I have been reading a lot about what makes great characters lately because I have long felt that mine need some work. I have one particular novel that I am working on and I realized that I made my hero just a little too perfect. Nobody will be able to relate to him if everything goes his way. People identify more with characters who struggle. Spider-man is a beloved character because he struggles to balance his personal life with being a part-time superhero. Everyone loves Wolverine of the X-men, not just because he has claws that pop out of his knuckles, but because he wrestles with keeping his more savage instincts under control so as not to harm those he loves. Every book or comic book I have read and loved, every movie I have seen that thrilled me, had a character that struggled. And that is what lets us identify with them.

I created the following survey to find out who people enjoyed reading about - who there most memorable characters were.

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If any of you guys out there are thinking that today is just another day and that it is no big deal, let me give you the following warning:

"It is better to dwell in the wilderness, than with a contentious and an angry woman."
~ Proverbs 21:19

So, if you aren't planning anything to make your loved one feel special today, GET THEE TO THE WILDERNESS!

Consider yourself warned.
 

I guess I wasn't totally truthful in that last post. I have been doing a little bit of writing for a program I developed called The Millionaire Marathon. It is essentially a fun challenge I developed to encourage people to create over $1,000,000 in a enjoyable and fulfilling manner without using any of their own money. I started a blog for the program at http://themillionairemarathon.blogspot.com/ and have been writing and posting encouraging, motivating and informational articles. Come by and check it out sometime. I highly recommend reading The Millionaire Marathon introductory series found on the sidebar and also the Celebrate 2008! series that has to do with New Year's Resolutions. I will also be posting a Universal Laws series in the near future so keep coming back.
 

It has been so long since I posted on this blog. Life has been so crazy and busy, but I have found that little escapes like Writing.com are helpful in destressing every now and then. I have been visiting the site for about a month reading pieces and doing a couple of reviews, but I haven't done much writing.

Yesterday, I took up the challenge of writing a piece for The Writer's Cramp contest ... and I won! Not bad for a guy who hasn't written anything creative in I don't know how long, eh?

The challenge was to write about someone confessing something to another person. I wrote the short story called "Breaking Her Heart" which you can find in my portfolio in the contests folder under The Writer's Cramp. There is a 1,000 word limit for the contest and, boy, I never realized how difficult it would be to keep it under 1,000 when the creativity is flowing. I had planned for a little more explanation and development at the end, but had to wrap it up fairly quickly. Even then, I was five words over and had to go back and edit some words out for a total of 999 words.

Feel free to read it and/or review it and look forward to seeing a bit more of me and my writing around the site. I have another great idea for a story (which makes a total of 4 stories in development) and I definitely want to get in more writing on the Thief of the Kingdom book that I started years ago. See you again soon!
 

I look at my last blog entry and asked myself that very question. I started out this year with very grand and ambitious dreams. Now, here I am, December 1 with nothing to show for it. Where has the time gone? What did I trade my dreams for? It's a question that I really do not want to answer.

I have been listening to Anthony Robbins' Personal Power II cds for some time now and one thing he talks about is wanting to achieve something, but never really doing anything because you get caught up in the daily business of living. That has been me all year - except I have been caught up in the daily business of dying, not living. I am more exhausted now than I have ever been and my financial situation seems more bleak than ever. And I believe without a shadow of a doubt that it could have all been so much better if I had taken some kind of action, any action, in the direction of achieving my dreams.

THIS ENDS NOW!!!!!!!!!

This blog will be the starting point for a new way of living. It is my first action. My first step to new and better living. Why wait for January 1 to set a new resolution. I resolve right now to identify what I really want from life and to take MASSIVE action to achieve it. If you want to know what that means, stay tuned to this blog. I resolve to write in this blog AT LEAST once a week, but I hope to write much more often than that. If anyone following finds me slacking off on that commitment, e-mail me immediately and ask "WHERE ARE YOU?" to help remind me of my goal. I hope to never get any of those e-mails, but if I do fail to write, I hope to hear from at least 100 people. Please help me and keep me accountable and I would be happy to do the same for you.
 

Basketball/Life Lessons: Take the Shot!

