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Welcome back to #4 in our Straight Talkin’ Business section – today we’re going to do a personal favourite of mine…

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it

How many times have you heard that phrase before?

Lots right?

Well, here’s another question – how many times have you really thought long and hard about it? I mean really stopped and carefully contemplated it?

See, like so many of these phrases we tend to use them as conversational shortcuts. Once a clever phrase catches on it doesn’t take long for it to be overused to such an extent that we tend to filter it out subconsciously.

In fact I’m sure that, before deciding to embark upon your own home based business, you had at least one boss who loved to copy and paste that phrase, and others like it, into as many sentences as possible.

That’s why we become immune to them, and forget the simple, yet profound wisdom that they contain, and how they can be of benefit not just to our business endeavours but to our lives in general. more »

It’s time for another installment in our Straight Talkin’ Business section, this time it’s that old adage; “if you want a job done right, do it yourself.”

By now I’m sure that half of you are nodding in agreement, but I’m sure almost as many are going, but wait! What about outsourcing, virtual assistants and the Four Hour Work Week? more »

Welcome back to our Straight Talkin’ Business series and part two on Murphy’s Law and Home-based Business.

“I’m Surrounded By Incompetence!”

There are times when I feel like a cartoon villain. My well-laid plans to control and dominate are crushed, once again, not by my own hand, but by the action, or inaction, of others.

I am The Brain in a world full of Pinkys.

I am a lone warrior on a crusade to forge forward through life on my own terms, hacking through bureaucracy and strangling layers of red tape like jungle vines, exhausted, sweat dripping from my brow, pushing myself, driving myself ahead to get to a point where I want to be, the point where I should have been months ago, if it hadn’t been for X, Y and Z. It just seems unending, so I keep on going, because I can’t afford to stand still and because if I’m ever to get out of this steaming, wild, unruly jungle and reach that cool, calm clearing, I just have to keep on moving.

Sometimes I wake up and start the day and everything’s just perfect, and I commence my work comfortable in the knowledge that everything is going according to plan and I’m progressing through my to-do list swiftly and efficiently. Then something completely unforeseen happens that blows everything out of the water. And nine times out of ten, that’s just the opening salvo in a sustained barrage of BS…

When it Rains it Pours

There are times when you begin to wonder whether the whole world really is against you.

And you know what? Statistically speaking, it is. We’re all in this system, a system designed to challenge and test the individual, to force compliance, to favour the bigshots over the little guys and to push people to their limits and thus separate the winners from the losers.

That’s just the rat race, however, and the only way to win is to just suck it up and deal with it. It’s when you think that the entire universe itself going against you, when you start joining the dots between one random unfortunate act to another and start to see a hidden hand behind everything, that’s when things get a little…well, that’s when a perfectly acceptable cynical mind turns a bit more beautiful mind – and that’s what you need to avoid.

I’ve gone through this, and every other business person I’ve ever talked to has gone through this at one point or another.

Avoid negative reactions; like the hedgehog reaction – curling up into a ball and remaining motionless – the paranoid gangster reaction, “everybody’s out to get me!” or the ever-popular ranting and raving reaction.

I’ve no qualms telling you that I’ve gone through all of those reactions in the past; I’ve procrastinated when I needed to take decisive action, I’ve panicked when things went wrong, I’ve held back when I should have pushed back because I thought it wiser to avoid confrontation, I envisioned a shadowy cabal of competitors allied against me and I’ve cursed down the phone at crappy ISPs and hosting company employees, frothing at the mouth like a Downfall YouTube mash-up when I should have been exercising restraint.

Why? Because I wasn’t born a businessman, nobody is. Entrepreneurship is a baptism of fire, and the hotter it gets the more resilient you get, your skin gets thicker and you learn how to discipline yourself to learn to control your reactions.

When you have a day job you take crap off your boss and go home, you don’t have the right to make your own decisions, you just do as your told, because that’s life. When you work for yourself, however, you make all the decisions and not all of them will be the right ones.

So you need to take responsibility, not just for your successes, but also for your failures, and when things don’t go quite right, instead of reacting emotionally to problems, you need to rationally seek out solutions.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

When you start off your own business you’re full of excitement and passion, though these initial bursts of energy, motivation and creativity aren’t always easy to sustain. As entrepreneurs we’re independently minded, we’re leaders, not followers, and we tend to be impatient – we want it all and we want it now!

