Yesterday is dust, tomorrow a dream. Our gift is now.

My daughter called me earlier this month, but I let it go to voice mail. I was busy. I didn't have time to chit chat.

That's kind of a pattern for me. I duck and weave through each day based on my priorities, deciding who and what gets through to me. If there's a lot of work to do, I ignore all but the most frantic requests.

If I didn't do that, I'd be overrun with people demanding too much of my time. How would I get anything done?

Sometimes I'm even like that on vacation. Because my business is online, I feel an obligation to get some work done, even when I've traveled quite a distance to be "on vacation". 

Like being in Croatia this summer and blowing off a basketball game to do something I don't even remember on the the computer. It probably wasn't really that important. Maybe I just wanted to seem busy.

This weekend, I got a bit of a kick. Nothing happened to me, or my family. For that, I'm grateful.

But I was on Facebook (where else, right?) and was just poking along and saw a friend had posted an update. I had to read it twice. I was confused. His son had died. Gone. Less than 30 years old. 

My immediate reaction was disbelief. Come on. I know that kid. He's a great guy. That's a guy that loves music. He has an awesome smile. There's a ton of things he's doing right now. 

But that's not going to happen now. That's ended. There's no turning back the page. 

My heart breaks for my friend and his family. How they'll rebuild their lives with that huge piece missing. I doubt anything will ever fill that hole. It's too big. 

They'll go on, as we all do. Obligations to be met, things to tend to. The daily ebb and flow of life washing over them.

But I know for myself, something burned into my mind when I saw that. How wrong I have been in the allocation of my time. 

Maybe I'm terrible for turning the event to thinking of my own family, but I couldn't help reflect on how I've put projects in front of people so often. It would crush me to be held to account for it right now.

And so, I made a promise to myself. To be a little wiser in how I spend my time. Not to be so quick to duck phone calls from people. Especially my kids. 

Last night the phone rang. It was my daughter. She gave me the gift of an hour together with her. 

Every word was a little clearer, every feeling more delicious. She spoke, and I consumed. 

Maybe that's what that huge hole is for. The one my friend's son left behind. It's a window into the purpose of our existence. It's not to be the one with the most money, or the biggest house. Your heart can only be filled with love. Everything else leaks away. 

Life is full of obstacles, don't create your own.

There are a ton of quotes about setting goals in the stars, and hitting the moon, etc...and while they might provide some momentary inspiration, I think it's a poor strategy for actually reaching a goal.

Why?

Well, my friend Jason Surfrapp just wrote an article about a fitness program that he tried out, that illustrates the danger of pushing people into programs of radical change. In short, when it's hard to get a feeling of success, it takes much more will power than most people can muster to stay in the game.

The psychology of this is pretty simple. If something is only providing pain, and no pleasure, it's just a matter of time before you will abandon it. Who wants to work hard to be presented repeatedly with a message of "You failed"?

Sure, failure is part of any path of growth. But it shouldn't be built in to what you're doing. Whatever your long-term goal is, be sure the path to get there is built on a highway of simple successes. Failure may occur, but it shouldn't be designed into your program.

To be clear, I think there is a major distinction between your overall goal, and your plan (mini-goals) to get there. Difficult goal? Awesome. Daunting path? Questionable.

Maybe your goal is to run a marathon. But at present you can only walk down the block. Make your first mini-goals to walk two, then three, etc. If you're going to try to go from walking a block to running a marathon, which is an aggressive goal, it's just silly to make your program aggressive too.

When you try to do too much too soon, you're too likely to end up frustrated and back to your old ways. Conversely, success begets success.

In recent article by James Altucher, about what he learned from interviewing Tony Robbins, this point is made crystal clear. The idea of bring the target closer. It refers to Tony training the US Army on how to improve it's marksmanship.

By starting with the target at close range, the soldiers got confidence in hitting it. Slowly it was moved further and further away, until they were exhibiting outstanding shooting from a distance. But that success was built on the simple victories of shooting from close up.

Design your own goals in the same way. Feel free to make your overall goal audacious, so long as your path to getting there is reasonable. There will be enough obstacles to side track you, don't let your own plan be one of them.

