Advice to a College Freshman

Congratulations! You have decided to pursue a college degree. Chances are you did this a) because you want a better life, b) because you love to learn, or c) because your parents said you will have to get a job if you don’t go to college. Regardless, you’ve made the decision to attend and now you it’s up to you to decide what you get out of this part of your education. So here are a few observations I’ve made over the past ten years…

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” - Mark Twain

1) What you get out of your education is your responsibility. If you show up and only work hard enough to pass, you will get some pretty letters that make your parents proud of you but are relatively useless to any future employer or client. The real world is a very competitive place, the more you work, the more you’ll have to offer the world, and the better your prospects will be when you graduate. Students who work hard separate themselves from their peers within a few weeks and those are the ones who get the cool jobs 99% of the time. If you want to be successful, plan on spending at least as many hours a week working out of the classroom as you do in the classroom.

2) Show up to school every day and on time. Attendance and punctuality are habits that can be developed. There is a strong correlation between a student’s attendance, his or her grades, and the probability that a student will graduate. Students who miss class very seldom graduate. And by the way, potential employers ask me more about a student’s reliability than about his or her grades. For some reason employers prefer average employees who are dependable over exceptional people who aren’t.

"We first make our habits, and then our habits make us." -John Dryden

3) Leave the excuses and drama at home. We all have lives and we all have the choice as to where we place our priorities. Knowing that you had a relationship breakup isn’t going to help you or your family 15 years from now when you don’t even remember that other person’s name. Getting the most out of your education will.

4) Choose your friends wisely, you will become exactly like them. Those friends who are more concerned about a good time, being popular, or going out probably don’t really care about you or your success. Those people just don’t want you to make them accept their shortcomings and will work as hard as possible to keep you at their level instead of encouraging you to reach for your potential. Ultimately you will have to accept responsibility for the results of your efforts and blaming your "party-hearty" friends will not put more food on the table.

5) Keep your legs crossed and your fly zipped. No means of birth control is 100% effective and the chances of you graduating if you or your partner becomes pregnant are slim. Every year I have two to three students who weren’t adult enough to be smart. Then these same students quit school instead of finding a way to work and complete college. What they end up with is huge student loans due at the same time as their child, no degree, and therefore a more limited means of supporting the family they quit school to support. Funny, the children of quitters usually grow up to be quitters. You have a choice and it’s no longer just about you. Accept it and step up.

"Argue for your Limitations and they become yours." - Richard Bach

6) Nobody cares about what your past challenges may have been. If you are using them as an excuse to stay limited, accept that you are making a personal choice. If you have difficulty writing, you can change that. If you were challenged in math, now’s the time to do the work you avoided. Your excuses are yours and neither your instructors, your future employers, nor your fellow students will expect less of you just because you accept less from yourself. It may not be easy, but choosing to remain the same defeats the concepts of growth and learning.

7) Doing and learning the things that are most challenging are often the most rewarding. It amazes me that people who do not interview, listen, or speak well avoid joining Toastmasters and other clubs that will help them advance in their careers and in life. If it was easy or fun, you would have already done it. If you want to have fiscal, personal, and professional success in the future you need to do what makes you better. I promise video games may be an easy, entertaining escape but nobody is going to hire you because of your World of Warcraft skills. Get over it, grow up, and move on.

"Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" - Albert Einstein

8) Do not ask your professors or peers to write you letters of recommendation or to give you additional assistance if don’t make the effort first. I will do anything for a student who works hard, but if a student doesn’t care enough to push him or herself, I have a standing tee time. Besides, you really don’t want me to be honest with someone else about how you preformed in class, now do you?

Throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor

 It happened 15 years ago. It was the scariest thing I had ever done in my life, and probably the most important. I made a choice. I took a chance. I quit making excuses, and I have never regretted that decision I made.

In my senior year of high school, I developed a stuttering problem. It was not a physical ailment, it was a mental one. I became absolutely petrified of speaking in front of an audience. Whenever I had to speak, I would trip on my words, go light-headed, drip sweat from my brow, and pray for it to all be over as quickly as possible. To say it was something I did not like is an understatement. To say it was something I felt I might never be able to do and would never attempt was a more realistic assessment and I was absolutely fine with that. I would rather hide in fear than to go through the pain and agony of speaking in public.

