Recognize your prime as an opportunity to learn…
This is a guest-post from Kris Rowlands who blogs at Fresh Focus who was thought she might just write a guest post on one of the questions I asked to get feedback from folks. Kris’ tackled one of the questions I proposed in crazy real-time. This would certainly makes sense she blogs on productivity. I struggled a little bit with the title, I didn’t know what Kris wanted, but I definately wanted to get it online, in the same rapid fashion in which it was created so I made one up. It is a blend of a quote which Kris’ had on Fresh Focus and the question I asked.
“Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.” - Muriel Spark
Thanks much to Kris for the guest post below:
This was one of the questions that Jon posed to his readers. He was looking for someone to do a guest post, and I decided to be a victim!
So, building on the sentence above has proven to be a challenge to me. Picking one single experience would be hard. But, I’ve found a way to wriggle outta that box and put my own spin on it. - hang on for the ride!
The single experience is called LIFE. Obviously, living our LIFE allows us the grand opportunity to learn each and every day…..I hear grumblings in the audience……”GRAND OPPORTUNITY”??? Yep - you bet.
LIFE is a grand opportunity for many, many things. Meeting people, traveling, having a career……….but none of that is more important than the lessons that you learn along the way. Once a lesson is learned, and really learned, your rid of it forever. But if you hem and haw, don’t learn the lesson and repeat the pattern, they you aren’t learning a darn thing! In my opinion, our purpose, while on this Earth, is to learn and teach. You may not thing of yourself as teacher, but you truly are. The people that are involved with you learn from your experiences, trials and tribulations. They also learn from your joy, exuberance and successes. Everything that you do touches all the people that surround your life. The LIFE that they see you live is impressed indelibly upon them. Hopefully, they will learn from your mistakes, as you have……….and if they don’t, and follow in your footsteps, then you have the skills and ammunition needed to help them learn the lesson this time around.
My LIFE has been a university with a mixture of hard knocks, Masters’ Degrees and kindergarden. There have been easy, hard, and lengthy lessons to live……but I, as well as all of those around me, have learned from all of them. It seems, to me, that once I learn a LIFE lesson that someone will present themselves that is going through that same lesson so that I can teach them what I have learned - they say the best way to learn something is teaching another! And I have, many times.
Live your LIFE and learn from all the experiences that come into it. Don’t dread the leaps and hurdles that you will have - learn and grow! But most of all, try and retain all that knowledge that you learn - you’ll never know who needs it next!
Great Ideas? Maybe not, but they are YOURS!
So I continue to just be so busy with life, that it is hard to keep the content comming, but true to my less fluff more value statement, I thought I would spend some time and share some topics hopefully you can blog on. I’ve already had a couple of great guest posts from folks and 2 more on the way. My thanks to the Bigg Success Show and Stephen for their efforts. I also am interested in letting folks guest post on the following topics (especially the first 9) or another topics which you feel might fit well into this eclectic mix here at Spatially Relevant:
Business and Social Media
- What is the biggest challenge for social media for general corporate wide participation/acceptance?
- What is the best use of social media for a business? Service, demand gen, knowledge management…
- Our brand has been hijacked online - now what?!?!
Social Media and Ethics
- What role do standards play in creating transparency and authenticity, if any?
- How can identity management improve accountability?
- What is the biggest hurdle for establishing best practices and ethical frameworks for social media?
Standards
- How can standards assist in scaling a given activity?
- What controls and governance opportunities exist for standards organizations/development which are NOT being pursued today in Social Media?
- What is the value in a standards based approach?
Product Management and Marketing
- Can a technology development model change a product or companies viability in the marketplace?
- Who owns the product strategy - the customer, the product management or the market?
- How can positioning and targeting of buyer persona’s improve sales execution?
Better Place Concepts
- This <single experience> represents an opportunity for all of us to learn <X>?
- In the last 90 days this in the biggest lesson I learned which should be shared
- If <X> was a commonly held belief/activity/x it would be easier for everyone to <x>?
Personal Growth
- I’m putting an personal action plan in place to accomplish <X> in the next 30 days?
- I just realized I’m not the center of the universe, now what?
- I used to think X was sorta important, now I think it is a requirement for a fulfilled experience
Personal Shrink (two sides to every coin)
- I am the center of the universe, deal with it jackass.
- If everyone would stop X, I’d be a better person
- I can’t believe you don’t appreciate X
Geography
- What cities are all of your Grateful Dead/Phish/Panic/Yonder T-shirts from?
- Where is the best place to do nothing at and why?
- What is the smallest city you actually flew to and why?
If you end up posting on one of these please link back and send me an email, I’ll do a summary post which itemizes all the blogs which posted on Wednesday and links to the posts.
If you think you have a guest post in one of these send me an email at publisher AT spatiallyrelevant DOT org.
I will schedule my guest post schedule for next saturday due to travel, so I look forward to your posts and submission by Thursday - midnight for an eligible guest post. Ok, Friday am will work, but much later than that - no promises.
So the question is - can you get listed in both the Wednesday list and the Saturday list? Yup, you just have to participate/do the work. It does have kinda of an outsourcing feel or another way to look at it is I’m going to pimp my list for you.
When you send the email for a guest post or to point me to your post on one of the above, please include the following:
Name, blog URL and Post URL - A sentence about your blog would be cool, so the folks here might want to add you to their RSS reader.
if you are interested in a guest post, just give me a sentence or two on why your should be considered along with the post you think should make it. I will post no more than 10 during the month of August. Everyone looks forward to YOUR POV on these.
Hope this is fun and works, because I clearly would like to learn more about the folks that read my stuff and how we can as a group influence our space.
~jon
