“Rule #32 – Enjoy the Little Things” ~ Zombieland
This morning while driving I was reminded that it’s the little things in life that we need to appreciate. My son had to point out that this is also Rule #32 in Zombieland, so it must be important!
Our daily lives seem to become more high stress and demand more and more each day. As an entrepreneur in a state that is considered the 8th largest economy in the world, I feel the pressure of success daily. It is during these times that I need to remind myself to stop and appreciate the little things.
Below is a list of some little things that may make me smile.
- Sunrises and Sunsets
- Puppy Breath
- The smell of popcorn when you enter the movie theatre
- The small cry of a newborn
- Someone saying thank you after you go out of your way to be nice
- Vacation with great friends
- A warm breeze on a summer afternoon
- The unexpected hoot of an owl while sitting on the porch swing
- A loving, respectful spouse
- Teenagers (I know weird, but imagine someone who has lost their child, I’m sure they’d love to be dealing with a teenager rather than their grief)
- Spring flowers
- Summer fruit
I could go on and on. There are so many little things to be thankful for that we should stop and appreciate. I hope that this post has helped you stop and take a minute to think of some of the things that make you smile. I’d love to hear some of your favorite little things in life!
Thanks for reading!
Pam
PS ~ Check out our new website design if you haven’t stopped by in a while ~ www.statusnotquo.com
Take A Step Back
On this Monday I want to take a minute to remind everyone of the importance of being able to take a step back. This is something that it seems I need to remind myself of at least once a week. It seems obvious that we all need a break from time to time; whether it is 5 minutes to step away from some problem or a couple of days to get away from everything. Unfortunately, if you are anything like me often times it seems like there just isn’t enough time to take a break. The truth is that there isn’t enough time to not take a step back. It often doesn’t take much. 5 minutes to clear your head, an hour to get away from the office, or a couple of days to relax, refocus, and recharge. Not only does doing so give you a fresh perspective but it also helps recharge your batteries.
I want to challenge everyone to remember to take a step back, breathe deeply, and don’t let yourself forget the importance of a break.
Manager Survival – 101
The shift from being an individual contributor to a manager can be tough. Suddenly, instead of being responsible for getting “your” work done, you need to ensure that everyone else’s work along with “your” work is being accomplished. During my transition, I learned a few critical survival skills…
The To-do list
The to-do list is the ever growing sword hanging over your head. The key to dealing with it and maintaining your sanity is to accept that you will NEVER cross everything on that list off as done – but as you progress, you’ll realize that you WILL get enough of the right things done to be successful. You learn to prioritize and delegate. And on that note…
Delegation
During a crazy busy time during the dot-com bubble, I carved out 2 days to attend a project management class. Here’s what I came back with – interestingly enough, regarding delegation and not project management:
1) Scope it out – exactly what needs to be done?
2) Is this something only you can do? Or,
3) Can someone else handle it (regardless of whether it will take longer, or not be quite the way you’d do it)?
4) If the answer to 2 is yes, it stays on your plate. If someone else can handle it (#3 is yes), delegate it and follow up as needed. This frees you up to accomplish the things that only you can do – a much better use of your time for the company!
Facilitating
I tend to describe my role as a manager as a facilitator. My job is to remove road blocks, ensure that the necessary information and resources are available, and that the team has the knowledge and support to accomplish their responsibilities and achieve their goals. The allocation of your time should generally be at least 70% focused on facilitating and managing your team and 30% handling “your” tasks. Good luck!
Hold on Officer, I Wrote it Down Here Somewhere… (Part 2)
Last week I recounted to you my harrowing dream experience that brought to light the need for writing things down. I promised to share with you my genius solution for tracking all that important information that races by you every day (and sometimes at night!). Enter Microsoft’s OneNote. I understand that there are competing note-service applications out there, and if you are already enjoying the benefits of one of them, I am happy for you. But if you have not yet tried one, I would suggest giving OneNote a spin.
