Tag: Linda C. Anger

The Dropout Hall of Shame

Posted on by Linda Anger

So there you are, loaded with years of experience, capable of way more than most in your field, and every job posting you see that fits you to a “Tee” lists some sort of degree as the first qualification.

And, that would be the degree – any degree – that you don’t have.

Throw your discouragement out the window. You’re actually in great company.

Here are the top six on my list of current-day dropouts:

  • Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College after six months, saying “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life or how college was going to help me figure it out.”
  • Peter Jennings,  top news anchor on ABC, flunked out of 10th grade and went to work as a bank teller at age 16.
  • Michael Dell, the founder and CEO of Dell, Inc., dropped out of college at 19.
  • Bill Gates was 10 points away from a perfect score on the SAT. He dropped out of Harvard College after two years and never went back.
  • Steven Spielberg was denied acceptance to film school and dropped out of California State University in Long Beach.
  • Simon Cowell, TV producer, dropped out of school at the age of 16.

And then there are the Degree-less from History:

  • Henry Ford never completed high school.
  • Andrew Jackson, 6th president of the United States, never went to college.
  • John D. Rockefeller Sr., the first American billionaire, was a high school dropout.
  • Andrew Carnegie, one of the first mega-billionaires in the U.S., dropped out of elementary school.
  • Thomas Edison joined the railroad at the age of 12.
  • Benjamin Franklin had less than two years of formal education.

If they could succeed, so can you.

Einstein once said that he was no different than any other man except for one thing– that he never gave up, and stuck with a problem till he solved it.

Ray Bradbury, the gifted author of Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and so many other brilliant novels, said “I never went to college. I went to the library.”

Now please, go to the comment box below, and leave your thoughts. There’s also a box you can check if you’d like an email notification when a new post is added to this blog.

 

The Places that Scare You

Posted on by Linda Anger

“We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.” (Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You)

The next time I catch myself grumbling about the weather, the jerk who just cut me off on the road, or the “imperfection” of some part of my body, I’m determined to grab my copy of The Places that Scare You by the American Buddhist Monk, Pema Chödrön, because she reminds me to practice rejoicing in my good fortune. She says thing like this:

“It is easy to miss our own good fortune; often happiness comes in ways we don’t even notice. It’s like a cartoon I saw of an astonished-looking man saying, ‘What was that?’ The caption below read, ‘Bob experiences a moment of well-being.’ The ordinariness of our good fortune can make it hard to catch.”

What good fortune has been hidden in the ordinariness of your days?

 

The Law of Attraction: Carport #35

Posted on by Linda Anger

On the late September day I signed the apartment lease, the manager said, “The waiting list for a carport is really, really long, a year at least, but I’ll put your name on it just the same.”

I was OK with that, I thought, way back in the early weeks of October. The apartment is the perfect size and configuration for me, the community is lovely and quiet. I can live happily without a carport, I told myself, even though the 13-year-old Jetta that saw me through corporate jobs and layoffs, a decade of self-employment, and a year of cancer treatment had never spent a Michigan winter totally exposed.

The days grew shorter; the night air grew chill and frosted the windows and door handles.

Each morning my little Jetta took a bit longer to cough awake. I’d let her sputter and groan into a reasonable driving temperature, all the time with my eye on Carport #35, second from the end right outside the door of my building. It was empty every morning, like a black hole begging me to enter, and empty in the evening when I walked the circumference of the community.

Carport #35, I kept thinking all autumn and into the winter. I should ask about Carport #35. But the days would get busy and I would forget to make the call. Still, each morning, I would stare  into the darkness of Carport #35 as I scrapped ice from my windows and fought to open the doors. I imagined how it would feel to drive into it; I visualized my Jetta snug inside while a storm raged, and smiled in thinking how cool the steering wheel would be on the hottest summer day.

One January morning my car door was frozen shut. It took ten minutes to get it open, another ten to scrape the thick frost off the windows. Carport #35 was empty.

A few days later, on the damp and cloudy day just before the first measurable snowfall of the season, the apartment manager phoned:  A carport had just opened up—was I interested?

You bet I was.

My Jetta now purrs awake even on the coldest mornings. She’s never dressed in frost, her doors open easily, and I smile every time I see her sitting patiently—in Carport #35.

A Gourmet Meal is Always Served in Courses

Posted on by Linda Anger

Well-crafted, relevancy-rich blogs are like gourmet meals: they’re served up in stages.

Attention spans are short. Demand for relevancy is high, and everyone needs a bit of time to digest one course before going on to the next one.

The best blogs are short and intellectually or emotionally nutritious. Just enough, ruthlessly edited for readability and comprehension.

Here’s an example from Seth Godin’s Blog.

When you think you have a lot to say, say it – then edit it down by half. If it’s still more than three or four short paragraphs, break it into a series of posts, spaced a few days apart.

Just like a gourmet meal.

 

Marketing Facts and Fantasies

Posted on by Linda Anger

HubSpot’s research shows that 39% of B2B companies has acquired new customers as a result of their activity on Twitter.

Over on Facebook, the number is 41%. It’s a coin toss between the two, but the fact is, business is taking place among all the chatter.

Did you know that 25% of the addresses on your email list will “expire” each year?

