Techy Things That You Should Know How To Do

• LEARN TO TYPE FOR GOODNESS SAKE. If you are one of those people who did not take Typing in school, you have just been hunting and pecking and two-fingering your keyboard. Aargghh! Get busy, be productive, be efficient, stop wasting time. Go to this site: http://www.typing-lessons.org/ and learn how to do it right.

• HOW TO TYPE AN URL IN YOUR BROWSER- if you want to go to a dot com site, you don't have to memorize that whole line. I definitely suggest you bookmark sites that you frequent, meanwhile if someone tells you to go to a dot com site, click in your url box to activate it, then type the word… here's the trick, hold down the Crtl key while tapping the Enter key. It will automatically add the http, www, and/or com to the site for you. Got it? Now try finding these sites yourself: kansasboatdocks, amazon, weather, craigslist, youtube, gmexcellence

• HOW TO DO A GOOGLE SEARCH – don't you hate it when you get results you didn't want? It's not the browser's fault, it's yours. Sometimes just typing in Chevrolet or Acadia or Girls Gone Wild will get you what you want. Learn to use the plus and minus sign operators which tell it to search for exactly a certain word or eliminating other words. This is good for terminology that is global and applies to vast ranges of topics. For example, if you want to find out about dolphins but not the football team type in dolphins –football and Google will know to eliminate any football references. If you want info on the newspaper The Onion, type in +The Onion to make sure it gives you returns including "the"and not a bunch of things on vegetables. Tip: do not put a space between the + or – and the word. Here's a great little site if you want more search coaching: http://www.dumblittleman.com/2007/06/20-tips-for-more-efficient-google.html

It's Between Your Ears

Are you a penguin or a peacock? It is easy to assume that we are open, that we value other styles and perspectives. Sometimes if we just look around us we will see that we are a bunch of penguins. The danger there is that as our world is changing, even disintegrating beneath us, our comfort at always doing the same things traps us and sentences us to failure. Watch this.

Fu Man Chu

So today was another one filled with windshield time and lots of familiar prairie on each side. I plugged in my MP3.
These are tough days, we all are worried, we all feel affected by things so out of our control, so out of any control, so much different and worse than we remember ever being. We vent, we complain, we retract. I hear it every day and it is exhausting.
I was thinking about what really helps, what really makes a difference to our success when we are so frozen with fear. And then the lyrics hit me like a ton of bricks… "Some day, I hope you get the chance to live like you were dyin'." (click dyin' to hear Tim sing it.)
This song is not the notion of a bucket list – all those things we want to see/do/accomplish before we kick the bucket. It's about being purposeful.
As I listened I couldn't help but think that it so applies to our car business woes. What will we do now that we've been given this death sentence?
Will we walk away from the car business? Will we stay in fighting and doing what we've excelled at all along? Will we not even listen to the death sentence and keep going along as if nothing has changed?
My cousin was diagnosed with brain cancer. She was dead in 6 weeks. The physicians didn't tell her "we can cure this" or, "you have 6 weeks to live". Nobody said anything so concrete. It was all just let's do this surgery and that treatment and all was lost in a whirl of activity.
I don't want to do that. I don't want to not think, to not be me. I don't want someone else "driving". I don't want to go along on someone else's agenda and then be gone or look back and realize that I didn't make choices, that I didn't live like I was dyin'.
In other words, is every day spent doing what I want to do? Am I thoughtful about where I spend my energy? Is it fun? If not, then why am I doing it? If not, what is keeping me from watching the eagle fly, being the friend a friend would want, going 2.7 on a bull named Fu Man Chu?
Your business is your business. My passion is that you are spending your energy on your passion. My role is to tell you when your baby is ugly, to give you the outside perspective, to question you, to applaud you, to say, live like you were dyin! Stop doing things that drain without repaying. Start doing things that you want to do, that make money, that support your interests, that fulfill your dreams for your life's work.
You have no time to lose. Because the death sentence has been pronounced. The car business is never going to be like it has been again. We are living at a tipping point. I am an American and I think that this is the best place in the world to be. We are the only ones to say it is our constitutional right to pursue happiness. We conquer things. We win. We figure out how to thrive. Lots of industries have come and gone. Lots of great ideas have come and been bettered. For me and my house, we are working to be part of the next great thing in this best place because the alternative, for me, is unthinkable.