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On the Matter of Tai Chi

Avoiding the debate on the validity of the force in question I will refuse to weigh in on my opinion or experience. Instead I want to focus on the practical takeaways from this article.
The seven secrets mentioned here are, in essence

  • belief
  • attention
  • relaxed sensation
  • orientation
  • breathing
  • imagination
  • and efficient movement.

Again I will ask no one to believe or disbelieve in Qi, Ki, Chi, Prana, or Vitalism. Instead, keeping it universally practical, let’s worry only about believing the technique. Don’t be hesitant in attempting a technique. Honestly this goes for T’ai Chi, weight lifting, running, or eating soup. Don’t cheat yourself by not getting the most out of any exercise, whether because of doubt, fear, or laziness. This would still, in practice, prove consistent with the eastern exercises in question since in literature Qi, like gravity, doesn’t really care if you believe in it or not. However Qi, again like gravity, can be used more effectively if you understand the techniques to use it, belief or not.

Regarding attention, I’m pretty certain I’m on record stating “attention” as the most important activity of being alive. At the very least be aware. Any exercise that attributes its effectiveness to Qi, Chi, or Prana is like a mini science where you shift weight, pressure, and balance and constantly correct until you get it. It won’t work if you aren’t fairly present or in the moment. The same goes for anything you want to perform excellently in.

Relaxed sensation. This goes hand in hand with attention. The trick is to pay attention without the “tension” part. Don’t strain, put intention into each movement, and stay aware of your entire body and environment. Not only is this an amazing exercise by it’s own, it will help ensure you improve, execute each movement correctly, and don’t injure yourself.

The article refers to “grounding and skying,” but let’s just call it orientation. Plant your feet, stand straight up, align your posture, balance you hips, and stretch. Take up some space. Then soften your knees to a bend, keeping your back straight and take up just a little less space. Be grounded, and with the previous states of accepting, relaxed, attentive awareness, take note of your position in space.

The previous steps were like outwardly radiating states of conscious awareness. The next three steps are more about time and motion. The first of these is breathing. I cannot put enough emphasis in the importance of breathing in all activities. If I tried I’d only waste my breath. Instead, I’ll simply say to focus on breathing deep and full from your belly, fill your lungs until you feel your torso shift inside of itself a little. Be aware of that feeling, then release slowly. Continue doing this steadily. Make a slow, relaxing rhythm. Respiration, that is breathing, is the process that accesses all of the energy you can chemically produce in your body, and it’s the same for every other organic cell on the planet. It also comes from the word roots “Re-Spirit” as nearly every ancient culture empasized the importance of air as being part of the spiritual ether. From Adam recieving the breath of life to vedic Prana, there’s no disconnect to the importance of breathing. Go without eating, die in a month. Go without drinking, die in a week. Go without breathing, and your count is minutes. Breath *is* life.

Imagination is the next one. The article mentions visualization and the ability to re-create visions in the mind. It also goes into some abstract visualizations, which is why I rehabilite the term myself with “imagination.” To imagine is a bit more than merely visualizing. It’s part of the process that even gets to vision. What do you want to accomplish? What do you want to look like? How do you want to feel? Some of these are hard to visualize, but easy to imagine. Start with the idea and make it more real.

Efficient movement. This is part of the realization of that idea, but specifically speaks to the effectiveness of how we realize it. In any exercise, physical or otherwise, make your movement count. Control and contain your body, your limbs, your torsion, etc. Keep elbows tucked when running, keep knees evenly spaced when boxing, keep hands over home keys when typing, and so on. This should all prove fairly easy after being aware and oriented. Each micro efficiency not only adds up to save a maximum amount of energy, but also gives you more energy to put into the movements you actually intend to do. Stay effective.

All that being said, I love T’ai Chi, despite having been exceedingly bad at it and found this article interesting, particularly in building a list of lifestyle tools for success. Whether you rely on Qi or chemicals to power you through it all, I think that this breakdown should be equally useful for anyone who wants to put some active mindfulness in their work or workout today.

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Freelancing With a Stable Income

I freelanced making websites, e-commerce shops, and web applications for several years before incorporating and running a business. At first I didn’t know if I ever wanted to move on from freelancing. Running a business is hard enough without the pains of employment, offices, phone lines, articles of organization, and so on. Eventually I knew that it was less about the job I wanted and more about the life I wanted.

