Something happened to me recently that caused me to reflect on this; I encountered a tradition that I believe actually enhances productivity, and I wanted to share this with you.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have noticed that I was silent  most of Sunday and all of Monday.  My eldest daughter was recently accepted to the University of Georgia, and she was invited to their “Out and About” open house. For the open house, Samantha shadowed a student as the student attended her classes for that day while my wife, youngest daughter, and I went on a tour of the campus.

It was a nice day, a little cold, but the sun and the walk kept us from freezing. Our tour guide was a  very entertaining senior named “Barrett”. After walking  a little on our tour, we stopped in front of the school’s Chapel. Barrett explained a little about the history of the Chapel, and then he took us around to the back of the building;  there we found the Bell Tower. As you can see from the presentation in the link, the Bell Tower is huge; the 173 year old bell weighs over 800 pounds. The bell has a long rope that (though you can’t really see it in the presentation)  extends all the way to the ground. Usually, when Georgia wins a major sporting event,  students flock to ring the bell in celebration.

Here is the really cool part…anyone can ring the bell at any time to celebrate any major achievement or accomplishment; get an “A” on that really hard paper on “The Use of Metaphor in Hamlet”, ring the bell; ace your Chemistry Final, ring the bell; overcome your shyness and ask that cute girl out, ring the bell (and then tell her why, that should put a smile on her face).  Barrett said that he lived close to campus, and he can hear the bell being rung periodically at all hours of the night.  How amazing is that! Of course, you can run out of your dorm and scream at the top of your lungs “I DID IT!”, but this, to me, is a fantastic tradition that promotes achievement. I actually found myself thinking that in the near future,  I would have accomplished something so “Bell Worthy” that when I visit my daughter, I will run to the tower and ring the bell myself.

So now I ask you…What would it take to make you “Ring the Bell”?  What way will you celebrate your major accomplishment? What tradition(s) will you start or do you follow that enhances your productivity and promotes achievement? Let me know…

Turns out the answer is a resounding YES! If you have expertise in any subject, chances are very likely that there is a need for that expertise. The Internet allows you to reach a broad audience who would be willing to pay you for your knowledge.

For example, let’s stay on the theme of languages; there is a site called VerbalPlanet who’s sole purpose is to help you learn a foreign language. If you are fluent in a particular language, you can sign up to be a tutor. Payments can be handled via PayPal. You have the freedom to set your own hours, and price.

There are also sites for general subject matter experts. For example, Ether, allows you to set up a phone number that you can publish and market. People then call you based on the hours you set and pay you for your knowledge. Two other sites that operate in a similar fashion are BitWine and SkypePrime. I also found a site called Jyve, but they seem to be down for the time being.

As you can see, your specialized knowledge could be your path to a second income, or perhaps a location independent lifestyle.

The comment that the poster made (in part) was this “I’m risk averse, so quitting my job to do something harebrained is not an option for me.”

In response I said that “I am still at my job, but I am laying a foundation for my transition. By leveraging technology, it is easy to test the waters with minimal investment of time and money.”

But let me take this a step further…I ask you (the reader), in general, what is the absolute worst that can happen to you if things ever go wrong…seriously?

I have given this a lot of thought and I have come up with two core worst case scenarios:

Scenario #1: You are somehow incapacitated (medical issue, injury, accident, etc…) and cannot physically do anything.

Scenario #2: You are reasonably healthy, but BAD happens to you. I mean Job Bad, Country Song Bad (lose the wife, the kids, the trailer, the pickup, and yes, the dog).

In Scenario 1, this can happen to you regardless of income level, social status, or career aspirations. It sucks, but it happens every day and there is little you can do to prevent it. The fickle finger of fate is giving you the bird…But on the plus side, they have this handy little thing called insurance. I have mitigated this risk to the best of my ability by investing in short and long term disability insurance.

In Scenario 2, in the extreme form, I am homeless, penniless, alone.

But I am breathing, and I have a functional brain and two relatively strong hands. I will do what anyone does in a survival situation. I will take stock of my assets – physical and mental, and I will put them to work in best way I can to survive. Yes, it will be hard; yes it will be very painful. I will shake my fist at God and say “Why Me?”, but I will endure; just as humanity has done for thousands of years; just as people now are now surviving day to day. There, but for the grace of God, go I.

