Just recently a man swam across the North Pole. It took him just over 18 minutes. The water was about 29 degrees Fahrenheit. He said it was the longest swim of his life.
Now, what do you do in your daily business that could be as difficult to overcome as that?
The most interesting part to me was that he had a "mind coach" with him as part of his team to get him through the event. Why? Because that was the hardest part – getting over the mental hurdle. The physical body is relatively easy to train. It's the mind that needs the most training focus.
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Not so much of a recap this week, as a reminder for progress in your business. As long as you follow a process that you know produces the results you want, then the real secret is to keep working the process, even though some days it feels like you're not making progress.
How do you know if a process works? You need to trust your business coach, your upline, or whoever has developed the process you're following. This may even be yourself. 
This video does not go into a lot of specifics, as it's really just an overview. There are a lot of things that we could drill further into, so let me know what you want more of! Just leave a comment on the blog and that will guide future video content. Have fun!
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As a member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), I like to keep up with their publication IEEE Spectrum. They've been increasing their online presence over the last year or so and have been incorporating more interactive features on their site, like blogs.
I'm a big fan of the print magazine because they provide great stories on interesting technical topics. Now I'm an even bigger fan of the online publication. Why? They have a blog called "The Sandbox" dedicated to "the latest in gaming". And it's not just about the latest whiz-bang creation. They actually take a big picture approach.
One one recent post they bring up a sort of hypocrasy in mental health. There's discussion in the mential health professions of considering video gaming as an addiction, you know, like alcholism. But is gaming anti-social like alchoholism, or more anti-social like avid book reading?
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It's finally happened!
You finally get to see a video from me without having to look at me. 
Several of the newer online systems in internet marketing have a "Tell A Friend" feature which is supposed to make it easier to "tell your friends" about your business. There are a couple of problems inherent in those systems, though. Because it's potentially sending the same emails to thousands of people, email servers can see it as unsolicited commercial email (UCE) and block it from ever getting to the destination. The server sending the mail could even get blocked outright for similar reasons.
Another problem I have with these systems is that while the message may be full of information you do want to share with your friends, it doesn't have your voice. So this week I show how to use the positive features of a system like this (the email full of information) along with adding your own voice and increasing the odds of the message actually getting through and getting read.
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We've done it! We've all survived our first year together.
Today is our son's first birthday and it's been quite a year. This may sound like a cliche, but it really is amazing how much a little person develops over the course of a year. When we look back at his birth photos we can hardly believe that it's the same kid as we have now. He hasn't been out of our sight much, so we're pretty sure it's still him.
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| Nathan and Dawn at Red Robin – Nathan is One! |
This last month especially has seen a lot of progress. He started crawling at about 10 months, but started taking a few steps on his own at just over 11 months. About two weeks ago he was walking from one piece of furniture to another, and now he walks around to wherever he wants to go.
We can tell that he understands many of the things we're saying to him, as well as the "baby sign" we use, but he's not quite to the point of repeating things back. He claps when we ask him to clap, and he comes to us when we ask him to, he understands "no", etc. Just a matter of time before he catches on to the other things, I guess.
For his "birthday lunch" we took him to Red Robin, which is a Pacific Northwest family burger restaurant that has a great reputation as a fun place. I've been going there since college and it's always a good time. My wife's parents were with us and they seem to be very happy grandparents. They are very into him.
We should have a new bike trailer to put in him in tomorrow, so finally after a year we will all get back into an exercise routine and get to spend more time outdoors. I guess this is really when the fun starts, eh?
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This week has been one of the "unusual" weeks around here as my wife has been on call. That generally means that I get to spend more time caring for our son and less time working on the business stuff. This particular week has not been so bad as far as my wife working more hours during the day – it's more of a problem for her when she does not get a chance to sleep at night from all of the "pages" coming in.
At any rate this week the business subjects have been about the use of blogging as part of your advertising mix and also thinking about how "hard" internet marketing is compared to things that a lot of people have to do for a living. To me, it's not so much that a person has a dirty or unpleasant job, but what bothers me is when people have to do that job to survive economically.
When you do things because you have to then life becomes a series of compromises rather than a series of choices.
So, to everyone who is putting the effort into your businesses, you are the heroes. You are going above and beyond the averages to make a life of choice!
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This weekend was my first Father's Day!
Our son will turn one year old this month. It's been quite a year. This is our first child so everything is new and there are a lot of challenges that we've learned to handle. Nothing Earth shattering, really, just the "normal" stuff that new parents learn.
Before he came along some people told us, "you will not be able to remember what you used to do with all of the time you had". That's not true. I know *exactly* what I used to get done with the time I used to have.
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This weekend I got to do something that I hope to do more of in the future: volunteer at a biking event.
Up until the past year when I've been more involved with raising our son and working on the internet businesses I would go to a fair number of cycling events as a participant. This was usually a fund raising event, a "recreational" ride like the Seattle-to-Portland (STP), or bike race – mountain or road. I'd always appreciated the service of the volunteers who really make the events go smoothly and sometimes found it hard to believe they were so friendly even though they weren't getting paid for it.
I found out the secret to why they're so friendly: it's a lot of fun!
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Over Memorial Day weekend we decided to take a few days and head out of town to visit relatives. This was our first trip involving more than a couple hours of travel since we had our son eleven months ago. The whole trip went pretty well!
We first went from Bellingham to Preston, WA which was a couple of hours. We stayed there overnight with friends. We've taken road trips that have last a couple of hours before and so we figure there would be no problems with this first leg.
The second leg going from Preston to Walla Walla, which we estimated at about 4.5 hours was going to be the unknown and any potential challenges were going to come up there. Nathan doesn't really sleep well on the road, so we needed to be prepared to keep him entertained. Fortunately, between Dawn feeding him and watching videos with him in the back seat and his little bit of sleep, we actually got though that leg with minimal emotional trauma.
However, it's not something I would want to endure frequently or without several days between the initial and return trips. We stayed in Walla Walla for several days with Dawn's family and really enjoyed ourselves. They are excellent hosts and it was good to relax for a few days.
On the way back we stopped in Burien, which is just south of Seattle, to again break up the return trip and spend the night with friends. We made the last leg yesterday and now we're back into our home routine.
But as far as routines go, we're changing things up a bit to make sure we get in some daily exercise. I'm going to start getting on the bike in the evenings and work on getting my aerobic capacity back. I have put exactly zero miles on the road this year so this could be a painful transition.
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One of the counterintuitive things I've discovered in internet marketing is that you don't really need to be super smart to make a big success. In fact, I've seen a lot of smart people who know as much (or more) than the "gurus" really struggle to make their business grow.
So if it's not about how smart you are, what is it?
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