OMG - It's 2014 and I don't have any New Years Resolutions!!!

  Hi there!

  Here are a few tips on making something happen in 2014. Some folks will disagree with my suggestions, but tough tiddliwinks.

  How to set goals, the quick version:

   1. Keep it simple, measurable, and in spite of the "soar with eagles" chatter, within reasonable grasp. Complexity messes up your thinking, measurement is essential, and by finding some things you can get done with a modest effort, you can always reset your target with the confidence gained from round one.

   2. Find a way to give your goals some synergy. Losing weight? How about a 5k run as another goal? The training will help with your other goal of losing weight. Losing weight will make running easier. Or if you want to read more, then add joining a book club. You get the idea. 

   3. Write it down! Commit it to a friend! - Everyone says this. Why? Because it works. Writing it down makes you internalize it. It's harder to forget. If you put it somewhere (like your calendar) it will keep staring you in the face. Good. Tell a friend too. They can also stare you in the face! If you have someone who will give you a friendly nudge, take advantage of it. Big help.

  4.  Don't be too rigid. Things go wrong. Adjust and move on. Rigid thinking is what puts goals on the shelf for another year. Relax a bit and if something goes wrong, dust yourself off, adjust and keep plodding along. You'll make it!

   5. Whatever you do - this is critical. Have fun. The more fun your goals are to reach, and the more fun you inject into the mindset, the more likely you'll make it happen. Fun: have it!

   Get your PEN and PAPER. Make it happen. Don't clean a drawer. Don't have a bagel. Sit down and move your life in a better direction for 2014. 

   Have fun. Really. Lot's of fun.

   Happy New Year.

The inside secret about my #quote tweets...

   Why all the quotes? Some inspirational, some political, some from Hitler??? What are you getting at?

   Great question! Nobody has asked me directly, but I do get some interesting comments, challenges etc. As a result I'd like to clarify my "goal" and provide some clarity about the quotes and my tweets:

   1) The primary purpose of my selections and compositions is to make you think. What you do with those thoughts is entirely up to you.

  2) While I am glad to sometimes briefly discuss a quote or whatever, I'm not going to enter a debate with you about a tweet. If you don't like a particular quote or tweet, there are +/- 72 per day. You'll probably find others you'll enjoy. The why is very very simple: The forum isn't ideal for debate and a bit unfair to people who stop by for content, and more importantly, you can deconstruct just about anything composed in 140 characters. I don't agree with everything I tweet, so why should you?

   3) With regard to tweeting things I don't agree with. Sometimes we are informed by consent, other times by dissent. Finding a place between the two creates a sort of imaginary set of bookends for an opinion. If nothing else, the idea of being thought provoking allows for differing sets of opinion.

   They are there to provoke thought. That's my goal. I hope you share it. Enjoy.

Yellow Zebras! Hello, over here! Hello!

   As Cory Doctorow said, "You can't monetize obscurity." In other words - The unnoticed are uncompensated. Enter the Yellow Zebra.

  Much of our lives we are encouraged to blend in, to be compliant. From our school days, into the entry to the workforce we get bombarded with the message to obey, and comply. Whole industries ride upon this wave. Our allegiance to brands that identify us as belonging to a certain group, or of being of a certain status. But blending in is dangerous. If you are hidden, how will anyone find you?

  We need to stand out. How? Pretty simple. Just be yourself. Though I imagine this is not as easy as it sounds. We are so programmed to behave in a certain way, we may have lost ourselves in the flood of messages to blend in, and join the party of sameness.

  But the benefits are so great, that we must work to be ourselves. To take a stand on something we believe in, to dare to occasionally piss a few people off. It is actually an old rule of advertising, that an ad that offends no one, effects no one. You need to be identifiable. You need to be a Yellow Zebra.

   Yellow Zebra's get noticed, they stand out. They won't be ignored. People have opinions about them. Some people don't like them. But in the end, they are remembered and rewarded., 

   At Omega Insurance Services, my old company, we were the "in your face" company. If anything we errored to the side of excess. You would get mail from us, e-mail from us, we'd call you. We took had the mantra of Donkey in Shrek "pick me, pick me!"  before the movie ever appeared. Since we made the Inc. 500 twice I'd say it worked pretty well. But we did have people occasionally say that we that were annoying. If that's the cost of doubling revenue year after year, isn't it worth it? Doesn't that make being a Yellow Zebra attractive?

