Welcome to the online home of me, some guy given the name John Cleveland Payne. In the grand scheme of life, I am just another guy with another blog. But to myself, and hopefully to all of you who actually read this, I am something a little more special. From a young age, I fell in love of the idea of ‘the message’ and medium in which you try to transmit.
Basically, everyone has a message to give to the world. Some are basic, some complex, some have the power to up lift and some are just out there to bring as many people down as possible. But everyone has a message, and most people have problems identifying their message. And the ones who get that far can seem to figure out how to get the world to listen.
Well, I have a message, and this is where I will get a chance to share it. Hopefully, you’ll get plenty of things to keep you motivated or inspired, provide knowledge and comfort, and just have a little fun. Apologies for the state of flux and state of seemingly confusing messages that you’ll get here for a while, as I am doing a lot of personal soul searching, and scrubbing of old ideas to take the best of the past to build a new beginning.
In 2007, I changed the name of blog from “The Mis-Adventures Of The Jazzy Cool One” to “Life In Fast Forward.” I began to tear down old blogs and newsletters and try to find places for them here. My goal is to take the focus off of me the person, and show the world the life I live and share with every human on the planet. I aspire to life at a very high standard, and instead of dealing with people who rather slow us down, I want to find ways to help people pick up there own pace. As you get to see an insight to the further adventures I hope to lead, hopefully you’ll enjoy the ride, and want to come along.
Other things
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Other things
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Today is Thanksgiving in the U.S., and instead of spending time with my family, am stuck at the house alone, with just Puffy the Puppy to meander in the way keep me company for the weekend. And while I’m not to thrilled with the circumstances that are keeping me from enjoying fried turkey and pork spare ribs with my wife stealing food off my plate, I am actually thankful for a couple of days of quiet to get a few things done and to clear my head. Being dubbed a ‘serial starter,’ I have a lot of half-baked schemed floating around that are cluttering my head, my inbox, and my office. A day to clear out some of that mental clutter, and even get started on raking the yard, is actually blessing, despite the sacrifice of alone time on a family weekend.
Not only am I thankful for a crummy weekend leading to a semi-productive weekend, I’m thankful for the crummy year I have had. I pledged that 2008 was going to be my year, and then watched 11 months go by full of false starts, letdowns, and setbacks. But this has been a valuable year for lessons learned, and the price paid for most of those were just frustration and a little time lost. Not a lot of money and definitely no lives or relationships. In fact, some relationships were made stronger do to the strain of a lack of success, and some new ones where created that have the potential to outshine any other.
I am not thankful for the large loss of financial capital I had this year. I am thankful I lost less than most, and that I still have plenty of years to recover, even if my current projects don’t have much time to recover. I am thankful for the opportunities I didn’t get a chance to take, because it has allowed for plenty of opportunities that I am glad I didn’t miss.
And I give thanks to God for lining up all the opportunities and responsibilities that lie ahead that I truly don’t want. Only through them will I get to the opportunities and responsibilities that I actually want. I am especially thankful to have just enough wisdom to know they are all opportunities and responsibilities that I AM SUPPOSED TO HAVE.
I’m thankful to live in a country that gives everybody the day off to eat, and I’ve got to get to cooking. Happy Thanksgiving, America.
Even with the news of more and more layoffs, you CAN NOT lesson your professional goals.
If you are showing up for work with the sole purpose of trying not to get fired, you are selling yourself and your company short.
I work for a company that isn’t doing so well at the moment, but our mission is pretty clear, at least locally. Come to work today, learn a little more, innovate a little bit, keep kicking the competition’s ass, and chances are we’ll get to do the same thing tomorrow.
It IS NOT show up, lay low, and take home a check at the end of the week.
My personal goals are insanely high. That in itself is a personal problem with failure at times to reach expectations...
…but if my only expectation was to show up, lay low, and take home a check at the end of the week, what kind of existence is that? It’s not worth my time, and probably not worth the money my company or personal clients pay me. And they currently aren’t paying that much
I have recently finished the book Fire Your Boss by Stephen M. Pollan and Mark Levine, where the authors pretty much smack you in the face with the notion that your job is your job because they pay you, and you have every right to leave a job if someone offers to pay you more. But what’s going to motivate anyone to pay you more…or let you stay and keep your current paycheck. Marginal effort or massive effort?
