Nostalgia. © by uhhhlaine

It seems like as a society, we’re becoming more conscious of the things we do that seem to be futile and seek to eliminate them. Enter the New Year’s Resolution.

Some people think they are futile.

Others think they are stupid but that it’s a concept that can be rescued.

And you still find people who believe in the New Year’s Resolution, though statistically speaking, most of us will probably break ours, though it seems the very act of making a resolution has some intrinsic benefit.

In mock of this, my Resolution was to remember the faces of all 12 models of the Cyclons, “just in case”.

Of course, this is an impossible resolution because of Daniel model – and it’s the reason I chose it. Better to consciously break one and get it over with than agonize over one I actually believed in and hoped to achieve.

But when I look at the larger spectrum of my life and how I have struggled, and often succeeded to embrace change and reinvent myself, I have to disagree with people who say we can’t change or that we never achieve goals.

Goals vs Resolutions

Some studies show that the very act of writing down a goal, with no other intent, will help you get closer to achieving it (though the oft-referenced Harvard goal-setting study  is a myth, newer research finds this to be true).

So if having goals aren’t a bad thing, and some folks can seem to do that, why can’t we keep our New Year’s promises? And is there a way for us to keep our resolutions or are we all just kidding ourselves?

My personal observation is that we attempt to have a goal that is too lofty for us to believe, and then we add an expectation to reach it in an unreasonable amount of time.

In a nutshell- we set goals that cannot reasonably be achieved, and even if we are able to somehow get things done, the cost of maintenance is too high.

And yes, when we actually intend to attain a goal, most of us are taught to do this differently if we mean to make progress. We tend to see what the big picture we want for ourselves in, say, five years is, and then work backwards into manageable tasks we can complete to get closer little by little.

For that reason, I think one way to achieve a New Year’s Resolution is to keep our high aims reasonable and within reach.

Is Your Goal Reasonable and Believable?

Why shoot for 10,000 visitors a day by February, knowing you’re only getting 100 a day now, and don’t have the advertising budget or time in your schedule to get to that goal, that soon?

You’ll get a higher success rate by setting manageable goals that eventually lead to success- I’m a huge fan of under-achiever goal setting. There’s a great example of this discussed on page 186 of Robert Kiyosaki’s “Cash Flow Quadrant”.

The basic concept is, setting yourself an initial goal that is so ridiculously easy to achieve that you can’t help but continue to achieve it. Then when you reach that goal for whatever set period of time you’ve chosen, set a slightly higher goal.

When he wanted to get in shape, he set a goal of five minutes. Honestly, who can’t fit in five minutes of exercise. You achieve that, you make the goal bigger, and so on. The benefits here are two fold. As the book puts it:

Set attainable daily goals that, when achieved, provide positive reinforcement to help you stay on path to the big goal.

By achieving a little bit – you are doing SOMETHING, rather than constantly missing the mark completely by doing nothing due to overwhelm. And you could still get to your 10k a day visitor goal – but at a rate of 25 new people a day, who stick, it’s much more likely to achieve by Next February than this one.

Force Change with A Compatible Tandem Goal

Another great tip I heard recently is to set a behavior-modifying goal in conjunction with the one you have. In Advice for keeping your New Year’s resolutions, a USA Today article, Psychologist Art Markman is quoted as saying:

“People say they’re going to eat less or they’re going to stop smoking or they’re going to stop drinking. One of the reasons it’s hard to do that is now you’re replacing this behavior with no behavior. So what you need to do is replace a habit with some other behavior.”

The article also gives an example – it’s harder to keep smoking when you’re training for a 5K race.

And it makes quite a bit of sense when your goal is to stop doing something – breaking a habit is much easier if you replace that habit with another, better one.

Be, Then Do, Then Have

In the book I mentioned earlier, around page 140 or so, Robert Kiyosaki discusses a goal setting seminar he attended And in it the presenter brought up the point that we often attempt to set goals that conflict with our current state of being, and that changing this set of being first is essential to achieving a new goal.

For instance, let’s say you decide you want to lose weight before your high school reunion, and you start a diet. You pick the one you feel would help you lose the most weight. But discipline is not enough when starvation is involve and you find yourself blowing the diet.

What happened there?

Part of it might involve learning how to be  a person who is at the weight you want to achieve- that is, adopt the lifestyle, habits and inner logic of the you that you’ll be when you get there.

