CLAMS

PRODUCE

 ICE   

(Outside a fresh fish and vegetable market on the Jersey Shore)

LOWEST PRICE

 JUST REDUCED!   

(On top of a House For Sale sign in Southern Delaware)

ALL BINGO

    WINNINGS FINAL.    

(On a church marquee next to a graveyard in Central New Hampshire) 

CORDSA WOOD

   FUR SEAL HEAR   

(Spray painted wood sign, back road, mountains of Northern Maine)

Post or send me some that you’ve seen recently, with some not too specific locations! 

halalpiar

Entrepreneurship?  It’s flyin’ by the seat of your pants and shootin’ from the hip! 

• It’s working late, turning out the lights and taking out the trash yourself!  It’s taking risks, but only reasonable ones! 
• It’s having nobody tell you what to do . . . but you can’t take sick days, personal days, or much of a vacation! 
• It’s being able to stop and turn on a dime! 
• It’s tough money times, physical exhaustion, a brain drain, joltingly competitive at every turn, and fed by a never-ending stream of shocking surprises. 
• But those who live it wouldn’t trade it for anything!  It’s a workaholic and business junkie all rolled into one.  It’s all about the excitement of making your idea work!

     Entrepreneurship is indeed all of those things, and more, but the common thread is attitude.  Entrepreneurs are individuals who instinctively or who have learned to believe in themselves and their ideas above all others.  They are curious, inquisitive, if not feisty explorers.  They are motivated by and focused on making their ideas work, not—contrary to popular opinion—on making money.  Money is something that happens when their ideas work.

I kood hardly even spelt ontrahprenoor, 

and now I are one!

     It’s the kids with the lemonade stands, the ones who go door-to-door selling stuff they find in their basements, attics, garages, or closets, who have entrepreneurial instincts and attitudes to begin with.  

     A common characteristic shared by many successful entrepreneurs is that they were lousy students in school, didn’t like being controlled and organized or told what to do, and would often go far beyond the simple science lab experiment, to nearly blow out the windows! 

     But these aren’t the only kids who grow up to succeed in self-owned and self-managed business!  Many others stumble into entrepreneurial attitudes along the way.  And still others are actually taught.  Entrepreneur schools and college level programs that have reached mainstream academia now crank out thousands of graduates each year. 

     Those who are “made” entrepreneurs often go on to successful careers minus many of the black and blue marks that come along with the trial and error, on-the-job learning we tend to associate with traditional “born” entrepreneurs. 

     More on this coming soon includes a bird’s eye view into specialized entrepreneur functioning in unexpected places!          halalpiar 

[See www.TheWriterWorks.com for results-guaranteed consulting help with business expansions, startups, and writing services that cater to entrepreneurs . . . over 500 new business success stories!]           

Those who knew her knew they had a friend. She never had just acquaintances, you see. Her helping hands were always out. Her heart was always open, and worn always on her sleeve.

     Honey left high school (and the beloved field hockey team she captained) at age 16 to be both Mother and Father to her three younger sisters and two troublesome brothers. Teacher, cook, housekeeper, breadwinner, nurse, and homemaker, she brought them up without fanfare or recognition, and usually without thanks.  

     When Honey married Harry and finally raised her own family—two sons five years apart with a third, a stillborn, in between—she never gave up mothering her orphaned siblings.

     When Harry ended up drinking half his mailman’s salary, Honey never complained; she simply accepted it as her due, and scraped together enough to barely pay the rent. She scrimped on groceries, stretched meals, and afforded clothes for everyone but herself. When Harry had beef for dinner, the boys got his leftovers; Honey had soup (usually tomato, sometimes ketchup stirred in hot water). When her sisters needed a roof over their heads, she took them into her tiny three-room apartment and made them thank Harry.

     When her sons were grown and her husband had passed, she continued looking after her brothers and sisters, and adopted all her neighbors too . . . cooking and cleaning and lugging groceries down the street and up the two or three flights of stairs, for those who were older, ill, or handicapped.

     How do I know Honey was such a honey? How do I know all this self-sacrifice to be true? Because, you see, Honey was my Mother! Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! How proud I’ve always been of you. How much I wish you could be here to enjoy your loving sons and daughters-in-law, and all your grandchildren and great grandchildren too. But, then, perhaps you are . . .                halalpiar  

     People don’t set goals because they’re afraid of failing. You set a goal to achieve something important for yourself by a certain date, and you don’t make it, so you’re a failure, yes? No! Why? Because having a deadline or due date is only one of the four factors necessary for a legitimate goal.