Two nights ago I watched the Cleveland Cavaliers take on the Denver Nuggets. It was a highly touted matchup between Lebron James and Carmello Anthony. For all the hullabaloo about these star players, they certainly didn't disappoint. It was a close contest that wasn't decided until the final seconds of the game.

One particular play caught my attention. In the final minute of the game, Denver was in the lead and Cleveland had the ball. The ball was moved around and ended up in the hands of Cleveland's leading scorer, Lebron James, at the top of the key with a wide open look at a three-point shot. It was the perfect setup; the perfect opportunity to take the lead ... and he passed the ball!

Why didn't he take the shot? It was the same shot I have watched him take time and time again, under pressure and fading backwards, burying it in the center of the net. Was the memory of the missed shot against the Los Angeles Lakers that cost them the game two nights before still haunting him? Did he just not recognize the opportunity? It is only something that Lebron can answer.

It is an all too common occurrence. How many times do we not recognize opportunities for what they are? How many times do we miss out on something great because we didn't take action? How many times do we let our fears stop us from moving forward? I am sure that you can think of at least one situation for each of those questions. If you are anything like me, you could think of many instances for each question.


Missed Opportunities

The ability to recognize an opportunity and take advantage of it is what separates the wealthy from the rest of us in the rat race. Thomas Stemberg, founder of Staples, is a great example of that. Recognizing that the office supply aisle is one of the most frequently restocked in a department store, he founded a store that combined the Toys 'R Us formula with traditional office supplies. Later on he founded Zoots, a twenty-four hour dry cleaner with delivery, after he couldn't find a dry cleaner that was open late enough for him to pick up his clothes after work.

My marriage is a direct result of recognizing an opportunity and taking advantage of it. I had given up on finding love in my hometown and was getting ready to head off to college, hoping to find a wife at the university happy hunting grounds. So, I was biding my time until I would leave when I met an attractive young woman who had just moved to the area at a volleyball activity. A month and a half later I asked her to marry me and two months after that we were married. Nine wonderful years and three beautiful children later I still count that as the greatest success of my life.


Lack of Action

Some of us may recognize an opportunity and say, "Someone should do that." That someone who should do it is you! One of the great secrets of success is to see the opportunity, come up with three to four ways to take advantage of that opportunity, and take action. Don't wait! ACT!!!

Something my dad always used to say to me is, "He who hesitates is lost." That is so true. If you don't take action, someone else will. If I hadn't asked my wife to marry me after falling in love with her, do you think all the other guys who had taken an interest in her would have just waited and watched for me to someday get around to it? No way! How long will an employer wait for an applicant to accept a job offer? Not very long!

"But, Andy, I plan on taking action. I just have to get all the small details worked out and find the perfect moment." If you wait for the perfect moment, you will be waiting all your life. Our whole lives we have been trained to be perfect. Mike Litman, coauthor of the book Conversations With Millionaires, was taught early on by a mentor that "you don't have to get it right. You just have to get it going." The universe rewards action. Not everything will work, but you keep what does and change what doesn't.


Fear

F.E.A.R. stands for False Evidence Appearing Real. I believe that the main roadblock to people taking action is their fear. They are afraid of what will happen. They are afraid of what won't happen. They fear it will work and they fear it won't work. They are afraid of how they will look trying to make it work.

Everybody is afraid at one time or another. But those who attain the success they want in life are they who do those things they don't want to do. They overcome their fears and bust through the roadblocks. When they fail, they pick themselves up, dust themselves off and move on.

The law of averages is in our favor. If you move forward, if you take action, and don't let anyone stop you in the pursuit of your goal, you will eventually find some measure of success.

The best check on whether or not you are moving forward is to ask yourself, "When is the last time I failed?" If you haven't failed at something lately, you are at a standstill. In fact, Robert G. Allen, author of the bestseller Nothing Down, teaches that, if you want to have success faster, you have to fail faster.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope this will be the year you have always dreamed of having!
 

Do you dream of a better life, but find yourself stuck in a rut? Why aren’t you living your dreams? If you are anything like me then the answer to that is “perfection.”

