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Focus is The Key to Stability

Focus is the key to stability.

Happiness is a mental state or “place”. Stability, on the other hand, is a characteristic of mind, more like a condition of physics as with liquid, gas, or solid. Happiness is optional. Some people actually find happiness uncomfortable while for others it is the preferred state. Stability, however, is essential to human functionality.

The mind has a stability scale. At one end is complete instability. At that extreme a person is very dangerous to themselves and others. On the other end is complete stability. At that extreme we refer to people as “a rock” and in that state a person can be a very effective leader and a source of strength for many others. Each person is somewhere on that continuum at all times.

An unstable mind is very uncomfortable and unfortunately it tends to get worse more easily than better. Much like a nuclear reactor approaching meltdown there is an acceleration as one approaches the unstable end of the scale.

The same can be said about the stable end which is why “very stable” people can scarcely comprehend instability in others. Being stable seems very easy to them because stability reinforces itself and becomes increasingly more stable.

Many lives are led stuck in the magnetic field between the two poles. Pulled slightly stable, then pulled slightly unstable. Feeling correspondingly comfortable and uncomfortable.

As solid water (ice) is ineffective in a fire hose, an unstable mind is ineffective in facing the challenges and opportunities of human life.

For our lives to work optimally per the Design, we need stability in our minds.

To move one’s mind into a state of stability, one simply has to focus.

Consider the ice skater or dancer who’s routine includes a fast spin. In order to maintain the spin without losing their place or becoming dizzy, they learn to find a single point and focus on it like an anchor of perspective.

The same principle is given at sea for motion sickness in a storm. Find a point on the horizon which appears calm and focus on it. The rolling of the ship soon becomes secondary because the focus point is fixed.

Apply the same principle to your thinking if you want stability of mind. And you do.

Choose a focus in each key area. Vocation. Community. Family. Hobbies. Spiritual. Health.

Do that and your mind will take care of itself because the thing to focus on for mental health (stability) is focus itself.

And by Website, I Mean “Web App”

There is really not much call for the traditional “website” anymore.

Even though that’s the term often used to refer to the various bits of on-screen information, media, and tools you might find at a given address, there’s really very few pages that don’t function more like a program than like a printed page.

Sites are expected to have interactivity, be responsive to various types of devices which might access them, and give dynamic feedback based on user input, needs, wants, location, and more.

Increasingly, what we’re really building is applications. Software that runs in the web browser which does actual functions. The flight school which needs a scheduling and reservations app, the blog that needs interested advertisers to not only give-up their email address but also be automatically responded to with rates and purchase links, or the speaker who wants to sell books and consulting services on her website. Function is key.

Looking forward (not very far forward) this means that all businesses in every sector of the economy will be expected to have websites that “do something”, not just pages that give information (yesterday’s standard) or even massive sites that educate, engage, and teach site visitors (today’s standard). Tomorrow’s standard will be active applications that perform useful functions.

Think…

Scheduling
Estimating
Contracts
Change Orders
Billing
eCommerce (online selling aka “shop”)
Long Term Relationship Management
Support Requests (beyond just tech businesses)
Service Requests (I need my A/C fixed today at noon)
Stats and Progress monitoring
Live work monitoring
Options, Selections

This list could go on for miles. The much shorter list is probably “what part of your business won’t your website be involved in?”

So, when we say website, we mean “Web Application”. Is yours ready for a revamp?

Websites Are Inventions

Entrepreneurial types everywhere probably do the same thing I do. They read the news and see one opportunity after another. There are so many opportunities that the biggest problem is trying not to see them all so you can actually focus on one, or two, or three. Four (or five) at the most. (generally)

I read the news and I read about opportunities in health care, finance, construction, non-profit, entertainment, travel, and in ministry. And that’s just one day’s worth of headlines. The truth is that there are thousands of things that will never change as long as people walk this earth. People will always need care, shelter, entertainment, escape, a place to give, and a place to worship and be ministered to.

These things are constant, will always be needs that must be filled, and are just a few of the biggest and most general. You can dial in the focus as close as you want.

As long as the constants remain, and they always will, then there will always be limitless areas of improvement and limitless ideas to make things better.

Some of those ideas will happen. Some of those areas will be improved. Some of those improvements will result in massive change. Some of those massive changes will be massively good for everyone.

That’s why we stay focused on the Internet. That’s why we’re looking for people who want to build “problem solving machines” online. We use the word website, but to us it really means “invention”.

What can we invent to solve your problem?

Focusing on What Won’t Change… and what will.

“I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one.

I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. …

In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,’ or ‘I love Amazon; I just wish you’d deliver a little more slowly.‘ Impossible.

And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”

– Jeff Bezos – Founder and CEO of Amazon.com

Use Caution With Email Personalization

Email marketing is a great tool and one that businesses and organizations of all types should take advantage of on one level or another. However, just like every other form of customer communication, it’s not without a few danger zones.

One of the areas to watch out for is personalization of your emails. This is the process whereby the computer automatically inserts the first name or other personal info into an email where you say to. The problem is, the computer doesn’t apply common sense, that’s up to you.

Danger Zone: Clearly Impersonal Emails Personalized

If you look closely enough, you’ll see that this email (which looks nothing like an email) says “Dear Tim” right before some words that sound nothing like an email.

Some people just like the sound of their own name and I’m right there with them, but other than some tiny potential endearment just because I see my name, using it in this email makes no sense at all.

There is no “personal” to this email. It looks like a web-page, it reads like a web-page, it essentially is a web-page that was delivered to my email inbox. Do they really think that I’m going to believe that they wrote this and arranged all these pictures and links, just for me?

Danger Zone: Email list “name field” problems

How does the system know what name to put in that spot anyway? It uses the information input into a form when the recipient signed-up to get the emails. The problem is that people don’t always follow instructions.

I, for example, might decide to use the name of my company, Crazy Tree Media, instead of my name in a form. I might not feel like giving out my name at the time. So, from then on, I will get emails from that company that say “Dear Crazy” at the beginning. Thus confusing me and making me think the email is from my wife.

If you have time to go through your entire list looking for things like this and fixing them, or at least being aware of them, then you can make the call. But sending out a personalized mass email to a list you haven’t looked through name by name is, IMHO, more trouble than it’s worth.

Weigh The Benefit

When writing an email to be sent to the masses, I often ask myself… what is the real benefit of personalization on this email. Sometimes it’s really a big deal. If you’re trying to make your email sound like it really is to just one person, it could be the way to go.

But at the same time, I think it’s possible to alienate people by using any form of automated “trickery”. If it’s clearly a mass email, give folks some credit for knowing the difference. If it really is personal, then you probably won’t be using a mass email system anyway, right?