OneNote’s interface works just like a notebook – harkening back to our youth. In fact, you can create several notebooks all in one place, each with tabs for different subjects, and pages and sub-pages within each tab. The pages themselves are an inviting, blank slate, and you can write, draw pictures, scribble comments, insert objects and pictures, doodle hearts and flowers, and basically use it just like an actual notebook. OneNote saves automatically as you go along, so you won’t lose any info.
One really fantastic feature is the ability to right-click on an object in another application (say, in your internet browser), and have the highlighted object sent directly to OneNote. You can collect articles and screen clippings this way. You also have the option of attaching documents to your notes, and linking notes with emails, tasks and meeting notes in Outlook.
When it comes time to share your vast collection of knowledge with the outside world, you have several choices. You can email a page of your notes without using copy/paste – OneNote has a selection you can click that appends your page into Outlook with one click. Since OneNote is accessible on the internet from any location, you can also invite others to view your notebook, and you can limit which items they are allowed to view. Those viewers can then comment on your notes, and their comments will be marked so that you know who they are from. Several people can interact in this forum in this manner.
A few other cool functions:
-If you have a tablet PC, you can “hand write” your notes and have it converted to text.
-You can create tables easily in your notes
-You can use a calculator on your notes screen
-You can record audio and synchronize it with your notes, or drag in videos to your pages
-You can draw a picture of your brother getting abducted by aliens and link it to your family’s vacation itinerary
Maybe you will write your notes and never use them. If that’s the case, congratulations! You have some useful information to pass down when you get promoted for being so capable. But maybe one morning you stumble into work after being up all night with your screaming 3-month-old baby. You are covered in spit-up and hoping no one notices. You are still frazzled from arguing with your 5-year-old about whether he can brush his teeth while singing, and you are distracted because you haven’t had time to use the restroom in 3 days. At this point you pull up OneNote, and remember all the things you needed to know for your big meeting in 10 minutes. Relief!
And maybe you should keep a section open for recording those important messages that come to you in dreams. When you choose not to buy a Ficus from a kid in the Congo one day, and thus avoid a long stay in a sketchy prison, you can thank me.
Hold on Officer, I Wrote it Down Here Somewhere… (Part 1)
I had a dream last night.
I realize it sounds common and uninteresting, but I have a point, and it starts with me having a dream. It ends with you writing things down that could save your life. Now this is a two-part blog, and the life-saving solution doesn’t come until the second part next week, so don’t do anything dangerous between now and then.
My husband says he almost never dreams, and on the rare occasion when he does, it’s something completely reasonable and encouraging, like becoming the greatest ninja-star-wielding Jedi to ever fly three XYZ destroyers at once (I’m sure there’s a lot in that description that he would get riled up about, but he’s not writing this blog – I am. So tough cookies!).
My dream, however, was about getting arrested. I got arrested for buying something from a little kid in a different country, but I can’t remember what I bought. I woke up right after the dream, and I knew THEN, but I went back to sleep and now I haven’t the slightest idea what it was.
Now you may be like me – and if you are, high five! – and feel that getting arrested in another country is something you would like to avoid. But what did I buy? I can’t remember! And what if this were a message to me that could save me in the future, an obscure warning about buying airbrushed T-shirts/snow globes/baby tigers in distant lands, and if only I could remember what it was I wouldn’t spend the next forty years digging a tunnel with a spoon! IF ONLY I HAD WRITTEN IT DOWN!
And here we are at my point. Write things down. People like to try to avoid writing things down, even when they aren’t sleeping.
I used to think I had a good memory. I performed in school plays and memorized 2-hours-worth of material. I did well on tests in college. I never head home and end up in a stranger’s driveway five miles away. But when my 5-year-old son started quoting movies back-and-forth with my husband and I didn’t even know they were quoting movies (though I did think they might have been exposed to too many cleaning fluids), I knew my memory wasn’t performing at the level I expected.
