6 Pros and Cons of Finishing what you start

I have been on both sides of this and the finishing has always been worth it. For some reason it juts is harder then other times to finish. Has this happened to you? I find when I focus on why I am doing it helps. If I don't get motivated by my why, I rarely finish. If I must finish I find a why that matters or a bribe myself with a reward that gets me excited to finish.



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The Pros and Cons of Finishing

Why do we bother finishing anything we start if it's not worth our time? And why would we leave ever waste our time working on something we won't finish? Here's why you should and shouldn't finish what you started.

Photo by Toshimasa Ishibashi

PRO: We All Want a Sense of Accomplishment

Finishing what you started gives you a great sense of accomplishment. Even if it's not something most of us consider fun—like cleaning your house—it's incredibly rewarding to know you accomplished the task anyway. You may not like every project, but if you get started you ought to finish. The sense of accomplishment gives you the self-esteem to know that you can get through anything you set your mind to, even if it's not always your favorite thing to do. You're not going to be able to always do the things you want to do, so it's best to build up a tolerance and the ability to handle the bad along with the good. In the end, you'll be a stronger and better worker.

CON: You Have to Start to Know if Something is Worth Finishing

If you come up with an idea that you think is fantastic, you may start working and find out it's a complete waste of your time. Why should you bother moving forward with that idea if it turns out to be a dud? Sometimes you have to start a project to really know if it's worth large amounts of your time. Finishing a crappy project isn't going to do anyone much good. At best you've wasted your time. At worst you'll be afraid to start new projects with the fear that you'll have to finish them even if they suck. Allow yourself to abandon things when they ought to be abandoned.

Comic by Nataliedee

PRO: You Don't Know The Future

Your life is guaranteed to be boring if you never allow yourself to be surprised. The world has a capricious nature and, if you're open to it, you might discover incredible things you wouldn't if you closed yourself off. Let's say you started watching a movie and, 30 minutes into it, you hate it. You decide to leave. Perhaps the rest of the movie will be terrible, but perhaps you'll learn something incredible or gain something more valuable from the experience that you'd be abandoning if you didn't stick around. You never know what's going to happen, and if you act like you do you'll miss out on a lot. When you commit to finishing what you started you gain new possibilities that you wouldn't otherwise have.

CON: You Know What's Important

Your time is valuable and you generally know the things that matter. If you hate something, don't waste time on it. There is not enough time in the world to remain open to everything you encounter. You can't read and answer every email. You can't finish everything on your to-do list. You can't see every movie you want to and you shouldn't. Some of them are going to suck. If you encounter a crappy movie, walk out. You have better things to do. There's a reason we prioritize our lives: if we didn't, we'd never sleep. Without priorities, choosing A over B, and cutting our losses, we'd never get anything done. Remaining open to every possibility in the world is romantic and idealistic, but it's hardly realistic. Be smart and don't bother finishing anything that doesn't seem to offer any real benefit.

PRO: You Made a Commitment, and You Should Keep It

It's one thing you abandon something on your own, but if you've made a commitment to somebody you've made a promise. When you agree to help somebody with something, they've put their trust in you. They believe you're going to help them. If it's something you might not be able to do or, perhaps, don't actually want to do but just want to help, don't commit in the first place. It's better to be unable to help in the first place than abandon someone after you've made a promise, so if you've made the commitment you better stick to it.

CON: Keeping Commitments That Make You Miserable Doesn't Help Anybody

There's no question that making a commitment to help somebody is an important promise, and it definitely sucks if you have to bail, but who hasn't been in a situation where you promise to help somebody but something unforeseen happens? Or you didn't accurately predict how you'd feel? Or you simply made a mistake? Continuing to work on a project you hate out of obligation is just going to make you miserable, and that's going to make the people you're working with miserable. Additionally, you're probably going to produce a bunch of miserable work. This doesn't help anybody. Keeping the commitment is honorable, but it's not necessarily what's best. Besides, you can always do the right thing and find someone to replace you. That's how it works when you leave a traditional job. Why shouldn't it be the same with one-off commitments as well?

What do you think? Should you always finish what you started or feel free to abandon anything you feel isn't worthwhile? Or are you somewhere in the middle. Share your thoughts in the comments. Read more at lifehacker.com

 

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6 Key Steps to Make any Change.

