My 20 Truths

I first saw this 20 truths post from Amber Naslund via Twitter. which not surprisingly was inspired by friend and former colleague, CC Chapman. I thought it was a great idea and figured I'd take a stab at what 20 truths were on my mind that day. Here we go:

1. I have historically not been a good listener, but I’m working on it.
2. Having kids really does change your life for the better. Whoever came up with all those cheesey sayings about it, they weren’t lying. 
3. Sometimes adults need babysitting too.
4. I wish old friends kept in touch better.
5. You grow fonder of your family as you grow older. I wish I knew that when I was younger.
6. People too often forget that marketing is all about the customer. If you're not listening to them, get off your high horse.
7. The world is full of great presenters and great thinkers. Unfortunately, the world has a very limited supply of great doers.
8. You can pick your friends but you can’t pick your family...unless you’re a celebrity visiting an under-devoloped country. I’m still happy with mine.
9. I must really like both my job and my house because my commute really limits the amount of time spent with my daughter.
10. You grow much more comfortable with yourself the older you get.
11. If YOU are lucky, then YOU are involved in that luck. So i guess YOU actually do make your own luck.
12. Squirrels are an evil animal.This screaming squirrel has to scare you.
13. When I think about death, it scares me. That’s why I enjoy every day to the fullest and dont sweat the small stuff.
14. Everyone has secrets.
15. If you have been there a while and some people you work with don’t feel like family, there’s probably a better fit out there.
16. Not sure who or where I’d be without ever meeting my wife, but I’d definitely be worse off...and with a horrible wardrobe.
17. I really like making people laugh. When they don’t laugh, I don't like them.
18. I still think I had the talent that would have allowed me to play a sport professionally, if I truly had put in the effort and work ethic into the right one. That part is kind of important.
19. Life would be depressingly different if film and music were never created.
20. I don’t care if other blog posts inspire me to write a blog post. It’s called inspiration for a reason. 

Commitment & Will Power

Commitment is a funny word.  For years as a single male, I feared that word. Or did I pretend to fear that word when in fact I wanted commitment all along? Being in a fun marriage with a beautiful wife and the cutest daugther I could imagine, commitment is certainly not a thing to be scared of.

But what about commitment to work? Or better yet, commitment to working hard? Is that something people fear or are they just not willing to put in the effort?

A recent blog post by Kathy Hanbury discussed content strategy and her steps in how to make the process less difficult. The steps she outlined are the right process and if you actually take out the word content, they can work for any marketing, communications or related initiative.  What really stood out to me though was this quote:

"It's not hard to figure out what needs to be done. The challenge is in mustering the commitment and will power to do it."

This is so right on so many levels. Personally, I think it always comes down to effort.  Whether it's being successful in digital marketing and social media, in sports, in content strategy, in relationships, in  your work or in anything in life. Not everyone puts in the effort and nearly everyone has a lapse in effort at some point. Many times, commitment - an actual, real concerted commitment to make something better - and effort is what puts some people ahead on the depth chart. Are you putting in the effort and commitment?

I Was Thinking About Quitting

Blogging. What were you thinking?

I just have not kept up with it like I had hoped and imagined. Yes, work life is busy. Yes, home life is busy, especially with our beautiful, 7-week baby girl. Despite all that, I had hoped to manage my time efficiently and be able to write...mainly for my own entertainment...but also hoping someone, maybe my mom, would go online and read this.

Then, I read a blog post recently, Mitch Joel's Blogging Still Matters...Now More than Ever, that motivated me to just continue to do what I'm doing...at my own pace. Some of the quotes from Seth Godin and Tom Peter really resonated with me on a personal blogging level. In the workplace, I've always been an advocate for how important blogging is to managing a truly effective online presence. For many organizations, blogs are THE source of content creation. But personal blogging? With the ability to share ideas and thoughts via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and comment sections of much better bloggers' blogs, I sometimes wonder how often I'll need this outlet for writing or sharing ideas.

