Happy Thanksgiving, my friends. I could easily make a list as long as a Black Friday line at Best Buy rattling off things I’m thankful for, but I write about them every post.
Today, my thanks goes out to you, the readers, because I would have been burnt out long ago if it wasn’t for your encouragement and support.
Count your blessings today. Be thankful for all you have and forget about what you think you’re missing.
Thanks for giving me a huge blessing to be thankful for this year.
You keep reading, and I’ll keep writing.
Saturday, November 20th, 2009, 11:05 pm
This is a surreal moment.
As I sit in my apartment in my third year at Ohio University, soaking in the last hour of my second decade on this planet, it’s hard to believe how fast time passes by.
Everyone anxiously awaits their 21st birthday. A day of freedom and celebration. Freedom to do just about anything outside renting a car at a premium and celebration for the years passed and those still to come.
I rejoice over each year I’ve had the pleasure of spending on this earth—overlooking the handful of bad days in the last 76-hundred or so and counting my blessings that I’m totally undeserving of.
I wouldn’t trade the memories and friendships I have for anything, but the time on this planet is merely a millisecond in light of eternity, so living it with purpose and joy is the only option for me.
I’m at a college that feels like home. I have a wonderful family I love, friends that I’d do anything for, and a future ahead of me that only the Lord knows what’s in store, but one that I’m excited to see. I am blessed beyond all belief.
If we’ve ever met, I’m confident you’ve had some impact on my life. In honor of this birthday, I wanted to commemorate some of the most important lessons I’ve learned on this earth by chiseling them into stone. I don’t have a chisel or a stone slab, so I’ll settle for cementing them into the new history book—the blogosphere.
I’m certain I’ve learned more than this (at least I hope), and I’m confident I’ll leave out some important lessons, but I know the following have shaped who I am. Continue Reading
“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”—Charles H. Duell, U.S. Commissioner of Patents, 1899
We all know the Mr. Duell was slightly off in his assumption about the future. It seems more difficult than ever to come up with great new ideas because we think everything has been invented, but that is by no means the case. There are millions of problems in the world that still need to be solved, and we aren’t even close to the end of innovation until all of life’s little nuances are taking care of.
Too many people today don’t share their ideas with others because of fear—fear they’ll be stolen, put into action, and end up embarrassed like Seth Green in The Italian Job after his roommate stole the idea for Napster when he was napping in his dorm room. Continue Reading
I don’t have class on Fridays, but they are inevitably my busiest days. I can’t explain why I go through the week with a moderate amount of responsibilities each day and Friday ends up as the Superbowl for meetings, but it’s a fact of life, so I suck it up and deal with it.
Last Friday I had a few meetings (read: more than I would ever want at the end of the week) to attend in the late morning, but I wanted to sneak a run in before hand.
Being a typical college bachelor, I needed to iron my shirt and pants that were balled up in the corner of my room before my morning of meetings, but I was confident I would have time to take care of that once I got back.
I was wrong.
Continue Reading
In my involvement with The Sales Centre (which has gotten a lot of action in my blog lately) I have the opportunity to meet with executives almost every week.
It’s a fantastic opportunity for me to learn from these executives, but my role, at the end of the day, is to tell them why investing in The Sales Centre is the best recruiting move they could possibly make. I, along with three other fantastic, motivated, dedicated students, essentially pitch the value of our organization to companies that fit well with our self-funded program.
We had a sales call last night, and it went very well. I had a great team helping me out, and I was very happy with how the call went.
Once my portion of the race was over, I passed the baton (and our potential client) off to two more terrific sales candidates to finish off the evening at dinner.
About fifteen minutes after our call, I received a text asking me to check on our client’s car. He remembered parking on the street in front of a meter that had a bag covering it. Normally, those bags aren’t much of an issue. The Athens Meter Maid Society has a tendency to put those plastic yellow slippers over top of the change collectors long before the spots are needed.
As many of you may know, yesterday was Election Day. Our client was parked just outside of the Athens County Board of Elections—the office where all of the ballots were being delivered and counted.
As I checked on his car, I saw there was a police vehicle with a flurry of patriotic lights letting out a radiant glow over the entire block just behind where our man was parked. A tow truck was hooked up to a car just a space away, and they were calling in the cavalry (read: more tow trucks) to force the surrender of the insurgents (read: tow away every car on the block).
Continue Reading
This morning I made a terrible decision.
I was in a rush to get to the gym because I had a lot of things I wanted to accomplish this morning (like writing a blog post).
I went out to my car and realized there was frost coating the windows. I didn’t have a scraper, so I proceeded to put roll down my windows, blast the heater, and spray the windshield with washer fluid as I drove.
I ended up leaning my head out of the window to see where I was going, gasping for breath as the cold air berated my face. Continue Reading