     If a goal you set doesn’t include all four of these criteria, you don’t have a goal. You have a wish! And if you think Tinkerbell is going to deliver your wish to you on a silver platter, you’re living in fantasyland! 

     1)  A goal must first be SPECIFIC. To say you want to increase sales is not specific; unit sales or sales dollars? How much of an increase? Vs. what? Use exact numbers.  

     2)  A goal must be REALISTIC. Sure, anything is possible, but it’s probably not realistic to have a goal of being President of the U.S, or of climbing Mount Everest if you’re 85 years old [That’s not to say that someday . . .] any more than it would be to open a business today and expect to be a “Fortune 500″ company in a year or two [Remember the “Dot-Gone” revolution?], or—unfortunately—to write a poem that will create world peace by breakfast time tomorrow. Be sure that your goal is something that really is possible to achieve.

     3)  Then, guess what? Your goal has to be FLEXIBLE. This is where most people fall short in their goal-setting. “If I don’t make the date or the numbers I’ve set, I’m a failure.” But not if you keep your goal flexible. If you miss the target date or level of accomplishment, move the target! It’s okay! It’s allowed! It’s YOUR target. You can do anything you want with it. Setting a new deadline or changing the dimensions of what you’re aiming for is part of what being flexible is all about. A goal shouldn’t control you!    

     4)  Finally, you do most assuredly need a DUE DATE or DEADLINE so that you know what you’re aiming for.

     In other words, “To increase fourth quarter sales by 10% over last year’s total ” is better than ”To increase sales.” And if the fourth quarter looms on the horizon and it doesn’t look like 10% will be possible, adjust the goal to 9% or 8% and perhaps add the difference to next year’s first quarter goal. SPECIFIC, REALISTIC, FLEXIBLE, and DUE-DATED works for personal, family, and life goals as well as for business and social change.                   It works if you do!                               halalpiar       

     “Start with a billboard!” I was told in my first writing job a zillion blank pages ago. It took a while for that suggestion to settle into my neophyte, know-it-all demeanor, but reality is that it’s one of the most important pieces of advice I’ve ever received. 

No matter what you are writing, no matter the audience, the medium, or desired result, when you can write a billboard first—even if you never use an actual billboard—everything else will flow easier and quicker, and have greater impact.

     And why is that? For an outdoor billboard to be effective, considering average passing rates of speed (and website billboard responsiveness, considering online attention spans plus trigger finger impatience), the total number of words should not—as a rule of thumb—exceed seven!

     And those seven words need to tell a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end . . . AND be persuasive! “You deserve a break today … at McDonald’s” is a perfect example. Look around; you’ll see others, and hopefully from some more health-conscious businesses than fastfoods. [Please post or send me any good examples you run across.]

     Even working with as noncommercial an entity as the Pennsylvania Heart Institute and a two-dozen member team of heart surgery and transplant specialists and cardiologists, it was enormously helpful to establishing the Institute and to growing the affiliated physician practices by coming up with a billboard to start things off.  

     “Put Your Heart In The Right Place!” [especially as caption to a graphic with a big red heart on the right side of a blue-outlined Commonwealth of Pennsylvania] best captured both the rational competitive spirit and emotional sense of sentimentality in a single seven-word statement.  It served as a successful inaugural theme for their branding and community relations programs.           

     Think about how to write an effective billboard before tackling your next letter, business plan, chapter, email, advertising campaign, sales pitch, poem, speech, short story, editorial, script, sermon . . . and do it! 

     It will force you to encapsulate the essence of what you want to communicate, help you be more persuasive, and ensure you of getting the most impact value from your efforts.                          halalpiar  

     It’s no secret that Demarva Power stands accused as being the #1 cause of pollution in the State of Delaware, and one of the top polluters in America. 

     No one with a brain eats fish from the Indian River (or, for that matter, lets their dogs swim along the riverbanks), where the fossil fuel plant is located.  Even putting incomplete but suspicious cancer cluster studies and conclusions aside, many of those living within a few miles of the power plant find themselves having to scrape and vacuum wayward coal dust layers and mounds off their ceiling fans and window sills with some frequency, monthly some report. 