   Yes, that's right. If you are truly yourself, and willing to express some of your truly unique qualities, it will pay off. It can be so counter-intuitive that people have trouble with it.  Thinking that they won't get through  a job interview that way. So WHAT? If you have to be phony to get a job, perhaps it isn't the right job for you. Wouldn't it be better to work someplace where everyday you could be yourself? To get up everyday excited about working in an accepting uplifting environment. Can you actually imagine being a Yellow Zebra without smiling? 

   If you have a business and want to have a special culture, let it be a Yellow Zebra culture. By letting people be themselves the results are astounding. You essentially develop a competitive advantage cost free by embracing that which is unique in people. Go crazy, have fun. There is another reward - fun! 

  The rewards for being a Yellow Zebra include both financial and spiritual. To give value to others, you have to begin by valuing yourself. This is the essence of being a Yellow Zebra, to identify that which makes you unique. Your personal differentiators. 

   Don't wait, don't delay. Begin the journey out of the darkness and into the light. We'll be waiting, and you won't have any trouble spotting us. We'll be in yellow with black stripes making some noise. Come on, let's see your stripes, you Yellow Zebra. 

Free at last! Um...Free again! Well, you get the idea.

   Almost ten years ago, on September 10, 2003, I sold Omega Insurance Services, a little less than seven years after we started doing business, and to say my life was changed would be a massive understatement. To be 42 and know you will never need to work again, is a pretty delightful feeling. In essence, I was free. Not in an insane Bill Gates sort of way, but plenty free for me.

   So, with the tenth anniversary of the event coming up, I decided to mark the day with another Alphabet Success giveaway. A way of celebrating my freedom over the last ten years by giving you a tool to help you get your freedom, or if you already have it, keep it.

  If you don't already know, Alphabet Success is a wonderfully short, very readable Kindle book available on Amazon.com. You can download and read it on any tablet, some phones, and obviously a Kindle.

    What is the book about? It is a distillation of the elements I think were most critical in my success as a business person as well as my success in other areas of my life. There are people who talk about the life they dream of having, and then there are those who go out and make it happen. If you want to be in the latter category, reading the book would be a very good idea.

   What secrets are in the book? None. Zero. Zip. Nada. You probably already know everything I will tell you in the book. However, you aren't using it on a daily basis to effect change in your life. Just like having a garage full of tools doesn't make you a mechanic, having the tools to succeed isn't enough to make you successful. You have to use the tools and master them.

   Will the book make me successful? If you let it. There is no plane ticket to success. There is no little bit of magic that will pop you into the life you want. There is a set of tools, and then a fair bit of work to be done. But it can be fun, joyful and the ride can be an absolutely amazingly blissful experience.

   Isn't this just common sense? Yes. But with that in mind I will leave you with two quotes from two people far more successful and well known than me:

   There is nothing more uncommon than common sense. - Frank Lloyd Wright

   There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult. - Warren Buffett

   September 10th, 2013 from 12:00 to 12:00 Pacific Standard Time. Download it, read it, apply it. Repeat as needed.

Congratulations! The winner is....

   Let's put our hands together and give a big round of applause to.... nobody! That's right, nobody submitted an essay for the $500 "Alphabet Success" contest. As much as I might be happy that the $500 will be staying in my company account, there is a much much bigger lesson here. If you don't try, you can't win. 

   Of course, I could have done a countdown and reminded people, but as the time drew near I became curious whether anyone was going to make an entry. I even waited until it was 1:00am in Guam, the closest point to the international date line. Nope. Nada. Thus, we arrive at the question of why?

   One possibility is that nobody needed the money. Great news, apparently the global economy is much more robust than I had imagined. Frankly, I'm not sold on that theory. Somebody reading this, perhaps you, is thinking, I should have sent the guy a quick page about "Alphabet Success" and I'd have had his $500. And you would be correct!

  Another potential thesis is that I did not promote the contest enough. Maybe. But there are roughly 50,000 people on my Twitter account, another 1,550 on LinkedIn and to date there are roughly 1,400 copies of the book out in circulation. That would seem a large enough population to elicit at least a couple of responses. But I'll take some of the blame for not "mashing" on the accelerator more as the date drew near to pique your interest. So there is a partial explanation, but seemingly not enough to have prevented any entries.