After much deliberation I decided to build a small business. But the plan was to keep it small. Really small. Not in breadth, reach or income, but in team size. A small, nimble organization keeps things fast paced, fun, and allows for the flexibility that comes with the freelance lifestyle. On the other hand, managing a team means leverage so that my time can be spent in my favorite activities, and others’ in theirs, and we all make fairly good change from it at the end from whereever we want.

Recently a local client of mine expressed similar concerns. Her primary concern was that, in a consultation, she expressed three concerns with making her freelance business generate a stable income and relevant presence: growth, hiring, and location. The following are some insights I would like to share based on that consultation.

Concerning Growth

Generally freelancers have a wide variety of services they provide. This is often because they want a wide net to catch the most fish, or because they haven’t settled into the service they want to focus on.

If your company has no standard rate, but that you have several services with different rates, I would recommend focusing on your support services in order to to gain the highest leverage. Once you’ve determined you can do this, raise your rates a touch. Even $5 or $10/hour can make a huge compound difference! Identify the service that is most requested versus the service you prefer to offer most. Focus on these two, and gear toward them so it’s easy to market to.

It may seem like shrinking, but that’s the magic in this illusion. Knowing exactly who to target means that prospecting and sales is now a science, rather than a guessing game. A series of niche testimonials makes a great case to close out any competition in the exact arena you are focusing on. This also makes it easier to turn down work. “Why would I want to do that?” I’m sure you ask. In short, when running a business, decision making is your primary activity. The ability to accept or shut down work in seconds rather than minute or hours of deliberation will not only provide peace of mind, it will free your time.

Concerning Hiring

There are two paths I’d recommend in hiring. The first has a high success rate but requires more cash flow; the second is harder but has less risk.

1) Find/train a contractor to do your simplest high quantity service. For this, you would have a freelancer/contractor whose job it is to take your work as soon as it arrives and prep all of the easy tasks. For instance, a support job might require initially installing firewall software or registering DNS filters. Their job would be to do this the moment work has been acquired, leaving more complicated or specific configurations to you.Your primary job would then to be to make sales until your hire is completely booked, after which you could break from sales to take all of his work over down the line, clear the pipes, then return to sales. The problem is that constantly running contractors require fast, consistent cash flow

2) Find/train a salesperson to sell your physical products on commission. This one would have a trained salesperson sell your Seagate hardware to clients. You would include a markup enough for you to gain profit and her to earn a commission. Her pay would be largely based on the volume she sells (since products are more leverageable than services) and can produce more revenue faster. This means you can focus on sales and work with the assurance that there will always be a consistent income. The problem is that it requires a skilled, knowledgeable sales person, which can be hard to find, and harder to negotiate a commission with.

In either case, don’t hire unless you’ve met these three criteria:

  • The job you’re offering is necessary to the company. This can’t be something you can go a week without tending to.
  • You have enough work in the pipeline the be suitably booked yourself.
  • You have enough saved to pay that person for one month if income died.

Also, prepare yourself to know where to find a new employee BEFORE you need them. This means that you should identify the site, agency, or audience you will farm in to get your next hire when work is light. When you’re slammed and need to release pressure on the valve is no time to need to break and build a Linked In or Craigslist strategy. This means you can go straight into prospecting immediately.

Concerning Office Space

Wilmington and RTP are rife with coworking spaces. UNCW’s CIE or the more expensive (and exclusive) TekMountain, along with AU and others in Raleigh offer affordable opportunities for space.

If you aren’t ready for that, try to make deals with existing agencies you fill a whitespace for. A whitespace is some service or expertise you offer that they don’t. This way, you can sit in their spare office space and invite clients there. In return, you are on call to help with their services for a highly reduced tenant fee. I’ve done this myself with local journalists and another digital agency.

On the whole, I wouldn’t concern myself with this at an early stage. Coffee shops, Skype, and tea house conference rooms are plenty and more affordable. When it’s time for you to expand, typically you will know. Focus on having a discretionary $20k available before worrying about renting space. The fees can become ridiculous on top of moving, security, storage, insurance, and networking.

Summary

The trick is to have preparation as you go into each new phase. Choose potential clients in your field, know where to find our hires, determine which office scenario you will want. Further, be consistent. Make sure you reply in timely ways and are available when you say you will be. This will keep loyal customers. By offering fewer services and to fewer industries you’ll be less likely to ever over promise.

