Three Flavors of Procrastination

It’s bad enough to have a taste for procrastination; it’s even worse to learn it comes in three different flavors. Which one have you developed a taste for? This short article from Inc may help you identify your favorite flavor and some tips for addressing it. Check out the procrastination flowchart!

And don’t put it off!

Five Contributions

Dr. Peter Drucker once suggested that the most important question executives can ask themselves is “What can I contribute?”  As important as the question is, each of should realize that we are capable of several types of contribution; at least five according marketing blogger Seth Godin. His brief enumeration and description of each will give you a better set of choices for action depending on the contribution the situation calls for.

Econ Recon: Sausage Making; Pricing

Sausage Making is an apt description for the activities of Congress as it stumbles toward tax reform, according to Brian Wesbury in his latest Wesbury 101 video “Tasty Tax Reform.”

Proper Pricing: The Producer Price Index is up 3% year over year and Alex Chausovksy of ITR Economics sees an opportunity for you.  Check out his brief and insightful tutorial on judiciously adjusting your pricing not only to cover your higher costs, but also for higher profits.

A Gratitude Sampler

What follows is an excerpt from Vistage Speaker Mardy Grothe’s “Quotes of the Week.” This is a wonderful, inspiration blog that I look forward to every Sunday. You can subscribe at http://www.drmardy.com/   It is always interesting and enlightening.

It’s Thanksgiving week, so here are a few some great thoughts on Gratitude from his collection…for which I am Grateful!

Dr Grothe says “As Americans celebrate their annual Thanksgiving holiday this week, it seems appropriate to turn our attention to the topic of gratitude, and its related themes of thankfulness and gratefulness.”

Whether viewed as an emotion, a thought, or some combination of the two, there is no doubt that gratitude has been viewed as a virtue for close to three thousand years. In his 6th B.C. fable “Androcles,” Aesop wrote: “Gratitude is the sign of noble minds.”

From Aesop’s era to the present day, the twin concepts of gratitude and thankfulness have been associated with “counting your blessings.”  However, a strong case can be made that we should be grateful for everything that has resulted in our growth as human beings, including the suffering we’ve endured.

“In 1939, after receiving an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Princeton, Thomas Mann expressed the thought this way:

“To be grateful for all life’s blessings. . . is the best condition for a happy life.
A joke, a good meal, a fine spring day, a work of art, a human personality, a voice,
a glance — but this is not all.  For there is another kind of gratitude. . .
the feeling that makes us thankful for suffering, for the hard and heavy things of
life, for the deepening of our natures which perhaps only suffering can bring.”

“Carrying the idea even further — and into the paradoxical domain — some believe we should even be grateful for things that have NOT happened to us. Storm Jameson put it this way in “Journey From the North” (1970):

   “For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful.
And more truly for what I have not received.”

This week, take some to be thankful for EVERYTHING that has made you the person you are today. To assist you in your reflections, here are a dozen of my favorite quotations:

   “My wish for you
Is that you continue
To let gratitude be the pillow
Upon which you kneel to
Say your nightly prayer.”
Maya Angelou

“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.”
William Arthur Ward