The Story of an Amaryllis

In November, my then girlfriend (now fiancée), bought an Amaryllis bulb (which is actually a Hippeastrum).  Her hope was that the Amaryllis would bloom in time for Christmas. Being a flower lover, she read about proper Amaryllis care and she lovingly tended to the sprouting base of the plant. She made sure it was in a sunny location by the back patio door, she watered it when it needed water, and she checked it daily to make sure that the plant’s needs were met.

The plant was placed near a table in her house where I often sit and work on the computer. For weeks I would look down at the nub and comment, “Your plant is not growing.”

My girlfriend’s standard response was, “Yes it is growing. Just wait and see. By Christmas it will be a beautiful flower.”

Weeks passed and Christmas had almost arrived. All that was to be seen of this beautiful flower was a brown nub with a few tiny leaves poking out. Every time I saw this gangly little nub, I would make the same comment, “Your plant is not growing.”

A few days before Christmas, she finally made the conclusion to move the brown nub in front of a large window upstairs.

Within forty eight hours, the leaves that were poking out of that little nub grew an inch. The next day, the leaves had grown more, and within a week the leaves of the flower had grown over four inches. The flower grew because my beautiful, yet stubborn, girlfriend finally moved the flower to a different place where it was exposed to a different temperature, lighting, and humidity.

How Your Superpowers Might be Like an Amaryllis

As you pursue the adventurous life of a superhero, you might get to the point where, despite your best efforts you are not seeing an increase in the quality of your superpowers. Maybe you know what you want to do, but you haven’t been able to get any clients, create any products, or get hired for the job of your dreams. You are in a rut and don’t know how to get out of it.

You are like the Amaryllis, because you have great potential to be wonderful, but you are not growing. You are stuck in the wrong place unable to break free and realize your true potential.

In order to develop your superpowers, you must make some changes in your life. Some of these changes will be big changes, other changes will be small. Big or small, the important thing is that you are doing one or more of the following activities.

• Change Your Environment – Your environment has a huge effect on your productivity and ability to develop your superpowers. Here are a few ways that you can change you environment to spur development of your superpowers.
• Get Involved in an Organization – Many new superheroes will start their journey without a clear idea of the needs of the people they are helping. By joining an organization in the field you are interested in helping, you can surround yourself with practitioners in that field, other service providers, and people that are thriving in the field you have chosen. Getting involved in an organization also gives you credibility in the field and provides you with educational opportunities that are only available to members of the organization. A final benefit is that it gets you out of the house or office and into a new environment with new ideas, people, and opportunities for growth.
• Try to Find a New Job – I have seen many people crushed by their current employment. They have no energy, no drive, and no desire to create a life of their dreams. By getting out and getting a new job, you can have a feeling of doing something new and exciting. This can push you to developing new ideas, learning new skills, and furthering the development of your superpowers.
• Move Your Personal Workspace – Sometimes something as simple as moving your workspace can have a profound impact on your productivity. Maybe the desk you work on is a mess. Getting some new filing cabinets and getting everything clean and organized might make you more productive. Maybe you are in a dark corner of the room. Moving to a better lit corner might give you more energy during the day to develop the superpowers you are working on.

Increase the Knowledge of Your Superpowers

As you develop your superpowers, you will need to develop your knowledge of those powers. As Superman went to the Fortress of Solitude to study the knowledge crystals provided by his father, you will also need to find sources of information to learn about your superpowers. Some examples are:

• Study a Book – As you develop your superpowers, you will need to develop your knowledge of those powers. As Superman went to the Fortress of Solitude to study the knowledge crystals provided by his father, you will also need to find sources of information to learn about your superpowers.  If you are tight on cash, then you can go to the library and study the books about superpowers you would like to develop. In most cities, libraries are great sources of information about a wide variety of topics. If you don’t have access to a library, then order a book off of Amazon that is current and has a decent amount of positive reviews.
• Take a Course – Many large cities and suburbs in the United State have community training and development programs. For $100 or less, these communities offer classes in graphic design, web page development, cooking, dancing, yoga, tai chi, and many other topics. You can also look into degree or non-degree classes at local universities and community colleges.
• Get a Product – If libraries and your local community let you down, you can turn to the Internet to find a product that can help you develop your superpowers. There are many products available on product creation, web design, knitting, and any number of other areas that you might be interested in pursuing. Search sites like clickbank.com or the E-Junkie Marketplace for potential products that might provide you the information you need to develop your powers.

Small Changes can have a Big Effect

Sometimes a small change to the best environment for you will take you from being a small nub to a beautiful plant. When you are in the best environment, you might also find that you are stymied by a lack of knowledge of your superpowers. Working in the right environment, you can begin to study and learn more about your abilities. When these two tasks have increased your superpowers, you can then start taking action which we will talk more about in the next post.