Maybe you don't have a problem, just the wrong perspective.

As you may or may not know, I spend about half the year living in Europe. Yesterday was Independence Day in Poland. It was quiet outside. Except for a handful of shops, everything was closed. It's a scene normally seen in the US only on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

When I first moved here, it bugged me. I didn't like planning around these holidays when nearly all stores are closed. Why can't they just stay open? I lamented.

I was wrong. Frankly, it's awesome. Having a forced break in the action is a good thing. Having a dozen days a year when the excuses for chilling out are simply erased. How cool is that? Very cool I say.

In our hyper connected world the temptation is to run from one activity to the next. Day off? Better buy those things you could not get during the work week. It's a holiday, more time to get things done. Ugh. Stop it!

Activity is not advancement. Even if it were, what's the point of advancing if you've discarded everything in life worth caring about?

It  may not be a holiday today in the US, but the next time you have a day off, try just pulling the plug. Or do something completely unrelated to work or your normal routine. In short, take a break.

It's easy to be led into believing that a little more effort will solve a problem. Very often with a little distance from our routine, we may find we don't actually have a problem, just the wrong perspective.

Success is normally found in a pile of mistakes...

We usually see success when it's been polished up a little like a diamond. It's pretty, and everyone wants it. That's where the problem comes for those seeking success. Often they've been deluded by appearances that success starts out looking like the finished product.

Nope. Success, as I have written before, is messy. You'll bump into things, make mistakes that'll have you cringing with embarrassment at times. You'll waste time on dumb ideas, get distracted, and waste more time. But, that's all part of the journey. 

Eventually you'll be getting better at what you are doing. You'll look in your pile of mistakes and see some flecks of gold, or diamonds. You'll figure how you got them, and start improving the way you work. In time, you'll have a great understanding of what you are doing, and progress will come much easier. More gold and diamonds. Nice.

Just to give you an example, when I was trying to grow my old investigative business, we went through many iterations of trying to keep up with the dictated reports that were submitted by investigators. This was expensive due to the overnighting of tapes, and on occasion we had to spend a ton of time looking for a missing tape. Then a woman who was working transcribing tapes asked why I didn't have a medical dictation system.

The reason? I didn't know what it was. But the system allowed all that dictation to be done via telephone every night. No more audio tapes, no more daily inbound express packages. In retrospect it seemed crazy we hadn't looked into it. But we didn't know such systems existed. But fixing that mistake was easily worth over a $100k per year. A nice additional profit.

You can improve the process by doing plenty of studying beforehand, but as my example illustrates, you'll probably still screw up. That's good. Because your success is going to be in that pile of mistakes. Just keep looking. 

Good luck!

Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right. - Henry Ford

A great quote by Henry Ford. There are plenty of other quotes about the role of belief in people's ability to accomplish things. 

In my experience, they are 100% true.

Now, if you can somehow trick yourself into thinking you can fly, that's not what I'm talking about.

However, there are many situations I have found myself in where I found myself delaying something or not doing it because I thought "I don't know how". 

Even after 53 years of living, I still play that game with myself. I'm convinced my idea for a podcast is sound, but I put all sorts of things in front of it, because of fear and a goofy internal dialog. 

It was no different when I started Omega nearly 18 years ago. Did I have a clue? No, I did not. But I just kept pushing myself forward. One more call, one more item on the list, until I was just doing it. If there was an inflection point, I have no idea what it was. 

The moral of my story. The best way to gain the "think you can", is to do it. Fail, but try. Try again. With every increment of effort you'll get better, and your confidence will increase. 

If you want to have your own business, then break it into "bite-sized" pieces. One at a time, try and master them. The process of doing that gives you not only the skill to start a business - it also gives you the confidence, the belief. 

Perhaps you truly can't today, but with effort inability will go away.

Real failure isn't a moment in time, it's an attitude in your mind.

In the movies, things are often painted with a nice black or white brush. We know what winning looks like, and we know what losing looks like. Success and failure are properly labeled so we can easily recognize them.

