Steve the Owl's Blog

Hi, everyone. I wanted to write you tonight because I am excited to let you know that I am appearing on another guest post. This time, I’m appearing on my friend Karen Marrow’s blog reviewing the book Happy for No Reason by Marci Shimoff.

Hi, everyone! I just wanted to let you know that my first ever guest post, for my friend Nacie Carson at The Life Uncommon, is now available for your reading pleasure. If you would like to read it, it can be found here.

Have you ever thought about the difference between success and failure? Have there ever been times where it seems like you are doing all the right things, but you just can’t seem to breakthrough? In the book 212: The Extra Degree, Sam Parker and Mac Anderson remind us that the difference between success and failure is very small indeed. As the authors noted in the book, water at 211 degrees is just hot water, but water at 212 degrees is boiling and it becomes powerful enough to propel a locomotive or a ship.

One of the examples that they use tells us that the margin between winning and losing in the 2004 Men’s 800 meter race was 0.71 seconds. This is a race of just under a half mile, and this race takes less than two minutes. In that time, a difference of 0.71 seconds is roughly six meters, or three strides. After all of that work, couldn’t you imagine coming to the world’s biggest stage, and only being three steps from the top rung on the medal stand? Another example is the Indy 500 which has an average margin of victory of 1.54 seconds for a race that lasts hours, and the difference between winning and losing is over $600,000.

Would you like to learn more about that extra degree? Here is a link to a video to inspire you to learn more about that small effort that makes all the difference. (NOTE: Please assume that there is an affiliate relationship with the company listed.)

212: The Extra Degree

Many of the readers of this blog know about my quest for a five-minute mile. The plan is a long one, and my next big mile time trial is slated for April 22nd or 23rd, and I have a 5K race on April 9th. I am drawing to the end of the hill phase of my training for these events, so in order to check my progress, I knew that it was time to do a time trial, and I decided on doing a two-mile time trial on the track.

Where You Are

In order to run a five-minute mile, I have to have a VDOT (oxygen capacity) of 59.5. My birthday mile time of 7:45.36 put my VDOT at 36.4, so my goal for the time trial at the end of this season is a VDOT 42 or better (a 6:49 mile or less) based on my improvements when I was running more regularly. Knowing that I tend to have a VDOT two higher on my specialty event, that means that my 5K goal will be the equivalent of a 40 VDOT in the race (24:08 or better). With that in mind, I was looking for a VDOT of 38 (15:49 or better) for my two-mile time trial.

So, I went to the track knowing that the 100-meter split on my stopwatch worked pretty well for me in October, and knowing that a 1:58.5 lap would give me a total time of 15:48, I knew that I needed to hit each 100 meters in 29.5 or less, which would give me a five-second margin of error for the time trial.

Going into the first lap, I knew that I felt pretty good, and as tends to happen, adrenaline got the best of me as I hit the first 100 in about 26 or 27 seconds, but I eventually eased into my pace, and finished the first lap in 1:56.59. Then, much to my surprise, my lap time on the second lap dropped a little, to 1:56.13, giving me an 800 meter time of 3:52.72. I still felt pretty good as I worked to finish the next two laps in 1:56.94 and 1:56.54, meaning that I was halfway through the time trial in 7:46.20.

This was the point where my body started to rebel. My calves were starting to burn, but I kept reminding myself that I was doing a pace that I could definitely handle. After all, I’d run laps much faster than the mid-1:56 range just a few days earlier. Granted, I took time to stop, but I was sick and tired of wondering what might have been in my running, so I knew that I had to keep going and keep pushing any time I noticed that my pace slacked, but my pace held for the fifth lap, hitting it in 1:56.54, for a total of 9:42.79.

Then, came the sixth and seventh laps. These are the laps that really hurt for the two mile. I noticed that I was turning in 100 meter splits of over 30 starting these laps, so I had to push harder to make my split for each lap, and I fell off a little, going 1:57.37 and 1:58.57 for the sixth and seventh laps, respectively. I was up to 13:38.73, so I knew that, barring a huge stumble in the last lap, I would beat 15:49 easily. Then, knowing that I was close to the goal gave me the energy that I needed to pick up the pace even when I noticed that my body wanted to slow down, and I ran the last lap in 1:53.18, easily the fastest of the eight, and I crossed the finish line in 15:31.91. Looking at my time, the one thing that surprised me more than any other was the fact that I actually ran negative splits, running the second mile in 7:45.71, nearly half a second faster than my first. This is something that I almost never do, so I wondered if I could’ve run a little faster if I had set a faster goal, but I go into the next phase of my training with confidence as I work toward my goal.

