Just Ask

My wife is wise.

One of her famous quotes is, "You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar." This is absolutely a correct principle.

For example, I was recently asked to conduct a speaking session at a conference. However, if I wanted to attend any of the other sessions I was going to have to register for the conference at a $1,500 fee. Ouch!

So, I called the conference and asked, in a very nice way, if there was any way they could comp me in. After a few minutes on hold she said she'd talked with the head of the conference and they'd provide me a pass for free.

Today I'm traveling back from Chicago, I've got an hour before my flight and really wanted a quiet place to work. So I walked into the Delta Sky Club and asked if I could go in for a while although I don't yet have a pass to get in. The gentleman at the desk looked through my records and saw that I travel a lot and that I will soon have earned a pass. He let me in.

People are generally nice (with a few bad eggs thrown in the mix) and will usually try to be of assistance -- especially if you are courteous and kind to them. I know that if someone asks me for something, I will really try and help them out.

13 years ago I asked my wife to marry me. Either she was feeling especially generous on that beautiful San Francisco day or I asked the right way (or maybe a bit of both). She said "yes" and my life has been blessed ever since.

The next time you're in a bind or need a favor, crack open the jar of honey and just ask real nice. You won't always get the answer you're looking for, but you should always ask.

Happy anniversary Laura!

Have you heard about the Singularity?

I just finished reading this article on the coming Singularity. What? You haven't heard about this event predicted to occur in about 2020? I hadn't either...at least not in these terms. WARNING: The article will fry your brain around the edges a bit.

Here's a taster to get you interested:

The difficult thing to keep sight of when you're talking about the Singularity is that even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn't, no more than a weather forecast is science fiction. It's not a fringe idea; it's a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth.

This movement even has a university, SingularityU, and an annual conference. I have a friend from Denmark that actually paid the $25,000 to attend the university last year. He's trying to get me to go next year, saying that it is the most amazing experience he's ever had. I'll let you know if my wife let's me sell her car so I can afford the tuition.

So, read the article to get a glimpse of what this means. For me, I'm pretty excited about it all!

Export your Facebook contacts with new Open-Xchange tool

I found this great post about how to import your Facebook contacts into Google+. The original post was found here. Thanks for the post Andrew Couts!

Right now, using the service is a little bit complicated. But for those of you who are anxious to migrate all you Facebook friends over to Google+, here’s how to use it:

1. If your browser is set to block pop-up windows, turn that off.
2. Visit ox.io.
3. Click “Create an account,” and fill out the necessary fields.
4. Validate your account via the link sent to your email address. A Wizard will pop-up on your screen. Cancel that, and instead go to Mail View, which is accessible though the blue envelope icon located in the top left corner.
5. Click “Add email account” on the left side, and add the email address you use for most of your contacts. You can add additional emails later, if you wish. The email you use must be IMAP (not POP), but that includes most major email services, like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc.
6. Click the Contacts View icon (black, fourth over in the top left corner). Then select “Import Facebook contacts.” To complete the process, we had to click “…or create a fresh one for your profile” button that appears in the pop-up menu. This will ask you to add the Open-Xchange app to your Facebook account, so it’s best to be already logged into Facebook before you get to this point.
7. Click “start” and the tool will begin the export process. (This takes about 5 minutes.)
8. And you’re done! Your contacts will then appear in the Open-Xchange, and you can also download the list directly to your computer. You can now import the contacts into a range of address books and social networks, including Google+

The Open-Xchange tool, which exports only email addresses, is not as thorough as the now-defunct Chrome extension, which also included things like birthdays. But it’s good enough to get things rolling past the Facebook blockade.

Why is the Space Shuttle project ending?

It seems sad that the Space Shuttles are ending. I remember when this started and how it affected my life -- I was just a kid watching it blast into space but it opened my mind to new way's of thinking. I even built a pseudo-model that I would launch from my school's baseball field and then watch it glide back down to earth.

I'm sure the space program will continue, I just hope that it will have as dramatic effect on my kids as it did on me.

View Space Shuttle and over 3,000,000 other topics on Qwiki.

When it's Due - by Seth Godin

I love this post by Seth Godin (by the way if you don't subscribe to his blog via RSS, you're really missing out!). You can find his blog at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/.

Here is the full text of this post:

WHEN IT'S DUE

Here's the schedule. Follow it.

There's your in box. Empty it.

When something is imminent, speed up. When you're off the deadline machine, take a breath and poke around a bit, explore, relax.

Nonsense.

The goal isn't to do work and hand it in just before it's due. The goal is to do the work as beautifully as you can, faster than anyone else, so you can do more work.

If it takes a deadline to get you off your butt and to push past the resistance, then move the deadlines forward.