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Define Done

My professional tip is this. If you have a project, draw a finish line. Do it almost anywhere. A guideline, list, or something that says very clearly what “done” is. Done is not just when you’re satisfied. Done is when you can pass the project off to someone else and you don’t have to touch it again. This can be for a meal, a drawing, a business, a poem, a website, or your laundry.

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It’s not a question of what’s natural or synthetic

It’s not a question of what’s natural or synthetic. It isn’t the matter of if DNA is an antenna to higher consciousness or a selfish gene that we serve blindly. Whether we change the globe or leave it as we found it is quite unimportant. The practical matter crystalizes here: is what we are doing killing us? Do our habits, actions, diets, and thinking risk destroying our individual bodies, our intellectual legacies, and the planet that acts as the only womb for our ongoing development?

Every thinking, culture, civilization can agree here. This is the only ethical question, that which starts with self-concern and extends into everything else that can be important to the individual, which will always prove to be EVERYTHING. It isn’t about what you value, but that value can only be created so long as we continue to exist long enough to actualize our species, so ask yourself this right now: “is what I’m doing tipping the scale towards our ascension, or our oblivion?”

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Expanding your Business Beyond the City Limits

It’s hard enough starting a new business. First off, there is the statistical fact that 90% of them are doomed to fail. Beyond that there’s the battle of bringing an idea to market, and identifying that market to begin with. Once you’ve celebrated the victory of your startup actually starting up, what comes next? It’s often said that a business that isn’t growing is dying, so many owners and founders will find themselves looking beyond the horizon into parts unknown. But what does it take to accomplish this? Where do you start to grow your business to extend past its birth town?

On January 27th Jim Roberts hosted another installment of NEW, Network for Entrepreneurs in Wilmington, an ongoing entrepreneurial event that works to strengthen business growth and leadership in the Port City. Held at Ironclad Brewery, this event ran with a theme of building your business beyond the city limits. The point of small business is seldom to stay small, at least for business flippers and serial entrepreneurs. The event featured three entrepreneur panelists: Joe Procopio, Mac Lackey, and Brandon Uttley, and was moderated by Ben Brown, reporter with the Raleigh News Observer. Each speaker brought their own perspective to the task of expanding your business beyond local.

Focus on Building Entrepreneurs, Not Startups

Joe Procopio has twenty entrepreneurial years and five exits under his belt. He was the Founder and CEO of Intrepid Media and ExitEvent and serves as the chief product officer of Automated Insights. Placing a stronger effort in building the local ecosystem to support your business, he believes, is an integral step to growing your business beyond that same ecosystem. Joe’s philosophy can be summed up in one phrase, “the rising tide lifts all boats.”

He states that a stronger entrepreneurial community is integral to creating more successful startups and points out a huge gap between the number of startups formed each year and the number of investable entrepreneurs that are available to nurture them. A support network that can identify leaders, along with an infrastructure capable of supporting the constant return to the well of knowledge required to educate throughout each stage of their ventures, is vital.

The framework to provide the events, resources, and education would be created by the community of business owners and entrepreneurs, Joe continues. The drive and direction needed to build and sustain it isn’t that which would come from government or other sources. Such a platform would be a sturdy one to train entrepreneurs in and build businesses upon, but would take time. Based on a premise by Brad Feld of the Foundry Group, Joe states that the Triangle is in year five of a twenty year cycle which Wilmington is just starting. This indicates that a mature version community described above is a task that reaches out into the horizon, which is something to consider while planning growth.

Speak Directly to Your Audience

Brandon Uttley comes from a background of public relations and web design, and now focuses his attention on the phenomenon of podcasting. His book Pod Castaway was recently released on December 31 and outlines the difficulties of entrepreneurship and getting heard by your audience. He stated that terrestrial radio stations are aware of the threat podcasting presents to them. “From what I know, iHeartRadio has considered doing a local business-oriented podcast in Charlotte, but it has not come to fruition.” It provides an opportunity to present quality, on-demand content to your target market.

Podcasting, according to Uttley, is nearly a blue ocean. With between 250–300 thousand active podcasts vs. nearly a million active blogs and bloggers, the competition gap is not negligible. If your niche, topic, or category is saturated, it may be necessary to do as you would with any product and differentiate by focusing on or stacking together topics. Even still, Brandon remarks that podcasting is hard, especially as a solo gig. You will have to hustle to produce content and keep your audience interested and satisfied with between daily or weekly updates. As Ryan Holiday, author of The Obstacle is The Way, told Uttley the week their books were ranked together on the Kindle best seller list, “publishing is both a sprint and a marathon.”