What step along the way has given you a boost toward your ultimate goal?

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As someone who spends a lot of time on social networking sites, I am always interested in the idea of which social networking site will be the next best thing. Everyone who follows social media networks and their rise and fall knows that one network eventually becomes “the next big thing,” and all of their friends flock to that site.

However, as with all empires, there is an inherent risk in becoming “the next big thing,” and that risk is complacency. The first major social networking sites were Friendster and Meetup. Meetup’s flaw in staying “the next big thing” laid in the fact that its primary goal was to help people meet each other online. I’m not saying that is a bad thing, only that most of the big social networks encourage interaction online. Friendster became popular as what became the basis for almost every social network since: find people of similar interests, get to know them, and watch your network grow. Friendster did grow, but its fatal flaw was its refusal to allow people to use nicknames or pseudonyms in order to interact.

While I’m not making a judgment on that front, it ultimately led people to search for a new network. Then, a network came along that avoided that obstacle, and it became the next major social networking site: MySpace. MySpace became the first online social media network became the first to get over 100 million subscribers in 2006. However, at the same time MySpace began its rise, there were concerns as well. It was known as “stalker-friendly” for its reluctance to get rid of adult profiles and lack of concrete privacy controls. However, because of its size, it thought that it would be untouchable because of its sheer size and how difficult it is to get people to meet in a new social network.

However, a site came along that seemed to answer all of the concerns of MySpace: Facebook. Originally geared to college students, Facebook slowly expanded to reach over 500 million people. However, there is a large contingent of Facebook users who recoil at the site’s constant reworking and efforts to diminish privacy protections (ironically, the same thing that made Facebook huge in the first place), but founder Mark Zuckerberg has largely ignored it. After all, there have been complaints, and the network has grown with every change. So, has Facebook become so big that nothing can stop it?

A New Contender

There is a contender in the world of social networking that has decided to try a different tactic, and given the fact that social networks have risen and fallen before, I would not rule such a move out again. One of the sites that is working to carve out its place in the social network world is PeopleString.

PeopleString is a social network that uses a different business and privacy model. Most social network companies rely on advertising revenue based on private information given to open the profile. PeopleString works differently. All information other than basic information is voluntarily given through an opt-in basis rather than an opt-out basis, and rather than keeping all of the money for corporate, PeopleString  shares 70% of its revenue to its members. Best of all: it is free to join. So, if you want to try a new social networking site, check out PeopleString and see if it has what you are looking for.

Here is an interview with the CEO of PeopleString where he explains how the company (celebrating its second anniversary today) works:

(NOTE: Assume that the author of the blog has a business relationship with the enterprise listed above.)

Recently, my friend Juli Parker posted a story about something that some unscrupulous person did to her in her network marketing business. Something occurred to me as I was reading this: there are too many dishonest and unscrupulous people in our industry, they are making the honest people look bad, and it is up to us to stand up and say, “We are on the side of honesty, and we hate these dishonest tricks as much as you do.” So, in an effort to join the effort to stand up for honest networkers everywhere, I am posting something about an experience in network marketing that I think is also wrong.

Getting People in the Door at All Costs?

Last year, my wife decided to give network marketing a chance. She realized that she joined for all the wrong reasons, and that she was expecting something that wasn’t there in her business. This is not about her efforts to start a business, but about something that we heard from the people who ran her business.

You may all be familiar with the “overcoming objections” scripts that a lot of network marketing companies give their distributors as they work to build their business. One of the questions that still bothers me is the question about whether or not the opportunity would cost any money. The company had a sponsorship with a free program, so they told people to tell the person on the phone that we were not asking for any money.

Is it Worth Damaged Credibility?

However, there is one thing that bothered me to no end about that tactic: the primary business did have a cost to it. So, what do you think is going to happen when someone goes to the meeting, only to find out that there is a cost to operating the business after all? I don’t think that person is going to want to go into business with someone who just lied to them to try to get them to a meeting. Not only that, but they will probably tell all of their friends about that dishonesty, thus poisoning any effort to build among that area. (Just to let you know, we never told them that there was no cost to doing the business.)

A Better Way

Not everyone is going to want to join a business, and a lot of people will resent not being told all of the hidden costs of joining a business even if they do sign up, which will make for a lot of people in the downline that aren’t building a business, or leave just as quickly as they get in. (Interestingly enough, I noticed that one of those high rollers got a lot of people into his business, but his income never seemed to go up, which implies to me that they are going out the door as fast as they are coming in.)