Watch the slideshow for more. Marketing fact vs Marketing fantasy

 

Iced Water with a Twist of Time

Posted on by Linda Anger

Water is the basis of life, the element that defines 90% of our body and without which we cannot survive. How it moves from snow to rivers to oceans to clouds and back again is an amazing meditation – watch this video!

And when you’re done, read the poem below. I wrote it in 1996 after reading an article on water in a Zen magazine. It was first published in Touchstone Journal, and earned an honorable mention in Current Magazine’s fiction & poetry contest.

ICED WATER WITH A TWIST OF TIME

 © 1996, Linda C. Anger

This drink,
iced and purified,
once touched the lips of
Australopithecus Afarensis –
Lucy in her first bipedal steps –
3 million years ago in Ethiopia.

Drawn from lakes, released
from faucets, evaporated, rained,
recorded, invoked –
billions of gallons,
rivers of thought,
around and around
in endless recycle.

This same water was sipped
from Buddha’s cupped hands
along the Ganges, cleansed wounds
on the beaches of Normandy,
fed cornfields in Kansas.

The quiet pond at my center
knows what Lucy knew;
the fluid touch and
illusion of time,
life’s undertow and current.

Like water, I roll down crooked paths,
drop to the depths of myself
and swallow,
a ripple in liquid history.

 

5 Tips for Beautiful Blogs

Posted on by Linda Anger

Content is King, it is true. Your blog must be an easy and informative read or viewers will click off in the blink of an eye.

But Content isn’t Everything.

The visual side of your blog is important, too. Here are 5 Tips for Beautiful Blogs:

  1. Choose and stick with a single font face, or at most, two complimentary fonts.  Use a sans serif font (like Arial) for headlines and sub-heads, and a serif font (like Times) for body text. Too many fonts and colors are visually disturbing.
  2. Use images to enhance your content, and set them to work proportionally with  and enhance your content. Clutter is nasty, balance is beautiful.
  3. Use simple, bold headlines to make your point. Edit down to five words or less.
  4. Keep your content short and informative. Anything beyond 300 words becomes a chore to read on the fly. If you have more to say, break it into multiple posts.
  5. Make your subject line enticing. If it’s not, the chances of people clicking through go way, way down.

Three Tips for Better Blogs

Posted on by Linda Anger

Sharon looked me straight in the eye and said: “I hate blogging. I don’t know what to say. It takes me forever to write two paragraphs and they end up being nothing but a bunch of blah-blah marketing statements. But I know I have to do it to stay competitive.”

Owner of a small consulting business and responsible for “everything,” Sharon echoed a sentiment I hear almost daily: Blogging is a piece of the success pie, and it has become a huge challenge for those not trained as communicators.

What can you do to make your blog better for your readers AND better for you as the producer?

Here are three tips to get you back on track:

1)  Focus on the Goal of your Blog.  Is your intent simply to keep your name Top of Mind with your customers and prospects?  Are you focused on Lead Generation, website traffic, or building your reputation as an information hub?

2)  Remember What Drew You to Your Industry.  Way back when, on the day you started your company or made the decision to take a job in your current industry, you were excited about it. There was something that thrilled you, that satisfied you beyond just the paycheck. What was it? What emotion did it trigger? Find that energy again, and write from that place. It might be helpful to create a list of the reasons you started and the dreams you had about your career.

3) Tell Stories. Stories pull the reader into an experience, and the more they see themselves in that experience, the more willing they will be to keep reading and remember you when they need your product or service.

 

Why LinkedIn Groups are Good for your Business

Posted on by Linda Anger

LinkedIn—it’s the quiet member of the Social Media triplets, longer-winded than Twitter, less social than Facebook. Yet, as is often the case with the less noisy sibling, from a business-building standpoint, LinkedIn is the golden child.

Nestled within LinkedIn’s powerhouse of tools is the Group function. Here we can connect professionally with the like-minded on topics as diverse as cooking and aerospace engineering, and engage in useful discussion.

Over the years, I’ve made some great connections through LinkedIn Groups. One of my favorites is the WM Freelance Writers Connection, where I joined a discussion started by Vincent Frogameni, a freelancer in Springfield, Massachusetts, on the Top 3 Freelancing Mistakes.

Because of my responses in that forum, Vincent asked to interview me—a request to which I quickly, and gladly responded. The interview is posted on his blog.

This is good for Vincent’s business because every interview he does with other writers and marketers drives traffic to his website and links him, via perception or reality, to the experts in his field. This is good for my business because being interviewed adds to the perception that I am an expert in my field, and also drives traffic to my website.

Get started with LI groups, if you haven’t already. Jump into existing discussions, or start one of your own. Then be proactive, like Vincent, using the relationships you build to boost someone’s business – and at the same time, your own.

My father used to say, “Still waters run deep.” In the Big 3 of Social Media, LinkedIn is the “still waters,” and the Groups function one of the gems beneath the surface. Dive in!

 

Four Tips for Effective Copywriting

Posted on by Linda Anger

1.  Don’t waste money on internet copy writing courses. Find the writers whose work resonates with you and follow them.

2.  Don’t waste a reader’s time with 6-page long letters full of highlighted text and screamingly large headlines.

3.  Do follow the advice of Joseph Pulitzer, one of the greatest journalists of all time. He said: “Put it before them briefly, so they will read it, clearly, so they will appreciate it, picturesquely, so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.”

4.  Learn to be a ruthless editor, and don’t stop until every unnecessary word is eliminated.