   My theory? People may have thought what's the point? I hate writing, and I won't win anyhow. Well, that's not really the ABC (Always Be Committed) or JKL (Just Keep Looking) sort of attitude I was hoping to promote in the book. If you glanced at the numbers on my sites the raw data suggest that there was a reasonable shot of winning. But you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. 

   One other alternative? People might think, he'll be looking at a few papers and my writing needs work (which would have been improved by trying..but anyhow) so I have no shot. I'll tip my hand a little here and let you know that I would not have nor will I judge someone on the basis of their grammar or the poetry of their prose. It is nice when language flows, but I was after a STORY. So long as you can convey an example of something that happened, and relate it to a chapter in "Alphabet Success", that will be a solid contender.

   For what it is worth, I would have taken a powerful story over a finally crafted, but boring tale. But that's water under the bridge. It's August 1st, and the contest is over with no winner. Bummer.

   But wait,! What if we use this example to try another approach? Let's have a new contest, with a bigger prize and give you more time to write your story. Shall we say October 31st? That's almost two months from today. Same rules, same deal. I'll update the contest rules, but in short, $500 for the best story  related to a chapter in "Alphabet Success". It must be submitted by October 31st, 2013, no later than 5pm EST. All entries must be received at my e-mail address: tim.fargo@hammerfest.com.

  There you have it. A second chance! If you are interested, I suggest opening a document and just jotting down the most basic outline of what you are thinking. A couple of sentences. Then put a note in your calendar to get cracking at the earliest opportunity. Don't get all jammed up worrying about appearances, and that nonsense, just take some time to write out your thoughts. You can always recraft it. And, should your piece be published on my blog, I'll work with you on it beforehand if you think it will help.

  You'll have to do the heavy lifting though. I'm not dragging you to the finish line.

   Go on. Just Keep Looking!


   Alphabet Success, your personal step-ladder to success.  To buy, click here. 
 

Leadership through laughter. Or why fun is profitable. (or at least fun...)

   There is nothing quite so therapeutic or disarming as a laugh. Some of our best ads use them, and many of our fondest memories are of a good shared laugh. But too often offices are like quiet libraries where laughter is,well, not very professional or even plain old dead. Why?

  During the course of running Omega Insurance Services into the Inc. 500 twice, I would say there were very few days that passed where we didn't all bust up laughing over something. Now given the size of the company, not everyone was always there, but it was in "our blood". The place was wired for levity. For fun. Why?

   Because a) It is free. It cost nothing to have a fun work environment. You might have to be at the end of the joke at times. If that's the greatest pain you every feel, lucky you. b) It loosens people up. This is a huge advantage. People who are not worried about their next move relax and get the job done, instead of spending an inordinate amount of time worried about their "image". c) It is infectious. People like to be with fun people. Customers feel it, prospective employees feel it. It ends up permeating the company. Why does that matter?

   It matters because all those things lead to a better bottom line. You'll make more money if people are enjoying themselves. They're not spending time complaining, their not sitting worried about their job, or some goofy gossip. They're working and enjoying themselves. Most importantly, to me at least, is that if you aren't having fun, I reckon you should examine your choice of career.

   Perhaps this is a matter of philosophy. But if you look around at the best companies, I dare say that the one's that stay on top do it with a combined commitment to excellence and fun. Even if it turns out to give you the same bottom line, isn't it more enjoyable to be in a place that's a little loose, where smiles prevail?

   It's your business or career, and your life. Why not enjoy it?


    Alphabet Success, your personal step-ladder to success.  To buy, click here. 

You don't get any points in life doing things the hard way. - Tim Fargo

   Let's dispel a little myth. Working hard is NOT the key to success. It may be an ingredient, but it isn't the main one. If sheer hard work was the KEY, then the people doing physical labor would be billionaires. Last time I checked it wasn't quite working out that way. It's no slight against the people who choose that path. But it is a choice.


   If you are really after success, it would be wise to define it. If you only have your current location in your GPS, it is going to have some trouble directing you. You must have a destination, and to my way of thinking, you also need to set some parameters for getting there.


   For example, one of my key parameters was FUN. To me, having to pursue a dream while being miserable is not success, it is torture. Even if there is a nice pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow, who wants to toil and sweat all the way there? If it is true that life is the journey, not the destination, then you better be pretty focused on enjoying the ride.



    Alphabet Success, your personal step-ladder to success.  To buy, click here.