In real life, we might imagine such labels exist, but the reality is that they don't. Failure and success are often two different perspectives on an event. And even those perspectives are subject to change over time. 

For example, there was a company called Blue Ribbon Sports, known better today as Nike. In 1971, they were a tiny business that was losing their distributorship for ASICS running shoes in the USA. This effectively put them out of business. They had no product to sell. In that moment, it would be easy to look at this event and declare it failure. 

But founder Phil Knight managed to find someone to manufacture a new design, to create their own product - later known as Nike. If they had NOT lost the distributorship, they may have carried on as a distributor. While there's nothing especially wrong with that, it would have meant that you'd have never heard "Just Do It" as there would be no Nike. There's no way that a distributor would have the brand equity that Nike does. In essence, losing the distributorship was a major success. But it took a bit of time to see that. Most importantly, it took the will to keep going.

Such is the nature of much failure and success. What looks good in a given moment may not stand the test of time. Conversely, what looks like a complete failure today can be the genesis of a remarkable success. Keep that in mind before you become too downcast over a setback. Real failure isn't a moment in time, it's an attitude in your mind. Stay positive and just keep looking.

Why blogging every day is a risky, goofy idea.

"You should blog every day"

This is a piece of advice I hear pretty frequently that I think is goofy. 

Look, there's no question that developing something of a rhythm with readers is important. But the idea that you'll have something worthwhile to say every day is flawed. 

If you churn out some garbage just to make your deadline, you're violating the trust of your readers. And as a content creator, trust is about all you've got. Why would you try to create an expectation of daily content when you may be having trouble knocking out a weekly blog?

If, someone shows up to read your blog for the first time and you're content that day is weak, what makes you think they'll come back for more? Isn't it a better idea to develop compelling content weekly? Write an article based on questions you see coming in, and then refine it over a week to make it a real value add for readers. 

There's obviously no set recipe for success in anything. But if you want people to flock to your content, you'd better take the time to let it ferment, get edited, and released when it is ready to be savored by readers. Once it's out of the "kitchen" you'll be judged by it's merit and quality.

Personally, I blog when I have the time to write something I think is worthwhile. Perhaps most folks would procrastinate. I'd actually love to do something daily, but if I'm too busy with other things, on holiday or just am throwing up rubbish ideas, I'd prefer to wait. That's my duty to you, the reader. 

But what do y'all think? Is more better? Is frequency a concern? Please let me know your thoughts.

All the best from sunny Poland.

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. - Arthur Ashe

This reminded me of something.

I was at Sears buying a computer. It was October 1996. The reason I was at Sears was that it was the only place I had sufficient credit to buy a computer.

The computer and I journeyed home (I drove) to the crappy apartment I was living in. Whereupon I set it up, started designing my company's logo and making sales calls. 

JUST LIKE THAT.

It is so easy to get into the "I will when..." game. There were no marketing materials, there was no "company phone number" just me and a desire to get the ball rolling. That's it.

It took two weeks to get an investigative assignment. I heard NO NO NO NO NO NO................. Ad nauseum, but I survived.

A year in later 1997 we did over $2 million in revenue. 

Stop waiting for everything to be "ready".  Get started, in some way, now. Who knows how far you can go in a year.

Best wishes.

Straight up. Buy the book, help a child. Here's why...

   If you want to know the foundation of what allowed me to be successful. It's in the book. It's refreshingly short, and (from what I am told) enjoyably readable. Useful, short and inexpensive. Three excellent qualities for a book.

   There have been a few people that wonder about my "making money" off this book. Frankly, I made more money cutting grass when I was a teenager. It's really about sharing some information. If you truly can't afford it, send me an e-mail at tefargo@gmail.com and I'll get you a free copy. 

  Moreover, I'll donate the entire proceeds of all book sales this year to sponsor children in Africa via @SavetheChildren. If you're on the fence, buy the book and make a difference. For yourself, and a child. Click here, buy the book and make it happen. 

   Either way...Stay Awesome!

Falling off the leading edge.

Like many people I'm interested in what is new and exciting. From when I was a kid and they had "x-ray glasses" to now, downloading the latest and greatest app. The promise of productivity, convenience, or x-ray vision draws me in.

