I’m an entrepreneur. Or am I?

This is what has been bugging me for a few weeks, and even more so since my birthday just whooshed by yesterday.

I have been working ( a lot) as the restaurant manager for a small hotel here in NH and, while it is rewarding and fun and all of that, I miss the freelancing and excitement of my own biz.

I spent some time yesterday working on brainstorming and planning and goal-setting for 2010, and came to the conclusion that I am going to have to be very focused and extremely diligent if I am going to accomplish the things that I want to do while working around the full-time-job thing.

In fact, I am a full month behind where I should be in terms of updating some of my products for 2010. While I can write part of that off to being sick for 4 weeks in Oct/Nov, a big part of it is that I simply have not been at my desk. The state of my in-box can attest to that! I linked to a post about creating a fixed schedule for yourself in order to balance work and non-work last week, but this solution is just not going to work for me – I can’t create a fixed schedule for the restaurant. So this is going to take some more thinking, with these concepts as guidelines:

1. Time allows you to rest and recover – I particularly need downtime for recuperating from stress. Pushing myself and overcoming challenges are excellent ways to invest time, yet until I fully recover from the recent bout with illness, resting is the best way to use some of the time I gain from that investment.
2. Time allows you to increase your focus – With less time to work on the “important” projects that I do want to complete, it is vital that I focus tightly on them. And start less projects in order to accomplish/complete the ones that I do start.
3. Time allows you to see how things turn out – Having set this restaurant manager gig in motion I am identifying the variables that are beyond my control, and now waiting to determine their full effects is all I can do. I will work toward investing this downtime to prepare for the next stage of the progression.
4. Time allows you to create balance in your life – All work and no play leads to a heart attack, or GERD. I must remember to invest the time that I do have to be with/communicate with my family and friends. Connecting with your circle is energizing and something that I definitely do not do enough of. Hearing from people that I have not heard from in a long time was one of the best things to happen yesterday.

There it is. Part one of the thought-process. Part two will involve making some choices and breaking down the vital projects into Action Steps. The choices will be difficult, mainly because I have started/want to start too many things.

Because it is time to get back into that entrepreneurial mindset, applying it to my “job” and to the freelancing/personal projects. It is time stop deluding myself, hoping that these projects can languish and wait on the back burner until some point in the future where “more time” magically appears.

Because, like everything else in Pandora’s Box, hope is evil and destructive. [important note: I am not being a pessimist or taking the negative point of view, it's just that hope is not a viable strategy for accomplishing anything, and hope is distinct from positive thinking]

Do less to accomplish more is my new mantra.

Discipline and Focus are the watchwords.

I will keep you posted, can you help me stay on track with encouragement and gentle prodding? I think that Twitter will be the best place for that.

Chris Perrin and I had a discussion about how your Productivity practice is more like a marathon than a sprint. Since I am not much of a runner, never have been, it was interesting to hear how this perspective could be applied to workflow and goal-setting.

Part of good productivity then, is looking at life as a marathon and planning for a longer period of time.

There are several ways to do this:
1. Know what has to be done (and when): A marathon runner has to know her track. You have to know what needs to be accomplished so that can you have the proper
strategy.

2. Know where you want to be: You can have more than one goal for running a race. Some people run to win, some run to finish, some run for the exercise. Why are you running the race and where do you want to be at the end?

3. Know what is important: Again, part of the strategy aspect. What steps will get you where you want to be?

4. Don’t panic: Once you have an idea of what needs to be done, there is a tendency in many to say “Holy [favorite expletive], I’ve got a lot to do” and just start diving in. However, this is not always the best course of action. You have to keep your strategy in mind and not overwork youself in the beginning only to be exhausted later.

5. Sprint only when you have to: There are times when you are focred to sprint and other times when it makes sense to do so. However, this should be a strategic decision you make, not something you do as a matter of course.

6. Don’t be afraid to recover: After a good bout of sprinting, feel free to take time to recover. Trying to be productive for the long haul means and you may
need time to catch your breath.

7. Understand the REAL consequences: This sort of falls under the don’t panic rule and the strategic plannning. As you decide what to do and when to sprint, understand the real consequences of completing a task or leaving it unfinished. In some cases, you may WANT to have something finished, but the consequences of doing something else (or not doing it) may be too great. Be honest with yourself and know that most things can wait a few days or weeks to get finished while only a small handful cannot.

