The End of an Experiment

Early last year we undertook a project to put our personal events and networking calendar onto the web for anybody to use. By "personal" I mean that it was something that we had been doing internally for a while in order to make it easier to get me out of the office and into the world. Having a holding bin in an Outlook calendar helped us to plan ahead. It seemed like a worthwhile project to see if we could go ahead and share the resources with the rest of the world through what we called out "Social Capital Calendar".

We even invited others to submit their events.

But somewhere along the way it stopped working for us. We found ourselves investing time into something that wasn't fun, nor was it really helping our business as far as we could tell. So, today, after much deliberation, we are pulling the switch. We'll leave the calendar up here for a while but the domain is expiring soon. Until it does expire it will be redirected to this post.

We will still be putting out there the stuff that we think is cool and important - especially if it's something I will be attending myself. But it's going to be much simpler and more in tune with what we are really about rather than a bulletin board for people to promote "whatever".

Watch this space for future details.

What Did I Learn This Year?

Thanks to The Muse and The GoodBlogs (see the sidebar) I have been invited to bare myself in a post of what I learned this year. The invitation originated at Instigator Blog. Ben Yoskovitz has instigated this writing project to close out the year and, besides looking like it might be fun, he's offering some cool prizes so I'm throwing my hat into the ring.

I'm not sure whether to do this in narrative or list form so I'll just get started and see what happens... soooo.... this is what I learned in 2006.

The time to make my friends is before I need them.

I actually learned this lesson a couple of years ago and took it to heart then but this year I saw it in action close up when a significant business opportunity came my way. I was fortunate to be connected to several key people who were able to help me kick it off in a big way. I have learned that it is important to surround yourself with the best quality positive thinking people you can, even if you have no particular reason in mind at the time. Also, I have learned the importance of staying in touch. When circumstances are right you will need access to those quality people - don't let them fade away.

Set bigger boundaries than I imagine I need.

Even though I need those special people for success, I still need to be able to pull up the drawbridge and get my "away" time. As successes continue to grow I am finding this is increasingly important.

Great habits are easily broken.

It is so friggin' easy to let things slide. Just stop paying attention for a little while and before you know it you are gaining weight, your blog entries are behind, and ...well, you get the idea. The sooner you get back on the wagon though, the better you feel.

Never work alone if I can help it.

It's just too hard to get things done solo. Meet with your partners, brainstorm, collaborate.

Technology can really bite.

It really blew me away when my ISP decided that any emails coming through my own web site could not be delivered to me. I was particularly impressed with their instruction that to fix the problem I had to call a special unlisted number that they would not give me. Lesson - always have a backup email system and a 2nd ISP and hosting company waiting in the wings.