Of course, many innovations have brought tremendous boosts in what we can do, and how we can do it. Since you can now carry 10x more music than I accumulated on vinyl in the first ten years of my record buying life on a micro SD card, I'd say things have improved considerably.

But as we change and adapt some things have gone missing. Many stores have taken the opportunity to use technology to reduce the amount of staff in their shops and stores. Other businesses are dropping service levels to near zero based on a strategy that seems to be derived from data and an overwrought need to misuse it.

But what happened to fundamentals? One example, I bought a used SUV a couple of years ago. It was a late model and by no means inexpensive. Moreover, I bought it through the internet side of the dealership. A quick sale for the dealer, and with no hassle since I paid in full. In terms of processing the deal they were excellent. But did I ever get a thank you? Nope. A follow-up on how the vehicle was working out? Nope.

One small example of how you can align all the pieces of a transaction, and deliver, but fail to pick up the real bounce, which is making me feel like I matter. Gaining a customer as opposed to just making a sale. In a business as hyper competitive as car sales you think they'd be kicking out the differentiators. Nope.

While technology is great, the fundamentals are greater. The very stuff that people will glaze over and say "I know, I know" as you try to remind them of it. Well, knowing and doing aren't the same thing. Knowledge without action is pretty worthless. You can "know" how to paint, but until you make a painting the paint is only worth what it costs by the tube.

In the end, technological advances are only valuable to the extent they serve to enhance the fundamental operation of a business. The should make the same ebb and flow of ancient commerce smoother. If you are somehow persuaded that business is now changed and that people are just numbers, you are about to fall off the leading edge of technology.

Ponderous Product Packaging

Please don't sell me something in a package designed to thwart a rhino attack. 

Your product package should not be more durable than your product.

I bought the product because I want access to it. It's not going to be a museum display or put into a time capsule. 

It should be a requirement that a CEO be required to open every type of consumer product package their company ships with their bare hands while being filmed for a subsequent YouTube upload. Hilarity ensues...

Joking aside, the reality is that the package is part of the product: our gateway to using it. When the packaging is poorly thought out, it's an awkward beginning to the relationship with a customer at best. At worst, it creates a mood where your product is being set-up to be judged harshly.

Don't let ponderous packaging ruin your product.

 

Lions and Tigers and Retweets, oh my!

   The messages just keep on coming. "RT my name", "RT me", "RT my Facebook page". 

   Why, oh why, would I do that? 

   For one, I doubt you'd gain much in followers from me RTing your name. Second, I probably stand to lose a few people who would not feel like seeing a stream of unexplainable tweets flying around.

   In short. It isn't going to happen. I value the people who stick around to see what I'm going to post too much to just throw out gibberish. Therein lies the key to growing "your following", post something worth retweeting. Engage with people, talk to them, post good content.

   Of course, I do retweet. If you happen to be interested, here is what I recommend: tweet a quote you think fits with my "theme" with my handle @alphabetsuccess in the tweet more or less as follows in this example:

   We have it in our power to begin the world over again. - Thomas Paine #quote via @alphabetsuccess

     In case you're wondering why: The old style RT, that starts with "RT" is a visual stumbling block to reading the content. People tend to gloss over it. My observation is that leading a retweet with RT is guaranteed to inhibit engagement. Also, while I could re-work the tweet/quote you are counting on me having the time and inclination to do it. The more you "set it up" the better your chances. 

   If the quote is really good, and I don't already have it, I'll add it to my database. If I do, your handle will go right along with it. Never forget a friend. :-)

   There are no guarantees. But what I have outlined will dramatically improve your odds. 

   Happy tweeting!

Good enough never is.

   This weekend I was in Eskilstuna Sweden for a basketball tournament. So one night we ventured out for some food, in this case Chinese food at Ming Palace. Being a somewhat cautious person, I did some checking on TripAdvisor beforehand to see what was decent. The place in question was 4th on their list.

   As it turns out, 4th place was good enough to be pathetically mediocre. The food  was served quickly, and it wasn't over or under cooked. But it was devoid of any flavor. All served under the watchful eyes of the owner who never once inquired if we were enjoying, or had enjoyed, the food.