Download the podcast

[podcast]http://stephenpsmith.com/downloads/productivity-marathon-podcast.mp3[/podcast]

Christine Major sent out a reminder:

In case you need to be reminded, the Portsmouth TweetUp at the Gas Light Co. is tomorrow night starting at 6:30! Woo hoo!

I am really excited to see and meet everyone at what will be a great event.

The weather for tomorrow night at this time is still a bit iffy and I choose not to pay attention to any forecasts that say it is going to rain. But the event will happen rain or shine because The Gas Light has made arrangements for us to go to the upstairs club if we cannot go on the outdoor deck, but let’s not think about that. Think only dry thoughts.

Don’t forget that there will be pizza there provided by JitterGram and MicroArts. We have a limited amount of pizza that will be coming out througout the night so hopefully everyone will get some.

We will also be raffling off a $50 GC to Gas Light Co and another $50 gift card to Sullivan Tire. We also have several tour passes for New England Curiosities to raffle off while you are there and some t-shirts I have lying around my house that I am not wearing anymore (ok, maybe not that).

I will be handing out Pokens that were donated by @startpoken to the 5 winners who played along with me on Twitter the other night. http://www.startpoken.com/ – if you are interested in checking out a poken you can see me. I will let you play with my poken

I am looking forward to meeting everyone, and pushing (gently, of course) the Social Media Club – New Hampshire.

My friend Robert Hruzek has a guest post at the SOBCon blog:

[Note from the Proprietor: The basis for this post comes from an – well, let’s call it an “incident”, shall we? – that happened last year at SOBCon08 in Chicago. Unlike your typical episode of Dragnet, however, names have NOT been changed to protect the innocent because – hey, let’s face it – there ARE no innocents here!]

All right y’all; I have what is (or if it ain’t then it should be) the Question Of The Ages: Is there, in fact, a “wrong” way to eat pizza?

The reason the question comes up at all is because of a little-known incident that happened at last year’s SOBCon08.

Read more –>

I feel pretty strongly about this:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Success is not Depravity

“Stop supporting your own destroyers”

Without the sanction of the victim, Socialism must fail.

If you permit it, you deserve it

While the Lovely Bride and I have been traveling across the country we visited the Museum of Art in Milwaukee, WI. A very cool place, in a very cool building. In the gift shop I picked up a book by Matthew Frederick entitled, “101 Things I Learned in Architecture School”.

In this little tome are a slew of excellent quotations and snippets of wisdom pointed at architecture students but applicable to a much broader audience. In that spirit, I present the first in a series of inspirations from this little book:

How do I Write a Post for my Blog?

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1. Architects use different lines for different purposes, but the line type most specific to architecture is drawn with an emphasis at the beginning and at the end. This practice anchors a line to the page and gives a drawing conviction and punch.

Your blog posts will be written in different formats for different purposes, but the basic framework of your post should remain the same. The post should begin and end with an emphasis on the title topic. To begin your post with punch, most internet style guides tell you to begin with a photo, as it helps to catch the eye. You should also edit your <h> title tags in order to create paragraph headings. This makes your post easier to scan, both on the page and in a feed reader. Many people read lots and lots of blog posts every day, and they need to be able to spot your value at a glance.

Write posts that have timeless value

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2.Overlap lines slightly where they meet.

Create “flagship content”, a series of posts on the main topic of your blog. These posts should overlap somewhat, leading the reader from one to the next in an orderly progression. Chris Garrett has an excellent article on selling with flagship content, and an e-book on the subject of witing flagship content that you can download, just for subscribing to his blog (and if you aren’t a subscriber, you should be). From Chris’ blog:

How does Flagship Content sell?

1. Attraction – You know your content is Flagship when that is how visitors find you. If people talk about your content then it will draw new pre-sold visitors to your door.
2. Education – In your niche is there subjects where people get confused? Is there something that you are especially well equipped to help with? Demonstrate your expertise, prove you are the person to come to.
3. Trust – What do you get when you combine third-party endorsements with great educational content? The answer, of course, is a good foundation for trust.
4. Decision – Is your approach and alternative to another method? Are you aiming to differentiate yourself from competitors? Work it carefully and you can help the reader, or now surely potential customer, take the decision in your favor.
5. Action – Finally you give the reader tools so they can take action, at the very least ways in which they can get in touch with you. …it doesn’t need to be a hard sell as by this point they will already be convinced you know your stuff.