One of the common phrases in network marketing is “don’t worry about the individual sale.” However, I think that these “sign at all costs” approaches show that this is just an empty phrase for a lot of people. Instead, I think that it is better to simply tell the truth. Yes, someone might decide that he/she does not want to join a business, but a one-time sale is not worth the damage to your credibility. This way, the numbers might not be as big, but at least the people who join your business will want to stay in it.

Welcome to the second part in my series on what I consider to be the greatest movie ever made, Citizen Kane. The first post was more of a general entry on why I think that this is the greatest movie ever made. Today, I will get into some of the specific elements that made the movie great, beginning with the innovations of this movie, both technical and storytelling.

Different from the Beginning

One of the things that a viewer of classic films will note is that, unlike most movies today, the credits are front-loaded. However, Citizen Kane lets the viewer know that it will be different by simply opening the play with two cards for the credit. Both are on a black background, with the first opening with “A Mercury Production” and the words “by Orson Welles” dissolving in, with the title occupying the entire screen for the next card. One of the things that makes it such a shocking opening is that there is no music or anything for those few seconds. Then, the movie shows a light that stays in the back right hand portion of the screen, beginning with a “No Trespassing” sign. Each shot (involving a mix of actual scenery and matte paintings) gets closer to a mansion, with the light remaining in nearly the same shot the entire time. As the shot is up on the building, the lights go out, and when the lights come back on, you are in the room. There is an old man holding a snow globe, and he says the most famous one-word line in all of movies, “Rosebud,” drops the snow globe, it breaks, and in the next shot a nurse covers him with a sheet. My description is inadequate to describe the brilliance of this scene, so I will let the movie speak for itself (NOTE: The original aspect ratio of the movie was 1.33:1, so this is not scan-and-pan. It is the shown the way Orson Welles intended, except for the notice from the censors at the beginning. SPOILER ALERT: This video links to the original YouTube video. The comments there contain spoilers.):

What is the other thing that is so interesting to me about the innovations in this movie is how commonplace some of them seem today. After all, if someone points out that it was an innovation to begin at the end of the story, and summarize the story, which is then re-told through a series of flashbacks, that would not seem to be so daring. However, only two movies before Citizen Kane involved any flashback sequences at all, and one of them, Wuthering Heights, was based on a book that relied on just that. This was the first movie to tell the story in a completely non-linear way.

The Camera Angles That Shook the World

Another surprising element to the innovation of Citizen Kane is that, at the time, ceilings were never seen in movies. This is because they were shot on sets where the camera angles were mostly a straightforward one. However, Citizen Kane changed everything by using camera angles to tell a story. Orson Welles wanted camera angles so extreme that he literally dug out part of the floors of some of the sets in order to get his desired camera angle of floor height facing up, often with low ceilings to make the characters seem even more mythic. (In the famous party scene where Charles Foster Kane is dancing with chorus girls, Orson Welles nearly hits his head on the ceiling.) If there was a character who had a diminished or weakened role, the camera would always face down (such as with Kane’s second wife, who is often sitting on the floor).

Credit Where It Is Due

Perhaps the greatest contributor to the innovations of Citizen Kane from a technical level was Gregg Toland, who had worked in Hollywood for years as a cinematographer and was experimenting with deep focus photography. The key element of deep focus photography is that it demands attention from the viewer because, unlike traditional photography, the entire frame is in focus. Scenes of Kane’s childhood have Kane’s parents and Walter P. Thatcher discussing the future of young Charlie, and the eight-year old Kane is playing in the background just as clearly, forcing the audience to see all of the things that are going on at once. Even in scenes where Toland couldn’t pull it off, he used split screens to the same effect, such as a scene involving Kane and Jed Leland (Joseph Cotten) that had issues due to lighting, but the timing of the two actors was such that this special effect is completely invisible.

Willingness to Experiment

The reason Gregg Toland wanted to work on Citizen Kane was because he knew of Orson Welles’ penchant for daring from his theater and radio days. As a first-time director, Welles was open to suggestion, and he wanted to do something like no one had ever seen before. Some of the ideas may have seemed crazy at the time, but there is a reason why this movie is celebrated. As you build your business, there may be ideas that you have had that could totally change the industry. What would happen if you tried them and they worked?

Those of you who have read my blog knows that I have watched a lot of movies, and what you may not have yet picked up on is that some of the movies that I really enjoy are the great movies that have made the canon of great cinema. One movie that seems to show up over and over again at the top of the list of the great American or English-language films is Citizen Kane. I knew of its reputation, but for the longest time, I thought that the greatest American movie ever made was Gone with the Wind. In some ways, I think that the latter may say more about America, but I believe that Citizen Kane has more than earned its reputation as the greatest movie ever made. Because of its impact and its myriad of lessons, I have decided to offer a series of blog posts on Citizen Kane.