   How can that be? Well, I suppose that the standard of Eskilstuna isn't especially high, being a town of roughly 100,000 people, it isn't a likely spot for a top chef to hang their hat. Perhaps because of that, the restaurant had several customers who seemed to be contentedly grazing away. There isn't enough competition to force the Ming Palace to "up their game."

   But let's consider it from another perspective: there is NO competition. In other words, here is a place with a facility that is already open, and is actively serving clients. They are already doing 97% of the job it will take to make the place a star. All they have to do is put a little love into the food. If it was well seasoned, they'd probably be jammed with people. 

   At a minimum I'd bet a fair sum that an addition 5% effort would yield at  least a 20% increase in business. But I suspect it won't happen. They are probably puttering along OK, paying their bills and taking some time off every year. Business is good, or at least good enough. Right? Wrong.

   For now, the owners are safe. The little eco-system of this Swedish town is allowing them to survive on what they are doing. But what if one of their competitors decides to bring their "A" game? All of a sudden they might be having very little business and struggling to survive. They might even be forced to close.

   Such is the danger in playing the "safe" game of good enough. It provides an elusive veneer of comfort. They might be doing a little less business than before, but they can cut expenses, turn the heat down a bit. Slowly strangling a business that could thrive if someone would just look at it with a fresh set of eyes. 

   Don't be tempted to play the game of good enough. Bring your best game every day. Don't settle for being a little better than others. If the competition is poor, play hard anyhow. You never know when someone will show up ready to compete, so you need to be at your best. 

   Don't be lulled into complacency; good enough never is. 

 

To the most rockin, amazing group of people in the Twittesphere!

   What can I say. I'm honored every day by all the retweets, favorites and comments. You guys are a motivational FORCE!

   Just wanted to take a moment and say THANK YOU! I spend a fair amount on Twitter, and you make every single moment worthwhile. 

   Much love to you all. Stay awesome.

   Upward and onward!

When you put profit before principles you'll end up with neither.

   Bought a printer for your computer lately? I did. About a year ago I got myself a Brother MFC-6490CW. Sounds pretty impressive, and it even looks pretty impressive. But looks and sounds is about as far as it goes. When it comes to printing? Oh Brother!

   For the purpose of context, I do not print many things. If I generate in excess of ten pages a month, I'd be amazed. The occasional document and boarding pass. That's about it. 

   In light of that, I expected a long and happy relationship with my large impressive printer. But it stopped printing a few weeks ago. The printer indicated that it was out of blue ink. Fair enough. But as I wanted black printing, I didn't think that was much of an issue. However, I have come to find that many printer companies now force you to install a new cartridge to proceed regardless of whether you'll be using any of that color ink.

  Previously you could sort of fudge your way through having to buy one until there was almost no ink of any type left. The old way made sense. The printer did its best to sort you out with what it had "on-hand". Not any more.

   For those who may be unfamiliar with the economics of the printer business, it is a low profit business on printers but high profit on cartridges. Thus the new "engineering" to force additional cartridge purchases. It's a sort of document extortion. 

   This blog is part love letter to an inventor, or printer executive that wants to take over the industry. People want a printer that prints, even when the inks a bit low. Ideally that'll be a very sporadic condition. I'm virtually certain you can charge more, way more, for a printer that screams "I'll be ready when you need me!" 

   In the interim, I managed to unearth an old laser printer from the closet. One manufactured before someone led the whole industry into a "profit before principles" mindset. How regrettable that nobody stopped to think that when you put profit before principles you'll end up with neither. 

 

Don't worry about your pride, worry about your principles.

   Just about fifteen years ago I held my first press conference. It was at RIMS, which is an insurance conference my old business attended every year.

   Everything was carefully coordinated, there was catering, and a wonderful room near the entrance so it would be easy for the media to attend. Except they didn't. Exactly one journalist was there. If I hadn't been an advertiser in their publication, the number would have dropped to precisely zero.