This is the perfect addition just after we have all made our New years resolutions. Have you kept any of your resolutions? Are you struggling to keep them.

This will help you recommit or to keep your promise to change.

Any other suggestion or tips you can add that would help others?

Pierre Rattini, CCO, BiZ BuZZ MeDia
http://bizbuzzmedia.net

Amplify’d from blogs.hbr.org

Six Keys to Changing Almost Anything

Change is hard. New Year's resolutions almost always fail. But at The Energy Project, we have developed a way of making changes that has proved remarkably powerful and enduring, both in my own life and for the corporate clients to whom we teach it.

Our method is grounded in the recognition that human being are creatures of habit. Fully 95 percent of our behaviors are habitual, or occur in response to a strong external stimulus. Only 5 percent of our choices are consciously self-selected.

In 1911, the mathematician Alfred North Whitehead intuited what researchers would confirm nearly a century later. "It is a profoundly erroneous truism," he wrote, "that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

Most of us wildly overvalue our will and discipline. Ingenious research by Roy Baumeister and others has demonstrated that our self-control is a severely limited resource that gets progressively depleted by every act of conscious self-regulation.

In order to make change that lasts, we must rely less on our prefrontal cortex, and more on co-opting the primitive parts of our brain in which habits are formed.

Put simply, the more behaviors are ritualized and routinized — in the form of a deliberate practice — the less energy they require to launch, and the more they recur automatically

What follows are our six key steps to making change that lasts: 1. Be Highly Precise and Specific. Imagine a typical New Year's resolution to "exercise regularly." It's a prescription for failure. You have a vastly higher chance for success if you decide in advance the days and times, and precisely what you're going to do on each of them.

Say instead that you commit to do a cardiovascular work out Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m., for 30 minutes. If something beyond your control forces you to miss one of those days, you automatically default to doing that workout instead on Saturday at 9 a.m.

Researchers call those "implementation intentions" and they dramatically increase your odds of success.

2. Take on one new challenge at a time. Over the years, I've established a broad range of routines and practices, ranging from ones for weight training and running, to doing the most important thing first every morning without interruption for 90 minutes and then taking a break to spending 90 minutes talking with my wife about the previous week on Saturday mornings.

In each case, I gave the new practice I was launching my sole focus. Even then, in some cases, it's taken several tries before I was able to stay at the behavior long enough for it to become essentially automatic.

Computers can run several programs simultaneously. Human beings operate best when we take on one thing at a time, sequentially. 3. Not too much, not too little. The most obvious mistake we make when we try to change something in our lives is that we bite off more than it turns out we can chew. Imagine that after doing no exercise at all for the past year, for example, you get inspired and launch a regimen of jogging for 30 minutes, five days a week. Chances are high that you'll find exercising that much so painful you'll quit after a few sessions.

It's also easy to go to the other extreme, and take on too little. So you launch a 10-minute walk at lunchtime three days a week and stay at it. The problem is that you don't feel any better for it after several weeks, and your motivation fades.

The only way to truly grow is to challenge your current comfort zone. The trick is finding a middle ground — pushing yourself hard enough that you get some real gain, but not too much that you find yourself unwilling to stay at it.

4. What we resist persists.

Think about sitting in front of a plate of fragrant chocolate chip cookies over an extended period of time. Diets fail the vast majority of time because they're typically built around regularly resisting food we enjoy eating. Eventually, we run up against our limited reservoir of self control.

The same is true of trying to ignore the Pavlovian ping of incoming emails while you're working on an important project that deserves your full attention.

The only reasonable answer is to avoid the temptation. With email, the more effective practice is turn it off entirely at designated times, and then answer it in chunks at others. For dieters, it's to keep food you don't want to eat out of sight, and focus your diet instead on what you are going to eat, at which times, and in what portion sizes. The less you have to think about what to do, the more successful you're likely to be.

5. Competing Commitments.

We all derive a sense of comfort and safety from doing what we've always done, even if it isn't ultimately serving us well. Researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey call this "immunity to change." Even the most passionate commitment to change, they've shown, is invariably counterbalanced by an equally powerful but often unseen "competing" commitment not to change.