You don't work on an assembly line any more. You work in project world, and more projects mean more chances to screw up, to learn, to make a reputation and to have more impact.

When it's you against the boss, the goal is to do less work.

When it's you against the project, the goal is to do more work.

Mid-year goals

My goal setting bench in Cascais, Portugal.

I'm a goal-setting kind of guy. If you don't believe me just ask my wife. Each year for our wedding anniversary I'll take my wife out to dinner and we use this time to talk about our goals -- for each other and for each of our four children. Besides this routine goal-setting time, I'm always thinking about what goals should be accomplished.

This spring, while on a trip to Portugal, I found myself walking through the Parque Marechal Carmona one evening. It was a really beautiful park and I had the place to myself. So, I sat down on this park bench and started writing down a long list of goals that I wanted to accomplish.

I always write my goals in four areas: Spiritual goals, Mental goals, Social goals and Physical goals. I find that when I focus on these four areas I can usually capture the bulk of what I need to work on.

The secret, I've found, is to regularly review your goals and make weekly plans to move them along. I know...it 's really hard to work on them all of the time...so you have to plan on being flexible. I try to find a quite place each week to read my goals. It could be at lunch, on a Sunday morning, or on a plane ride. But the important thing is to keep them in the front of your mind all of the time!

So, here we are at the middle of the year -- July 1. If you haven't been able to keep up on your New Year's resolutions, try dusting them out today and make a Mid-Year Resolution to refocus on them and accomplish them during the next six months.

Three lessons I've learned this year

It's been a while since I've posted anything. I like to use the excuse that I've been traveling a lot, but that shouldn't be an excuse...it should be a reason to post!

I've been learning and experiencing so much over the past few months it's unbelievable! Here are a few lessons learned:

1) You need to carry your own weather. I've found that I'm happiest when people around me are happy. The problem is that people aren't happy all of the time so I've made a resolution to try and make them happier, thereby having an impact on my environment. Here's a short video to help inspire you.

2) There's no place like home. I've logged more than 100,000 miles in the first half of this year. I've traveled to four different continents and seen some amazing sights like Cabo de Roca, the westernmost point in Europe; a Bollywood opera in New Delhi; The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul; and Independence Hall where the Declaration of Independence was signed. I don't list these things to brag and boast, rather to illustrate how inconsequential they are. Because there's nothing like coming home to your family -- pushing your daughter on a swing; riding a bike with your son; playing a game with a daughter on a lazy Sunday morning; or teaching a son to play baseball. I would trade my travel experiences -- all of them -- to have more family experiences like these.

3) Focus begets success. When you truly focus on a goal and take steps to accomplish it, you have a greater chance of success. Conversely, when you are unorganized and undisciplined you have a tendency to wander in circles, unable to attain that which you seek because you have not charted a course and diligently focused on it.

Isn't life strangely wonderful? It's like a constant puzzle that you're always trying to solve but, as one piece slips into place you see more pieces that need to be arranged. It's a never ending game of trial, error, and success. Hopefully we'll all find more success than error for the second half of this year!

Good Thoughts

I was asked to go to India to speak at a conference this week. I really didn't want to go because:

1) India is really hard to get to (35 hours of multiple long flights)

2) It's really hot (The last time I was there it was 120 degrees)

3) It's extremely dirty

4) It's a really, really sad place

But I went.

While there, I saw the horrific poverty of the people -- families literally living in cardboard boxes in the dirt. I saw young children, the ages of my own kids, dragging sheets of corrugated metal through the streets, supposedly to create a rudimentary shelter for their family for the night. I saw beggars in the street with nothing to eat. I saw horrific pollution and dirt.

It's almost too much to take in.

But then I read an article online about how you should try and look for the good in everything, no matter the situation. The next day, I saw things differently.

I saw families laughing together. I saw neighbors helping neighbors. I saw hard workers providing for their families. I saw children playing soccer and having fun. I saw people serving each other. I saw beautiful colors. I saw lots of smiles.

I don't mean to diminish the horrific situation of these people. But they seem to be happy with what they have. Perhaps because they don't know any differently. Maybe they realize any other life is unattainable and they've come to accept their reality.

I have a new appreciation for India. It is a beautiful place filled with a rich culture that I will never be able to fully understand.

Hong Kong Kaboom!

Treion and Matt have been visiting Hong Kong to help organizations understand The Learning Explosion and embrace virtual classrooms. Hong Kong is truly an amazing place with a great culture, lovely people, and, like other major cities, lots of traffic.

Imagine the stress relief you can experience by using virtual classrooms rather than having to drive in endless traffic to your training. We talk a lot about the convenience of virtual classrooms, but rarely do we hear about the stress relief it can have.