Superpowers Take Time to Develop

Growing your superpowers will take time, energy, and in many cases some financial investment. The same way building a house takes buying and pouring a foundation, developing your superpowers takes spending time and energy in the right environment, with the right knowledge, and taking the right action. This is not an overnight process, but starting now is the best way to move toward future success.

If this post has given you some insight into helping you grow your superpowers, let me know in the comments how you are going to change your environment or learn more about how your superpowers can be put to use.

How to be a Superhero – Part 3: Developing Your Superpowers is a post from: As A Dude Thinketh
As A Dude Thinketh is written and edited by Chris Elliott. Chris helps small businesses figure out what their big idea is, how to get it to market, and how to get people to notice their wonderfulness. He is also a dynamic speaker and trainer in personal growth and public speaking. Do you need help with your next big idea or speech? I encourage you to talk with me to see how Chris can be of service.

If you liked this post, then you should also check out:

1. How to be a Superhero – Part 4: Taking Action
2. How to be a Superhero – Part 5: Joining Forces with Other Superheroes
3. How to be a Superhero – Part 1: Liberating the Superhero within You

Imagine how Clark Kent must have felt sitting at his desk all day knowing that Superman was only a shirt pull away from being released. Think of how liberating it was when a calamity struck and he was able to break free from his suit and become his true self.

Do you feel like Clark Kent? Do you yearn to be free of your suit and be able to soar in the clouds with ease?

At times, we all feel that we want to be free, but how to we accomplish becoming what we know that we can be?

Step 1: Accepting that You Are Not Your Title

Do you hate when people define you by what it says on your business card or pay stub?

When you go home at night, do you really feel a deep connection with the label of Lawyer, Doctor, or Fry Cook?

If you do feel a deep connection with your title, that is OK. It means that you have found a career that will allow you to be a superhero.

For others that don’t feel a connection with their title, realize that you don’t have to accept your title when you are not in that role. When you go home at night, on lunch breaks, or when you are away from your employer, you do not have to continue to identify yourself with a title you don’t want to be.

You have permission to reject your title and embrace your super power. So if you do not want to be your title, then accept that you are not your title and begin to develop your super powers.

Step 2: Finding Your Super Power

What do you wish your super power could be?

Do you want to fly? Do you want great strength? Do you just want to be able to read people’s minds? While we will not all be able to fly or read people’s minds, we do have a super power in a skill that we might already possess.

Do you think you have a super power?

If you don’t, here is the exercise that I use to help people I coach find their undiscovered powers.

How do people ask you to help them?

• Are people asking for your help to fix their computer?
• Do people ask for your help to move?
• What about someone asking you to watch their kids, cook dinner, create a logo, or Paper Mache their house?

When someone asks for you help, it is a sign that you have a skill that others do not possess in abundance. When you are more skilled in something, you have a super power that others don’t possess.

What is your super power?

Step 3: Create an Alter Ego

Now that you have figured out your super powers, you need to create an alter ego that will be the aspect of you that shows off those super powers. Your alter ego is really you performing your super powers, but it is distilled down to the aspect of your personality that you want to show off to the world.

For example, some alter egos I have interacted with are:

• A foul mouthed marketing guru – Ittybiz
• A caffeinated web designer – The Caffeinated Elf
• A humorous blog and marketing coach – Johnny B Truant

Your alter ego is you.

Don’t think I am telling you to be someone else. Inside the shy Clark Kent was a confident Superman, but that confidence was only shown when the time was right. In the same way, your alter ego is a part of you, but it might be somewhat separate from your day to day life.

You might be a very edgy and somewhat dirty minded writer, but you are not going to deliver an edgy and dirty reading of your kid’s bedtime stories. Instead, you save your alter ego for the times that it will do the most good for the world in a way that is specific to you.

What is great about an alter ego is that it allows you to develop a very specific image in the minds of people you are helping. How can you not remember someone in a bright blue outfit and red cape that swoops down to rescue you in your time of need?

What alter ego can you develop that helps you be memorable, and fits your super power?

Step 4: Establishing Your Lair

Superman has the Fortress of Solitude and Batman has the Batcave, so you need a lair that you can call your home as well. At home, you will want to create a place that you can do your good deeds from. Make some space on a desk, in the corner, or some other place where you feel comfortable showing your alter ego and helping people with your super powers.

Once you have a physical lair, you might want to consider setting up an online lair. You can set up a website or blog. To do this, find a webhost (I use dreamhost), install word press, and start creating your online lair in your image. You can even keep it simpler than a webpage and set up a fan page on Facebook.

