You know it’s coming.
You have dreaded it for months, or at least weeks.
The Season Finale of your favorite TV show … and worse, that cliffhanger right at the end, and nothing for months.

You really want more. Another episode next week; the next chapter of the story.

With many ventures I have made a mistake. I set the expectation of perpetual production. Two episodes per week. One episode per month. One post per day. Sixteen hours per day. Fifty hours per week.

Each was a mistake.

Each venture was missing a designated reevaluation date, a predetermined season. Instead of just starting out with a goals, each needed to have a point where you are forced to review, reflect, and make a decision to continue in the same, similar, or different direction. On a personal level humans sometimes need  sabbatical (breaks from your normal) or a sabbath (day of rest each week).

When looking at media projects, especially podcasts, there are three natural seasons. Think of school semesters, or when TV seasons are on the air.

Spring – January to April
Summer – May to August
Fall – September to December

During the summer an audience typically dwindles; there are just too many other options out there. It’s also harder to produce during those three or four months. Another extremely hard time is the winter break around Christmas and New Years. If you have children, the time around the end of school & beginning of a new school year is also hard & both fall in that summer season.

If you start a new show in January, around the beginning of April you know you need to make a decision:

• Continue into May and commit to release until August
• Skip the Summer season and restart in the Fall
• Stop with no expected return date

Continuing to do what you have been doing until something major breaks is a poor way to build your dream.

To succeed you must first have a vision. The vision provides the energy in the form of passion. Because of your vision and passion you must be disciplined. Sticking to planned seasons is one form of discipline. Because of your discipline, passion, and vision you take calculated risks. That’s the best path to success I know.

The key is to find the natural break points, or seasons & actually have the discipline to take a break. If you don’t know of a natural season, then take a break as soon as you can. Do the hard work of honest reflection, evaluation, and planning for the next phase. Lastly, communicate with your fans, customers, and all other stakeholders. The only thing worse than your favorite TV show ending a season is not having a clue when it will be back on.

The article is written for Stay At Home Dads and Stay At Home Moms, especally those wanting to build a business, but the idea really applys to you. Especally if stay at home parents are part of your target market.

Something other then spamming the crap out of people is needed if you want long term success & ever want to reduce the amount of work you need to do for results. The funny thing is you don’t define “spamming” your potential audiance does.

It has also been posted on Stay At Home CEO.

The general process is

• Reflect,
• Thank;
• Dream,
• Plan

With deciding on Goals in there too. An added element is a way to look at life in terms of types of relationships.

[ read more ]

This episode focused on priorities.

Knowing what your priorities are, and focusing on them is an important task for anyone & this episode can be usesfull for you.

Listen Now:

[mp3 - 14:48]

Leave a comment on the episode post.

Inspired by a coaching client who asked a couple simple questions:

How can you find these people? What skills or services would they offer?

Just getting started with a few throughts including the StartingCube episode Seed to Tree & post here on finding the best website for you.

It’s an exciting time to have this venture into supporting a specific group: Stay At Home Parents looking to increase income while taking care of their children.

It is flexable & allows us to move fast and focus on the new and unique elements, as opposed to reinventing the wheel.

Over many years we have helped people get started & currently maintain several sites for clients. Over and over we have developed little guides & taught individuals how to publish new content on their site.

Now we are going to focus on some core elements that we use, the stuff that piratically every site we are involved with does. Here are some of the topics already on our list:

• Categories
• Menus
• Pages & Posts
• Custom Page Templates
• Widgets
• Featured Images

With knowledge of these areas anyone who we have helped get started will be able to do about 95% of what one wants to do.

First you should start off listening to Cube 21:

[Download mp3 - 4:48] One-Click Subscriptions for StartingCube: Zune : iTunes : RSS

Now for my reactions:

[MP3 - 14:52]

Business vs War

Business is not War

Businessmen who think of business as war gives business a bad name.

Breaking vs Building
Primary goal of war is to impose your will on a group.
The primary goal of business is to build something, or provide value.

Sun Tzu really pushes the use of deception to win a war.

Deception in a business is a destructive strategy; and is too similar to fraud or oppressive methods for acquiring wealth, not acceptable or good ways of building your dream.

Keep Your Eye on the Prize

It’s important to enjoy the journey, but the journey is not the destination.

Not every moment of building your dream shall be enjoyable, but the overall journey should be.

You have to have both parts, if you lose sight of either:
- journey
- destination
you have lost

The destination might not always be clear to an outsider, that is not a big issue, the goals must be clear and remembered by you.

To help with both elements, keeping written records of what you are striving for and what you have accomplished (or progress) can help.

One Trick Providers

There is power in focus on the part of an individual, but as a group, if everyone brings the same viewpoint & skills, then some people are unneeded.

You have to find additional resources to achieve your goals.

Might be a coach or outside consultant, or it might be a new book, podcast, training course.

Be intentional with what you input into your mind & who you spend time with.

Need an Outside Perspective?

We provide coaching and consulting for individuals and organizations who are striving to solve a public problem with a private solution.

Another place is to post your thoughts in the comments of a Starting Cube episode.

This morning I decided to re-watch a great Ted Talk about work. I continued to work on other stuff while listening to the audio. Then an ad came on.

I went to shut down that tab, but the video captured me.

From there I went and found the video embedded above, tweeted about it, posted to facebook, and finally started on this post.

It use to be that I would only watch movie trailers as commercials, but I can say that if the approach is less about speed bumps and more education & entertainment, I would watch more. In some regards some of the other media I do take in, podcasts & webinars, are just large commercials.