View from the Mountain

Managing yourself, the biggest challenge

Sometimes your goals can be as hard to find as the buoy in this picture. Often you cannot see your goal until you have gotten closer.  But as your own manager, you have the luxury of defining those goals yourself.  While it is a huge challenge being your own manager, the upside in positive energy and success is huge.

For the nearly twenty years that I worked for Apple, my managers were almost always hundreds if not thousands of miles away.  For only two of the twenty years did I work for a manager who lived within twenty miles of the office.

When I started for Apple, I worked in Halifax, Nova Scotia and my manager was located in Montreal over 700 miles away.  There were two of us in the office.  I was the one who lasted more than a year.  I survived because I managed myself.

What key differences did that self management create.  I was dedicated to my job, worked harder, and focused on getting what had to done. I often took the extra hours out of my personal life with no complaints.

The other person in the office was more interested in enjoying the perks of the job than mastering the job or even getting what needed doing done.  He was a Xerox trained sales person who knew little of computers.

I had just spent ten years building a successful cattle breeding operation and two years managing the sales people in a five store regional computer chain that sold Apple.

I understood what we were selling and why people were buying.  I did not need any fancy sales tricks to get people to buy computers.  I lived and breathed them.

I also had a commitment to the Apple brand. In 1984, when I went to work for Apple, I truly believed that Apple products were the best computers for a wide variety of people.  Apple was a company that I wanted to be far of for the foreseeable future.

It was at this time that I learned one of the most valuable lessons from Apple.  Your success was often in spite of your manager not because of your manager.

There were only two brief periods in my career at Apple when I had managers who actually helped me get my job done instead of throwing up roadblocks that I had to clear.

By the time that I became a manager in 1993, I had learned well that a manager's job is to do the blocking and tackling for his employees and to become a leader instead of a manager as soon as possible.

In building a team instead of a group of employees, I had to learn not to do their work for them.  I had to give them enough freedom to fail or to be successful.  I had to be there to pick them up when they failed or to make certain that their success did not go to their heads.

Considering the success my teams had at Apple, I believe that I became a top manager because of my own self management skills.  The many years I worked at Apple for either incompetent or toxic managers prepared me well for managing myself after Apple.

I learned the importance of a plan for yourself.  You cannot be successful without goals and without trying your best to make those goals.

When I came back to technology sales in 2012, I was reminded once again of the importance of goals and developing relationships.

I am happy to have long term customers as part of dialog once again.  Still the conversations that you have with yourself are absolutely critical.  You have to evaluate everything that you are doing and make certain you are focusing on the right elements.

You need to explain what you are doing to experts and listen to their feedback.

Above all you need to maintain balance and stay close to those who believe in you.  I have always believed that the road to success is paved with the bodies of those who gave up too early. Along the way to success you will also pass those who tried to build their success on the bodies of others.

When you are managing yourself it is very easy to do what you want to do as opposed to what you need to do.  You cannot let yourself fall into that trap. Your day may have to be focused on doing things which you least enjoy but which are most important to your success.

I create a three to five year plan for myself.  When I measure myself against the plan, I make adjustments for the things that I cannot control, and I work hard at the things which I do control.

It is a tough job being your own manager, but it is far easier than having a toxic manager.  As long as you keep focused on what you need to do, and try to socialize only with people whose energy can help you succeed, you will make it.

My one rule is never let those who are not going to make it make you a part of their defeat.  Stick to your plan, focus on achieving your goals, and make sure you add value in whatever you do.

It is a good recipe for success.

Doing what is right and honorable

It should be as easy as walking out the dock pictured to the left, but for a number of people, doing what is right and honorable is a huge challenge.

Somehow I think it all goes back to how you were raised.  If you were raised in a family where doing what is right was given great value, then likely you find doing what is right and honorable as natural as I do.

My mother was a great Southern lady.  She would give you anything that you needed as long as you truly needed it.  She believed in treating people right, and expected me to do the same.  In the same breath she believed in standing up for what was right.  She did not want to be mistreated or see anyone else mistreated.