  Unsurprisingly my initial reaction was to be a bit depressed. Thankfully I quickly reframed the incident in my mind. Business was strong, my family was good, my health was excellent, and furthermore, I hadn't compromised myself in any way to pull off the event. Thus, there was nothing to be ashamed of in the lack of attendees.

   It illustrated a very important point: principles matter, pride doesn't. Valuing your principles means doing things in the right way, being honest, sticking to your commitments even when it is painful to do so. Pride revolves more around feelings. Principles are fixed, pride is fickle.

   So when you are considering the success or failure of a situation, evaluate your adherence to principles rather than your sense of pride. Why does that matter?

   When we are afraid of failing, that's usually our pride talking. Our worry over who is going to roll their eyes at our efforts, or ridicule our performance. By that standard, my first press conference was a dismal failure. But was it?

   Even though there was virtually nobody there, I learned some valuable lessons (always book too small a room...crowded always is more intriguing than empty). There's more, but that alone was enough to make it worthwhile.

  Now, I always try to remember whenever I feel fear creeping up: Don't worry about your pride, worry about your principles. 

Don't Hire Anybody!

   If you have a new business, it's pretty common to start thinking about hiring someone to help with the seemingly endless tasks you are presented with. Don't. Do NOT do it. 

   Eventually, you will have to hire people, but try to put it off as long as possible. While you might think there is an element of sadism involved on my part there are reasons...

   First, you need to be able to present someone with a clearly delineated job. That's very hard to do in the beginning. In a start-up, many days end in a blur. But patterns eventually emerge in your work wherein you could explain a list of items to another person, you have the beginning of a job for someone. It takes some time.

   Second, by doing things yourself in the beginning you gain a massive amount of knowledge. That helps in the operation of any business and it also gives you valuable empathy for the person you'll eventually have doing those tasks for the business.

   Third, hiring is: easy in, hard out. Searching for your first "employee" is kind of exhilarating. You meet lot's of eager people ready to make a difference. Then you pick someone. But sometimes you blow it. You pick the wrong person. If hiring is fun, firing is the opposite. Firing people is a major buzz killer. The longer you wait, the better delineated the job will be, and the greater the chance for success in hiring.

   Fourth, hiring people costs money. Unless you have been massively funded or were born into big money, you'll find cash has a quick evaporation rate. Employees are helpful, but they are also expensive. Be sure you are absolutely clear on how you're going to specifically benefit from having this person. Have enough clarity to explain the hiring to an investor, even if you have none. 

   With some luck, you'll grow and clear these hurdles. You'll hire lot's and lot's of people and live happily ever after. But applying this logic to each position will keep you lean and focused. That's a very strong quality for any business to possess.

   

Beware of the quagmire of quantity.

   We are often lead by our wants and desires. We'd like to have a holiday in a particular spot, some new clothes, a better body, better sex, you name it, we all have our "list".

  But often we don't want the "thing" in question, we want how we think it will make us feel. We imagine that we'll be transported. Therein lies the trick. We might get that feeling, but only if getting access to what we want remains somewhat elusive.

  For instance, earlier this week a woman in the UK was treated at the hospital for having a "two-hour orgasm". Crazy right? But I think of all the hullabaloo on magazine covers for "ultimate pleasure" and then it turns out, like most anything, that getting the quantity right matters.

   Or consider the time I was on my first safari in Namibia. We all trundled into the jeep and sped away. The first zebras we saw were breaktaking. As the trip continued we saw more and more animals, but lots of zebras. By the end of the trip we'd see movement in the brush, and the inevitable conclusion, "It's just more zebras".

   It can even apply to the wonderful feeling we get when someone slips us a love letter. It's grand and we savor the moment. But if they start sending note after note, leaving messages, and calling all the time, we quickly lose that lovely feeling. Then the word "stalker" jumps into our mind. All because the quantity was wrong.

   Quantity counts, up to a point. After that point we start rapidly reducing the value of what was previously so valuable. Beware of the quagmire of quantity.

A tale of scale.

  In the past four years I have had the need to sell two houses. One in Stockholm, and the other in Florida. One sold, the other didn't. This is a tale of scale.

