Success Starts in the Head

September 9, 2008 | General

I’m a big cricket fan.

I never really played it and only got into it in my early twenties but it is undoubtedly now my favourite sport. Working from home can be a double edged sword because I can easily lose track of time and spend all day watching England on the TV when I should be working.

I used to tell myself that if I won the lottery, I would follow the England cricket team around the world on their Winter tours to Australia and the Caribbean - now I’m waiting until my business is established to a level that I can run it from my laptop and a mobile phone and I’ll be away.

I was on holiday in France when Michael Vaughan resigned and at first was totally confused as I start to piece together what had happened as I listened to the radio commentary of the 1st day of the 4th Test as we were travelling around in the car. (You can pick up Radio 4 on LW throughout a lot of Europe - much to my family’s dismay).

At the time I didn’t understand why he had done it. Did he jump or was he pushed?

Yes, he had been a bit out of personal form recently but even though we had lost the Test Series at home, it could have been so much different - if only a couple of breaks had gone our way. We weren’t outclassed overall and South Africa were a good team.

He is our most successful cricket captain of all time and his honest, strategic, calm, collected character epitomised that which we expect (but rarely get) of an English leader. He had led us to a great victory over Australia in 2005, an event that escalated the profile of cricket in this country, and was surely the best man to do it again.

A few minutes after I came to discover that Vaughan had resigned, I had even more jaw droppingly shock to contend with. England’s new captain was not Strauss, who was being talked about as Vaughan’s possible successor, but a cocky, arrogant upstart with seemingly little previous experience of captaining a first class team.

What’s more, he was more South African than English AND he was called KEVIN !!

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Finding an Antidote to the Doom and Gloom

September 6, 2008 | General

Cloudy Sky

Despite all the doom and gloom dished out daily in the media at the moment I believe that it is still very possible to find sources for encouragement and inspiration if you work with yourself to adopt a more positive outlook.

To be honest I feel much more affected by the miserable weather and the frustrations that my business is not as far ahead as I would have liked it to be by now than letting myself get depressed worrying about the state of the economy.

After all it is not something that is in my control - so what can I hope to achieve by spending every waking hour worrying about it. It is a cyclical occurrence that always follows a time of great growth and prosperity. It’s happening now and eventually it will pass - we hope that it will be sooner rather than later and without too many life threatening casualties - but it will pass .

It’s like being a sea in a fierce storm - all you can do is baton down the hatches, steer a steady course and wait for calmer times to return.

Don’t get me wrong I am most definitely affected and feeling the pinch of the current economic situation.

I have taken time to make sure that I am getting the best deal on my mortgage and all my insurances, secured the best energy deal, made my whole family more conscious of saving energy (they might put it a little more strongly than that!), thinking about unnecessary journeys in the car and generally being more careful in shopping around for the best deals. More than that what can I do?

Admittedly I am not as affected as those who have absolutely no hope of covering even their basic bills or may end up losing their house, but equally I am affected more than most who have not given up several tens of thousands of pounds by quitting their jobs within the last 15 months to pursue the dream of having their own business.

So am I now beginning to regret the decision to leave the regular wage and relative security of my job to start a business from home at this time?

 

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Can We Really Control Our Lives?

July 14, 2008 | General

As you can tell from my last proper blog, there have been a few situations and conversations recently that have really made me think about the massive influence that time has over our lives.

With my children’s summer holiday’s only a week away, I was feeling nostalgic about how my school summer holidays seemed to last forever when I was a kid, and now - how quickly they arrive after Christmas!!

Why does time go so much faster as you get into your 30’s and 40’s?

I just can’t believe it. And, does it go even quicker as you get into your 50’s and 60’s? I suppose the answer to that would depend on what you are doing with your life.

Over the weekend, some friends that had emigrated to Australia two years ago, returned for a holiday - the first time that they have done so since they left. When their two boys arrived in our hallway, instantly it was like they had never been away. Yes they looked a little older but as they disappeared up to our son’s bedroom, it seemed impossible that two years had passed by since we saw them last.

How could it have gone by so quickly and why has so little appear to have changed/happened in that time?

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How is Your European Geography?

July 13, 2008 | General

This is just a little bit of fun but can be very addictive - just what you need for a brief distraction in a busy day.

Test your geography by flying your plane to airports throughout Europe 

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Get A Life

July 11, 2008 | General

You get a totally different perspective on time when you work at home in your own home based business.

Last night my wife said to me, “Thank goodness its Friday tomorrow”, obviously meaning that it was getting near to the weekend. But only hours earlier I had honestly been thinking, “Oh no, its Friday tomorrow, I wish it was only Tuesday or Wednesday as I have so many things that I want to get done”.

Now I hasten to add that she doesn’t always think this way, it’s just that she hasn’t been feeling well this week - but I’ve met a lot of people in my life that do.

Where I used to work, one of the members of staff used to have to come and get her keys from one of the managers before starting work. If it was me that she found first I would ask her how she was that day, as I would out of habit and common courtesy to anyone that I spoke to during the day.

