How to correctly sing Auld Lang Syne
Every year, people sort of hum Auld Lang Syne as the ball drops. Every year, you don’t have to.
Music and lyrics:
Just the lyrics, courtesy of Wikipedia:
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne* ?
CHORUS:
For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp !
and surely I’ll be mine !
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.
CHORUS
We twa hae run about the braes,
and pu’d the gowans fine ;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit,
sin auld lang syne.
CHORUS
We twa hae paidl’d i’ the burn,
frae morning sun till dine ;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
sin auld lang syne.
CHORUS
And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere !
and gie’s a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll tak a right gude-willy waught,
for auld lang syne.
CHORUS
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Phoning it in
Phoning it in has become a popular pejorative among the blogging and social crowd. It’s considered the epitome of laziness, the pinnacle of apathy, and it’s something that you want to avoid as much as possible, right?
Except… we’re human. Some days we simply don’t have enough A-game in the tank. Some days we simply don’t have a well to draw from and not enough time or resources to recharge the batteries in a timely manner.
Some days, we have to phone it in.
Here’s the funny thing: if you phone it in correctly, at least from a content creation perspective, you can create some stuff that’s incredibly valuable and timeless. Here’s a few examples of posts I phoned in:
- Tools I use on my Mac. Total phone-in list post that involved opening my Applications folder and talking about what I found in it. In the 3 years it’s been up, it’s one of my top 50 most visited blog posts.
- Bertucci’s pasta sauce cloning attempt. Another post that’s in the top 50 of all time, I was messing around trying to figure out how they got their pasta sauce to taste as good as it did.
- Free iPad wallpapers. I was swamped at a conference I was at and didn’t have time to blog, so I fired up iPhoto, browsed through my archives of photos, and sliced up 10 photos into 1024×1024 JPGs, then linked them up. In the top 25 blog posts I’ve ever done, traffic-wise.
The secret behind phoning it in, when you have to do it, is to draw on stuff you’ve already got, stuff that you know so well, stuff that is fresh in your mind that you can write about . These more casual, less “on message” pieces of content appeal to the personal, human sides of ourselves and can be a welcome break for your audience as well.
Some other phoning it in ideas:
- Favorite songs in your audio collection that make you…
- Your grandmother’s heritage recipe for…
- How to make tomatoes taste better in …
- Five tricks you use to break the ice at…
- How to shop for…
Should you phone it in all the time? No, of course not. But when you do have those days when you need a break, make something valuable anyway. You’ll be amazed at the longevity and power of some of the phoned-in topics. I wonder how a blog post on phoning it in will do…
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Who’s working this week?
Both Chris Brogan and I have exhorted you recently to make the most of this quietest week of the year when everyone else has checked out. Here’s the corollary to those bold statements. If you’re looking at starting something new or adding to your team for 2011, if you’re looking to hire, grow, or otherwise expand your business, then this week is also really important.
It’s how you tell who the hard hitters are.
I got an email from one of my sales team on Monday morning, bright and early. They said the office was as deserted as a graveyard. It would have been easy for them to check out, head out, and throw it in, but they’re working instead to make business happen. I certainly took note.
Take notice of who’s still on the clock this week and why, especially if they don’t have to be. Pay attention to who is still blogging and Twitter accounts, to metrics that matter internally and to people who are still feeding the machine. Pay attention to who’s working when in all honesty you don’t have to. The noise of normal daily life and the loudest voices that normally fill the air with “activity” (as opposed to productivity) are silent for this week. Listen carefully and you’ll uncover the true power players in your networks and organizations.
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Why you must be a liar online
You should be a liar online.
No, scratch that, you MUST be a liar online if you have more than 232.86 friends/followers/fans in social media.
I lie all the time online. Flat out lies, deception, incorrect information, omission – you name it, I do it. I lie about where I live, about my birthday, about my family or lack thereof, about all of the things that would be useful for someone to cause me significant harm.