People who lose weight permanently don’t think in terms of diet. They make permanent changes. They also typically don’t attach the pressure of a certain date or event. They primarily want to get in shape, no matter how long it takes.

There are many philosophies of the be-do-have achievement model that discuss this, some more spiritual, some based mainly in logic.

It’s an interesting question – can you be a long distance runner if you aren’t willing to do more than sprint?

Hopefully these tips will help you get to your New Year’s Resolution. I’d love to hear what yours is, especially if it’s business related.

In less than a minute, you can find out how a small donation can help the Somalian refugee crisis. Just watch the quick video below, or follow the links after.

This is a part of the Non-Profit Sundays series, here to make you aware of easy, low-cost ways to help people. If you can, I hope you’ll join with me in a small donation.

If you can’t, remember that you can use your own platform to spread awareness to others. Thank you for whatever you can do.

Resource Links:

• Get Your Blue Key for $5 and Raise Awareness.
• The article that provides the statistic in the video.
• An alternate place to donate (the Red Cross).

My dear friend, Jill Foster, of Live Your Talk wrote a blog post today called “1 minute video story: a refugee advocate, Africa, and $5”. In it she included the video below, in which I talk about how far $5 goes in other countries, naming things I discovered that I could do with $5 during my trip to West Africa this March.

Most of them actually happened, a couple are hypothetical but accurate, and I share them to illustrate a point I used to miss myself, quite often. That point is that as Americans, it may be hard for us to conceive that what seems like a small amount of money could help so much.

But as another intelligent peer of mine said on Twitter, “when many people do small deeds for the same cause it adds up quickly.”

Through The Blue Key Campaign, you can help refugees get life’s basic necessities by getting your own blue key, for just $5. Not $5 a month. Not $5 down. $5. And they’ll send you a pin or a pendant to help raise awareness about the cause.

From the Blue Key Website:

Right now, more than 43 million refugees are displaced by war, violence or persecution. That’s nearly the combined populations of New York and Texas. At UNHCR, more than 6,000 staffers around the world help open doors for refugees worldwide and have been doing so since 1951.

By getting your own Blue Key, you’ll tell them you support their life-saving work, and stand in solidarity with the other citizens, celebrities and world leaders who do so. Please join us today.

Get your own blue key today.

Picture is from Emergency in Somalia Collection on the USA for UNHCR Facebook Page. Click the picture to go there.

I started the Non-Profit Sundays series because I one day hope to become a great philanthropist. I figure, why wait? Is there a better time than now to start helping your neighbors, here or anywhere in the world?

This week, lost amid the disaster in Norway and the tragic death of Amy Winehouse, there was a story that hasn’t been reported as much, one that you can actually do something about. I don’t know about you, but I’m solution-oriented, so I like to hear about news stories on situations I can help change, even if it’s in a small way.

This is one of those.

Here’s the news, quoted from en email I got from USA for UNHCR ( you may have heard me talk about them before in regards to the Blue Key Campaign.)

As a result of famine and ongoing violence within Somalia, approximateky 3,000 refugees continue to stream into UNHCR camps in Kenya and Ethiopia every day.

They arrive exhausted, dehydrated and malnourished, with up to 50% of children suffering severe malnutrition. Many have walked for weeks to reach aid; the weakest children die along the way as their mothers watch helplessly.

They urgently need medicine, high-protein and high-energy food, clean water, shelter and other basic services. UNHCR has already airlifted 4,400 tents and rushed additional emergency staff to the camps to begin relief immediately. But we need your support to save more lives:

• $1,000 will provide shelter for up to 60 people.
• $500 will provide 25 families with kitchen sets containing a cooking pot, cup, table spoon, and deep plates.
• $100 will provide a refugee with a survival kit containing a blanket, a mattress, a kitchen set, a stove and soap.
• $50 will provide a therapeutic feeding kit to help feed five children.
• $45 per month will shelter a refugee family of five.

> Learn More about the Famine in Somalia
> Donate Now to Help Somali Children in Need

I know it’s hard to imagine that such a small amount of money could help so much. I certainly couldn’t live on $45, not in the United States. But when I was in Africa earlier this year, I lived – like a princess – on less than $100, not including housing. The only thing I wanted for was internet access, and that was an infrastructure/mobility issue, not one of access.

If you can spare it, please join me in donating to this cause. And remember that even $5 can change a life.

