One Thing
By Jeff Earlywine
 
During a coaching session with a client a few days ago I said something that I don’t believe I have ever said before. I am certain I have had several discussions similar but this discussion took hold and really got my client going. If I could go back in time, I would like to invite you to listen in on the conversation.
 
I asked my client if he had ever seen the movie, “City Slickers?” He said he had. I asked if he remembered the part where Curley told the young buck (Mitch) what the most important thing in life was. With great anticipation the young buck was so eager to hear the wisdom from this old prospector. And then Curley came out with it. The most important thing in life is, “One thing.” That was it. One thing. Really???
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One of my greatest loves as a kid was fishing. This love developed quickly because my family owned a little bait shop that was located near Toledo Bend Lake in Louisiana. Toledo Bend is well known for its large bass and large quantity of crappies.

I soon found out that there is a lot more to fishing than just catching fish. Learning to cast a fishing lure into a tree-covered fish hole takes great skill. But casting is just the start; you have to learn to make the lure look irresistible to the fish below, so irresistible that an attack is inevitable.

Casting a vision for your organization works much the same way. Over the years I have written many articles on the topic of vision. I have written about the value of a vision, how to evaluate your vision, how to design your vision, and how to write a vision statement. This article will coach you on how to discover the practical process of casting a vision.
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Voice To Text (A Call To Action)
By Jeff Earlywine
 
I am sure you would agree with me, the voice to text technology was a magnificent invention. Ray Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first charge-coupled device flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer, the Kurzweil K250 music synthesizer capable of simulating the sound of the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition (voice to text). What a brilliant man.
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Making the most out of today
By Jeff Earlywine

It has been said that yesterday is a canceled check and tomorrow is yet to come, but today is the bridge between the two. If you look at it that way, today is all we have to get from yesterday to tomorrow. But do we really take advantage of every second of today? Do we maximize all of our time to get accomplished what we want? Do we know what we want and more importantly why we want it??? These are the questions I deal with everyday with clients all over the U.S.
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To help you consider this ... read this simple but profound story.

The Focus Of A Champion
By Jeff Earlywine

Many would agree that in the world of professional basketball Michael Jordan is the greatest player to have ever played the game. What amazes me is his magnificent talent. Not many people could retire from the NBA, begin playing baseball, come back to professional basketball and still be at the top of their game. What he can do and has done for basketball is truly amazing.

There is another person in a similar profession that is truly amazing in his own right. A sport that is full of past and present heroes. A sport that is extremely competitive. That sport is stock car racing, and the person is none other than the late Dale Earnhardt Sr. Now, some would take issue with me if I said Dale Sr. was the greatest race car driver to ever get behind the wheel. This would put him in front of the Allisons, the Jarretts, the Pettys, the Bakers, the Wallaces and the list could go on and on. The reason I think Dale Sr. is a great champion is not just his talent behind the wheel, his passion for the sport, or his ability to win races seemingly with little effort. The reason I feel he is such a great champion is because of his focus when competing.
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The Ending Before The End
By Jeff Earlywine

If I can be so transparent with you – I recently had a dream. Not the kind like Martin Luther King had, but one like you probably had last night while you were sleeping. However, if you are like me, you don’t remember most of your “night-time” dreams after you wake up. Well… I remembered this one. And, if you will indulge me, I am almost certain that my dream will have an impact on how successful you are, how much your business’s profit grows this year, and how you attack each day of your life.

In the dream I was one of four speakers at a conference. Each speech built on the other, and I was the final speaker of the four; or so I thought. My job was to combine all of the three speeches into one and drive home a point or two. But the third speaker didn’t show up in time, he was late. And when he did arrive he said he would go after me. As you can see, this messed up everything. I seem to remember from the dream that he really wanted to go last and try to steal my thunder.
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Bullet Points To Take Along On Your Journey To Success
By Steve Turner

Here are some broad-based bullet points for success that are available for you, and can be used
on almost a daily basis.

1. Do not forget what it was like to be a non-management employee.

No matter where you go in your career, no matter what you’re doing, no matter who you’re
talking with, no matter who’s reporting to you and no matter what level you’re at, don’t forget
what it was like to be a non-management employee. As you move up each management level,

Is Your Daily Agenda Full Of Important or Urgent Things?
Jeff Earlywine

A while back I was talking with Tom Rhodes, business owner extraordinaire, and he began to tell me about a time management system where you prioritize your schedule and tasks in four different quadrants. Tom is a very intelligent person and he spoke about this like it was an old concept, a concept that I had not heard of. Which really surprised me because I have been a student of time management techniques for two decades. I began researching this system and found the source; The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People written by Stephen Covey.
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Covey and many others since have written that management of the important and the urgent are both needed for effective time management. The importance of an issue is the impact that resolving it will have on your overall performance and the urgency is the time by which action needs to be started so it can be resolved.