I approach Scenario 2 as the ultimate do-over, with the added benefit of life experience. In my younger days, I have waited tables, washed dishes, stocked inventory in a department store, and tutored in math and computer science. I have torn down both of our bathrooms (one literally down to the subfloor) and restored them nice and pretty. You cannot tell me that a person does not have at least one skill (other than their current occupation) that they can rely on if the s**t ever hit the fan.

Do this now, go to Google, and enter the following “+Skype +English” without the quotes (or Spanish, or Italian, or whatever your native language is).  There are people who will teach a language, or translate over the Internet full time or in their spare time, all you need is a computer (If you are reading this, I assume that you have one), Skype (free), an email address (free), and a paypal account (free). Opportunity is all around us if we open our eyes to it.

In addition to skills, what about a social network? What about friends, immediate family, church groups, charities? Yes, they exist in this day and age, but few people are truly hermits.

In my heart, I believe that at our core, we are a self reliant people. It is in our DNA. Not to wax on patriotic, but it is a lot of what makes us the envy of other countries. We seem to be at our best, when things are at their very worst.

So all that is left is the fear of risk, but let me ask you, what in life that is worthwhile has not come without risk (and overcoming the fear of it)? How did you feel when you proposed to your spouse (or when they proposed to you?) How did you feel when you sat down at the closing table to basically sign away your life to the bank to get your house? How did you feel in the job interview? Ok, so maybe you are reading this single, renting and jobless, but you get my point.

Ok this has gone way longer than I intended, and I am sure I am going to get a lot of comments, pro and con to my point of view (which I welcome!). The point of my post is this, once you see that it truly takes a lot to totally mess up your life, and if you shed that fear, it is a truly liberating experience.

I am not saying if you are unhappy at your job, jump ship immediately without a Plan B. What I am saying is that there is always a Plan B, and a Plan C, and a Plan D ad infinitum, and there always will be.

But I will let you in on the real secret of my success and it is so simple to implement; yet I talk with other engineers on my team, and in fact other engineers I know, and they don’t do it at all.

After every customer interaction, whether I was on site or on the phone, I send an email to my customer that does the following:

1) Tell them it was a pleasure to work with them and that I was glad I was able to help them out.

2) Solicit feedback on the interaction.

#2 is the key. I tell them flat out that after every customer interaction, I send this email so that I can get valuable feedback – good and bad – on how the interaction went and what I can do to improve the way I support my customers in future interactions, and I thank them for their candid opinion.

It’s really that simple, yet so few people ever do it.

That feedback has been pure gold, and I have learned a lot from it.

Yesterday, I posted a link to Catherine Lawson’s excellent collection of resources for entrepreneurs. She saw it and came to my blog and read my Escape! posting from last week. This prompted her to make the following comment:

“I know that motivating yourself because you want to leave your job seems like a good idea at the time, but it’s a good idea to set yourself a list of goals and motivate yourself towards them. It’s a lot easier that way and you’ll be concentrating on something positive instead of something negative.”

She is, of course, right.

My job has been grinding away at me, eroding my moral, and all I could think of was pain avoidance. I have seen this happen to my coworkers, where they basically can’t take it anymore, jump ship and take the first available job offer that comes along. This inevitably ends up in something similar to a “rebound relationship” that most every one experiences at least once in their lifetime, after breaking up with a significant other. It rarely works out in the end for either party…

I have been focusing on the obstacle, instead of what lies beyond it. I do have a list of goals, but I have not looked at it in a while. Between my day job and getting the house in shape, I have been too preoccupied. So I am setting aside some time tonight to go back over my goals and get myself back on track.

Thanks Catherine…

1) Be impeccable with your word.

2) Don’t take anything personally.

3) Don’t make assumptions.

4) Do your best.

Yeah…the words “Common Sense” spring to mind, but I look at my dealings with other people and find that I may occasionally skip one or two of them (usually #2 or #3, but honestly, never #1).