Non-Profit Sundays is a series I write to inform my fellow small to medium business owners of the different ways we can band together to make a positive impact on the world, whether we have the financial means or not.

Feel free to post any or all of this post to your own blog as long as all links remain intact. Links back to the individual posts are appreciated and reciprocated, but not required.

No One Should EVER Have Malaria – it is completely preventable and curable – and thank God, my mother is a nurse, so she spotted it quickly and got me medication. George Clooney and some other famous people have had it too.

So how did someone who was born an American get malaria? What is it like to have malaria? What can you do to stop malaria?

Read on.

From February 23rd to March 12th, I was in Lagos and nearby areas helping my sister, her two sets of twins, her husband and my mother move to their new overseas home. There is medication that cures malaria that can be taken in a smaller, preventative dose. It was our number one concern as we were traveling with my sisters four small children, her now 10 month old boy twins, and her 3 year old boy and girl twins.

Since my sister’s family was moving, there was a LOT Of baggage, some of them boxes, and several last minute changes concerning how much we could take, down to what could fit in the cars that were transporting us to the airport. Unbeknownst to us at the time, part of that confusion led to the loss of the preventative doses of malaria for all the children.

Upon our arrival, we were able to get more medication. There was enough for everyone but in the wait to obtain the medication, we all missed at least one dose. The house where we were staying hadn’t been occupied in some time, so there was intermittent power, and thus, no air conditioning. In the stifling heat, we had no choice but to crack open windows.

Despite our best efforts – pesticide spraying that my sister endured, even though she was allergic, Skin So Soft and Easy Off repellent, dressing the children in the proper covering – one of the 9 month olds still got malaria. One of us would have to give up their preventative dose for the baby to have a curative dose.

Of course I sacrificed mine, knowing that I’d be back in the States in less than a week even if the worse should happen.

By that evening, I had malaria. I’d had it before as a child, but my recollection of what it was like was very faint. This time it started with a nearly uncontrollable cough that had me gasping for oxygen. At times I felt fine, but moments later I would be completely weak and could barely move. It felt as if my life force had been co-opted and was slowly draining from my body.

My mother, thankfully, has been a nurse for four decades, and caught on to the symptoms by early morning, and sent someone to fetch a curative dose of the medication for me. Unfortuneately, I still couldn’t eat, and on top of that, the medication made me dizzy — and we later found out, reacted badly with the medication I’ve been taking for nerve damage.

Even with the cure, it’s a rough disease to recover from – it took weeks to get back to a regular schedule. And I’m still recovering from the impact the medication had on my existing health problem.

To this day, my own suffering is a sidebar.

It is a struggle to write about this through the tears that come with the memory of seeing my nephew suffer through this horrible disease. At least I could talk and ask for help. No child should ever feel the way I felt, ever.

And yet, every 30 seconds a child dies from this completely preventable disease.

I’m blessed to have been born to a privileged class both here in America, and to the African family I am descended from abroad. When in Lagos, I wanted for nothing once the power issue was resolved. When I was sick, the medication was provided, accessible and available, at what for us was a modest expense.

Most people are not so lucky.

You can help though, even if you can’t spare a dime to donate.

1- You Can Raise Awareness

• Add hashtag(s) #endmalaria, #malaria, #malariaday and/or #worldmalariaday to your tweets and the hastags will trigger the addition of  clickable mosquito icons to the tweet that will take you to hope140.org/endmalaria

The Case Foundation will be matching every ten dollar donation now through April 27 up to $25,000.

2- You Can Make a Donation

So what can Social Citizens do to show their support and become social media envoys among their own networks? Please visit hope140.org/endmalaria and:

• Tweet this message to make a $10 donation to Malaria No More: Every 30 seconds a child dies of malaria. Nets #endmalaria. So do retweets. RT2Give $10 http://rt2give.com/t/425 ( If you already have an account through Twitpay, you’ll receive a direct message from @Twitpay asking for confirmation. If you don’t have an account, @Twitpay will send you an @reply message with simple instructions on how to enroll).
• Text ‘NET’ to 85944 to make a $10 donation to Malaria No More. (A $10 donation will be charged to your mobile phone bill. Messaging and data rates may apply)

3- You Can Help People Get Mosquito Nets – Whether You Can Personally Donate or Not

4- You Can Volunteer Your Services or Labor

5- You Can Create an Event (Like a Fund-Raiser)

There’s so much to write about it’s hard to know where to begin, except that at least three of the topics are too far off the beaten path to discuss here.