Starting a podcast can also be a low cost and simple process. His general shopping list included a Mac or PC, a decent USB mic, free editing software like Audacity, an account with Libsyn for hosting your files, a WordPress blog to store the information, and a place to record audio, which could be the back of your car. Once you have the supplies, clearly define your audience using avatars or personas to outline the segment you are speaking to and hoping to reach with your message. He also recommends joining a mastermind group to help develop ideas and make discerning decisions.

Design, Distribution, and Direction

Mac Lackey offers the advice to use storytelling to control perception. Mac explains that while primarily focusing on tech companies, he once had the opportunity to be the founder of an aspirational brand, Mountain Khakis. This put him face to face with the story telling process, from how he presented himself as a component of a company that represented a city he didn’t live in, to promoting the lifestyle it represented itself. Story telling is in and of itself an art form, so Mac provides a framework for creating this perception using the Three Ds: Design, Distribution, Direction.

Design is where the story telling process begins. Through design the entrepreneur can shift the focus of the conversation away from the negatives and distractions, whether real or perceived. As an example, he discusses business cards. They are a generally inexpensive tool and are often at the top of the list of cut costs. Lackey suggests, however, using incremental investments in the card designs, such as a thicker stock and cleaner edges, to change the perception to a larger company at first impression. As an investor, Lackey filters through many investment presentations at his desk, many of which are black and white and dull. When he comes across a bound and color printed presentation, however, his attention is immediately excited and that becomes the first presentation he reaches for. Focusing on incremental, attention-focusing improvements to one’s brand can help manage the high cost of marketing and the problem of shouting into the wind.

No story, no matter how well designed, can reach the customer on its own. For this reason Lackey recommends partnering with a capable distribution channel who already has access to the market. With his soccer startup KYCK, he found the biggest players in the market and formed exclusivity agreements with them. This win-win relationship meant that KYCK did not need to incur costs of generating market penetration. There are manufacturer matching services that can assist with these.

Finally, to create a powerful story and to attract the key players into it – your team and your customers – you must inject a profound direction into your brand image. “People want to be a part of something going somewhere great.” Tell the story that supports this. “We will be the number one manufacturer in this sector,” or “we will eliminate this problem from our customers’ lives.”

In Summary

If building a community is a key step to building strong startups, there will be no difficulty for founders in Wilmington. Ironclad Brewery, which served as the event space for the panel, was filled wall to wall with men and women who raise their hand to the title of entrepreneur. Moderator Ben Brown, a seasoned reporter for the Raleigh News & Observer, expressed that he was impressed both with the informative panel of “heavyweights” and with Wilmington’s growth.

“Wilmington has come a long way quickly with start ups and I can’t help but think that this event nudged things further. Can’t wait to hear the first new podcast that comes from it.”
-Ben Brown, Raleigh News & Observer

After the panel, Ben opened the floor to questions, to which the presenters provided valuable information for the entrepreneurs to put to action. Overall each speaker placed a particular emphasis on a different part of the startup journey, each being highly important to the growth of one’s business beyond local boundaries. Create a community strong enough to support and deserve hosting your ambition, talk directly to your market in a way that they will listen, and design your brand to portray an incrementally greater vision over time.

Originally posted – https://medium.com/@bluefission/expanding-your-business-beyond-the-city-limits-afe300d078f8#.4gr1a43kw

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Plant Seeds

Plant seeds, all day, every day. Put something valuable into someone or something, nurture it, harvest it. Invest wisely! Don’t lay seeds on bare stone. Don’t neglect to water the sprouts. Plant seeds forever. Create a garden of life and you will know an existence in which man was never cast from Eden. Invest in your work. Invest in your friends. Invest in your family. Invest in yourself. Invest in yourself, damn it! Plant your value everywhere and even in your final days the reaper won’t be grim.

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The “Other”

The “Other” is this nebulous whisper, an amorphous anonymous, and is in our minds always strange, odd, and wrong. Learn to associate the “other” with the reality of a conscious and perceiving individual or set of individuals. The failure to see that “other” has a perspective and a validation for the same is the cause of so much wrong thinking. Remove your false biases and don’t spend precious energy that could be solving problems identifying problems that aren’t there, like the idea that the “other” is some moronic dimwit that must be educated to some higher universal truth.