Upon starting it, I really wasn't sure how long I'd be doing this or how frequently I'd want to do it. Even when the posts, like this one, happen infrequently and might not have the impact I intended. All I know is that, even during the few times I do it, I enjoy doing it...and that's all that matters.

Is Pending Fatherhood Making Me Sentimental?

Every now and then, I've been known to track some of my commute's set lists as I ride home and tune from radio station to radio station.  I know, I'm strange.

Well, I tracked a commute this week and it was quite different than most. I was listening to songs that I would skip right over in past situations. With brief intervals of sports talk radio, the songs were:

• Father Figure - George Michael (Tough to pass up a song from this album)
• Kiss from a Rose - Seal (I have never once listened to this song before)
• Sometimes When We Touch - Dan Hill (Ditto. I swear)
• We’re Not Gonna Take It - Twisted Sister
• Blurry - Puddle of Mudd
• Pride (In the Name of Love) - U2
• Halfway Gone - Lifehouse
• Heaven - Bryan Adams
• 1901 - Phoenix (I feel like I ended on a good note)

I don't know how to quite explain my music interests as they're all over the map, but I would typically not listen to the majority of these songs during a normal commute. Am I getting softer in my old age? Is pending fatherhood making me become a little more sentimental? Are my music interests changing yet again? After looking at the above list, I'm hoping it was just a full moon 'cuz I don't know if I could listen to that group of songs very often.

There's A Reason I'm Not Pregnant

I'm male. And thank god for that. I have truly seen why the female gender is the stronger one. There would be no human race if this monumental task was up to us. I get allergies and I complain.

I've seen many friends, colleagues, relatives and even my sister go through a pregnancy, but you never quite understand its complexity until you see someone go through it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 9/10 months. I owe another congratulations to every single one of you...through a different lens.

This has been quite the ride and we are close, but not quite there yet. Likely just a few days away. You learn SO much during this stage in your life that I can't imagine how much more I could possibly learn in the coming weeks after our daughter's birth...but I know there is still much learning to come.

I like to think that I've always respected women to a high degree, but seeing what they go through has been amazing. I'm already so proud of my wife and I know that will only grow over the next few days, weeks and years ahead.

The Male Baby Announcement

I've recently been sharing the great news that my wife and I will be expecting a baby in 2010.  While I have not been shouting it off the rooftops of every social network, the news is pretty public at this point.  For some reason, I just have not been comfortable spreading the initial news through a status update or tweet.

A couple weeks back, we hit the stage where I was comfortable with sharing the news at work. Our families and really close friends knew, but I wanted to share it with the people I see every single day.  My wife had shared the news at her work for a while at that point as she had unfortunately been so sick and needed to let some colleagues know. But when does a male share this great news at work?  And how do you do it? I'm not gagging; I'm not starting to show; I'm not puking in the bathroom nor am I eating saltines at my desk.  There are obvoiusly no male signs that ease co-workers into the possibility of pregnancy!  I've been excited about the news for months at this point, but I have had to hide my excitement.

I was also struggling with whom to share it with.  I work with many different offices on campus and consider myself friendly with all of them. I figured news would travel fast and didn't really want to develop a hierarchy of awareness!  But how do you do it? Do you walk around from office to office sharing the news? Do you wear a sandwich board announcing the news and just wait for people to react? (to the news and the sandwich board) Do you send a mass email, maybe even mail-merged to disguise it as personalization? This bit of advice is not shared in mantown.

While sharing the news with a female co-worker who I just found out was pregnant, I asked this same question and joked about some ways to do it.  One of the jokes spawned an idea. Knowing that I wanted to add a comedic twist to it, I went to someecards.com for some inspiration. I didn't want to go as obscene as some of those tend to be so I created my own. And then I distributed it out via e-mail at nearly the same time to many different groups of co-workers and friends who had not known yet. It seemed to go over well.