Monthly Archives: February 2009

The Samurai Writer Takes Up His Elance

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If coaching has taught me anything, it’s that accountability is a formidable tool for personal change when wielded constructively. People often hire coaches to hold their proverbial feet to the fire – and that can be well worth the cost.

Another approach is to follow the ‘success crumbs’ of someone who’s already doing what interests you. That’s how I’m going about adding freelance writing to a mid-career change repertoire.

I signed up for Angela Booth’s “Sell Your Writing Online Now“, and for $37 per month I get a weekly lesson on a particular writing topic – along with some exercises. And usually a bonus file. (BTW – Studying Angela’s online marketing approach for this course is a great way to learn about outsourced passive income streams, ably run by her virtual assistant. But that’s a story for another blog!)

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We never knew that it was impossible!

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As regular readers may know, my current mid-career change strategy follows a multi-pronged approach – and includes roles from my professional past, such as school teaching.

It’s still very much a work-in-progress and I’m making things up as I go along – while trusting in the serendipity goddess to make an appearance from time to time ;-)

This week I did some substitute teaching which included showing video #1 from the PBS series, “Triumph of the Nerds“. Although made in 1996, it’s still an amusingly watchable and fascinating story of the PC / microprocessor revolution.

Of course, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs feature prominently but other players such as Paul Allen and Steve Wozniak get honorable mentions.

Another gentleman’s story, Ed Roberts, kept me guessing as to the connection between the 1970s “solution-in-search-of-a-problem” personal computers he helped bring into being, and the “BASIC interpreter” software that Gates and Allen were busy sculpting. (Wikipedia does a good job of filling in those details.)

What struck me about Ed Roberts was that even though many other professionals at the time thought what they were doing wouldn’t work, he and his colleagues persevered. I think he said on video words to the effect of:

“We kept going because we never knew that it was impossible.”

There were surely business reasons behind Ed’s desire to succeed but also a very personal ‘wish’ to simply have a computer of his own (however impractical – see the wiki article!) to play with.

And that’s as good a working definition of “do what you love” (and the money might follow) as I’ve seen!

- Mark McClure

Chance Favours The Prepared Mind – Louis Pasteur

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And for those who spell differently…
“Chance Favors The Prepared Mind.” ;-)

I’ve always loved that line attributed to the French scientist, Louis Pasteur – he of pasteurized milk and rabies vaccination fame.

So what exactly is a prepared mind?
Well, here’s an example of one half prepared…

Having coded and launched my new web content writing site a few weeks back, I was shocked to discover my contact page looked like this on Monday morning:

contact-mark-firefoxcontact-mark-explorer

The image on the left is with FireFox. On the right is with Internet Explorer (6).

Duh! Bye-Bye!
There go 50% of the visitors to that contact page (stats say around 47% are using Internet explorer browsers.)

And the only reason I checked was because of problems on Sunday with this blog and Internet Explorer – the ‘Widget’ code on the right hand column was screwed up and displaying annoying “bullet points’ everywhere.

Anyway, the contact info image is now displaying correctly after I added the width and height pixel sizes to the html code. I must’ve forgot to do so at the time because this is what it looked like beforehand:

contact-mark-html

Lessons Learned?

1- Ass-umptions are for tripping over!
I knew I’d checked some of the web pages – but had no system for recording that I’d checked each page after a change was made.

2- Being 1/2 prepared was better than nothing – but what chances were thrown away because I’d reduced the odds of potential clients making contact (“First impressions count”.)

3- Systems Rock! – If I’ve learned anything from years in business, it’s that documented, checked and audited systems work! (It’s not rocket science – simple enough to work will do for starters…)

Followup Questions:

Is chance favo( )ring u?

What % of opportunities are passing you by?

Where and what are your systems for a prepared mind in career, business and life?

- Mark McClure