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Don’t get ahead of yourself

by JimRaffel on September 12, 2010

Do you find yourself wanting to get too much done and jumping ahead of where you are supposed to be?

Don't get ahead of yourself

I am constantly reminding myself to finish what’s on my desk and work those opportunities. Some time needs to be spent on future business and planning but not too much.

In my case, the speaking opportunities I have worked to secure and the transformation of ColorMetrix to an inbound marketing company, will result in the leads that will become my new work for next year.

My plan is sound, as long as I constantly remind myself to stick to the plan and not get ahead of myself.

What’s your plan look like? How are you doing at not getting ahead of yourself?

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Continue Reading 3 comments }motivation, personal development, priorities, public speaking

It’s real because writing is the doing part of thinking.

It’s authentic because my writing comes from the heart about what’s going on in my life right now.

My life is sustainable because my thoughts turn into words which in turn become actions.

Earlier this week I had the privilege to speak at MKELive’s Ignite event. I was not asked to speak until late last week and thought to myself what can I talk about for five minutes? Not an extraordinary length time but as such more difficult to pick a topic for. The MKELive group is social media savvy so I decided to speak about the importance of your blog being the center of your social media universe.

My blog became my speaking notes. An hour before the event I sat in a coffee shop and read my last half dozen posts. A couple things occurred to me (when I say occurred it’s not as if I just thought of this it’s more like saying I “got it”)….

1. Your blog IS your on-line reputation. Tweets come and go at a pretty fast rate. You can still read blog posts I wrote almost five years ago. It is considered bad etiquette to delete old blog posts.

2. Your blog will become a community the instant an audience of ONE reads your first post. Just trust me on this one, I’m five years in and it took a day like yesterday when I had something like a dozen comments in a 24 hour period to realize that what I have built here is a community. A community where one person can inspire another and then we can all feed off the goodness caring between people.

These days LinkedIn is your resume, and your blog and the blogging you do are your interview. All other things being equal I’d like to do business with people who blog. It lets me check out their long-term view. Again, you can go read my posts from almost five years ago (it’s painful for me – I’m a much better writer now) and check the consistency of my story. You can also check out how I adapt to change (the world has changed a lot in five years) by reading through some of the history.

What do you think? Would a perspective employee, vendor, or business partner have a leg up with you if they had several years worth of consistent blog posts for you to read? Please jump in and let me know what you think!

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Continue Reading 9 comments }blogging, motivation, personal development, Uncategorized

#73: From the desk of Jim Raffel

December 12, 2008

These troubled economic times have transformed many of us in the Graphic Arts into senior level executives. What I mean is that we must all manage a long list of multiple priorities on a daily basis. Each and every day we are asked to get more done with fewer resources of every type. So, success [...]