Society has perpetuated the myth that we must be perfect. Just look at the education system. You are graded on the answers you give – they are either right or wrong. Once you are graded, it’s over. So we go through life afraid of giving the wrong answer or answering too soon without having collected every last possible shred of information out there to make sure it is the “perfect” answer or solution. So the aspiring author does not start their novel until it is perfectly mapped out from beginning to end. The aspiring musician doesn’t perform for anyone until they are able to play every song frontwards, backwards, and inside-out. The aspiring salesperson doesn’t approach their prospect until they have memorized their presentation and practiced 1,000 times or more in front of the mirror. What is it that you aspire to do with your life, but haven’t done anything because it isn’t perfect?

Mike Litman, author of best-selling Conversations With Millionaires, attributes all his success to a technique one of his early mentors taught him. What Mike learned, what has propelled him ahead of the rest of us in terms of attaining our dreams, is that “you don’t have to get it right. You just have to get it going.” He doesn’t wait for his projects or products to be certified as Grade A. When he has gotten them to a “C,” he puts it out there for all to see. But the rest of us don’t do that. Why? Because we are afraid to fail!

Robert G. Allen, author of New York Times best sellers Nothing Down and Creating Wealth, points out that “there is no failure. Only feedback.” Life doesn’t operate on the principle of “Pass/Fail” so neither should we. We need to live by the maxim of “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

Would the world hail Michael Jordan as the greatest basketball player if he was afraid he would miss a shot? Of course not!

A quote came back to me just the other day from a movie I saw a few years ago. When I first heard it, it just stuck in my head and I didn't know why it was important to me ... until now.

The movie was "Cast Away" starring Tom Hanks as Chuck Noland, Fed Ex executive whose plane crashes and he gets stranded on a small island with no hope of rescue. Early in the film he is training Russians to be a part of the Fed Ex franchise, and he tells them "We live and we die by the clock, that's all we have."

What I realized yesterday as I pondered that quote is that very few of us actually live by the clock. The majority of us die by it. What I mean is that most people do not effectively manage their time. They allow distraction to creep in and sidetrack us from those things that are truly important. Stephen Covey illustrates this in "The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People" with the time management matrix.

Most of us spend time on Quadrant III activities - the Urgent, but Not Important activities - and by so doing push ourselves into Quadrant I where we have important projects that have now become urgent! The deadlines are looming and the stress drives our blood pressure through the roof. The clock is now killing us!

The reflex reaction to that situation is to escape to Quadrant IV (Not Urgent, Not Important) as soon as the Quadrant I projects are done. We "veg out" in front of the T.V. We play games online when the boss isn't looking. We gossip with our coworkers around the water cooler.

We are all guilty of wasting time. You do it. I do it. And by so doing, we neglect the Quadrant II activities, those that are Not Urgent, but they are Important, until they drift into Quadrant I again. It is a vicious cycle and yet we are so willing to perpetuate it.

So the question is "How do I live by the clock instead of dying by it?" I am sure most of you are familiar with the phrase "Time is money." I believe it goes a little deeper than that. Time is the currency we use to purchase our future lives.

If we are spending our time on those QIII and QIV activities, the unimportant activities, we are cruising through life and throwing money out the window. We are enriching the television networks by watching their programs (QIV). We are enriching others by giving time to their priorities at the expense of our own (QIII). And pretty soon we are deeply in debt in QI again and we are scrambling to make the payment.

Invest your time by giving priority to QII activities in your life.

The best way to do that is to follow Covey's advice by Beginning With The End In Mind. Write down what you want in your life - the quality of relationship you have with your spouse and children, the business success you want to attain, the level of health and fitness you want to reach or maintain, the things you want to have, the places you want to go, the people you want to see and the things you want to do before you die. Write it all down!

After you have defined what a successful life is to you by writing down your dream life, write down the actions you need to perform to bring those things into your life. Do you want to have a loving and fulfilling relationship with your wife? Bring her flowers every now and then. It is important! Don't wait for the urgency of her packing her bags and walking out the door.

The key to having everything you want in life is to do what you have now written. Take action! In life you can either act or react. Take action and invest in your future happiness. Break out of the III-I-IV cycle.

Now, I am not suggesting you never spend time in Quadrants I, III or IV. QI activities are still important, but they are also now urgent! They have to be done. If your wife is walking out the door and you still love her, you are in a QI situation. If you don't act and do whatever it takes to show her that you really do love her and appreciate her, you are going to lose her. If your boss has been waiting for a report and you don't make it a priority, you will find yourself in the unemployment line with no visible means of support. Urgent and Important activities must be done first. But spending time in QII keeps many activities from spilling over into QI and you are able to minimize the amount of stress urgency can bring.

