How do I protect my ideas and intellectual work? It has come up quite a bit in my world lately. But I am not sure that question is really the best one to ask. When I stop and really think about it, the more important thing to consider is whether the premise of that question is valid to begin with.
Does this intellectual work need to be protected? Do my ideas need to be secret until they are ‘ready’ to release? What exactly needs to be perfected in order to make them ‘ready’ to share?
I’ve been pondering the term “taken for granted” lately. There are so many things in my life I always thought I would be able to rely on that have rapidly turned into things that are quickly evaporating. Those things I thought I could always count on, are turning into massive uncertainties. I know that a big part of that is just seasonality and part of the typical business cycle, part of it for me has been related to trying to delegate responsibilities and free myself from time consuming tasks that distract me from pursuing other interests. All of those lately has led me to profound conclusion that I am counting on things that really are not guaranteed or owed to me. I’ve been taking them for granted. I’ve been expecting things to work without really understanding what the underlying key factors that drive them are or fulling engaging myself in doing the work to ensure the deck is stacked in my favor as much as I possibly can. Continue reading
There is no right answer.
Throughout my life I have spent a tremendous amount of time trying to understand the right answer for any given situation or circumstance when I needed to make a decision. I have spent a lot of time trying to decipher what the right answer is in a lot of those situations and found that there is a fundamental flaw in that question. It assumes there actually is a right answer to any situation. From my experience, except when it comes to decisions with a clear moral implication, there is rarely a single right answer. For me, it has typically been a spectrum of right. Not necessarily that there is anything wrong with one decision or the other, just that each one has different outcomes that will logically result. Continue reading
My first introduction and interest in business started while I was in Boy Scouts working on a Merit Badge on my way to Eagle Scout. I was about 12 year old and it was while reading the Personal Management merit badge book that I learned about the time value of money. The idea that you could flip the traditional model of trading your time for money completely upside down and have your money work for you was extremely compelling to me. I was fascinated with the idea and pursued everything I could find that would help me understand how to implement it in my life. I read every book I could get my hands on that covered making money, investing, or running a business. I setup meetings and lunches with people who seemed to be where I wanted to be and were willing to talk to me about it.
Continue readingI hear so many great ideas and methods for success. They are from a variety of sources and have an even wider variety of application. It’s seems that most of the advice about how to manage time, resources, people, difficulties, challenges, setbacks, and any of the day-to-day challenges are presented from more of a ‘reflective’ position. Specifically, very few people write about those challenges in the moment and really display the full range of emotion, internal conflict, and real depth of the struggles. That seems to be the only part that really matters. Once an idea is distilled, reflected, or otherwise summarized to have the largest possible application, it can leave the reader somewhat confused regarding if or how the advice, technique or model really applies to their situation. It also seems to me that these ideas are typically presented as a singular action or focus that will impact and shape a person’s context or reality and create the results they desire. There is no silver bullet that works every time. Not there, doesn’t exist. The reality is that most of these topics really are different presentations of the same core theory or idea. The difficulty for most people is not in theory or method, the core difficulty for myself and the people I know is application. How do I apply this idea to my situation? Does this idea or technique actually apply to my situation? Continue reading
My life is so full of demands for my time. Employees need direction, my wife and kids deserve my attention and time, my tasks require time, my hobbies and interests are only developed with time, and there are still emails to attend to. There is no shortage of things to do and the older I get, the more demands I have on my time. Continue reading
Last night, as I was falling asleep on the couch, I received a call from one of my tenants that sewage was backing up in the bathroom and toilet. The apartment building has a main sewer line for all units and when that sewage line gets a Continue reading
Fear is necessary. Fear is the gateway to wisdom and ultimately to freedom. It’s the internal check that directs attention and focus like a rudder guides the course of a ship. This is why understanding fear and how to process fear in a healthy way is so critical to living life fully and making wise decisions. Continue reading
As my personal responsibilities have grown and I have moved further into leadership roles in my family and at work I have been working to get a better understanding of what good leadership looks like. There are a number of methods I have encountered from a variety of people over the years. One commonality I have noticed is that each person has a different style and philosophy (some very thoughtful and formulated and some less theoretical and more practical) and that each leader has found some key points, habits, techniques, or whatever you want to call them that work for them.
Here it is again… That gut wrenching frustration and feeling of being stuck dealing with the same problems over and over again is so completely exhausting and depressing. You know what I mean! It’s that feeling that everyone is out to get you and that you have to work so hard only to gain such little ground. It always leaves me with the exhausted sense of despair and the lingering question: Why is life always so hard on me? Continue reading