Wednesday August 8th, 2007: Issue #831
Why is it that the week before you go on vacation is so stressful? It’s like you have to cram a whole month’s worth of everything into a few days. Time seems to speed up and your energy levels diminish.
I guess it is nature’s way of ensuring that you really need your holiday!
Anyway, to try to get more done I’ve set my alarm to wake me an hour earlier this morning. It worked - I am up and typing thing before 6 am, but I can’t honestly say I’m really awake yet! Maybe the caffeine will kick in soon. 
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Not being a Hotmail user I don’t know if this is true, but I’ve heard that they are disabling URLs in emails. That means that if you have a Hotmail account, you won’t be able to click on any links in emails you receive. If you want to follow them, you’ll have to go to the effort of copying and pasting the links into a browser.
What nonsense!
Coupled with this, Hotmail and MSN are also setting to block a whole lot more emails than ever before (and they are already one of the worst for getting through to). It seems that they will treat any doamin from which emails come from as suspect, and will block emails from it, if they don’t have prior experience of them.
In other words, everyone is guilty until proven innocent.
You wouldn’t catch me using a Hotmail account - and I strongly recommend that if you would like to receive your emails in future, that you find yourself a better email provider. GMail is free and is supposed to be pretty good. Try them!
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I had a very nice email from a reader the other day, thanking me for Kickstart. She said that as English is not her native language, she enjoys reading Kickstart because it helps stretch her language skills.
All good so far, but then she went on to say that she gets confused because I sometimes use words that are complicated, or not taught to EFL students - and asked if I would dumb it down a bit (my words there, not hers!) In other words, she likes to be stretched a little, but not too much!
Sorry, but no.
I love language and words. I enjoy the fact that the English language contains many esoteric words that give different shades of meaning. Using such words, sparingly and in context, adds color and dimension to writing - and if you don’t know what they mean, then use the opportunity to look them up!
There is often advice given to budding writers to run their work through comprehension checking software. MS Word has such tools built in to determine the reading age of what you’ve written. I think that the advice is to make sure that anything you write is easily understandable to someone with a reading age of about 12.
How sad and colorless it would be if everyone followed that advice! How would the average 12 year-old reader ever reach 13 if every writer wrote down to them?
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Speaking of which, what a literary lot you are! Dozens of people entered my instant competition on Monday and emailed me to say that “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” comes from T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - an extraordinary poem about a socially awkward aging man. (all the more extraordinary because the poet wrote it at the age of 22).
Derek Tither was the first one to get his entry to me and so won a copy of my book ‘14 Days to Total Time Control’. Well done Derek - and a big thanks to everyone who entered into the fun.
I will run more instant competitions in future, so watch out for them!
Meanwhile, if you’d like to learn more about my Time Control ebook, the URL is http://www.totaltimecontrol.com
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Now that the holiday season is almost over I am at last going to offer mentoring. I didn’t want to do it over the June/July/August period because so many people go on vacation (me included) that it would be constantly disrupted.
The service will be launched now in mid September and only 30 places will be available.
Please don’t email me about it yet (I might miss your message) - wait until I make the formal announcement at the beginning of September.
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An Inspirational Thought
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“No chipped paint; all the horses jump.”
Those seven little words sum up what inspiration is all about.
When Walt Disney took his children to a fair they all had a great time, but after the carousel stopped spinning, Walt noticed that the exciting blur of moving horses and twinkling lights was an illusion. The reality was that the horses were faded and chipped and that only those on the outside went up and down.
At that moment, he asked himself what an amusement park would be like if there was “no chipped paint and all the horses jump”?
The result is history.
That little phrase is a metaphor for the process we can all go through every day and in any circumstance.
Everywhere we look there are ideas that have become tired, paint that is chipped and horses that don’t jump, that with a small amount of vision we can revitalize into new and exciting concepts.
Creative inspiration is rarely about creating something out of nothing. Most of the best ideas in the world have come about because someone created something better out of something jaded.
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Who do you know who would love Kickstart Today?
Don’t keep it to yourself - send them to
http://www.kickstartdaily.com today!
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The Quote of the Day
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John Henry Gary said,
“Success lies in doing not what others consider to be great, but in what you consider to be right.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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Since we often look at opportunity in Kickstart, an old saying came into my mind:
‘To grasp the nettle’.
That phrase has come to mean grabbing opportunity, or taking a firm hold on something that might at first seem unpleasant but which has hidden benefits.
I couldn’t see how nettles fitted in so I looked up the expression. It comes from a longer saying that goes:
‘Tender-handed grasp the nettle, and it stings you for your pains. Grasp it like a man of mettle, and it soft as silk remains.’
Huh? That makes things clear, doesn’t it!
What all this is actually refers to is that while nettles sting you via tiny hairs that inject an ammonia-based venom, the flesh of the plant itself contains chemicals which have anti-venom properties.
So if you touch it you get stung, but if you grab it hard enough to both get stung AND crush the flesh of the plant, you stings will be counteracted.
I don’t plan on testing it out, but now at least I understand why grasping the nettle can be construed as a good thing (apart from the sting, nettles are incredibly valuable plants that were used for all kinds of things including making cloth and proving nutritious food).
And against that explanation, you can see why opportunities are like nettles. Most opportunities involve a degree of discomfort to you:
* They may cost money
* They often require that you do something NOW rather than later
* They may involve taking unfamiliar actions
* They certainly involve taking SOME action
* They might force you to move out of your comfort zone
* The could require you to learn new skills
* They may even need for you to re-examine your personality
All of those things are like the nettle’s sting - unpleasant in the short term.
But REAL opportunity, rather than pie-in-the-sky scams and hoaxes, also contains within it the ability to make those minor discomforts seem like nothing when balanced against the very real proposition of success.
A good opportunity is one that as soon as you’ve grasped it vigorously makes the discomforts you agonized over up front seem like silly excuses.
And if you are anything like me, you could do with erasing a few of the silly excuses from your life to clear the way for your own future.
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Fascinating Facts
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Chickens that lay brown eggs have red ear-lobes.