Tired

I have just started Ultimate Bootcamp, and I am tired. I was reading two other blog posts today that talked about tired in a slightly different light and I think they are both relevant and pretty illustrative of where we are headed as a country and a culture.

The first, by Seth Godin, who I read at least three times a week. He is a straight shooter the way our politicians dream they could be. He calls it like it is and most of the time has some really interesting insight about how you can make your business better. Today, his post was titled, "Is Effort a Myth?" He talked about how people tend to cling to being lucky and just talented and claim that's the reason they haven't gotten ahead. He challenges that theory by suggesting that it's up to each of us to do something new everyday in order to learn and grow, actually put some effort in. We can't do that if we are tired.

In another blog that I follow: Dave Taylor from the Business Blog at Intuitive writes about sloppy PR pitches. He wrote about one from Bloomingdales and another from Disney most recently. PR gets a bad wrap because I know some really great PR people out there that develop relationships with journalists and clients and are able to clearly communicate stories that are relevant. They don't blast pitch every journalist in New England when only one of those journalists cares about the story. They search and search for that one person and read what they have been writing and make sure that the journalist knows about their story. They pitch it to the one most relevant person. It's not a job for the weak or tired.

Basically, the way I see it, it's coming down to work. I feel like our country was super excited about the computer because it allowed them to do things so much faster. Then came Email, the Internet, Web Conferencing, iPhones, etc. Now it's easy, but it requires more work. We have to be more diligent. We have to find what we love and do it well and completely and that's the only way we will make it. As the politicians said in the debate tonight, our country is full of smart inventive people, now we need to actually work at it. It's no longer about luck but about hard work. A little Protestant Ethic that hopefully will remind us it's not about being at the right place at the right time, but about making your own right place and right time with hard work, there is no place for tired here.