QIII and QIV have their place as well. Phone calls, reports, meetings and everything else that falls into QIII may not be all that important to you and your future success and happiness, but they still need to be dealt with. And we all need a break once in a while to slip into QIV. You just need to make it a conscious decision to deal with these tasks.

Just as you wouldn't go blow all your money on lottery tickets and not keep any of it back for food, housing and electricity (or at least most of us don't do that), you shouldn't spend your time without budgeting for the areas that need to be given priority. You may say "But I don't budget my money. Why should I budget my time?" Of course you budget your money. It may not be written down, but you have some idea of how much money is needed for what area of your life and you spend accordingly. It is still a mental budget.

Now a mental budget does not work as well as a well-thought out written budget and you may be surprised by a car repair bill you did not expect or plan for. Welcome to the concept of QI spending. Budget your time on paper before you start each day. Block out time for the QI activities that have to be done, prioritize for the accomplishment of QII activities and prevent the creation of more QI tasks, and balance it out with the proper allowances for QIII and QIV.

This crash course in goal setting and time management is just the tip of the information available to help you make your life rich and fulfilling. But if you would commit to implementing the few recommendations I have listed above, you can finally start living by the clock instead of perpetually dying by it.

Here's to you and your future.


 

New Baby

I haven't been writing in a while due to the arrival of our third child, Jordan, on Halloween day. My wife gave birth without the use of any drugs whatsoever and did a fantastic job. Baby J came through it wonderfully as well. Now, we all enjoy short, and sometimes sleepless, nights as we try to adjust to his constant eating schedule.


New Project

For quite a while now, I have dreamed of being a professional writer and motivational speaker. Over the past year I have dedicated myself to studying businessman and success gurus to learn the habits and techniques that brought them the success that they have enjoyed in life. The more I learn, the more I think to myself, "Wow! If I had only known that 8-10 years ago." I have been more and more convinced that today's tv-taught, celebrity-influenced, video game-drugged youth need to learn what it takes to become successful and how to go about it.

The dilemna I face is that I want to speak about success principles, but I don't have a world-recognized success story. I have successfully created the family I always dreamed of, but what kid wants to listen to someone tell them how to be a successful father or parent?

The answer to my problem came by means of a cd by Mike Litman. Mike reads biographies of successful people in his spare time to find out their success secrets. While reading Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Education of a Bodybuilder," he learned that Arnold took those habits, practices, mindsets that he used in becoming a successful bodybuilder and applied them to acting to become a successful actor!

I thought about my life to determine areas that teenagers can relate to where I have been driven to succeed and have become successful. The answer I came up with is basketball! I thought of many different principles that apply in becoming successful in basketball that are transferrable to becoming successful in life. So, all other writing has been set aside for the time being to move this project forward.

I hope to donate one copy of the finished book to each high school in America with the help of contributions. I plan to approach the NBA Commissioner and each NBA team to ask for financial contributions and contributions of their experiences and input for the book itself. With the NBA players' help, I would like to write a type of "Chicken Soup for the Basketball Player's Soul" ebook that will be available for free download with the purchase of my finished book.

If anyone knows an NBA player personally that could help me make personal contact or would like to contribute financially to the project, please e-mail me. Remember, you can give up to $11,000 as a gift without having to report it to the I.R.S.
 

Galatians 5:13 - For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.

I was reading PlannerDan's blog ("My Sporadic Journal" ) and something he said sparked this train of thought. He says that he does "a lot of stuff that makes (him) busy and tire, not important." Do you ever feel like that? That everything you do is just meaningless busywork? I know I do. But then I started to think about the end-users of the things that I do.

If I had my choice, I would stay home every day and pursue my various interests in the arts and seek to satisfy my thirst for knowledge. But instead, I trudge off to my 8-5 job and stare at my computer screen for hours on end, shift through the mounds of paperwork on my desks (yes, I have more than one - it would become a serious health hazard to stack all that paper in one place), and try not to fall asleep as I perform the various mind-numbing tasks that are placed upon me. I willingly suffer through each day because of the lovely lady I am proud to call my wife and the beautiful children she cares for each day.