I guess what was taught in the home was reinforced in church and eventually in Boy Scouts.  At an early age I figured out that you never ask your team of people to do anything that you are not willing to do yourself.

My family, church, and Boy Scouts taught me that I have a responsibility to help those who cannot help themselves.  Learning that the world beyond you is more important than you, is one of the first steps to learning to do what is right and honorable.

At a fairly young age I was shipped off to a McCallie School, a military school in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  Not only was McCallie a military school, it was a strong Christian school with a Presbyterian heritage.  "Truth, Honor, & Duty" was the school motto.  After four years of early morning motivational speeches, a lot of that managed to sink into my character.

After McCallie, I went off to Harvard College where "Veritas." Latin for "Truth" is on the school shield.  I think there are times when you can slip through college without a challenge to your beliefs. That did not happen in the years between 1967-1971.  We were in the midst of the Vietnam War, and what we were told by our government was often not the truth.  It did take us a while to figure that out.

My moment of truth came one April evening in 1969 when some roommates and I who were on our way for burgers at the Bartley Burger Cottage were caught in a line of charging state troopers.

I got clubbed and chased back to our dorm at Quincy House where we were tear-gassed and got to hear the ominous sound of pump shotguns being loaded.  We were just college students, and we found out that was all it took to be clubbed.

I think it changed a lot of our thinking.  While there were some who ended up believing that there was no good government, I somehow did not end up that way, but I certainly learned that with power comes great responsibility and most people cannot handle it.

Using the police against unarmed and even innocent students galvanized the university community.  The university was shut down, and I think a lot of people learned that might does not automatically mean everything is right.

The truth ended up being the big winner, and many of us came away from those events more loyal to the truth than any political power.

If you fast forward from that time to near the present, you have covered thirty eight years of living the lessons learned in the first twenty two years of life.

Beyond all I have learned that money is not worth pursuing when it requires me to abandon my values.

I have been asked a couple of times in my life to do things which would have let down people who had put their trust in me.  I have declined the offers even though potentially they might have been very rewarding financially.

At one time I had to stand up and point out something which was fundamentally wrong.  It ended up costing me my job, but I did what was right.  It might have been suicidal from the beginning, but I did the honorable thing.

A few years ago I was in a business deal with a friend, my friend did something very dishonorable and backed out of the written contract.  I could have held him to the contract, but I chose the path that treated him as a friend and not as a business partner.  It cost me a lot of money, but I sleep at night.  It was the honorable thing to do.

As I move towards the final chapters of life, I see nothing which would cause me to abandon a life lived with honor and with a goal of always doing the right thing. 

It has got me this far, and I still sleep well at night.

Sometimes you just have to dive in the water

We live in a time when it is very hard to figure out the right thing to do for yourself and your family.  Even when you have a small amount of financial freedom, you often risk that very freedom by making the wrong decision.

I will admit to being someone who has never feared important decisions.  I became a cattle farmer for ten years after graduating from Harvard.  That took me to what many would describe as a Canadian wilderness.

When we left the farm, I went to work for Apple Computer, first in the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, then Columbia, Maryland, and eventually Roanoke, Virginia.  All those moves were challenging, but at some point in the process, we had weighted everything that we could and had to either move forward or stay put.

We always moved forward, and I do not think we have any regrets in spite of having to face many unknowns in our new areas.

It really is impossible to know what the future will bring.  I try to invent as much of it as possible myself, but that is about as far as you can go.

My family and I have enjoyed a broad experience of living in places as diverse as a farm in rural Canada, the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, the planned community of Columbia, Maryland, and the side of a mountain in Roanoke, Va.

A little over four years ago, I decided that I had one really important dream left.  I wanted to live on the North Carolina coast.  Even after finding the right area, the challenge of finding a home that matched our needs and budget was great. On top of that I had to build a new career in the collapsing field of real estate.

None of this has been easy, but we have managed to do it, and our lives are richer for having done it.  Twenty five years ago, we could have easily stayed on our two hundred acres of farmland north of Fredericton, New Brunswick.

I seriously doubt that my children would have had the opportunities that they have seen if we had done that.  I know I would have missed some wonderful experiences along the way.