And since I can’t do anything the easy way, here is my current gamelan for Simulations Impossible Missions:
1) Reclaim the dream of a professional bowler’s life - life got in the way of my bowling practice, so I am even further behind in that goal, but that’s not stopping me from getting back on track...
2) Read like a fiend – I’m want to average reading a book a week next year, but I’m going to cheat a little bit by making my goal 52 books by January 1st, 2010, which gives me the last 5 weeks of 2008 to bulk up my total. I will cheat even further by reading a lot of short and totally useless books...
3) Pay to run like the wind – The River City 5K is July 18th, 2009, approximately 9 months for now. I should be able to get into good shape by then, especially with all the bowling I’ll be doing right...
And you follow all the insanity that is my attempts to make these things happen, assuming I don’t go on 3 month drought of postings…like that will ever happen...
Nicholas Bate encourages you to be be a rock star, minus the party...
Mark Hengel of Arkansas Business asked the heads of the biggest newspapers in Arkansas about the future of the business in the state, and even got his boss to weigh in...
This is a trick I learned from a farmer friend of mine. This person has learned to log everything--and I mean just about everything--attached to growing his crops. He says it’s a lot easier to do today than it was twenty years ago, with computers able to automatically record things as minute as soil temperature and weather condition from his tractor, but the result is the same as if he were taking a pencil to his ledger in the 80’s.
Because he records just about everything, the farmer ends up with an incredible amount of data. Much more that the farmer would seem to need for the normal season. Until he finds himself facing a problem with a growing crop.
Once the farmer stops getting a decent yield from a crop, he goes back to his logs and studies the data. Piece by piece, line by line, step by step. If there is anyway possible to correlate one factor that is not being done that could be the difference in his current yield, this farmer will find it. Just about any good farmer would find it, because they have plenty of examples and information to test to make sure you were doing it right in the first place.
From this example, I’ve come up with the suggestion of a different kind of journaling. I have brought up the power of a journal many times before, and often steal a phrase from Tony Robbins, ’any life worth living is worth writing down.' This time, I am proposing a mostly 'work' journal that will take a good bit of effort, but can save you time in long run in back research, and may prove to be the perfect tool to save you from a CYA situation.
This ‘What Worked Journal’ is simple in concept, but is a bit labor intensive. It requires writing down JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING that is relevant about a project as it happened and notating whether it actually succeeded or failed.
And then you let it sit for a while. You add a little more for you next project, and then it sits. New project, new inputs, then more sitting.
The usefulness of the What Worked Journal is the ability to go back to that place in time when you were working on a similar project, and compared what you are doing now to what you did then. If your current project is on a path heading for obvious failure, open up the journal and look back to the past, and see if you can find some step you missed that could have been the critical key to actual progress. If things going a little too well for you comfort, turn back to your similar projects that did end in failure, follow the road map backward, and find a way to not do it again.
If you are like me,and have problems with keeping an inventory of your day, a site like Memiary.com will help you track your top five activities... http://www.memiary.com/
Are you not hitting your weight loss goals because of eating? Are you having problems keeping yourself from going to the stove for a second or third helping of food because you are hungry? I've got a secret that will help. A way that will allow you to eat more food. Yes, I said eat more food.
The secret? Well it’s not much of a secret really. It’s eating a salad, and eating and much salad as you would like.
Whole grains, beans, and fruits and vegetables eaten with their seeds and peels contain fiber or protein, both of which help you to maintain a full feeling longer. Protein takes longer to digest that other nutrients and fiber actually remains in the GI track, not being digested at all.
Knowing this, I personally try to eat a salad with dinner every night, and the difference for me is amazing. Along with a concerted effort to eat extra helpings of vegetables and being as strict as possible on limiting but not depriving myself of the things I love (meat, starches and carbs from sides, desert, more meat) eating a salad, (and in my case, a large salad) with meals has allowed me to easily eat more 'food.' I have learned to keep my salads simple (lettuce or spinach plus a few other pieces, like tomatoes, celery, cucumbers, carrots or some beans or peas) and stay a little stingy on my salad dressing to leave the extra food I get to eat pretty close to right as nature made it. I get plenty of extra vitamins and minerals in the form my body is actually supposed to get them from, which is just another added bonus.
So just like you avoid that salad when you go to the all-you-can-eat buffet to save you a little extra room for that third dessert, the use of the reverse of thinking could help you gain control of your eating habits, which is just one more key to achieving your goals for a healthier life.
Go ahead. Try eating a green salad with lunch and dinner. Especially dinner. Every time you have dinner.