When we were married, I agreed to do what I could so that she would have the opportunity of fulfilling her greatest desire - being a full-time mother. I love them that much to do what I do. They are the end-users of what I do.

If you ever find yourself thinking how meaningless a task you perform is, consider what would happen if you just stopped doing it. How would it affect the company you work for? How would it affect your position in that company? Would it have an effect on your employment with that company? If so, how would that affect you and those you care for?

Knowing my ultimate end-users and knowing how I feel towards them plays an important part in my daily decisions. I would love to watch tons of sports on the weekends. How would my wife feel if I tuned her out for a whole weekend, especially if she needed help with stuff? How would my kids feel if they rarely saw me during the week and then I completely ignored them on the weekend, too? It really helps me understand my own importance and the importance of the little things I do. I am still free to choose what I do. I prefer to spend my time serving those I love.

Have you given any thought to who your end-users are? You should.
 

I was listed at #60 for the Top 100 Reviewers for the month of September. I think that is awesome! I also received a reviewing merit badge for it. I'm so excited!
 

When I was a kid, there was a song on the Dr. Demento radio show that totally describes my life right now:

They're coming to take me away, ha-haaa.
They're coming to take me away, ho-ho, hee-hee, ha-haaa.
To the funny farm, where life is beautiful all the time and I'll be happy
to see those nice young men in their clean white coats and they're coming
to take me away, ha-haaa!!!
To the happy home, with trees and flowers and chirping birds and basket
weavers who sit and smile and twiddle their thumbs and toes and they're
coming to take me away, ha-haa!!!

Everything in my life is so crazy that it is starting to make me crazy! My third son is due to be born at the end of the month, so my wife and I are up to our eyebrows in projects that she wants done before he is born (of course, she is limited in what she can actually do right now, so I represent the main labor force). I am working to jobs right now - one is a 500+ newspaper/80 mile paper route that I have to get up for at 1:15 a.m., and the other is an accounting job that is usually 8 hours a day. Unfortunately, I am so far behind at the accounting job that I will be pulling 10 hour days this week until I am caught up! (The funny farm would be a welcome vacation from all this right now.)

This has not left much time, if any, for blogging or writing. It is really frustrating because I get all these ideas, but I haven't had time to put them to paper. When I finally do find a couple of seconds to jot something down, either the clarity of the idea is gone and it doesn't make sense or I fall asleep the moment I stop and sit.

So, if you see more entry gaps like the gap between this entry and the previous one, it isn't because I have forgotten my blog. Most likely, I am sitting somewhere with face planted in my keyboard and snoring loudly.
 

Do you know what is worse than a bad review? No reviews whatsoever!

I put the start of a new book in my portfolio about two weeks ago. It is a project that I started writing about 3 years ago before I got sidetracked. I just recently dug it out again and decided to put the beginning on Writing.com to get some feedback. I think it is good, but I know it can be better.

I plugged it, and I plugged it, and I plugged it again. I even created individual items for each chapter in hopes that it would get more exposure. I saw a few views here and there, but nobody wanted to rate or review it.

It was all very discouraging. At least with a bad review you find out what people think and have a hope at improving the weak points. Without any reviews at all, you just don't know.

Finally, I received a review earlier this week. gr82dream read the Prologue and gave some great feedback. I was so ecstatic to have someone finally reviewing even a small part of the story that I sent them 1,000 gift points (and I am a pretty frugal person when it comes to spending)!

I am finding that most people would rather read the short stories and poetry because it doesn't take much time than some of the longer stories and books. I really think that is too bad. People who put the time and effort into a large work such as a book should be rewarded for their efforts and dedication, not shunned like lepers.

Personally, I prefer to read the longer works simply because I am not an expert on poetry and a lot of the shorter stories leave me wanting more.

So, anyone reading this, take the time to read one long item every day that you review. Help out those who have made an effort to put such a work together. You may be just the person they need to make their dream of becoming a writer come true.