  To many people the image of Sweden is probably of a chilly place with somewhat grumpy socialists marching across the frozen landscape. Florida by contrast is a wonderland of palm trees and happiness. But I digress...

  When I contacted my broker in Sweden, he came by, we discussed the market conditions (a bit mediocre in 2010) and signed an agreement. Since I was on the road a bit we arranged for the house to be shown in my absence. 

   In Florida, I also contacted a broker I knew and arranged for the house to be listed. Market conditions were a bit better in 2012, so I was optimistic about the prospects for the house. This house was also being sold with me being out of town.

   Two houses, both in desirable settings, were being sold in roughly the same manner, at least from my perspective as the seller. 

   Where things became very very different was in the approach of the broker. 

   My broker in Stockholm takes very few houses to sell. But they ALL get sold. He puts his time and effort into it, and the listings are exclusive to him. 

   He took a decidedly average house in a nice suburb and had it sold well above our expected final price within a matter of a few weeks. 

  Why? Because he is focused on very few things professionally. He takes in listings which he is confident he can sell, and then puts his efforts into making that happen. In this case he even, at his own expense, detailed the property. 

   By contrast, the broker in Florida has many many listings, all in the MLS. He's a good, hard-working guy, but he's focusing on running his business, rather than the individual listings his firm has.. His money is in having enough inventory that some houses move and they take a cut. He is, in a word, scaling. 

   In fairness, they did put some effort into it. But the focus of the business is too spread out. The effort to market the house was just not sufficient. It sat and sat, until the market just sort of forgot about it and I had it removed from the market after several months.

   The moral of the story, is that while scale might sound very appealing, it doesn't work for all businesses. For me as a client, I was much better looked after by my broker in Sweden. 

   Client's don't care about your market share, or your reach. The internet reaches everyone. We want to be looked after. In a business involving such an intrusive process as selling a home, being another number feels lousy. Having the home not sell, worse.

   I even wonder if scales works for the big broker. The smaller operation is less visible, but also less stressful, highly profitable (virtually no overhead) and he has the luxury of turning away business. The larger operation is a machine with a lot of moving parts. All of which must be kept working for the business to survive.

   In businesses that are totally data driven, with wafer thin margins, scale is a necessity. But in businesses where humans matter scale can be a stressful, counterproductive mistake. 

   To me, the equation looks pretty simple. Sometimes scale just doesn't work. Grow at your peril.

Forget your weaknesses, increase your strengths.

  We get the message over and over, "work on your weaknesses". Nonsense. Do you think Michael Jordan should have studied Spanish instead of practicing basketball? Or maybe Michelangelo should have spend time learning more about banking from the Medici family? Maybe, or more likely, probably not.

   When I was in high school, my parents were very keen for me to study engineering. A fine idea, except for the fact that I wasn't even remotely interested in it. I liked business, and frankly, making money. Learning more about how airplanes stayed aloft wasn't in my circle of interests. 

   Now to listen to many gurus, I should have worked on my weaknesses. Why? So I could be bored and disenchanted with school? Possibly knowing more about certain things would have served me in some way. Except I didn't care then, and I don't care now. I can buy the books, but I'll always read something else ahead of them, and they'll sit unread for the rest of my days.

   I've taken the liberty of indulging my strengths. As a result, I've had a very nice business career, and a ton of fun. It's not to say that I haven't done considerable learning and growing along the way, but I think pushing myself into directions I wasn't interested in would have done pretty much nothing for me. 

   Truth be told, if you want to be really amazing at something it takes a focused effort. I'm no "super star" but I've done well, and I don't think it would have happened without having been extremely focused on business. Because I had a keen interest from an early age.

   Furthermore, I could read something every day and not come close to knowing everything about the things I am interested in within my field. You just keep banging away trying to stay a few steps ahead of the competition. 

   If you look at the top people in virtually every field, they got there through a keen focus on one item. Yo Yo Ma is an amazing cellist, Warren Buffet is a remarkable investor, Wayne Gretzky was a phenomenal hockey player. Focus, focus, focus. 

  Given the limited amount of time available to all of us, I say focus on your strengths. It's enough work just to maximize them.