I started reading the Alchemist. I didn’t think I got it until I started discussing it and realised the book is all about following your dreams and not getting stuck in the comfort of every day. I haven’t finished but suspect that the other point is to spend less time reading about life, and more time living it (a funny point for a book, but to be fair, it’s a short book).

In my life, I’ve had many (unfulfilled) dreams, from being a vet, to being a dancer for Michael Jackson, to being like a big shot business person, to now, just being happy.

But then i thought maybe I should change my dream again back to something that I can measure.

All my life up until November last year I had big plans and dreams. Now I deliberately avoid them. I felt like I needed to take a break from finding my one calling to figure out what it is that makes me happy. Now I know what that is again (and what it’s not), and I’ve started on the Alchemist, I feel a pressure to find my life dream again.

But I just don’t want to.

It’s quite the dilemma.

Man I am a blabber mouth. I got a twitter email the other day and went to reply with my usual waffle, only to find Twitter cut me off after 160 characters. I deleted half my rant then sent it on through. Same message, same outcome, in like a quarter as many words.

When humans are given any space to write, we LOVE to fill it. Email enables us to pretend we are famous novelists with prose that the world can’t wait to read. Twitter reminds us that we are every bit as boring as the guy sitting next to us and to keep it to a minimum thanks.

I wonder if someone could invent a thunderbird plugin that counts words and gives you a massive warning when you start to ramble? Is there one?

When you are young and in business, it is VERY easy to fall into the trap of people finding it so impressive that you are even scraping together a living for yourself they engulf you in praise and congratulations.

This isn’t actually that helpful and while I accept that owning a business in your 20’s SOUNDS super fantastic, the reality is that normally it’s just another job… But a job where unless you seek help, you don’t get it. There is no senior management staff out there to guide you through, so you really rely on outside people to offer criticism and identify weaknesses and teach you how to improve.

Yesterday , Emma and I met with our favorite branding person Simone Lennane from Maxim. The intent was to go through the beginning of a fairly grueling process of discovering WHO WE ARE.

And man oh man is it difficult!

Even with plenty of warning and stories about how she will go straight to the jugular (and to be fair I think she was pretty soft on us…), It was pretty hard to sit down and HONESTLY point out flaws and weaknesses and even the good bits.

It is something we have needed to do for a while, we have managed to get by with a lot of hard work, but it really is time to do as she says and stop thinking comfortable and start thinking world domination - even if only to make the business so well managed that we can work less.

But it struck me yesterday after the meeting, that I have come to expect surface slaps on the back and even though I know everything we pointed out yesterday has been sitting there in the back of my mind, I’ve never actually had to acknowledge it. That’s a pretty weak and dangerous position.

So. Simone (if you are reading this), I am sorry in advance for the tantrums I will probably pull at some point when the process gets hard, but Emma and I are VERY excited and pumped about the next month, we love your work and we are stoked to have met someone who really seems to care enough about our future that you are willing to tell us the stuff that’s hard to hear :)

Can’t wait to see where we get!

For some reason, in the last 2 weeks, I started to panic about the recession.

Claire informed me that I should be panicking because the world is a changing and since we are soon to run out of petrol and we should all start biking.

Lance took over my whiteboard for 2 minutes to show me graphs of how it would/wouldn’t affect me.

Jack and I listened to how hard it is for restaurants and found out how many are closing down.

Someone else said to get more government work.

I jumped up and down and told everyone I was worried because I have no strategy if things slow down and become sad that I would never own my little cottage which I now NEED because I have the perfect rug to put in it.

So I came up with a strategy:

1. DON’T Panic!!!!! Currently I see no signs of this business slowing down, and the only thing that will slow it down is if I start to cut down on everything (like new Macs which we seem to buy like all the time) and we go into hibernation mode
2. Get variety Things hit worse if you have only one source of income. If you have nicely spread out international customers and a nice mix of governemnt and business customers, you have not put your eggs in one basket.
3. Be necessary If your job is to help people get more business, they will probably still need you if they hit hard times. Maybe they will need you even more.

Not the most complicated of strategies, but I am sleeping at night again.

I also just wanted to say to all the mothers out there: Thanks you do a great job.
And to those whose mums aren’t here anymore: I thought about you too yesterday.
And for those whose mums are: Don’t take your mum for granted. She is your greatest ally in life.

It’s been one of those weeks.

Everything is an emergency, everything is behind, I started the week with a cold and haven’t got my energy back…

And today I can’t get my act together. Actually as of last night when my friend informed me that ‘Happiness too, passes” and it hit me that life simply wont be this good all the time, I slumped.

I am taking tonight off.

Tomorrow is another day. Next week is another week.

I know it sounds kinda funny after a year at PlanHQ to think an organisation dashboard is a revolutionary idea… But I’ve been thinking recently about how to ensure we never get behind in a small business where none of us ever have any time or inclination to put in more than a minute to track our progress.

Yesterday, while I was at a morning seminar run by the Results Group, the idea of a quick business dashboard came up. I LOVED it. I am gong to make one. I know it can be done in a web app, I know there are probably a million startups working on it right now. But I want it on my wall, so I’m not buying.

We’re going to get some big colored dots and list all our tasks and then every week change the dots around so that we know where we are on everything.

You can have dashboards for measuring anything, and what I love about paper ones is that you can completely customise them to your business AND that they glare at you from the wall when they are covered in red and orange - The idea being that simply SEEING where you’re going wrong, leads to an automatic re-adjustment to set it right.

