No, turns out it isn't.

        Last week I wrote a post pondering if it, meaning some of the more stringent difficulty of late, were over yet. Turns out they are not. Still supporting four sick little kids, a sick wife who is spending far too much times trying to make others' lives easier and trying to maintain my work and school schedule. Just when you think you have everything in a row, you catch a high and inside fastball right in the earhole. The crap keeps piling up. The air conditioning went out on my car this week This might seem to be a summer problem, and it would be, if it wasn't 90 this week in SoCal. My good friends are moving away this week as well, and I'm swimming in a sea of depression watching them go. I feel like I'm sinking.
        Of all the more valuable things I have learned, I am coming to realize even more as I get older, that there are times in life when hope is dwindling or gone, there are few great things on the near horizon and the suck just keeps coming. You can't quit and you can't stop, so all you can do is lower your head and plow ahead, taking the hits and hoping they don't knock you down more than a little. Business is the same way at many times. I read a book called, "The Dip", that really was about this very thing. You either keep going, or you quit. And you simply can't quit some things, at least not easily, and you can't just do nothing, so you pack up and keep moving. That's all I have this week. My head is down and my eyes are closed, and I'm just plowing on.

Is it over yet?

         Recently my four year old talked my wife into going on a scary ride at Disneyland. My wife didn't want to go but i sure wasn't going so off she went, dragged by an excited kid with no fear. When they emerged 45 minutes later, my son was grinning from ear to ear and my wife had a grimace on her face. My son related that my wife spent much of the ride with her hands over her eyes and when they neared the end she wailed, "Is it over yet!?"

        That was this week for me. Trying to finish several projects for both school and work, all in time to leave town on Friday night for a trio that never materialized and then the anguish for my dear wife of having to put her mother in a home this Thursday on what may be the long slide towards her final days on this earth. This week left me half dead on the ground bleeding out of my ears.

        Nothing is left but to just get up and do it all over again. Just like in business, you;re only defeated if you just lay there. So Monday is another day, and thankfully just a three day work week and I may actually get to do some hunting this weekend.  We'll see.

Getting better

                  This week has been a good one. I found out this week that my time in school should be shorter than I had originally thought. And any amount of time less than what I figured is a good thing.

                  The most important thing I learned this week was in a study of JetBlue airlines. Jetblue focused a toe on energy, long before their official open date, on making their employees and customers happy. It wasn’t about money or the business model, but their sole drive from the outset was to have happy customers. This was a new thought to me. I had always focused on how to make a product or service and then worry about employees and customers as an afterthought. Jetblue put their customers and employees first and built the whole rest of the business model on and after that. This sort of modeling, especially coupled with the huge amount of capital that JetBlue started with, is sure to make a winner. Even without the capital, if a customer is focus on their employees, the happy employees will drive the economical success of a business, providing they have a product the public wants.
                     My goal is to turn my thinking towards this train of thought instead of focusing on the strictly business oriented acts that have occupied my thoughts. 
                      The softball season wrapped up this week and we made a net profit of $132! My daughter and I had a lot of fun together. I think I enjoyed that aspect of this more than anything else. She is an awesome kid. 

Struggling this week

This week I struggled to do just about everything. My health issues decided to flair up and I spent four days in bed. The only productive thing I can say I accomplished is getting some sleep.
     I did learn something, however, and that was how to address the human problems behind whatever business problems there are in your organization. Short of actual hardware or software problems, every problem in the business can be traced back to a human cause. How you deal with that human cause likely determines how successful you will be in you endeavors. Probably the most difficult aspect of business in general is dealing with the wide variety of people that either work for you, work with you, or walk through your doors. The customer may always be right, but sometimes he isn't, and then he needs to be dealt with accordingly. Some of the best managers and leaders I have ever known have the particular gift of being able to tell someone how wrong they are and they believe it.
     Still trucking along on my $100 challenge. Had to sit more than I worked and let the minions do most of the heavy lifting this week but at least we were out of the house.

Winter weather

          This week the weather changed. Here in Southern California, we don't have fall. We have a Thursday that is still smoldering and then Friday requires a down jacket. Snow and rain and all sorts of crap mean that the things I planned get done on my lone free Saturday will be relegated to the next day that is over 80 degrees, or in other words, next week.
          Tackling some honey do's inside caused me to think a lot about the lesson I learned this week about a company who pays it's employees to quit. This is overly simplistic, of course, and leaves out why and how they do it. They introduce their new hires to their business model and suggest that if they cannot handle it or don't want to, then they will pay them a modest sum to leave then and there. At first blush this seems like a good program and likely works for them, but leaves out the fact that the economy is in the toilet and wise people will do their best to go with the flow as the modest sum they would be paid to leave may not keep them afloat until they found another job. In this day and age, one would be wise to take just about any job and labor intensely to keep things together at least until some sufficient money has been made. In short, I do not know if I agree with this practice but it has certainly given rise to a lot of thoughts about how to retain employees and have them be emotionally invested in the company. Without happy employees, your business will not succeed.
          When I first started with my current company, and for some time afterward,  I was very pleased with my job. In the last year, that has changed dramatically. The company currently owes me a lot of money, and though it is not quite their fault that we all have not been paid, I feel my satisfaction slipping away. Once it is gone, it won't be coming back, so I am struggling with how to make myself happier in this situation, as it is still the best situation for me, at least for the next nine months. The rain isn't helping.
          We had another successful week with the $100 challenge and were very productive and on pace to finish well.