     This is for real, and no study is needed to support homeowner findings that coal dust accumulates everywhere.  One needs only to look with her or his eyes!  Imagine how much soot is not visible that makes its way into the lungs of residents and visitors?

     Delmarva Power’s coal cleaning and burning processes have often been reported as examples of something considerably less than state-of-the-art technology.  The smokestacks appear to spew out toxins 24/7.  But instead of spending the money to upgrade technologies used, and act like responsible State and community citizens, the company simply turns its back and casually responds that they’re “not the only ones” polluting Delaware’s environment.  Duh. 

     Delaware’s Governor and the State Government act like they’ve been shell-shocked into a catonic stupor as Delmarva Power’s management and attorneys have relentlessly barraged the public for over two years (in customer-paid radio commercials and professionally-crafted news releases among other means) with every conceivable argument for rejecting alternative energy sources driven by renewable wind power proposals. 

     In fact the power company had the audacity to at first suggest that it would instead be better to expand its already-flawed operation, claiming that windmills that were proposed to be located over seven miles offshore would ruin water views, then that too many birds would be killed (by the slow-moving blades), then that it would interfere with boating enthusiasts, then that costs to consumers would be prohibitive, and on and on. 

     Now, in seeing that public outcry was starting to turn the tide against them, they’ve taken up the mantle of out-of-State onshore wind power alternative firms, using out-of-State employees, which they would presumably have a hand (and no small amount of control) in working with.  The power company claims that these choices would be better and more economical than the original proposers, Blue Water Wind, a company that appears to be a capable and responsible in-State provider and employer.  Blue Water was of course one of the first stating opposition to power plant activities. 

     And where have Delaware’s political types been hiding after originally approving Blue Water Wind’s plans?  Instead of taking some steps forward and launching a trial project, the Governor and State Legislators have had a sudden change of heart (supported by virtually no one except Delmarva Power people). 

     State government leaders have been led to believe that all forward movement should stop because they need to study the situation to death.  As coal dust continues round-the-clock to blacken homes, waterways, and critically-needed State farmlands, they may be doing exactly that!          halalpiar

     A basic tenet of organizational development is that the solution to any group or organization problem lies within the group or organization that has the problem. 

     When your objective (which is simply the flip version of the problem) is clearly defined, the strategies (or thinking avenues for achieving the objective, whether business or personal) must come from inside the individual or inside the organization that’s in pursuit of the goal.  It’s unreasonable to expect an outsider to understand enough of what has prompted the goal that’s been set to be able to step in and produce meaningful strategic results.

     If you had a marital problem, would you depend completely on a step-by-step solution plan that’s handed you by someone who neither you nor your spouse has any history with (even if that someone has professional credentials)? 

     Businesses that rely on strategies put together by outside consultants—strategies based on research and analysis done by outside consultants—are not making the most of their own organizational and management team strengths.  And I promise you the odds are that they are probably wasting large amounts of time and money in the process. 

     Some of the most highly-credentialed and most reputable marketing and advertising firms in the world would readily admit in moments of weakness, that huge amounts of client research is done and has been done not to discover directions to take in creative and media development, but to justify what they have already dreamed up and have hidden away and plan to parade out at the appropriate time . . . all as part of an overall scheme for expending more hours to justify increased fees. 

     Yes, I know this for a fact. 

     The bottom line:  No one knows you better than you.  No one knows your business organization better than your business organization’s management team.  Knowledge is strength.  Take advantage of your strengths, or find a good coach who can help you take advantage of your strengths.  But do it!                            halalpiar            

The difference between the

almost right word and the right

word is really a large matter  —

 ’tis the difference between the

lightning-bug and the

lightning.”

     Whether for business or pleasure, for commercial reward or literary accolades . . . when you’re writing an advertisement, commercial, website, direct mail piece, news release, brochure, billboard, matchbook cover, a poem or short story, a fiction or nonfiction book chapter, a technical report, business plan, magazine or newspaper item or feature, a speech, photo caption, letter to the editor or a letter to your lover . . . remember Mark Twain’s words above.

     He was right, indeed! 