Ahead of Its Time

The first time I saw Citizen Kane, I was 22 years old. I was a junior at West Virginia University, and as a Christmas present, my parents gave me a VCR for my apartment in Morgantown. The local grocery store had a video store adjunct, and it had a section for classical films. This being a college town, some of them were part of the canon, including works by Bergman and Fellini (although I never watched any of those). They had a copy of Citizen Kane, and I thought that I would see what the hype was about. When I saw the movie, I could not believe that it was made in 1941. The camera angles, the lighting, the method of story telling: everything about that movie screamed something that was truly great and magnificent and in a class all by itself.

A Clear Dividing Line

One of the most amazing things about any great work of art, or any great artist (such as Marlon Brando), is the way that one sees a clear dividing line between the things that happened before and the things that happened after. Some of the innovations in Citizen Kane have become so appropriated in film since that it is hard to see just how revolutionary they were at the time. For example, it was the first movie to have a non-linear narration. This is something that is so commonplace today that moviegoers are used to seeing dates in place to keep one oriented in time.

Citizen Kane uses a different tactic. The movie begins with the title character’s death in 1941 and his last word, “Rosebud.” Then, the movie shows a newsreel to give a basic summary of the events of the story of the life of Charles Foster Kane, a thinly-veiled biography of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst with some elements of other figures and elements from the life of its visionary creator Orson Welles. Then, the movie retells the story through several witnesses, sometimes jumping back and forth chronologically (such as multiple tellings of his second wife’s musical career) in order to tell the story.

The Story Itself

Even if the movie were only a collection of technical advancements, it would certainly be remembered as a great film, but the real genius of the movie would be considered Gregg Toland, the cinematographer, not its director, producer, star, and co-writer. The movie is a compelling story of someone who started off with lofty ideals, but someone who became a victim of his own success whose methods were ill-suited for a new age. Seeing the deterioration of the relationship between Kane and his childhood friend Jed Leland is something that was painful to anyone who knows what it is like to see people drifting apart.

This is a movie that shows what happens when visionaries have a dream, have the talent, have the skill, and have the drive to make something that is truly great. Come back for more of the specific lessons from the greatest movie ever made.

I have worn a lot of hats in life. While wearing the hat of businessperson, one the things that has struck me the most is all of the people who seem so excited in the days leading up to the business presentation, or the people who are still excited at the very beginning of the business presentation, only to lose that motivation and end up frustrated. I am not saying that every failure of business is that person’s fault. There are times when the market shifts, and the big million-dollar business goes under. There are other times when the technology changes, and jobs become obsolete. There are also times when a mentor turns out to be a not-so-good mentor after all, and that person gives you bad ideas about how a business is run. However, what has amazed me is watching the people who have persevered through all of the struggles that everyone deals with and come out at the top of the heap. What was the difference between these people and so many others who are in the 97% of the industry?

“It’s all a matter of motivation…”

In Mike Judge’s 1999 cinematic masterpiece Office Space, the hero of the story, Peter Gibbons, is a computer programmer who is hypnotized into a state of total relaxation. However, the hypnotist has a heart attack before he can bring Peter out of his hypnotic state. After this, Peter takes a lackadaisical attitude toward work. At about the same time, he has a meeting with two consultants who are trying to figure out who to lay off.

In the meeting, Peter decides to be brutally honest, and he explains to the consultants, both named Bob, that he has no motivation at work because he is asked to work extra to move extra units (as a salaried employee, he gets no overtime), and his only real motivation is knowing that he moved those extra units… that, and making sure that he does not get fired, which only means that he will do enough work to avoid getting fired, and no more. We laugh at this part of the movie, because we think about how many times that is the case.

However, once we own our business, there is no getting fired any more, and there is a possibility of reward. However, that reward often comes in the form of delayed gratification. In the world of network marketing, the real leveraged income comes once we have enough people in the business that we start to make real money once our network grows and we have helped enough people grow their own business. There are also going to be times, especially at the beginning of the business, when we just aren’t that good at marketing, and we ended up ruining our leads.

At this point, this is where motivation comes in. I am not talking about the “rah rah, turn that frown upside down” type of motivation. I am talking about the core reasons for joining the business. If there are difficult times, and there is not a true motivation or internal drive, nothing will happen. I have seen people put on a brave face, but that’s all it was, a face. It wasn’t real. Instead, the ones who know why they cannot and will not give up, and the ones who will look for alternatives when what isn’t working continues to fail. Whenever it is your name on the business, you have to want it.