Whatever form your lair takes, make sure that it is suitable for your super powers and matches the personality of your alter ego. It might take some time to get your lair built, but remember that Superman had many different lairs over the years, so you can start small and develop your lair as your reputation grows around the world.

Next Steps to Becoming a Superhero

Now that you have embraced your super powers, created an alter ego, and started constructing a lair, you might be wondering how you can use your powers to help people. In the coming posts, we will look at how you can become more aware of who needs your help, how to further develop your superpowers, how to help people when they ask, and why you would want to join forces with other superheroes in order to do more good in the world.

Make sure to subscribe by e-mail or by rss to keep up to date on this series.

How to be a Superhero – Part 1: Liberating the Superhero within You is a post from: As A Dude Thinketh
As A Dude Thinketh is written and edited by Chris Elliott. Chris helps small businesses figure out what their big idea is, how to get it to market, and how to get people to notice their wonderfulness. He is also a dynamic speaker and trainer in personal growth and public speaking. Do you need help with your next big idea or speech? I encourage you to talk with me to see how Chris can be of service.

If you liked this post, then you should also check out:

1. How to be a Superhero – Part 5: Joining Forces with Other Superheroes
2. How to be a Superhero – Part 4: Taking Action
3. How to be a Superhero – Part 3: Developing Your Superpowers

You can either:

A. Escape into a World Others Have Created for You

This means getting a job that gives you the means to survive. You have a roof over your head, use some sort of effective transportation, and don’t go hungry. You spend whatever excess you have on cable television, computer games, movies, clothes, music, drinking, and the like. You watch a lot of TV, read a lot of fiction, or spend a lot of time trying to have fun before you have to go back to work. Work is a drag and you spend a good part of your day dreaming about what your life could be like doing nothing.

Occasionally when you have had too much coffee, you find yourself watching  infomercials about losing weight, making money from real estate, and blending all of your meals into a healthy pulp that makes you younger, gives you energy, and makes your colon squeaky clean.

Your dream career is anything where you can get paid to do no work or winning the lottery. You might even spend a lot of money on products that are supposed to make you money while you sleep or invest a portion of your paycheck in the lottery. You might even have a stack of those products sitting in the corner next to all your losing lottery tickets.

Or maybe you have another choice . . .

B. Create Your Own World to Live In

Creating your own world means having a goal for your life. Whether it is creating a business or doing something good for society, you have some idea of a vision for the future. You might be working for someone else, but the entire time you are planning, saving, and creating a network of like-minded people that are pursuing similar goals to your own.

For you, watching TV is a rarity, you absorb non-fiction, and your residence is the launching pad for your business or organization.  Your dream job is doing something greater than you are now. It is exciting to think about what you are going to be creating in the next few years.

You are either stressed out because you need to break free and do something great, or you are happy with the knowledge that you are moving towards your dream. You know that the right path is out there, you just have to push a little harder to get there.

Which Path Are You On?

You might be saying, “I am on the second path. I am creating my own dream.”

Are you?

I see many people saying that, but then turn around and give someone else tens of thousands of dollars to help them learn what they are supposed to be doing with their lives. They have given up a large portion of their lives and money for what? They spend all of their time and money trying to create something that just makes money, rather then create something they are passionate about. That is just the first choice, but rather then creating your own life, you are trying to buy someone else’s.

Creating Your Own Life to Live

When you are creating your own life to live, you are free from worrying about exchanging time for money. You are exchanging value for money, so even if you are earning a large amount of money for little work . . . it is because of the value you are creating not any system you are following.

When you are creating your own life, you are living by your own rules. This allows you to break free from the daily grind and do something great in this world. It means living your own life and not the life that others want you to live.

Are you up to the challenge?

You Have Two Choices is a post from: As A Dude Thinketh
As A Dude Thinketh is written and edited by Chris Elliott. Chris helps small businesses figure out what their big idea is, how to get it to market, and how to get people to notice their wonderfulness. He is also a dynamic speaker and trainer in personal growth and public speaking. Do you need help with your next big idea or speech? I encourage you to talk with me to see how Chris can be of service.

If you liked this post, then you should also check out:

1. How to Create a Value Mindset
2. How to be a Superhero – Part 1: Liberating the Superhero within You
3. Good is the Enemy of Great

I hate the monotony of doing the same report day after day, so after learning how the reports are constructed, I will spend eight to twelve hours building a new spreadsheet or database that generates the reports in less than five minutes.

When a boss or coworker wonders why I am rebuilding the reports, I will often get asked, “Why are you wasting your time redoing the report when it only takes 20 to 60 minutes of your day to run?”

