Archive for December 31st, 2007

I was really frickin tired.

After taking a long red eye to Cuba (where the charter insisted on keeping the cabin lights on the entire flight) Jenner and I arrived at Varadero to a quiet and empty beach. We were soooo tired.

Cuba was kinda meh. You can read my review of Melia Las Americas at Trip Advisor. We booked through Jubilee Travel who highly recommended the resort. We paid a hefty premium to travel over New Years and it wasn’t even close to being worth it.

Pretty much the last time I will be using a travel agent, considering I can get it all done on my own, online, for cheaper.

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Regis and Kelly are having a Beautiful Baby contest. We just saw the promo and there are HUGE prizes. Over $100 grand and a cover shot on a magazine …

Not one to be shy from pimping out my son, I got all excited and then quickly deflated thinking it was probably for US babies only.

Well guess what? It’s not! The rules say Canadian babies are good to go, but the picture has to be taken in the last month. Here are couple of pics Jen took at the beginning of the month .. I had a hard time deciding. Which would you have entered?

#2 is the one I submitted. Deadline for entries is January 11, so we’ll find out in a couple of weeks if Le Grand Monsieur is cute enough!

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Mark Cuban is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks.

He made a lot of money in the first dot com boom of the late 90s when he sold his company, broadcast.com, to Yahoo! for nearly $6B. Not bad.

Since then he’s become an HD pioneer, one of the most outgoing sports owners in the business, and a contestant on Dancing with the Stars. He’s also a blogger - and a pretty good one.

His latest post is about effort. As we head into a new year, and we search ourselves for ways to improve our lives, change our ways and make things better - this is a piece of advice I will staple to my bulletin board:

In sports, the only thing a player or coach can truly control is effort. The same applies to business. The only thing any entrepreneur, salesperson or anyone in any position can control is their effort.

I had to kick myself in the ass and recommit to getting up early, staying up late and consuming everything I possibly could to get an edge. I had to commit to making the effort to be as productive as I possibly could. It meant making sure that every hour of the day that I could contact a customer was selling time and when customers were sleeping, I was doing things that prepared me to make more sales and to make my company better.

And finally, I had to make sure I wasn’t lying to myself about how hard I was working. It would have been easy to judge effort by how many hours a day passed by while I was at work. That’s the worst way to measure effort. Effort is measured by setting goals and getting results. What did i need to do to close this account. What did I need to do to win this segment of business. What did i need to do to understand this technology or that business better than anyone. What did I need to do to find an edge. Where does that edge come from and how was I going to get there.

The one thing in our business lives is effort. Either you make the commitment to get results or your don’t. [link]

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