Opportunity is a matter of attitude!

Some days ago I found the video below via Nancy Duarte’s blog. It’s great to watch, an excellent exhibition of passion…

But I want to repeat the start of the presentations here.

Probably a lot of you know the story of the two salesmen who went down to Africa in the 1900s. They were sent down to find if there was any opportunity for selling shoes. And they wrote telegrams back to Manchester. And one of them wrote: “Situation hopeless. Stop. They don’t wear shoes.” And the other one wrote: “Glorious opportunity. They don’t have any shoes yet.”

Need I say more?

You can be positive about things, or negative.  Thing is, regardless, but sadly, you are probably right.

What do you choose?  To see the opportunity or to see the difficulty…?

Investing time…

What do you do with your time? Seth Godin made me think about this in his blog post “What’s the point” when he said one should not spend your time on project, you should invest time…

Time afterall is a very scarce non-renewable resource.  Once its gone it gone, nothing can be done to get it back. And there is no point sulking about it either – just more time wasted.  So I figure we can use time in a very similar sense as money.

We can:

• WASTE time, not do anything productive. Note that I am not saying that not working is a waste, it’s not – all of us need to rest sometimes.  I just spend three weeks on vacation – it definitely is not time wasted; no, it refreshes and re-energises!  But to just do stuff because… well no reason: that is a waste.

• SPEND time, by using it in some way. This has that “must” feeling to it – just doing the job. While we probably cannot get rid of all of that – sometimes we do stuff because we can – most of this time befalls something perceived necessary, most often habitual…

• INVEST our time by spending it on activities that are sensible in the long run.  Family time can be seen as an investment, but so can time spent on solving a noteworthy problem, or doing a project that will make a real difference…

I will consciously try to INVEST more time, actively trying to avoid WASTED time and minimize habitually just SPENDING time.  Are you with me?  Any good suggestion, leave them in the comments (that is time INVESTed to help others (me for one) and organising your mind, so go for it!)