So when considering whether to move or stay, do not forget to factor in what might go right.  If you look just at the downside, it is certainly hard to see the positive.

Also do not forget, not everything can be measured.  Sometimes the only way to figure out the water is to jump into the pool.

Is free content worth the effort?

I am among the bloggers who make some money for their efforts.  For fifteen months I have been writing Crystal Coast Living for Bluewater GMAC Real Estate where I also work as a Realtor®. 

I receive a modest sum which certainly is not enough to let me support my family on writing alone.  I also do a lot of photography.  At one time I sold my prints and made a few dollars.  I could not get to the scale that I needed to in order to really make money so now I give away my images. Most people think my photos are very good.  They might be better than my writing for all that I know.

The only thing that I do different for the blogs where I am paid for the content is I have my wife proof read them.  She catches a few errors that I miss.

She long ago gave up reading my free blogs.  I actually have a lot of readers across all my blogs.  I suspect that I easily ring up 25,000 blog visits over the course of a month. If I got ten cents for each visit, I could come close to supporting myself with writing if I add that to what I am already receiving.

And if I could get something for hundreds of thousands of monthly hits on my  main websites, I could retire, but that is not going to happen either.

I have learned how to build traffic, but I have yet to figure out how to really get paid for those efforts or found anyone who really understands how strategic these skills are.

Fortunately all those web efforts have brought me some real estate clients who have bought property in a really tough market so not all the efforts are for nothing.

I have tried Kindle Publishing, but my material does not really fit well there at this point.  So I either need to create some material that does work well on Kindle, find someone else that would like to pay me for a blog, or go back to working on my book.

It is really a tough choice because I love writing, but I also need to support my family since the economy has not been particularly nice to real estate agents.

Blogging has been very good to me.  I have learned a tremendous amount.  The Crystal Coast Living blog that I started last year has become a real success, but anything supporting real estate sales these days might be on life support at any moment.

My own website, the Southern Outer Banks, has also benefited greatly from my blogging efforts.  The Crystal Coast social networking site that I have been helping to build has seen tremendous growth and much of it comes from the content that I post on my blog at the site.

I think we certainly are at a point where sites that depend on free content are going to find some challenges. There are fewer writers out there than one might imagine.  I have tried to train some more, and I have found it hard to motivate people to write.

I plan to keep churning out posts on View from the Mountain, Applepeels, and my other sites as long as I have the energy and creative spark to provide good content for free.

We will see how things evolve over the next few months.  Maybe the real estate market will recover, and we all will be surprised.

Nice to have a large country

Today we were back on the beach late in the afternoon.  I wanted to try my hand again at surf fishing.  

After watching the Redskins recover somewhat from their loss to the Lions, we headed over to the beach for some relaxation and fishing.

I took my trout rod and my surf rod.  I also brought along six or seven frozen shrimp which fit my program to enlightenment.

I either catch something worth while or run out of bait fairly quickly.

Back in the summer I decided that if I don't catch anything worth while before the shrimp runs out, we head on home.

The rule has worked well so far.  I usually alternate casting with my surf rod and shrimp or using my trout rod with a lure.  Yesterday there were some pesky little fish stealing my bait so I switched to fishing with shrimp on my trout rod.  It only took a couple of casts before I caught a pinfish which validated my theory that the fish worth catching still are not running.

While we were on the beach in shorts wading in the water, a client of mine from Montana was sending me information about a snowstorm developing for the Beartooth Mountains of Montana.  They are expected to get over one foot of snow.

After we pulled into the garage, I went out and pulled the first ripe tomato off of my second planting of tomatoes.  I took a picture to send my Montana friend who has given up trying to grow tomatoes even in the summer.

Today our temperatures are in the seventies while friends are visiting Orlando where temperatures will peak in the nineties.

It will take fall a little longer to reach us on the North Carolina coast and even longer to cool off in Florida, but that is one of the advantages of having a large country.

I would sure miss all that nice winter produce if we did not have California and Florida.  Somehow I feel a little better about American grown produce that I do about all the stuff shipped in from all over the world.