Crash and Learn

I’m not great with Linux. I know just enough to know that there are a lot of things I don’t know. On a windows file system, I can look at the folders and tell you what is supposed to be there and what is not, but when it comes to Linux I get lost. That doesn’t mean I don’t like it or that I don’t like to play with it, but it does mean that I’m slightly out of my comfort zone when making changes on a Linux server.  So when I crashed our web server this morning, you can imagine how quickly my normal unease moved to outright panic.

Continue reading

Work as a Relationship

It’s important to love what you do. Your career is such a large part of your life that committing to anything less than love for it means that you’re going to be spending a lot of time wondering “what-if” and daydreaming about the job across the hall. I don’t mean that everything has to go well with your job all the time and it always has to make you happy, that’s not how love works outside of the movies. It just means that when you’re at work, you should be giving it your everything, your attention, and you should enjoy it most of the time. In fact, I propose that your work life should mirror a healthy relationship.

Continue reading

My Secret to Public Speaking

It’s no secret that I don’t enjoy networking events. I think they’re a great way to meet prospective clients and, in the service industry, the quality of clients that you get from networking far outweighs any other form of marketing. However, as I’ve told many people over the years: being that person for that long is exhausting to me. On the other hand, public speaking is something that has always come easily to me. In college I took a public speaking course, as I’m sure many people did, but the course did not help me at all. The preparation methods — prepare an outline first, put your notes on cards, rehearse the speech — these were all things that only served to make my speeches seem boring and lackluster. The only thing we were required to turn after giving the speech was the outline so toward the end of the semester my method became “give the speech, and then write the outline.”

Continue reading