That changed when my daughter entered the public school system. I did not like some of the decisions the school board was making in regards to my children’s education and I realized that I could 1) sit at home, complain, and do nothing, 2) speak up and look like a babbling idiot which wasn’t really a pleasant proposition, or 3) I could go through the painful process of learning the skills I needed to become an effective communicator. So for my 33^rd birthday, I attended a local Toastmaster’s meeting.

It was intimidating to watch people comfortably give impromptu talks, deliver beautifully prepared speeches, and then listen graciously while other people offered advise and critiques. I chose to hide in the back of the room and do as little as possible ,which is where I stayed for the next two months. Eventually, I ventured out and tried to take on a few roles and after 4 months of attending, I found the courage to deliver my first speech. It was a dreadful attempt. I was physically ill for two days worrying about it. When I spoke, sweat literally dripped from my face onto my note cards, and I had to add lib the ending because the ink started running on my hand-written speech. After it was over, I decided to quit.

Three weeks later, a friend convinced me to go back and give it another try. Time went by and I forced myself to deliver a second horrendous speech and again I quit. This went on for 9 months but for some strange reason I kept letting myself get talked into coming back. It took me two years to deliver the 10 manual speeches, but by the end of it all, I had developed some great friendships and knew I could control my fear enough to appear somewhat competent if I ever had to speak to an audience.

I stayed with the program for another year and a half and discovered that I was learning a great deal more than how to speak in front of a group. I learned to listen, to positively evaluate others, and to effectively think on my feet. I learned to manage a meeting, and then a  club, and eventually an entire area of clubs. I learned to develop leaders and maybe how to draw out the best in some individuals who were as desperate for a different life as I had originally been. But most importantly I learned that nothing is truly impossible if you are willing to persist and to keep trying.

For me, Toastmasters helped me better listen to and communicate with my daughters, clients, and co-workers. For me, Toastmasters gave me the confidence to speak publicly in order to advance my business and my career. For me, Toastmasters taught me to never give up on a lost cause who still was willing to do the difficult work of trying to grow and to change.

I mention all of this tonight for a few reasons.

1)    I know some people who are frustrated by life and by the challenges of trying to improve their future. It can be done if you just keep coming back and keep making an honest effort. “The pain of the change is soon forgotten once the rewards of the effort have (begun to be) realized.” - Zig Zigler I think

2)    No matter how far you have come or how good you think you are, there are still paths that can lead you farther... if you are willing to seek them out.

3)     Most limits in life exist only because you choose to place them upon yourself. These limits are often masked as excuses, poor timing, and bad luck.

4)    If you need skills to change, it doesn’t matter what you like or enjoy, go develop those skills. You may discover once you have gained competency, you actually enjoy those things you once dreaded (like writing, public speaking, and web design).

5)    Becoming a CTM in Toastmasters was more difficult than earning my college degree or my Eagle in scouting. Maybe because of this, I value it even more than I do those other two accomplishments, and I know for a fact it has done more for my career and my personal relationships than anything else I have ever attempted.

6)    There is a new Toastmaster’s club that meets the 2^nd and 4^th Monday of each month at 1:20 in the afternoon at Keiser University in Lakeland, Fl. It is a club that is open to students, faculty, alumni, and anyone else over 18 who is looking to improve the quality of their life and their potential for a better career. Please feel free to visit and participate.

“In 20 years you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do, than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sail. Explore! Dream! Discover!”  (Mark Twain) and quit making excuses to remain trapped by your fears and habits in a world of frustrating mediocrity.

Ten Easy Ways to Sabotage Your Career

1. Be conceited, ungrateful, or arrogant. Watch the leaders in any field and to a person, they always find time to say thank you, to share, and to listen.
   
2. Be vengeful, negative,  and deceitful, especially in public places. It’s always easy to find faults, but it takes talent and discipline to find solutions. Employers and clients need solutions not criticism.
   
3. Treat your online activity like the boy’s locker room. Everything you say or do online can and may eventually be seen by the people whose respect you need to earn. Acting and posting as if you are in eighth grade shows an future employer you are not yet mature enough to represent his or her firm.
   
4. Put cute messages or extremely long musical numbers on your answering machine. When a client or employer wants to speak to you they don’t want their time wasted. I know an excellent designer who has lost at least three interviews because you can’t leave her a message until you’ve sat through 90 seconds of a poorly recorded message. “I don’t have time for this. Next!”
   