This is why I have become a faithful user of a program that could solve all your problems! Or at least some of them… tune in next week!
Hope Once Again in Los Angeles
On March 27th, 2012, as a long time fan of the LA Dodgers, I breathed a sigh of relief. The ownership of the Dodgers finally switched hands and at the helm of the new era stood Magic Johnson. Once again there was a glimmer of hope in the Dodgers organization. The hope I think can best be summarized by Vin Scully’s response to the new ownership:
“At first I was amazed that they won, and then like everybody else, I was overwhelmed by the price that they paid,” Scully said. ”But at the same time it’s also encouraging, especially to the fans. Someone who invests that much money, you know they’re going to invest every ounce of energy to make it a go, to make it a winning team. So I think that’s probably the best thought to conclude after all the other maneuvering.”
Although Magic is just a small percentage owner of the Dodgers, his winning attitude and great aptitude for business will be a welcome change in the organization. At Status Not Quo, we had the incredible opportunity to meet Magic last month and hear him speak at the Santa Clarita Valley Industry Association B2B show. I have been a Magic fan since the 80s and was so impressed with what he has done with his life and career since leaving the NBA as a player. I knew he was considered a successful entrepreneur, but was blown away by the depth of his success and the passion he brings to everything he does. If you ever have the opportunity to hear him at one of his business speaking engagements, I highly recommend it!
I wanted to share with you the Core Values listed on his MJ Enterprises Site. The values have both substance as well as objectives that the organization can easily be held accountable for. When creating a list of Core Values for your organization, think about incorporating principals that do the same:
CORE VALUES OF MJ ENTERPRISES:
- Accountability to having quality standards and measureable outcomes
- Over delivering on our promise to our customers and business partners
- Empowering and improving the quality of life in our communities
- Creating and sustaining the best work environment
- Building strategic partnerships that benefit the community and strengthen our brand value
- Delivering integrated and innovative solutions to opportunities and challenges
- Recruiting and retaining the best and the brightest, skilled personnel
- Fostering and practicing teamwork
I hope that as we enter the 2nd Quarter of 2012 that we continue to over deliver on our promises and empower our customers to do the same!
Thank you for visiting our blog,
Pam
www.statusnotquo.com
Am I Dreaming?
So sometimes I have a really hard time coming up with something to post here on the SNQ blog… well OK I always have a hard time with it but sometimes it is really hard. This seems to be one of those times… So what I want to do is share with you something that I came across a while ago that I found very interesting and hopefully you will too. Hopefully it will also give you a little insight into the mind of a programmer: http://www.independentdeveloper.com/archive/2009/03/17/programming-is-like-a-dream
Speaking as a programmer I found this article (and the two it referenced) not only interesting but also mostly true. I can definitely attest to the fact that there is definitely very specific mentality that programing requires. Without that mentality it is quite challenging to write good code. I can also attest to the fact that it can take time to get into that mentality and that once in that mentality the rest of the world seems to fade away. When intensely focused on writing code know that I have missed phone calls, meetings, and even meals.
What I think the articles fail to mention is that over time it actually gets easier to switch into the programmer mentality. I find now that I can slip in and out of that “dream” state rather quickly. Though it is still more efficient not to “wake” me up when I am writing code. 
Jeff
TextboxTitle – a jQuery plugin
Earlier this week I found myself needing to create a simple but effective User Interface tweak on a client’s website – I needed to include a label for a text field within the field itself. I find the need for this type of UI enhancement a lot on mobile websites, where real estate is so limited, but I have found it to be just as useful for desktop-browser websites, so I decided to implement it as a jQuery plugin, and it worked well enough that I thought I share it here.
First, to give a clearer picture of what I’m talking about, imagine a simple mobile website with the following simple form:
This form is in need of some UI elements to explain what each of the two text fields is for, but with such limited space on a mobile form, it’s often not practical to add label elements either above or to the side of our textboxes. So, the obvious solution is to put the labels in the textboxes themselves, like this:
This is a pretty simple function, but let’s take a look at the required functionality.
