Greg's Right FIT #448

Quick notes to help you grow your business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week. 

In this issue: 

- Thoughts on Action
- Being Human
- Random Stuff

Thoughts on Action

• The more an organization knows about a subject, the more they assume everyone they talk to knows it too. Take a minute to check your client's level of understanding before plowing ahead. It will save time in the end.
• Write stuff down. Research shows that the act of putting pencil to paper works magic in our brains. 
• Archeologists look for evidence of arrangement when investigating ancient civilizations. Signs some human moved boulders or built mounds on purpose. Someday, an expert is going to dig in my backyard and bump into a tiny putting green. Definitely arranged on purpose. Hard to know why. 
• Why does the dog offer you his belly? He gives you total control, "I was bad. Do with me what you wish." There's a powerful lesson in there. Give in to expertise.

Being Human - Why bother?

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.” – Mark Twain

Before engaging in an endeavor, it helps to ask, "why bother?" as in, "why are we bothering to take on this project at this time?"

When coming up with an answer, work inside this framework:

Like, "why bother doing this from a business perspective? What are the business financial reasons? What are the non-financial business reasons?" And, "why bother doing this from a personal perspective? What are the personal financial reasons? What are the non-financial business reasons?"

The answers you come up with will help you communicate Focus to your team. 

Which just happens to be the first part of FIT.  Which happens to be the subject of my book, "The Human Being's Guide to Business Growth." 

Random Stuff

“The library is a gathering pool of narratives and of the people who come to find them. It is where we can glimpse immortality; in the library, we can live forever.” ― S. Orlean, The Library Book

Last week I mentioned my Aerobin 400. This week I saw one in the wild. We are helping our youngest move from Brooklyn to Chicago this week. As part of the festivities we have been taking in a few of the big city's sights. Including a visit to the NY Botanical Gardens. 

We're amateur amateurs when it comes to gardening, but in my wife's family tree there was a botanist who has a series of plants names after him. She figured this out when looking for old book prints and ran across the "escallonia" flowers. A little research found Antonio Escallon and, thanks to her mother's interest in genealogy, a match was made. He is Spanish and came to Colombia back in the 18th century. A 6th or 7th great-grandfather or something. 

Since the gardens have millions of plants we looked for an escallonia in the wild. No luck. The exhibit took us to the library and we thought, why not ask a librarian? 

Librarians are awesome. 

The NYBG librarian went on a hunt. Why wasn't he in the database? He has a lot of plants named in his honor, where is he? She tried this spelling, that spelling, this database, that database. Eventually she found a footnote in a journal from a Harvard researcher giving an explanation. 

His research boss took the credit. 

Mother cusser! 

My lovely bride and I studied history in college and this was a glorious way to spend an afternoon. A mystery being solved by an expert sleuth. 

Now my wife is armed with all sorts of new information and may be able to get her great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather in the botanist database. 

Moral of the story: librarians are a treasure.