5.  Dress and act as if you don’t care. If you don’t care enough to iron your shirt, to comb your hair, and to put a little polish on those shoes, then you don’t really care about the company for which you are hoping to work. It’s a matter of respect.
   
6. Go to the interview, presentation, or meeting unprepared. Research the company/client. Be prepared to not just answer questions but to ask intelligent ones as well. Reorganize your portfolio to show your future employer /client the work which is relevant to their business. Being prepared shows you care and are willing to earn the opportunity to work for the firm or individual.
   
7. Treat the receptionist like a peon. He or she doesn’t really count anyway and has no influence in the company. Right?
   
8.  Make people wait and be impatient if you are required to do so.  I remember my firm once lost a $10,000 web site because my sales person was ten minutes late and didn’t even bother to call. “If you don’t respect the value of my time, then you don’t respect my company.”
   
9.  Place your company information on a vehicle and then drive like a jerk. I seldom respond to vehicular advertising except when I make it a point never to work with a particular company because their driver cut me off in traffic.
   
10.  Don’t bother hand-writing a thank you note and following up with a phone call. Taking the time to say thank you isn’t really that important anymore and neither is the person who gave you an opportunity to work with them.
    
11. Send out mass e-mails and thank you notes. Everybody loves being treated like a number, so why not reaffirm this by showing some real insincerity. It's better to personally thank a few individuals at a time, by name, than to try and thank everybody with a generic mass mailing.

Yes, I know I can't count. Giving more than I promise is another one of those nasty habits I'm working on. :)

Stick a Fork In It !

One of the first things that I identified as a requirement when I started trying to develop my Latin American businesses was the need to attempt to communicate in a language that my customers understood.  In 1990, the first of the mass fax programs were now affordable as were the early attempts at translation programs. So I learned the software, spent  three months developing my leads list, and started faxing out monthly sales letters to the top 500 retailers in the Caribbean, South, and Central America. I translated these into Portuguese and Spanish with the help of the computer and started being referred to as the “fax man” when I finally met these future clients at trade shows.

One of the companies I represented was Retroneu , a higher end flatware company.  The top tier of their product line was branded as the “Landmark Collection”, bridal registry flatware that retailed for $150 - $200 per place setting.  I wrote a marvelous sales letter explaining why every top retailer should be carrying the magnificent  Landmark collection in their bridal departments.  I then proofed the letter, ran it through the translation software, and faxed it out.

Unfortunately, the program didn’t recognized the word Landmark and substituted its best guess which was “heap”. The literal translation for heap is mierda  (sp?).  So I sent out a letter to the merchandise managers, owners, and buyers of the major  Latin America retailers explaining why they should be carrying “un magnificante colleccion de mierda,” loosely translated as a marvelous pile of excrement.  I received more than 3 dozen responses within the next 2 days explaining my error.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that mistake did more to endear me to customers/prospects than almost anything I had done to that point. I became human. I was making an effort to communicate, however poorly, in their language. I opened more new accounts in the next few months than at any other time during that particular part of my sales career because I wasn’t another  indifferent salesman trying to make a sale, I was just another human trying to make a connection.

The reason I share this, is that it amazes me how many people don’t do things because they are afraid of making mistakes.  We learn the most from making mistakes, but sometimes during the process, we also make wonderful friendships because we care enough to try.  I’m sure that I’ll make plenty of mistakes as I try to be part of the transition from traditional marketing toward personally connecting with and listening to our individual, human customers. But I guess I’d rather look foolish than to be left alone and out of business. 

Flowers are red young man, Green leaves are green

"And she said...

Flowers are red young man
Green leaves are green
There's no need to see flowers any other way
Than they way they always have been seen"

In forth grade, we were given an art project to paint a spring picture. My creation was a grand collection of color and movement, flowers and clouds and colors.  In my mind, it was a fabulous, abstract piece work. The art teacher , in front of my entire class,  announced that it was the worst painting any forth grader had ever made and required that for homework I look up in the encyclopedia what a Tulip was really supposed to look like.

Since I had no artistic ability, I decided to try out music. The second day of class, the instructor played a series of notes and asked if each one was higher or lower than the proceeding one. I had never studied music, and so I didn’t really understand the terms.  My music instructor, again in front of the other members of my elementary school band, informed me that I was tone deaf  and should pursue other activities. Can't paint, can't play music, I must have no creative talent.

