I have to admit: I’m a bit of a megalomaniac.  As such, I have a tendency to be a bit of a control freak.  And I think I’m good at it.  I honestly believe that I have everything under control.  My condition is so bad, I once won a few hours of free administrative assistance from my friend Todd Lay, but never used it, even though I was juggling a full-time job and my own business at the time.  It’s a sickness.

I don’t think I’m alone in this.  Many people,especially entrepreneurs, have a tendency to want to “do it all”.   I think we all believe the old adage that “if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself”.  Leaning on others doesn’t come naturally, perhaps because we’ve been jaded by past experience but more likely because we just haven’t learned to trust yet.  If there is one skill the entrepreneur needs, though, it’s the ability to delegate.  It can literally be the difference between success and failure in your business.

Think about it for a minute: how much time do you lose, each and every day, procrastinating and stalling when you have a task you hate that needs doing?  One of my hated tasks is making changes to my website, mostly because it involves looking at HTML code (who came up with that garble, anyways?).  Ugh!  I’d rather have a root canal.  I can do it, though, and that was my hang-up.  I thought that if was able to do it, there was no sense spending the money to hire someone else to do it.  So I would sit down to tackle the project and immediately find 10 other things that “needed” my attention (you know…YouTube, Facebook, Twitter), and the website never got done. 

Then, I met a great web designer who was willing to do what needed to be done in trade.  So I thought, “What the heck?  I might as well give this a try.”  And I learned an incredibly valuable lesson that day: there are people in this world who, believe it or not, actually like looking at and monkeying with HTML code.  For them, it’s a joy, a delight and, as a result, they’re really good at it.  My eyes were suddenly opened to a whole new world, populated with people who were thrilled to engage in all the tasks I hated.  There are virtual assistants who actually enjoy bookkeeping and transcribing and all the administrative tasks that make me cringe.  And there are even people who get their kicks from taking the content I create and blasting it out to the thousands of sites in the social media world, another task I dread.

Happy Monday, everyone!

After a brief (OK, so it wasn’t so brief…sorry!) hiatus, the Motivation 101 Blog is back and better than ever.

I’ve been spending the last couple of months exploring this wonderful device we call the World Wide Web and all of the powerful things it can do. I’ve been studying social media and Web 2.0 and Facebook and Twitter and all of the leverage they can provide to businesses who are paying attention and learning how to adapt to the new world and the new economy we find ourselves living in.

Most of all, though, I’ve been exploring my own life and business and trying to make sense out of all the advice I’ve been getting from business associates, mentors and friends.  And I’ve had an epiphany. More on that later, though. For now, I want to let you know what’s going to be happening with the Motivation 101 Blog here at it’s new home. 

First of all, this blog is going to be the home of the best content I can write.  I truly believe that the only way the current ‘economic crisis’ is going to end is if we all decide to quit playing along.  I’ve said it before, and I’m going to keep saying it: this recession has nothing to do with a lack of money or resources.  It is the result of a lack of confidence and trust.  In other words, it is a psychological  recession.