It is a strange feeling to hear yourself being talked about in a public forum. You know what I mean… you’re in a meeting and the boss talks about an error and you know it’s you but he doesn’t mention you. You can feel your face turning red with embarrassment wondering if everyone else knows it’s you that is the target of a well-deserved scolding. Well, I got a scolding yesterday in front of an audience of a few thousand people though I didn’t here it until my commute this morning. Jack Spirko has a business podcast, “5 Minutes with Jack”, in which he offers tons of awesome advice with a catch. You have to do something with it. In an email to Jack recently, I filled it full of excuses on why I haven’t taken some steps forward with my ideas:
I know if I had spent some $$ to get dillonallen.com, was hosting on Hostgator, and had installed WordPress that SEO Smart Links would handle this for me. That is my plan, just can’t justify the $$ since I don’t even have a detailed plan for a business yet.
I’m still sitting on Blogger and planning a move to actual hosting/domain following the outage I’m working right now and better formulation of my plan
In yesterday’s Episode 91, He basically ranted on the subject of excuses and not having an “I can do it, so I AM doing it NOW” attitude and it seemed he was reading directly from my email. If not, some other dude wrote in with the exact same words, since Jack read off the excuses listed above – in that order – with a few generalizations. ACK! The point is, there will always be a reason or potential issue to stop you from moving forward if you don’t step up and attack the future. I deserved my scolding and I acted… http://www.dillonallen.com is now in existence (though it won’t show up until tomorrow some time) and I will be posting there in the future. I will run my main blog at dillonallen.com/blog as well as my photography page, Ka-Click, within the dillonallen.com domain. I also have a few ideas for both product and ebooks that I want to market. They will be available there by summer and I can remove myself – if only for a while – as a source of self-inflicted ridicule. Jack, thanks for the push.
LOL, yeah Jack’s good at giving kicks in the butt when they’re needed. We ALL give excuses, but we we have to examine them to see if they’re really valid. Johnny B. Truant is another guy I’m following, who’s highly motivational, if a little crass.
Did you listen to Ep. 94 about how being an employee isn’t normal? That one really gave me some motivation to get up out of the mud and keep pushing on. Thanks for outing yourself.
I have a 3-hr round trip commute 6 days a week. That’s 18 hours of drive time. Jack puts out about 6-7hrs of content. I listen to one other guy Dan Carlin, who has 2 podcasts – Hardcor History & Common Sense. But he apparently doesn’t listen to Jack enough to regularly/constantly get out new content. So I am content starved. I have even been re-listening to FMWJ as I started up this blog and the accompanying shop (not yet live). It gets so bad that I even have to turn to NPR a few hours a week.
Bottom line, I listened to Ep 94. I am an employee and enjoy what I do. You can’t do the type of work I do solo (nuclear power). I do crave some of the freedom of entrepreneurship, as I’ve watched my dad (aka, my hugulkultur bed-builder) and uncle live that life for all of mine. But I think I can help make the world a better place in my current spot too. I’m trying to do things on the side though to help live a better life if times get rough or even if they don’t.
Thanks for checking out the site.