It boils down to this: among more than half of my close circle of friends, myself among them, the first quarter of 2010 to the first quarter of 2011 was the year of Job. It was a time of having one’s faith truly tested. Many of us built empires only to have them lost. Some of us lost our homes. Others of us built a home environment for other people, and in the process began to lose ourselves.

We fought for our health, struggled with the discipline to live within our means, closed old businesses, opened new ones, lost partners, got rid of clients, gained new customer bases. It was a time summed up best by the word “stress”.

Some of us sank even deeper, losing loved ones, and even having the remaining loved ones tell us to get lost.

Times like that truly make you question your own values. (I did.)

They make you wonder if making your flawed attempt to be an honest business person is worth all the misunderstandings, pain and trouble, as you observe people you used to trust prosper on a foundation you built. (The man I admire most in the world just went through this.)

It makes you wonder if you somehow managed to get out of the Light of God’s Love, or have tilted the Laws of nature out of balance. Or violated the grace of whatever or whoever you believe in, in a way unknown to you, in a fashion that is irreparable. (The struggle of my closest friend.)

Tonight, I’m here to tell you that is Not the case. Whatever you are struggling with right now may make you feel abandoned and alone or insecure. But think back… there are many instances where you would not have been where you needed to be to meet your husband or wife if you hadn’t lost all your possession.

That’s what a close friend from college is now going through.

Or maybe, like one of the smartest businessmen walking the planet recently found out, you had to give a project your all and think you were losing everything just to realize your dream of becoming a millionaire.

I’ve lost every single thing I’ve owned in my life three times, the last time happened in 2008 when I had to slink away from an abusive fiancee, covering my tracks with half-truths that probably saved my life.

But, now I have new things, am closer to my family than ever before, and am finally starting to see longer stretches of better health than I have in years.

Sure, I had to go through a bout of malaria to get here (don’t get me started on what happened during my Africa trip!), but I’m here.

And I’ve come to realize the same thing I realize in helping my clients get more business, and making products to help my customers squeeze as much as they can out of the visitors that come to their site.

It is this: the road is the road.

How we journey through life, our businesses, the ups and downs, it’s part of a process.

You can’t get better Google rankings without some type of content, a video, a web page, your own website, a podcast.

And when I take that idea that certain things are just part of the process in certain aspects of business building and apply it to life, it’s all so clear, for a few, brief, clear seconds.

The road we’re on to get to where we need to go can’t be changed. How we navigate it can. Sometimes there are alternate routes we can choose.  But the road is the road.

We can’t change it, even though it changes us. The question left to us is how we will change.

There’s some reason I felt compelled to share this here, when I could have put it up on Amplify, in my personal blog or on Facebook. I’ve learned to listen when my heart compels me. Today I believe the reason is you, reading this now.

I hope it brings you some peace, and makes a little bit of sense.

It was an honor and a blessing to be invited to go to the Google offices in Washington DC last Wednesday, to attend a presentation Google’s Non-Profit division was making. They were announcing the consolidation of many different non-profit tools they offer into an upgrade to the Google for Non-Profits site.

(You can also follow @googlenonprofit on Twitter, and the Google for Non-Profits YouTube channel is not to be missed.)

Highlights?

Several services available separately before are now bound together in one place, one program that can be applied for in one spot.

Apparently in response to some concerns various non-profits had about responsiveness, Google has promised to respond to nonprofit organizations who wish to sign up within 30 days.

If approved, nonprofits can get up to $10k per month in free AdWords advertising, as well as discounted use of Google Apps

There’s now a Google for Non-Profits marketplace where Google approved vendors are offering their services for free or at a discount to nonprofit organizations. It can be hard to find legitimate IT help that will work for less or for free, so this should help a great deal.

There were several Amazing product-demo-style presentations, sharing how various Google tools can be used to connect people to help in real-time during natural disasters, as well as how they are being utilized to give potential donors an immediate view of how their assistance can or will impact those they reach out to help.

Almost a week has passed since the announcement, but it was hard for me to figure out what to write, without simply repeating what has already been said.

Rohit already has a great summary on What You Should Know About Google For NonProfits, also offering “a few observations about the most interesting aspects of this program and how your nonprofit might best take advantage of it”, written before the day was even over.

Beth contributed fantastically detailed coverage of what was announced at the event.