As you can see, Chris does know his stuff.

Get to the point

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3. When sketching, don’t “feather and fuzz” your way across the page– that is, don’t make a vague-looking line out of many short, overlapping segments.

When writing, get right to the point. Blog posts should (generally) be kept short and pithy. Just a couple of paragraphs with catchy headings can deliver all of the value that you need to your readers. If you have a longer post, manifesto, important lesson, or rant that you’d like to share – put it on its own page and point to it with a short post.

There you go, how to write a blog post in 3 easy steps. Now what are you waiting for?

Jeremiah Owyang says,”It’s official, we’re in a recession… Four quarters since Q4 2007 indicate this economic change and Bloomberg reports that “The U.S. economy may be headed for its deepest and longest recession since World War II”.
In his post Five Ways Web Professionals Should Be Proactive In a Recession Owyang discusses some steps that you can take to prepare and protect yourself:

I’m not all doom and gloom, here’s how you can be proactive, even if you work at a Fortune 100, you are after all, a company of one, so respect yourself and be proactive:

Learn How to Adjust at Your Day Job

I survived 10 rounds of layoffs and was the final 12.5% of Exodus before I went to work at World Savings, what did I do learn? The trick is to stay flexible and demonstrate you can adapt, increase revenues, or use your skills in a scalable and efficient way. You’ll also need to properly internal market your abilities within your corporation or with your clients to demonstrate why you and your services give greater return out the end. Fortunately, the web can be such a tool –if you know how to do it right.

Understand How Social Media is a Risk and Opportunity

Social media has an opportunity in a recession, these tools are cheap, some marketing campaigns range from 10-50k on the low end, far less expensive than any traditional marketing. Of course, with comes great risk: doing it wrong can result in a punking, not doing anything at all could leave you exposed, and most brands overlook the amount of labor required to develop these programs. As a result, I’m working on an upcoming report, and we’re surveying social media marketers to find out if they’re going to increase –or decrease –their social media resources during a downturn. In fact, we’re re jigging some of my research agenda to meet the needs of the market and client –so stay tuned.

Read the rest of “Recession and Human Networking“

Guy Kawasaki has a long and detailed article on using Twitter as a tool for marketing, rather than a conversation device. I take a contrarian view to the main thrust of the article, since Kawasaki presents a method of using Twitter in the same way that he uses his blog and other web properties: to push his own marketing.

Don’t get me wrong, Kawasaki is a brilliant marketer and we can all learn a lot from his books and other writings. I just disagree with him on the application of some of these tools and ideas. At How to Change the World he starts off with a bang:

Forget the “influentials.” You must buy into the theory that products and services reach critical mass because mere mortals spread the word for you. This defies the common wisdom that a handful of “influentials” shape what the rest of us try and what we adopt. In the online world, these influentials include Mike “I can go a week without Twitter” Arrington, Robert Scoble, Seth Godin, and to some extent me.

Reliance on influentials is flawed because the Internet has flattened and democratized information. Influentials don’t have as much special access, special knowledge, and distribution as you might think because of the growth of websites, blogs, and, of course, Twitter.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t care about influentials—if nothing else they can help you get to what some consider “nobodies.” But mark my words: (a) Nobodies are the new somebodies, and (b) it’s better to have army of committed nobodies and than a few drive-by somebodies. The most somebodies can usually do for you is a one day bump in traffic.

The post is full of alternative ways to utilize the Twitter service, but I believe that some of these methods are a little “shady” in the sense that Twitter is not just another platform for pushing your own agenda.

@JayGregory, in the Comments, brings up a good point:

One thing I think you are ignoring is that you are a celebrity on Twitter and that influenced people’s decision to tweet on your behalf. No offense to alltop, but I do not see how it would inspire anyone to lend their tweets to alltop news. I think it is the fact that they want to be associated with you because of your success. In addition, you are ignoring the importance of humanizing oneself on Twitter by degrading those that comment about the line at Starbucks, etc. This is relationship management 101…humanize yourself, let people in and they will trust you and your product/service.