Provided it’s within our comfort zone, that is. We’re naturally excited about certain areas of the business, but tend to be disinterested in, and in some cases even intimidated by, those other aspects which we feel we’re weak at. Examples might include a graphic designer who’s excellent at the creative side but inexperienced in handling his or her own finances or a freelance programmer who’s got incredible technical skills but always feels tongue-tied when the times comes to make a sales pitch.

For a while you’ll wing it, but eventually Murphy is going to weigh in on things and you’re going to have to learn your lessons the hard way. The trick is not to think of it as punishment, but rather a case of tough love.

Naturally it’s going to slow you down, and three months down the line you’re still not past the point where you thought you’d be after just a week because you’ve had to embark on a whole new epic side quest all just so you can get back to the point you started from. If you find that happening to you, don’t fret, it’s just the way things are, nothing worthwhile in life is immediate, the quick fixes and the fast bucks always turn out to be scams, instead you need to remember that…

Life is Not a Rocky Montage

If there’s one thing we associate with the Rocky movies more than anything else, it’s the training montage. Every morning he’d get up and start training, punching meat, running up steps, racing Apollo Creed – each day getting consistently better, faster, getting strong nooooow!

It became not just a cinematic cliché, but a cultural one. Those of us who grew up in the 1980s, particularly, grew up thinking that life was really like that. The montage is a a narrative shortcut, and a misleading one at that. It doesn’t show you the mornings where Rocky’s arms were so worn out that he couldn’t lift his toothbrush, where he got a flu that floored him for a week, where he had to go to stand in line for hours and kow-tow to some slimy little bureaucrat just to get a piece of paper, the hours he spent on hold waiting to dispute a bill or the three days he waited at home for a repairman to finally show up and overcharge him.

These types of things are part and parcel of life, but not the ingredients of a feel-good movie.
In fact they’re precisely the sort of things we watch movies to escape from in the first place.

We can never escape them entirely, of course, but we can edit them out of our own life-montage through the power of memory.

In time we come to look back and laugh at them, those seemingly insurmountable barriers we faced back in the early days which now pale in comparison with our accomplishments.

And, for those days when ever bigger challenges come then you need to face them, well, who better to motivate you than the Italian Stallion himself?

http://youtu.be/0N-c8MIFvaI

As an Irishman I thought we’d start this series off with a man called Murphy, and the law which has become forever attributed to him.

Murphy’s Law

There are variants of it, but basically it states that, whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.

Many people are surprised to discover that there actually was a guy called Murphy who invented the law.

In fact the story behind Murphy’s Law is quite an interesting one. It dates back to the pre-Space Age, when America was conducting tests with rocket propulsion and the resulting effects of G-Force.

Edward A Murphy Jr. was an engineer working on the project and apparently one of the rocket scientists was no rocket scientist – “If there is any way to do it wrong, he will”, Murphy replied, after one of his fellow engineers made an oversight resulting in a critical equipment malfunction. From that day forth, the statement, and all variants of it, have been dubbed Murphy’s Law.

Other variants include Murphy’s British counterpart, Sod’s Law, which, in typical cynical British fashion, adds additional layers of personalized torment and Finagle’s Law, which has become one of the most widely-used version; “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong – and at the worst possible moment.”

Murphy 2.0

It’s fitting that Murphy himself should be an engineer, when it comes to things going wrong, there’s no more potent combination than people and technology, as anyone who has ever worked in IT can attest.

Working from home can be quite trying at times, because you’re personally responsible for maintaining your own support infrastructure. There’s no in-house technical support line to call, there’s no computer guy going to come out, unless you call independent contractors and then you’ll be the one who has to pay them.

Running your own business from home raises the stakes somewhat, because it means you ultimately take responsibility for everything, especially if you’re starting out on your own and are operating as a one man (or one woman) band.