I want to say, “Because the monotony of this report is sucking the life out of my body!” but normally I would respond, “it just makes sense for me to do it this way.”

People that see the report as a daily task to do are in a certain mindset.

Most are Task Not Value Focused

What I realized, is that many of the people I encounter in corporate America are task focused and not value focused. They see a report as one of a series of tasks they have to perform in order to get paid, so they don’t care about how long it takes to get completed. These people expect to come to work, perform a series of tasks, and get paid for their tasks. This mindset applies to hourly employees, salaried employees, and trained professionals such as Doctors and Lawyers.

The result is a mindset that you have a certain number of tasks you have to do in order to get paid. I equate this to a rat in a maze having to run a certain path in order to get a standardized food pellet. Remember, “The cake is a lie” and you need to focus on the value you produce and not the tasks that get you the same pellet week after week.

Creating a Value Mindset

Looking at the example of my reports, spending ten to twelve hours making the reports more efficient frees up 15 to 50 minutes a day for me to do other activities. The time I spent creating the new report is made up in two months and the process for teaching others how to create the reports is greatly reduced, making it easier to move the reports from employee to employee. One day of work gives me hundreds of additional hours a year to work on higher value tasks.

Anyone that is looking to start a business should adopt a value not task mindset. What are you going to do for your customer that adds value to their business or life? How are you going to create a system, a product, or a service that reduces their workload so they can focus on value added activities?

Exchange Value for Money not Time for Money

When you are working for money by the hour, you always have to press the task bar to get paid. When you create value for your clients, you are able to trade money for value instead of time for money. This has the opportunity to increase your future earning potential dramatically.

How to Create a Value Mindset is a post from: As A Dude Thinketh
As A Dude Thinketh is written and edited by Chris Elliott. Chris helps small businesses figure out what their big idea is, how to get it to market, and how to get people to notice their wonderfulness. He is also a dynamic speaker and trainer in personal growth and public speaking. Do you need help with your next big idea or speech? I encourage you to talk with me to see how Chris can be of service.

If you liked this post, then you should also check out:

1. How Not to Do Free Content
2. You Have to Create Your Own Recovery
3. The Cake is a Lie

A Disturbing Trend in Job Growth

Author’s note: This section is a little dry and scholarly, so you have been warned to skip down and get to the good stuff if talking about past economic data is not your thing.

In “The Empty Raincoat”, Charles Handy claims that as businesses return to positive growth after recessions, they have shifted the burden of work on to a few highly paid individuals so they do not create as many “good” jobs as they had available before the recession. I found an analytical analysis of this claim in the article, “The Weak Jobs Recovery: Whatever Happened to ‘The Great American Jobs Machine’?”

When I looked at the first chart in Freeman and Rodgers on employment recovery, I was scared. It showed that during the most recent recessions, employment recovery has increasingly lagged economic recovery. Making some rough projections if the trend continues, we could see job recovery not happen for more then two to four years after this current recession is over.

The reasons for the lack of employment growth are debatable, but it can reasonably be predicted that if you do find employment after being laid off, that you will not be making as much as you did before. Employers know that they can hire qualified candidates for less, so they will in order to streamline their costs.

Why You Have to Create Your Own Recovery

I will not discuss if what businesses are doing is right or wrong. It is what they are doing, so it is up to us, the employable, to make a decision. Do we wait for an employer to pay us what we are worth, or do we create our own recovery by working for ourselves?

It is up to you to determine what path is right for you, but if you do decide you want more than is being offered, then you have to make some choices.

The Path Forward

If you want to create your own recovery, then you need to consider what you have to offer the world. What skills or hobbies do you have that can be applied to today’s economy?

It is not easy to figure out, but when you do, you have an amazing opportunity available. Never in history has it been easier to reach out to potential customers and find out their needs. With the many social networking applications out there, it is possible to see what people are interested in, promote your business, and converse with others on the same path as you.

The path forward with an employer is not always paved with gold, but if you chose to go it alone on your own path, you just might be able to do something more during the current challenging times.

Will you take the leap, or will you wait a few years to be making what you were a year ago?

You Have to Create Your Own Recovery is a post from: As A Dude Thinketh
As A Dude Thinketh is written and edited by Chris Elliott. Chris helps small businesses figure out what their big idea is, how to get it to market, and how to get people to notice their wonderfulness. He is also a dynamic speaker and trainer in personal growth and public speaking. Do you need help with your next big idea or speech? I encourage you to talk with me to see how Chris can be of service.

If you liked this post, then you should also check out:

1. How to Create a Value Mindset