A Businessman's View

Warning: if you're here this week to read a business-minded blog entry, you will be disappointed. Instead, this week's entry is about relief. "Relief from what?" you ask. Relief from a lot of stress and anxiety is my answer. While the vast majority of America was relishing (pun intended) in the taste of a properly cooked turkey, my wife and I were unpacking in our new residence in NJ. On Tuesday, she came here as the vanguard to accept the keys from our landlady; Wednesday found me riding behind the moving truck as all of our possessions were transported from Great Neck, Long Island to the new place in Crystal Springs (technically a resort, but we live in the residential area of the development). "Moving is a form of relief?" you reply. When you consider that my wife, my 14 month old, and I lived in a 600 sq. ft. apartment where I alone had enough possessions to fill the entire place then you can understand the stress. Now we live in a 2,000 sq. ft....

Steve Jobs was deemed to be the CEO of the Decade by Fortune Magazine . As they put it, he not only revolutionized one industry, but he revolutionized four industries. And he did it when there were already other established leaders in each, unlike his compatriots Josiah Wedgwood (chinamaker), John D. Rockefeller (oil), Andrew Carnegie (steel), Henry Ford (automobiles) and Estée Lauder (make-up). After reading the 31 page exposé about him, one thought struck me like a wall of bricks crashing down: how do I ensure that I am more than a footnote in history? Will I ever leave a lasting impression on something more than just a gravestone? The only effect I seem to be leaving right at this moment is the effect that I'm not as good a planner as I thought I was. I intended on writing about a few things I read in Entrepreneur , but due to the fact that we are moving from Long Island, New York to New Jersey on Wednesday I mistakenly packed the issue in question away and don't remem...

One day, several years ago, I was eating dinner with some Chinese new friends in a small, Chinese restaurant in Flushing, NY. After the food was gone, I turned to Jeff who was sitting next to me and watched him eat the rest of his bowl of rice by itself. The young, philosophical me had a picture in my head. I could see the women in their bamboo hats, ankle deep in the mud of the rice fields. So I asked him at that point, "are you eating the rice because it symbolizes the hard work of the laborers in the fields and you don't want to waste it?" Jeff assessed my mental state for a few moments, then resumed eating his rice. It turns out he was just hungry, and plain rice was better than no rice. Elegance is...well...elegant. It's nice to devise a solution to a problem that you feel would qualify for a place in the Museum of Modern Art, but sometimes the best solution is the easiest. We know this as the Keep It Simple, Stupid or KISS principle. (For the astute read...

Yesterday morning, I panicked because I had not written a blog entry for this week. When I first started this blog, I had so many things that I wanted to share with the world, but new topics weren't arriving as fast as I had been spending my philosophical coin. There have been plenty of distractions here too: I've been out of work since the end of May; we have (as of this month) depleted our savings account and in fact are a few thousand dollars in short-term debt so that we could meet our financial obligations for the month; we accepted an offer on our apartment out of necessity (since we didn't know when we'd get the next offer...we had already been on the market for 18 months) that resulted in a 27% loss in two years; we're moving from NY to a location in NJ that is a few hours away; etc. This isn't an excuse, but it is worth noting that the stress level that I have been exposed to on a constant basis has been quite high. And while I've been trying to ...

Last week, I talked about how I didn't take advantage of extra time in an attempt to influence my future when I knew my employer was not in the best financial and sales health. I'm sure that after reading that, especially with my opening line stating how I've been unemployed since the end of May, many of you are wondering "have you learned from your experience?" Obviously, if I'm unemployed there are things that I could be doing right now to lessen the stress level and more quickly reenter the workforce... ...right? Last week, Donna Sweidan posed a question on LinkedIn that followed a similar vein. She's currently finishing up a book / DVD set on using LinkedIn effectively for a job search, and wanted some final input. Specifically, her question was: " What do you do on a daily/weekly basis to maintain your networking momentum ? It seems a given today that networking for your job search is as important as exercise is to a healthy lifestyle, but ...