So the next time you plan a live training session, think about holding it virtually. You'll may save some unnecessary tension in your life and in those of your participants.

How long until I get one of these?

My friend's agency, StruckAxiom, created this amazing technology display for PepsiCo.

PepsiCo Social Media Visualization from StruckAxiom on Vimeo.

My review of Adobe Connect

Adobe asked if I would do a review of one of their software solutions, Adobe Connect. Here is the final video as posted on Adobe.com.

Life Imitating Art

We got our kids an XBOX Kinect for Christmas. As I was playing it with my kids--waving my hands in the air to move things on the screen--I was truly amazed at how life imitates art.

I can see that in 3-to-5 years we are living with computing devices very similar to those seen in the Tom Cruise film "Minority Report". I vividly recall a scene where Cruise is manipulating objects on his screen with a flick of his hand and scrolling through information with the motion of his fingers. Of course he was wearing those silly gloves... Soon, you'll be doing it without any accessories.

In fact, someone already is! Check out this video by a programmer at MIT.

I think we're closer that we think.

OK. I've been AWOL for a while and haven't written on my blog for a couple of months.

But I have been busy. A colleague (Treion Muller) and I are just completing a book entitled, The Learning Explosion. It's a take on how so much knowledge can be found in the strangest places. But the bulk of the book talks about how organizations can take their corporate training online through the use of virtual classrooms.

400 galley copies are being printed and delivered tomorrow. The final draft will be available sometime in January if all goes well.

You can follow our tweets here: http://twitter.com/learningexplosn.

An addicting game...

This is, by far, the most addicting game I've played in a long time.

Dan Ball

Josh Loses a Tooth

My son Josh has been wiggling his loose tooth all day. He finally asked if he could have a little help to get it out. This is what we came up with...

Adam Barker Photography

If you want to see some great landscape photography, check out Adam Barker's galleries online. It makes me want to quit my day job and just shoot pictures all day! He's got a great training course coming up this fall... Perhaps an early birthday present?

http://www.adambarkerphotography.com/galleries

Moving the classroom online

For a couple of years my team and I have been working on finding an effective way to move training classrooms online. We've always known there's more to online events than just free, promotional, webcasts. We knew there had to be a way to effectively teach people live online

I believe the main reason we succeeded at this project was because we didn't know any better. Had we known then what we know today we probably would not have tried. And trust me, there were times I really wanted to quit. It was really hard to blaze this trail.

But, in the end, it's interesting to see how many of our competitors have tried to follow (and copy) exactly what we've done. It's flattering actually. Some have copied our pricing. Some have tried to copy our technology. But the one thing they can't copy is our content. This is OUR intellectual property.

What content do you have that others can't copy? Put your stamp on it and put it online.

Expose Yourself by Seth Godin

I really liked this post by Seth Godin a few days ago (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/). I think about my kids and what they're exposed to and how this will form who they are in the future. For example, each year, my oldest son reads more books than the librarian. Not surprisingly, it's his dream to be a best selling author. (I told my wife that we need to feed our children more candy so they have greater to the dental profession.)

Here's Seth's post:

"Expose yourself"
With so many options in media, interaction and venues, you now get to choose what you expose yourself to.
Expose yourself to art, and you'll come to appreciate it and aspire to make it.
Expose yourself to anonymous scathing critics and you will begin to believe them (or flinch in anticipation of their next appearance.)
Expose yourself to get-rich-quick stories and you'll want to become one.
Expose yourself to fast food ads and you'll crave french fries.
Expose yourself to angry mobs of uninformed, easily manipulated protesters and you'll want to join a mob.
Expose yourself to metrics about your brand or business or performance and you'll work to improve them.
Expose yourself to anger and you might get angry too.
Expose yourself to people making smart decisions and you'll probably learn how to do it as well.
Expose yourself to eager long-term investors (of every kind) and you'll likely to start making what they want to support.
It's a choice if you want it to be.

New Lens

I'm pretty excited. Tomorrow my new Nikon lens arrives. I purchased a Nikon 18-200 VR. From everything I've heard, it's a great all-in-one lens. All of the articles I've read have pointed to the fact that this is a lens that you rarely take off your camera. I bought it at Pictureline (pictureline.com).

I can't wait to get it.

By the way the Nikon 18-135 lens is as horrible as all of the reviews state. It broke within a year. Don't buy it.

Rearview Mirrors

I was walking through a parking lot and couldn't believe the volume of bangles and junk hanging from people's rearview mirrors. Some was creative. Some was filthy. And some left me wondering how people could actually see where they were going.

I mean really... just how much air freshener do you need?