- It needs to be simple to apply to any text field.
- The “title” text should be visually different (in my case I made the text a lighter shade of grey).
- The “title” text needs to disappear whenever the form element is given focus, and any text typed into the field by the user should be the normal visual style.
- When focus is lost, the element should maintain any user-entered text, or, if the element is empty, the “title” text should reappear.
- If the “title” text is still in the field when the form is submitted, the form should treat it as an empty field.
My solution is the jQuery plugin you can find here. To use it, first add the .js file to your HTML page, along with the usual jQuery script include:
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”../resources/script/jquery.textboxTitle.js”></script>
Next, on your form fields, add the following class:
<input type=”text” class=”inputTextboxTitle” />
In ASP.net, it would look like this:
<asp:TextBox runat=”server” ID=”txtLastName” Width=”150px” CssClass=”inputTextboxTitle />
Last, add the text you want to appear within the textbox using the “title” name / value pair:
<input type=”text” title=”First Name” />
In ASP.net, the ToolTip attribute relates to “title” when the input field is rendered as HTML:
<asp:TextBox runat=”server” ID=”txtLastName” Width=”150px” CssClass=”inputTextboxTitle” ToolTip=”Last Name” />
And that’s it. The class name is only used to make it easier for jQuery to find the form fields – all necessary CSS for the functionality is created dynamically by the plugin. If you start typing in one of the fields, your text will appear normal (not the lighter shade of grey), and when the form is submitted, the plugin will remove the “title” text first, so the fields are truly empty when your server-side code tries to handle the submission.
I hope someone out there can find this useful. I don’t usually blog this specifically about my code, but building this as a plugin was fun and I thought it might be of use to the community. If you do find this useful, or have any questions about it, please let me know.
Success Defined
I came across what I thought was a really good definition of Success and wanted to share it with you.
To me, success is about making a difference for good in the lives of others and in the organizations we support. Helping people and organizations make positive changes is fulfilling work, and that is at the heart of success, in my opinion. Perhaps the best measure of this comes from how much we would be missed if we were gone. Wealth, fame, power, or stature do define success – making a difference does.
I hope that you choose today to work in a way that you would be missed and hope that I do the same.
Pam Capistrano
Status Not Quo
www.statusnotquo.com
Degrees of Separation
It’s an incredibly small world when you start looking at degrees of separation in business. Go one, two, maybe a few more steps and you can find someone who knows of or has worked with someone you’re looking to do business with. And that means that your relationships and how you handled yourself in them will forever be your shadow. That shadow can haunt you or promote you – and you make that decision every day.
A broker who is notified that they’re losing an account under management can react one of two ways. One, continue to deliver exemplary service. Two, check out. Given the many reasons that could have driven the decision, such as a new executive’s personal relationships, the first scenario lays the ground for future business opportunities with everyone involved. The second guarantees not only that those involved won’t consider them for future opportunities, they will recommend against them whenever asked with the specifics.
On the other hand, let’s look at an employee who is “transitioned out” due to management changes (their manager is replaced and the new manager has their own team). Again, two choices. One, they conduct themselves professionally, don’t badmouth the company or management, and work to make the transition seamless. This stands out, and will be remembered and talked about around the cooler. It can lead to opportunities or clench the deal. Or two, they check out. They badmouth everyone involved. And do nothing to assist the transition or worse, sabotage it. Again, this will come back to bite.
Bottom line, you determine everyday what kind of relationship you’re developing – and you need to decide if you’re going to build the relationship, or blow it up. Your choice – and the results will be right behind you for the rest of your career.
Scott Capistrano
Pam Capistrano
Shawn M. Capistrano
Ben Loveless
Jeff McIntire
Tati Santos
Ashley Loveless