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ID: 1013671   (Rated: 13+) Thief of the Kingdom - The Journey  A thief embarks on a journey destined to change the world by GoalGetter

There is nothing like a good night's rest to get your creative juices flowing.... Unfortunately, I haven't had anything like a good night's rest for the last couple of weeks. I have been averaging about 3-4 hours of sleep a night. It all caught up to me last night.

I fell asleep at the dinner table at 7:15 p.m. I had just gotten the kids to bed and finished the last of my dinner. I was contemplating going down and attacking some work that I needed to do before going to bed. I laid my head on the hard wood of the table top and the next thing I knew it was 8:30 p.m. I was still at the table and my back and neck were killing me from sleeping in such an awkward position.

I headed to bed after that but it still took me an hour and a half to wake up this morning (a pox on whoever created that blasted "snooze" button). I feel a little better today, but, if I sit too long in any one place, I could fall asleep in an instant.

A healthy sleep schedule is important for your body and your creativity. I have been so tired for so long that I have a hard time thinking of new ideas. That is why I haven't made a blog entry for a couple of days.

I have neglected my sleep too long. Don't let it happen to you. You'll have to excuse me now. Being "the day of rest," I'm going to go take a nap!
 

Yahoo! I finally started to put a book that I began writing 3 years ago on the Writing.com site. So far, I have only put the first few chapters on, but it's a start. If you would like to read it, I have it in to different formats:

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ID: 1013671   (Rated: 13+) Thief of the Kingdom - The Journey  A thief embarks on a journey destined to change the world by GoalGetter

I happen to have two button-pushers for kids. My youngest son loves to push buttons; tv remotes, tv's, microwaves, toys, cell phones - if there is a button, he will push it to see what it does. It's what two year olds do. My seven year old, however, loves to push MY buttons!!!

It really makes me thankful for a wise, all-knowing God in Heaven who creates that special bond between a parent and a child. If it weren't for that bond of love that seems to transcend every problem you can encounter with a child, I probably would have gone crazy and killed my kid long ago just for five seconds of peace and quiet. Then, my son that is due to be born next month would have been a replacement child instead of an additional child.

So, when your kids drive you up the wall and you find yourself reaching for the kitchen knife, just remember that you love them.

Sometimes I forget the importance of teamwork. I am one of those "gotta figure it out and do it myself" kind of guys - particularly when it comes to my writing. I will research other peoples suggestions and writing, but, when I am in the creation process, it is all me. And when I am in that frame of mind, I don't accept suggestions very easily. Shame on me!

Napolean Hill, in his book Think and Grow Rich, talks about the power of the Mastermind group. The mastermind group is a group of individuals working together towards a common purpose, lending their collective talents and experiences towards the achievement of a common goal. It is the principle of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts - 1+1=3!

Even in writing, working with others can produce a greater work than you can do alone. My wife and I were talking over lunch yesterday about a book I started years ago and why I wasn't making very much progress on it. In that half hour, she helped me puzzle out some knots in my plot that were frustrating me. I didn't like her ideas much at first, but once I opened my mind a little, I developed her idea a little further into something I could work with. Then she added my revised version of her idea. And then I added some more. The ideas were flowing faster than Niagara Falls!

If you aren't already, talk to someone about your books, poems, ideas, whatever you are currently writing now. Do this for two reasons:

1. You will be opening yourself to other people's ideas and viewpoints and drawing on their knowledge and experiences. Even if you don't like other people's ideas, just thinking about them will stimulate your creativity.

2. Once you have told people that you are writing something, they will come back to ask you how it is coming along and if it is done. This will provide you with the extra incentive to finish what you started!

Write on!
 

Apparently, I am only going to blog every other day. Yesterday was busy, like all Saturdays tend to be. I was able to take my wife out for a dinner and a movie, which I haven't been able to do for a long time. I took her to see Reese Witherspoon's newest flick, "Just Like Heaven." I loved it! Mark Roffulo did an excellent job as always and I thought it was a well-written story. We laughed, my wife cried, it ended happily - what more can you ask for?

After the movie, we came home and watched an episode of Smallville, Season 4 until 10 p.m. That may not be late for most people, but it is for a guy that has to get up at 1:15 a.m. everyday. I am exhausted! I usually take a nap later in the day (unfortunately, half of those occur during church services), but I let my very pregnant wife sleep instead. Now, it is my turn. Goodnight!