Tuesday, January 1, 2013

2013: Bring It!

2012 was a very good year for me. I will write a year end summary later in January like I have for 2011 and 2010 and 2009. However, I spent over three hours today driving back to Dubuque and thinking about the future quite a bit. Let me share the future with you.

Professionally this is going to be a huge year for me. I will learn things about manufacturing and product development that I use for the rest of my career to make incredible products, and save millions of dollars. Part of this process will involve me traveling, mostly throughout the United States, but perhaps Canada or Brazil. In fact, I have to book a trip to North Carolina tomorrow.

This bring up an interesting point, I am not one to make a slew of resolutions, but I hope to improve my ability to make connections professionally in 2013 even better than I did in 2012. What do I plan specifically to do?

  • Follow up every business card I am handed with an email or more.
  • Understand the customers and what they do better than I understand today.
  • Only go to meetings that are very informational or that I contribute. There is not point for me to be in an hour meeting when I have nothing to say. Yet most meetings have people who never say anything.
In the rest of my life, I hope to improve. Run faster. Specifically break 15:00 in the 5k and 4:30 in the mile this year and run a fall marathon, it's looking like either Twin Cities or Chicago. I want to get that iOS sonnets app published. Do something with my unemployment book. I wrote 55,000 words, and some of them are pretty good. Maybe I could hire someone for a portion of the profits? Unemployment is still high isn't it? If you know someone who wants to get into the publishing industry, I have a book, let's discuss. 

If there is one kind of overarching idea that I would like to apply to my life in the new year it is to develop more connections with people. They don't have to be deep connections. I don't have to get anything out of most of the connections. I would like to be able to tell people, "you should talk to so-and-so." I suppose, I am also quite interested in others perspectives and stories. What inspiration might I gain from a person that I meet tomorrow? I do not know. 

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