I discovered photography when I entered high school, and considered myself fairly competent. In my senior year, when asked about my future plans, I stated that I either wanted to be a photographer or maybe even a teacher. My parents, teachers, and guidance counselors all sang the same chorus to this. Photography is too competitive and you’ll never be able to provide for a family on a teacher’s salary. Join the military or get a degree in Business. I chose the latter.

I did well in business. I grabbed onto using technology to be more productive with my Apple 2e and fell in love with the prospects of what could be done. I ended up opening the Latin American markets for 20 mid-sized US manufacturers using Compuserve, an internal fax/modem, and then e-mail and the Internet. I had great adventures, but was never completely happy. 

The devaluation of the Peso and the destruction of the Mexican middle class, a run on the Brazilian banks, the depression in Puerto Rico caused by new policies in regards to the pharmaceutical industry, import restrictions in Venezuela with a new government in place,  textile tariffs in Argentina, and then the Asian Flu. Wallah!  In under 6 months, the business was gone.  Such is life.

While trying to figure out what to do at 38 years old and having lost my motivation to go back into sales, a bumper sticker in a parking lot led to a conversation with a stranger that led me into a Web design firm. Circumstances forced me from just designing in the back room, back out in to the world of sales and recruitment. A midnight talk with a janitor led me to seek interns at a local college, which one day led to that school asking me to teach an Introduction to Computers class.

Today I am the program director for Graphic Arts and Multimedia Design at Florida’s second largest private university. I usually have more freelance photography, illustration, consulting, and web work than I can take on. But mostly importantly, I love my job, I love my life, and I can draw a Tulip any way I damn well please. I can only wonder what would have been possible if I had been born with a little creative talent and some education along the way.

"But the little boy said...
There are so many colors in the rainbow
So many colors in the morning sun,
So many colors in the flower and I see every one."

-Harry Chapin, Roses are Red

Go Ahead, Make my Day! I may make it worth your while.

How often have you been made to feel special? Really special ? Important, valued, respected, and appreciated? If you’re like me, then most likely it just doesn’t happen often enough. It’s funny how in our rush to collect contacts, to get noticed, to drive traffic, we often forget the most important thing: the human element. Who cares how many followers you have or friends you have if you get nothing from them? But if you aren’t getting anything from them, it is probably because you aren’t giving anything to them.

I went to a SND meeting for the first time last Friday, Stephen Komives  met me at the door. When I met him at the door, he said, “Hello, Greg. It is great to see you here today. Let me get your badge for you.” The enthusiasm and sincerity were real. I don’t know if he took the time to research a little about each of the 1^st time visitors that were at that meeting or not, but it certainly made me feel like he was genuinely interested in me, as a person.

Following a post or a blog, I sent a friend request to Bruce Ramsay  because his comments really seemed interesting and useful. I received an e-mail back that stated “Greg, you're an amazing person. It is my honor to be friends.” Wow, talking about making someone’s day! Yes, I want to be fiends with someone who is that thoughtful.

Of all the people I follow on Twitter, three have extended the hand of friendship with a direct message, just to say hello. Guess who I follow most closely?

And finally, from my campus president 5 minutes ago, “First of All – YOU ROCK and your students ROCK!  I love these. “ It is because of comments like these that our program is always willing to help out other departments on campus, the front office,  and the Chancellor’s office. Thanks, President Rogers.

The point is, the reason social networking became such a popular phenomenon is that we all got tired of feeling like, and being treated like, a number. We wanted to express ourselves, be noticed, connect with new people, learn and experience new things. But without the connection, are we accomplishing any of that?

It doesn’t take long to say thank you. It doesn’t take long to let someone know you appreciate them. It doesn’t take long to turn a chance meeting in cyberspace into an ally, a loyal customer, or even a good friend. Take the time to say thank you, take the time to recognize each contact as a valued, human being. It’s that little step that will do more for your career or business than all the friend collecting and retweeting in the world.

Here are a couple of other blogs that you might also find useful.

• Web 2.0 is better than ME 2.0
  
• Customer Loyalty — Why You Need It and How To Get It 
  

So, when was the last time an online friend made you feel special? How do you let your online contacts know how much they really mean to you?