Almost without fail she would reply “I’ll be much better at home time” or words to that effect and I used to think “Good God woman you’ve only just started your shift and you’re wishing the day away”. It used to really get to me sometimes. With some people you can tell that it is just a phrase that they have learnt and repeat as an almost unconscious response, but with her I wasn’t so sure.

There are two sides to this that I see.

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A Time for Reflection

July 5, 2008 | General

I have just found a copy of a post that I originally wrote in March and thought I had lost when I accidentally wiped clean my original blog a few months ago. There is a good chance that you have heard the story and seen the video but even if you have, it’s power does not diminish by watching it again. Below is the exact blog of my feelings about it at the time.

One thing about working for yourself is how you motivate yourself to get things done. When you are in a job, it’s easier. I’m not saying it is better but you usually have either accountability to your boss, pressure of deadlines, awareness of company standards, customer expectations, legal obligations etc etc to drive you on.

When you start your own Home Business you initially have to find a way to motivate and discipline yourself, especially when you suffer setbacks or if things aren’t happening as quickly as you would like. Surprisingly having money to pay the bills doesn’t always do it and in fact it can have exactly the opposite effect if you let it take over your whole thinking.

I get my motivation by knowing that I made the right decision in quitting my job, knowing that if I work hard in my chosen venture then I can be successful and from articles and reports on inspirational people.

People like Randy Pausch.

Randy is a 46 year old American College Professor who you will see delivering what is called “The Last Lecture” to his college students. This is an academic tradition whereby a professor delivers the very last lecture that he would ever give if he were hypothetically about to die, only in Randy’s case it is not hypothetical….

But it is not about death, it is about life. Over 1.3 million people have watched the full lecture on the internet, this is a shortened version for the Oprah show. It is very moving and a message of inspiration for us all.

http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=ithct48cqw

By way of a brief update, Randy is not well at the moment as he has recently had another session of Chemo therapy but he is still alive, 10 months after he was told that he had 3 - 6 months to live. You can follow his personal blog (which contains another inspiration message that he gave to the graduates of Carnegie Mellon University) at www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/

 

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Life is Too Short to be Unhappy

June 22, 2008 | General

Without doubt the greatest benefit about having your own home based business and not being tied to a job, is being able to spend more time with your family. I think that the majority of people who do work for themselves would agree with that. It is not usually about the money but the freedom that you get to do what you want to do.

I used to work from 11.30am until 9pm four days during the week and then one day at the weekend, so this restricted my opportunities to see my son play football during the winter and cricket in the summer. I particularly enjoy the cricket season as it is far more civilised to sit down with a beer on a warm summers evening (OK they are a bit few and far between this year) than stand on the touchline, freezing cold and being battered by horizontal rain.

It’s far more sociable as well and even the Friday training nights are an excuse to “go up the club” for a beer and a chat. And even though I am not seeking it, I often find inspiration or even direct business ideas come from the conversations I have. In fact once you get tuned into it you can get ideas and motivation from many situations that you are involved with in your everyday life.

Last Friday night I was talking to a friend that I have known for five years now through our son’s friendship and what he had to say greatly enforced my own opinions about starting my own business.

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Getting Back In The Saddle

May 16, 2008 | General

Wow, I can’t believe that it has been so long since I posted a blog!!

There have been a number of reasons for this but it is also a question of once you get out of the habit and, more importantly the discipline of doing something, it can be really difficult to get back into it.

This can be both one of the biggest pro’s or the biggest con’s of having your own home based business. There is no one breathing down your neck everyday to push you on (except maybe the wife) but when you do pull things back round and start making progress, then you get a far greater feeling of achievement and satisfaction because you’ve done it all by yourself. You have to search out your own motivation and momentum but if you can achieve that it is infinitely more powerful than that provided by someone else.

I was absolutely gutted when I wiped two of my three sites completely off the web, but after I’d had a stiff drink I realised that it wasn’t exactly the end of the world. Although I had spent a lot of time on them, there wasn’t actually that much content on them that couldn’t be replaced. I even had about half of the 6 - 8 blogs that I’d posted on this site saved in Word documents but there didn’t seem much point in reposting them.

I decided that it would have been a lot worse if it had happened in six months time and I certainly won’t be making THAT same mistake again. I’m also a lot more aware of backing up, I was able to go through the whole ’setting up’ process again (a lot quicker this time), I changed the theme and I made improvements in the back office of the sites that I probably wouldn’t have returned to for a while.

So, in answer to the point raised in my last blog, yes, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you DOES make you stronger’.

 

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I Nearly Cried

April 27, 2008 | General

At 5pm today I completely wiped out my blog by accident, so if you have been here before and wonder what has happened then I’m afraid that I have had to start to rebuild it from scratch.

Everything that I have written before has been lost but, as I have only been blogging for a month I suppose it could have been worse.

If you have been following my posts then I apologise but I hope to have it fully functional again by tomorrow.

They say “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” - I’ll let you know on that one !! 

 

 

 

 

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