store, customers and workers alike. Almost immediately the place began to fill up. The place had been almost deserted during play, but now the game was done people flocked in. Almost all of them were grinning. The first few were eager either to tell me the result of te match, or find it out from me. We had folks wearing flags, with Maple leaf face paint, Canada jackets, T-shirts, hats… One ladty said she’d been in CostCo when the match was won and the place went mad. I couldn’t work out why CostCo in particular, but then I remembered they have a huge display of big-screen TVs. Where better to watch the match?
I was sorry to miss the closing ceremony, but got home to find Mrs Dim had recorded it for me. I had been surprised by how brilliant the opening ceremony had been, and regretted not recording that, so I’m looking forward to watching this one later.
People are starting to wonder what we’re all going to do now the Olympics have happened. Are we going to go into a posy-apocolympic slump? But that’s not really fair. In a few days, on March 12th we get the Paralympics, and if you thought the struggle of the athletes in the regular games was inspiring, you ain’t seen nothing yet. I shall be watching the opening ceremony (and recording it) because Eldest Weasel is one of the schoolchildren who’ll be singing with Nikki Yanovsky, and I spent a good deal of today wrestling with the ticketing system to try and get a ticket for Mrs Dim to attend in person. No joy so far, but I think it’s churlish to complain about someting like that when he events themselves will feature people who have overcome far more. I will not be defeated by beaureacracy…though the spelling may give me pause.

So Week Two of Work has begun, and it’s going well. The times are fitting in nicely with Educating Weasels and Mrs Dim’s schedule, and I’m getting enough writing done to feel like I’m not writing to support my new career in retail. (Oh, my new play! It’s going SO WELL. Of course, I’ve had to halve the length and revise my grand plans, but it’s GOING SO WELL! Don’t tell anyone, though. It’s easily startled.) I still don’t have my schedule for the week after next, so I don’t know if my shifts will line up with my elephants and allow me to go on holiday. Now we’re into March time is moving even faster. There’s only a handful of days before Spring Break, only a few more to the holiday and once we’re back from that it’s packing and moving. Tomorrow I’ll pile into the redirection business again. Seems weird, trying to remember what it’s like to be unpacking boxes – this house has been sorted for a while now. We even stopped changing the pictures around, so maybe we got those right at last. Must be time to move.

[Via http://dtrasler.wordpress.com]