     Ah, you may say, but he’s ancient, and that was in the days of yore!  The truth?  He might just as well have said it this morning! 

     Writers will do themselves (and their readers) the greatest justice, achieve maximum impact, and most effectively march their persuasion skills to the beat of a different drum when they follow one simple rule of thumb (or pen, or keyboard). 

     It is the single most dramatically productive guideline that directly addresses the sentiments of Mark Twain’s quote, and where oh where does it originate?  Why from surgeons of course!  Where else?  And where did those super skilled, robotic, ice-water-veined ER and OR scalpel-slicers learn the trick? 

     Why, where else but from the friendly neighborhood carpenter.  And guess what?  If you, dear communicator friend, will follow their lead (the surgeons and carpenters — not the hammering, drilling, screwing and scalpeling), you too will discover that getting through skin, wood, paper, airwaves, and cyberspace all have one thing in common! 

     You will (I personally guarantee it) end up putting your message across more clearly, more effectively, and more persuasively than ever before if you’ll simply remember to measure twice and cut once! halalpiar

     Remarkable though it may seem, there are some golden people still out there. 

     I recently wrote wrote a combination fanmail inquiry letter to Dean Koontz, author of more than 75 books published in 32 languages totaling over 250 million copies sold in the last 35 years (reported in a five year-old article, no less, from The WRITER magazine www.writermag.com). 

     He’s one of only a dozen writers with ten #1 New York Times bestsellers. Does this sound like someone who’s about to respond to any of the thousands of letters he reportedly gets every few months? Why even bother, right? Wrong.

     In two weeks time, he sent back a thoughtful and personal two-page response, which included a personal handwritten closing P.S. paragraph, a seven-page article and four-page folder that specifically addressed questions I had posed about finding a literary agent and some other points. 

     Mr. Koontz even included a twelve-page newsletter featuring golden retriever talk because—having just finished reading his latest novel, The Darkest Evening of the Year dedicated to his recent doggie-heaven-bound golden, Trixie, and which includes a heavy story focus on rescued golden retreivers and —I mentioned sharing his love and enthusiasm for the breed. [My golden, Barnegat Girl, now ten, is under my desk as I write this, smiling happy dreams and keeping my feet warm.] 

     The point is that Mr. Koontz reached out when he didn’t have to, and he reached farther than good sensible public relations might dictate. He actually showed interest in my pursuits and quite literally made my day a golden one! 

     Thank you, Dean Koontz.  Applause!  Applause!                      halalpiar 

     Why “Bah! Humbug!”?  Because life, I’m convinced, as I reflect on my birthday, is not a commodity that’s just “good” all by itself.  Life is neither good nor bad.  It simply is.  And each of us chooses to make the experience of life a good one, a bad one, or something in between. 

     The point is that behavior is always and everywhere a matter of conscious or unconscious choice.  “Good” and “bad” and “in-between” is never dropped on us from the ceiling or the sky; it is not something that “happens to” us.  We somehow choose to act and feel great, or to act and feel lousy. 

     Well, I remind myself, guess what?  That I can just as easily choose to act and feel great as I can choose to act and feel lousy?  So why would I choose misery?  I’ll never get back the time I waste feeling miserable, the “here and now” time that passes me by while I wallow in self-pity or anger.  It’s simply a waste of time and energy and life. 

     “Great!” you say, “but HOW do I get myself out of the doom and gloom upsets and move onward and upward in spite of myself?”  The answer may be simpler than the action, but even that’s a choice!  The answer is to get and keep youself focused on the present moment as much as you possibly can. 

     Upsets breed in past thoughts that become unhealthy dwelling attentions, and on future thoughts that become anxious worries . . . focusing attention on past and future can quickly transform into nonproductive fantasizing.  Worrying about what’s over and can’t be changed or what’s not yet happened and may never happen is a colossal waste of energy, and life, and totally loses the “here and now” that’s right in your face!

     LIFE IS GOOD WHEN YOU CONTINUALLY CHOOSE FOR IT TO BE.  HOW?  BY STAYING AS TUNED IN AS YOU CAN TO THE “HERE AND NOW” OF EACH NEW EXPERIENCE EACH NEW DAY.  You’d need a pretty big shirt for all that, so just write up your own version and carry it in your pocket for a week!    See you soon.      halalpiar