Here's a very simple way to surface your competing commitment. Think about a change you really want to make. Now ask yourself what you're currently doing or not doing to undermine that primary commitment. If you are trying to get more focused on important priorities, for example, your competing commitment might be the desire to be highly responsive and available to those emailing you.

For any change effort you launch, it's key to surface your competing commitment and then ask yourself "How can I design this practice so I get the desired benefits but also minimize the costs I fear it will prompt?"

6. Keep the faith.

Change is hard. It is painful. And you will experience failure at times. The average person launches a change effort six separate times before it finally takes. But follow the steps above, and I can tell you from my own experience and that of thousands of clients that you will succeed, and probably without multiple failures. Read more at blogs.hbr.org

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• Why Your New Year's Resolutions Are Doomed to Fail [Resolutions 2011] (lifehacker.com)
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Keyword and 4 more ways to get your video played

This article will help you get your video found, especially helpful if you are a YouTube fan.

Find out what the keywords are that your niche clients are using to search and use these keywords to create content so they can find you.

Pierre Rattini, CCO, BiZ BuZZ MeDia
http://bizbuzzmedia.net

Amplify’d from www.ducttapemarketing.com

5 Ways to Get More From Online Video

The use of video to tell your story, put a real live face on the company and showcase your products, services and customer testimonials is a very foundational online tactic these days. As cameras become more sophisticated and cheaper to buy and services such as Vimeo and YouTube provide free and low cost hosting and streaming, small business owners are embedding video in blog posts and web pages with increasing ease. There is one aspect of this tactic that is often overlooked however, and that’s taking proper care of how you place your videos on the hosting site,  in particular YouTube. While many businesses seek to draw attention to the video placed on a page on their site, millions turn to YouTube to find information and getting your videos to rank well there may be an extremely important way to get visitors to your site. Here are a couple facts that you should consider when it comes to your YouTube video strategy: YouTube is the world’s 2nd largest search engine – that’s right more people turn to YouTube to find information than Yahoo and  Bing. According to Compete.com over 25% of YouTube’s traffic comes from Google – people are turning up lots of video in Google searches. Google is committed to something they called Universal Search – this is the act of returning more than textual information for many searches. This includes video, blog posts, images and even near real-time Twitter streams. In some cases getting your videos to rank well can be easier than getting your pages to do so. Below are five things to consider as you begin to optimize your video assets on YouTube. Do your research – Use the YouTube Keyword Tool – Most people are familiar with Google’s keyword research and related search tools, but did you know that YouTube has the same tools? By visiting and using these tools you can find some great insights about video topics that are hot and ways to optimize your video content to take advantage of what people are searching for on YouTube. Describe and Tag Well – One of the first things you can do is make certain that you do all you can to help YouTube know what your video is about. (Of course you’ve got to make it public first) This includes the file name (don’t use newmovie.m4v use importantkeyword.m4v), description, tags and categories. Make sure you pick the right category – there is no business category, but I’ve found HowTo and Style to be the best for my videos. Use your description to describe what is going on in the video. You’ve got lots of room here, but don’t cram keywords in, make it a thorough description and include a link back to you site. Use all of tags that work and include a few variations. (Get your keywords in the description within the first 20 or so words too.) Annotations and Transcripts are Key – YouTube allows you to annotate or add notes to your video that show when people watch. This is a great way to emphasize content, show links that you mention, or point out other related videos you’ve made. It also adds content that Google may index in some cases. You can also create and entire transcript that is used by hearing impaired viewers using Closed Captioning. CaptionTube makes it easy to do and the transcript can go a very long way towards helping your video rank well. Call to Action – One of the things I notice quite often is that people spend a great deal of effort creating videos that simply end. I think this is because the videos are created to go on a web page that has lots of information and a call to action. If your video is to stand alone and ranks well on YouTube, the video itself must contain a verbal and visual call to action. End your videos telling and showing what people should do next. Spread the Love – Once you’ve done your work on YouTube it’s time to spread your video to other places. Here’s a list of video sites beyond YouTube for starters, but many people find that using a tool like TubeMogul to automatically submit to video sites and track traffic is the best way to go.

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Related articles

• Google Links To Competitors Next To YouTube Videos (searchengineland.com)
• YouTube Keyword Tool and Video Optimization Techniques (searchenginewatch.com)

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