Which @indefensible agrees with, following up with this comment:

I’ve unfollowed you, for a mixture of the alltop tweets, which I don’t enjoy, and for this blog post, with which I disagree. However, it’s not something I do with any malice – you use twitter one way, I use it in another. I’ve found some cool things through your tweets though, and I thank you for that!

I’m a bit surprised by your cavalier attitude to a lot of the people on twitter, especially when your post here is basically a ‘how-to’ on stripmining the goodwill out of your audience.

What say you?

One of the great things about the internets is that you can easily link to really cool information from really smart people. Like this post from Chris Brogan, who knows something about Social Media Literacy:

Okay, so you’ve heard from someone that this social media and social networking stuff is great and you should get involved, and it’s really going to help you out. Maybe it will help you in the economic downturn. Maybe you have heard how you can use Twitter for business. But there’s a lot to it all.

Where would you start? What would come first? How might you think about getting out there and joining in on the experience?

If I Started Today

Here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll build three different scenarios out, and give you the starting points for what I’d do with social media if I were in these steps. Try to extrapolate them out to your profession or your need. If you really want to have fun with this post, take what I’ve started here, and write your own post for your vertical or condition, and then be sure to share the ideas with us here, so we can go to your site and check it out. (We’ll even be able to visit via trackbacks, if you link back to the original post).

Social Media Literacy starts with Listening

The number one thing that I tell all of my clients is that you start by listening. Again, no sense re-typing this:

Listening is my first move in starting to understand social media. That means this: go and read the blogs that are out there. Read from different genres. Go visit Twitter.com and more importantly search.twitter.com, and see what people are saying. Read comments on people’s blogs and see which ones seem to get any response. Search using Google and Technorati.com, and start listening to conversations that are out there.

Find the people and players in your market. Read what they have to say. Read what their customers are saying. Look for them in forums, blogs, and online magazines. Read as much as you can so that you understand where the conversation is going before you start talking back.

• Take copious notes, who started the conversation and who has the best insights.
• Bookmark the posts and comments for later reference.
• Find the authors on Twitter and LinkedIn, and follow them.

What to do when you feel ready

When you believe that you have enough background to get involved in the conversation:

1. Leave a comment on the blog. Make it insightful, make it useful, contribute to the conversation.
2. Invite further suggestions or comments.
3. Do not make it an ad or pitch for you or your company, let the value of your comment be the pitch.

Once you get involved, build some trust, and create some name recognition, then it is time to take the next step.

Read all of Chris’ post – “If I Started Today” – for much more insight.

Do you have Evangelists? How can you encourage them to help you grow your business?
One tip: Your fans will spread far more word of mouth if you make them look great.

1. Make them look important
2. Make them look smart
3. Make them look connected
4. Make their status visible

Make them look important

You can create a VIP program with membership cards; access to a private web site, newsletter, or forum; or other special privileges. Offer something extra, like free shipping, valet parking, a secret URL, a private phone number, or free upgrades. Make sure they can share the benefits with their friends, so they can show off their importance (and spread word of mouth about you). Track the sharing and reward the evangelists that share the most.

Make them look smart

Give them access to technical details, product & service roadmaps, and stories featuring background information. The smarter they feel, the more they want to talk about you. Everyday minutae that you may find boring can be the most interesting gossip to a true fan. Talk about what you do: How do you make it? Where do you source it? What’s the best way to use it? Give them tons to talk about when their friends ask about you.

Make them look connected

Give your evangelists exclusives that make them look like insiders. Try secret discount codes, off-menu items, extra services, or private shopping hours. Be sure that they are the first to get early notice of big news, new products, and other announcements. Make sure they know your name. Watch them bring their friends to you to show off their connections.

Make their status visible

Give them tools to show off their status. Hand out membership cards, certificates, luggage tags, or anything they can show off. Put their name on a wall plaque, hang their photos, give them a place to store wine or cigars, and put their name on a sign when they visit.

It does not matter what kind of business that you have, showcasing your best clients and most active evangelists will always pay off. How can you turn your evangelists into spokespeople? Share your thoughts in the comments.