Don’t laugh at it’s simplicity, I just saw a roomfull of business owners fall in love with the idea.

A customer of mine and I have been waging a 2 month long battle against a domain registrant over a domain name he has owned for several years.

Through one reason or another, the domain expired and he didn’t notice until after the grace period. I rang up and the nice lady said that the domain was about to be auctioned and to email a particular email address and ask if we could have an exemption due to the mistake and the length of time he had owned the domain.

No reply. After about 12 emails from me, 12 from him and numerous phone calls from both of us, we still could not get through to anyone who was responsible for the domain.

Now, I assume coinciding with another grace period expiring, he has received a very polite email from “Brian”, and I quote:

“Our client owns this and current asking price is $22,788.

Please let me know if you’re interested in making a purchase.

Kind regards,

Brian”

I have a sneaky suspicion that they refused to talk to us until this time because they knew once it had passed they could resell him his domain name for this much money. (They actually can’t is only reaction was to laugh).

Is that unusual/wrong/dodgy or just one of those lessons you have to learn about domains?

The Decisive Flow team headed along to the Webstock mini conference on Tuesday night.

Apart from now knowing more about tag clouds than we ever thought we would, we also learned about living on the fringe. And the fringe is an exceptional place.

I loved the quote “We didn’t think we’d make any money off it, and we didn’t think it would last”

What a brilliant way to form an idea or start a company. I’m not being sarcastic. To do something purely for the love of it. How could you not be successful? Despite the fact Wellington is so small everyone is like your next door neighbor, the world is quite large, large enough for other people to share your passion and buy your stuff.

People who live on the fringe don’t start something for the sake of the ability to call themselves an ‘entrepreneur’. In fact I don’t even think they would consider themselves entrepreneurs.

People on the fringe don’t care about success. Success to them is living the life we all dream of.

People on the fringe, it seems, very quickly get off the fringe, upon achieving traditional success (Bill Gates was a fringe dweller, now his company is a fringe blocker)… Unless they are a special type of person who was born to decline adoration in favor of a good time.

People on the fringe probably can’t smoothly get their ideas across and charm investors (Which I DO believe was the point of the CodeBlacks team in the Half baked Challenge), but they prove that slick presentations mean nothing in comparison to just going out there and doing it.

Despite what the speaker said (and I’m sorry, I’ve completely forgotten his name, I’m terrible with names), I don’t believe companies CAN harness the fringe. It’s like when people catch hackers and try to train them up to work for the ‘good guys’. You gotta numb the fringe and tame the beast before they can work in your world. And when you have done that, they are no longer what you are after.

What I love about the people on the fringe is that you probably will never pick them. They wont be at the very events we go to to figure them out, they don’t talk up a storm about their achievements - they don’t even look at their achievements as achievements, just something they love to do. I think that’s what I found funny in the speech, the very concept of this type of person flies in the face of coming up with any strategy to harness their power. We know they are there, but no one can do anything about it. That must freak out the big guys.

I LOVE holidays. I don’t love my business failing because I’m on holiday. This is an interesting point in life.

As you get bigger, I suspect there are people there to back you up and take over, while you are small, your business is kind of dependent on you being there ALL the time. And since I’m not sure IF we want to get too much bigger, I want a solution that doesn’t require size.

I am off to Vietnam in September. I’ve done 1 week trips before. This is looking like 2-3 weeks. I don’t need a full holiday - I’m totally happy to work my way around but worry that some days I wont be completely there and don’t want everything to fall apart at the seams.

I know when you own a small business, you’re meant to grit your teeth and bear it, but holidays got me thinking…

At my age, people start talking about babies. I am a female, so chances are, I’ll be the one doing the pregnancy and birth thing. The current theory among people I trust is that it would be best to start on this plan before 30, for health and lifestyle reasons (I would love it if someone could say this is wrong and in fact you’re as safe having children at 40 as you are at 30, but for now accept this fact).

So sometime in the next 5 years, I’ll be having some big time off. I need to start the planning now in order to ensure my life remains as cool as it is now.

So the next few months will be spent planning how to:

a) Get 2 weeks off on a working holiday this year
b) how to ensure within the next few years this can extend a lot further or my role can be far more flexible

Isn’t that awfully sensible?

I hate public speaking, which may sound weird given that in private, you can’t stop me. Over the years I have come to realise that the ability to clearly articulate your ideas in front of an audience is a key to success… You can quite literally have a average idea that is presented well, and it will be worth a lot more than a great idea without the charismatic unveiling.

It kind of makes sense, but is unfortunate for those of us who go weak at the knees at the thought of getting up in front of an audience. If you can’t talk it up in front of an audience, you create your own glass ceiling.

If you can… You can successfully cover up a lot of your weaknesses and have a very strong impression on people.

At the very least, in the next year I will be talking at a wedding. This has prompted me to figure out how to not feel like my stomach has turned into a butterfly farm for the weeks leading up to the event (I do not want to sacrifice my time as chief bridesmaid!)

So what are good techniques? I know it’s simply a confidence thing and have heard that:

• Going to a professional public speaking course can change your life
• Force yourself to just do it and it will get easier
• Just imagine you’re talking to a couple of friends

But am wondering if anyone has experienced a breakthrough ever and how it happened?