Everybody Makes Mistakes – But Not Everybody Learns From Them

When it comes to mistakes I’ve made some doozies. I blown money on crappy investments and even crappier equipment, I spent 700 bucks on a brand new Toshiba laptop 3 years ago, then accidentally stepped on it. I fried a PC motherboard because the PSU switch got accidentally switched to 110 instead of European 220V. I’ve been hacked, smacked and utterly ripped off, I’ve lost critical data, lots of money not to mention my patience, my temper and my motivation – but I got it all back again.

See, there are two types of mistakes, avoidable mistakes and unavoidable ones. As time goes by you get better and better at avoiding the majority of mistakes through experience, discipline and mindfulness. Some people will argue there are no such things as unavoidable mistakes, but I disagree. Some days you just get blindsided by something you have never encountered before. By learning to deal with these issues calmly and rationally, however, you learn how to overcome them and recognise them in future, thus they get added to your growing database of avoidable mistakes.

In business, as in life, mistakes aren’t always a bad thing, they can provide highly valuable experience provided we learn the lessons they teach us.

To err is human. To really screw up, you need a computer.

Human error we can live with, more or less. If an individual or group is failing frequently, or letting you down habitually, then you can always replace them, you just find a new worker, contractor or service provider and chalk it down to experience.

Computers, however, often seem like they were built with Murphy’s compliance built in. No matter what brand or model you buy hard drives will crash, servers will go down, ISPs will suffer an outage just when you’re about to send that all-important completed document, you’ll wake up in the morning and discover your website has been hacked…

I guarantee to you all of these things will happen to you at some time or another. There are no ways to prevent them, all you can really do is prepare for them as best you can and have plans of action in the event of failure. So that means having lots of backups, in secure and separate locations and having contingencies and systems in place in the event of a power failure (e.g. UPS, generator), network or internet connection failure, and so on.

Even so, with devices using ever-cheaper components, cost-cutting services, buggy software, proprietary, built-in non-compliance and compatibility and our overall infrastructure getting flakier by the day due to a flagging economy, system failure can, and will, occur and, as the law states, at the worst possible moment.

Software, too, can wreak havoc – and the more dependent we are on it the more vulnerable we become. We start our computer in the morning with some application bugging us for an update which, after downloading, crashes the computer completely, we upgrade our software to the new version only to discover the user interface is completely different and we’ve to learn how to use it all over again, we spend forever and a day getting our profile and page sorted and then Facebook decides to redesign and resets all our privacy settings (again).

Or how about all those internet marketers out there who’ve watched their empires crumble on account of a Google algorithm change? Their reaction? Blame Google. In reality it’s actually their own fault for having a business that’s wholly reliant on just one company’s infrastructure. That’s why, with software, as with hardware, you always need to have backups, fail-safes and extra layers of redundancy.

When judge Murphy bangs his gavel it’s very easy to scream at technology. My generation, for example, the so-called internet generation, grew up learning to hate Bill Gates because he was a tangible face to the technology which we felt was failing on a daily basis. Before Bill Gates we’d all just curse at the “stupid computer!”

Of course you can’t really blame a computer, any more than you can blame a toaster for burning your toast, it’s either the fault of the manufacturer for building a faulty unit, or it’s the fault of the operator for using incorrect settings. In the first instance you can either learn to live it with or, if you can’t, replace the unit, and in the second case, once again, you have to just learn from your mistakes just like everything else.

Next…
In the next post we’re going to talk more about Murphy’s Law and how to maintain your motivation even when you start to feel like everything’s going against you.

Whilst having my cup of morning tea and checking my emails, I opened up two articles from Business Insider, both of which were sent to me via Linked In. One was about the true motivation behind Apple’s outsourcing practices, and the second was about comments made by Seth Godin regarding the future of employment – two stories, from the same source, telling the same story in two very different ways.

Of the two it was the Seth Godin story which managed to cause the biggest stir. On Linked In I noticed the story bubbling up again and again on various groups, I even saw one person question whether or not it constituted “right wing propaganda”. Once again, in other words, Seth has got people thinking, and talking.

Seth Godin, for those who still don’t know, is a one man phenomenon. The best-selling author, speaker, entrepreneur and founder of Squidoo is a highly influential figure, when Seth speaks, people listen. Large businesses, in particular, listen quite intently to what he has to say.

So when Seth has something to say about the future of employment, you’d do well to listen too. more »