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I have to tell on myself.

I’m pretty scared to drive around big cities.

So, when I booked a speech on Long Island, New York, I faced a dilemma. I couldn’t get out to where I needed to go and back without paying a small fortune to a limo company or attempting a series of really problematic connections via train and taxi. And I sure didn’t want to drive.

Rent a car and drive in New York City, coming out of LaGuardia and onto the Long Island Expressway? Oooooh baby, no thanks!

The year is 1989 … October. The place … East Germany. Tens of thousands of people are out in the streets demonstrating for freedom … and against the rule of the communist party. The Berlin wall is soon to come down, but, at this moment, the government is determined to stay in power by any means. A showdown is brewing.

Now, imagine you’re a young soldier doing an 18 month stint of compulsory service in the East German army.

On several nights, you’re ordered to get on a truck with a baton in your pocket, at the ready to go out and beat up protestors. And, at any moment, you could be ordered to wield a gun instead and shoot people.

The protestors are regular people, the folks you interact with in the community every day, including members of your family, your friends, your classmates from school. They aren’t your enemies. Quite the contrary. You wish you could be out there with them.

“I got plenty o’ nuttin’ and nuttin’s plenty for me.”

Most of you know the song, but some may not know the context. The man singing is Porgy. He’s a poor black man living in the tenements of catfish row in Charleston, SC in the 1920’s. He’s a “cripple” and a beggar who has nothing … or so it would seem.

“I got no car, got no mule.” But just as importantly, “I got no misery.”

The 4 A’s Transform the Sales Process 

The bitter truth?

You can be excellent at what you do, and if you aren’t adept at sales and marketing, you’re left with the equivalent of a lot of unsold inventory. Your time and talents are going to waste, sitting on the shelf. You’re not making the kind of living you should, and the people who need you aren’t being served.

That’s downright tragic.

To be successful, you need to possess two distinct skills beyond your professional qualifications … the ability to market … and sell.

I’m guessing most of you know about the Pig of Happiness, but if you don’t, you’ll find the short video instructive. The Pig’s message is that you have to think and do certain things to keep a positive, uplifting vibration alive on an ongoing basis.

Have you experienced it yet?  The time of your life?

Of course you have.  Take a moment and think about that singular time in your life that you enjoyed more than any other, a time you can look back on and say, “Wow, now those were good times.  That was a wonderful experience.”

But there’s a double entrendre in the title … another meaning there.

The following is a great little article from my friend, Suzie Price, of Priceless Professional Consulting … pricelessprofessionalconsulting.com It shows you the incredible impact the small, but important, things you do consistently … every day … can have on the results you achieve in your life and business. Thanks Suzie.

If you were a young artist looking to establish yourself, what would you do?

Put together a portfolio and contact galleries to see if they’d show your work? Put your pictures on your website to display what you’ve done? Enter art shows? That would be the standard approach. And what if that really wasn’t working all that well? Say you’d done all that and still had only a few contacts and clients, a short resume, and your work hung in just one gallery in a small city.

You’re the stereotypical starving artist and everyone and his cousin is telling you how hard it is to make a living selling art. What do you do?

You play a bigger game. You get creative. You get bold.

Her face just lit up. She threw back her shoulders and grinned from ear-to-ear with satisfaction. It was a quiet Sunday morning in the coffee shop off the hotel lobby, hardly anyone around, a kind of sleep inducing atmosphere, and she was working diligently at a low paying job.

“Oh, thank you … thank you … I’m glad you like it.”

One of my clients said something pretty profound recently, and I wanted to share it with you.

She’d been struggling a bit with implementing a time management system and hadn’t quite mastered it yet, but it was important to her that she get the hang of it. In a determined and resolute voice, she said …

“I’m going to start over until I don’t have to start over again.”