Zachary gave a report at Mashable that added some journalistic depth on Google’s upgrade to its nonprofit digital tool set. Even Google has announced in cross-posted blog updates about the changes to the Google for Non-Profit program.

In the midst of this, what could I possibly have to add? A few blurry pictures and a proud announcement.

You see, this gathering was much more moving as well as informative than what you might normally term as a press conference. It was truly a meeting of many brilliant minds, and I left inspired, ready to make change in the world, or help make changes in the world.

My small part will be the re-opening of a series called Non-Profit Sundays, in which I would share ways even the most modest person or organization can reach out to those less fortunate, as well as make my own public pledge, asking others of like mind to match it if they can.

Isn’t it amazing that we live in a time where we even have enough to open our hands?

One final note: there was a huge need expressed by the non-profit community for a way to connect to each other via Google, to share techniques, information, resources and ideas. Not much has been written about it, and Google has more of a role in facilitating the tools of community, not the direct nurturing of the community itself.

Hopefully, there’s some solution between Google Moderator and Google Groups that can be provided to the Non-Profit community to make this happen. If not, or if further help is needed, perhaps we socially-inclined and web-literate entrepreneurs can find a way to connect to them via Google. I’ll be following up on this, so if you’re such a small business owner of a like mind, please respond in the comments or on Twitter.

Doesn’t it feel amazing to be a part of change?

I recorded this audio before I went to BlogWorld last October, and forgot to publish it. I wasn’t able to ask people what they do, and why, but once you read this post, please feel free to respond below.

Links to things mentioned in this audio:

• The Instant Google Traffic System – thanks to everyone who bought this so I could have a safe time at BlogWorld.
• The Blog World Expo
• What I Do

After you listen to the audio, please answer the question in the comment section- what’s the story of how you got into business for yourself or why you started your company or ended up at your current job.

Don’t forget to tell me WHY you’re still doing it today, even when it gets hard.

Ain’t nobody dope as me I’m dressed so fresh so clean

(So fresh and so clean clean)

Don’t you think I’m so sexy I’m dressed so fresh so clean

(So fresh and so clean clean)

Ain’t nobody dope as me I’m dressed so fresh so clean (So fresh and so clean clean)

I love when you stare at me I’m dressed so fresh so clean (So fresh and so clean clean)

Oh, hi there totally cool blog reader. I recently was linked to by Network Solutions for a little article I wrote… and shook with horror at the fact that I *still* hadn’t found the time to upgrade my blog look for the upcoming addition of tons of fun to Free Traffic Tips. So guess what I stayed up all night doing? 

That’s right! If you’re reading this via RSS, click through to the Free Traffic Tips site to see how fabulous the blog is now. The Multimedia section is really easy to find and scroll through, and we have a featured section for those of you who want to dive right into the most relevant content of the moment. 

Why should you care how super-dope my blog is? Because yours, too, can be ever so fly.

All you need is the Studio Press Themes from Brian Gardner, genius of all things WordPress um… Themey. They’re in the Hizzle fo Shizzle, My Frizzle. I’m still gonna hack mine up a bit, do some things with the header, change the coloring slightly so it matches the brand colors exactly, get a custom logo, hire Trish Jones to trick out my column positioning and such. So if you get the same theme that I do, all you’ll have to do is implement it differently (or the way it looks out of the box) and you’ll have a completely different theme than I do.

It’s one of the magical things about the smoking hot Studio Press Themes. Have a look at Five Beautiful Sites that customized StudioPress themes to their liking. While you’re in the blog, look out for the latest theme updates and special offers. Big thanks to Brian for a job well done. Now when I get linked by prominent sites, I won’t look like I’m stuck in 2007…

something weird is going on!

Good morning!

Some of you may or may not have noticed that I have not been leaving comments to those who have commented.

Au contraire!

I always write comments – and, much to my chagrin, I just realized that my comments are not showing up in the comments section.

To all of you who think or thought that I was just being lazy – now you know what’s happened. I will try to fix this situation ASAP. Until I do solve this pesky problem, I will be emailing my comments to each and everyone of you.

Thanks for understanding.

MorganLighter

This is off topic -

I have a great site for you to visit and be able to not only download music videos, but be able to find the exact song you’re interested in, or your have a list of songs to down load from your favorite artist(s).

Once downloaded, you can make a DVD or a CD as this site will also let you listen to the song without the video.

I find this site a lot cleaner that YouTube, and so I’m giving this to you.  You’re welcome.