Why? Simple. There are bad people out there. What you probably don’t know is how numerous they are. Based on the FBI Uniform Crime Report, here are some interesting statistics. I make a couple of assumptions here. I assume that the FBI doesn’t double-count, which means that if someone is raped and murdered, it’s filed only under murder. Second, I make the assumption that law enforcement is working as intended and each crime is perpetrated by a unique individual within a calendar year. Yes, there are definitely multiple offenders, but I’d hope that if someone commits murder, they’re not out of jail and doing it again within the same calendar year.
So, with that disclaimer, here’s why you should be lying online:
- If you have more than 20,143 friends/fans, one of them is statistically likely to be a murderer.
- If you have more than 3,485 friends/fans, one of them is statistically likely to be a violent rapist.
- If you have more than 752 friends/fans, one of them is statistically likely to be a robber. (remember PleaseRobMe.com?)
- If you have more than 381 friends/fans, one of them is statistically likely to be a violent criminal.
Now, these statistics (derived from the FBI data of crimes per 100,000 population members) aren’t uniform, of course. The crime rate per 100,000 people will be different if you physically live in Fargo, ND than if you live in midtown Manhattan. That said, it’s still worth thinking about, still worth realizing that in the social world we live in, there are plenty of bad people mixed in with the good. We think nothing of having 100, 500, or 1,000 people in our social media circles that we’ve never met and never had a chance to get a gut feeling for. You’d better bet that at that scale of people, there are some bad apples in the bunch.
This is why you should be lying. All 3,000 or 5,000 or 20,000 friends/fans/followers don’t need to be criminals in order to make your life miserable and/or cause you harm. Only 1 of them that takes advantage of information you post online carelessly is needed to do the job. I’m not saying you need to live under a rock and hide away from everyone online, either. I’m just saying that you need to be careful with the information you share and be thoughtful about how truthful you actually need to be online. Do you need to check in everywhere? Do you need to share photos of your kids? Do you need to announce that you’re not at home?
Transparency and stupidity don’t have to be synonymous.
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Removing obstacles to change
Around this time of year, people start cranking out lists of resolutions, things that they want to to accomplish in the next year. Sometimes they’re business wishes, other times they’re personal wishes. Most don’t survive the first few weeks of the new year because habits, for good or ill, are exceptionally difficult to break.
Take a look at the average resolution. At best, it’s barely measurable, such as wanting to lose a specific weight, stop a particular habit, or change a particular behavior. What’s wrong with this sort of resolution is that it’s entirely out of context with the rest of your life and thus, the momentum of life will easily shatter the resolution. “I want to stop smoking”… but you’re not taking into consideration the high stress job or sleepless nights that drive you to smoke in the first place. “I want to lose weight”… but you’re not taking into consideration a manic travel schedule that forces you more often than not to eat anything just because fast food places are the only places open.
If you want to make a resolution work for you, you have to make it compelling. Take your goal and ask why it’s important to achieve. Give it a measurable, tangible, emotionally compelling reason. Want to stop smoking? Figure out your life expectancy with or without smoking (it’s about a 20 year difference according to some sources, go Google it) and then Photoshop yourself a nice set of tombstones, one with and one without smoking.
Once you’ve figured out your emotionally compelling reason to change something in your life, draw out a map of all the things in your life that allow a given behavior to exist. These are the forces that will actively work to stop you from making a change! Make it branch out as far as you practically can. For example:
I procrastinate at blogging because I can’t write under pressure on demand because I need more hours in the day because I don’t know where my time goes because I don’t have a time management system because I don’t know how to budget my time.
The solution in this example isn’t to try to blog more. The solution is to find a better time management system that will in turn give you the time you need.
Not every resolution will be as neat or clean. Some will have multiple branches of reasons why a resolution would be opposed by your life. Look in the tree of reasons for junctures where you can make a change that will have the greatest impact and start there.
Accomplishing goals is as much about removing obstacles as it is about creating change. The more obstacles you can remove in advance of making a change, the easier the change will be. As a side benefit, if you can dig deeper into the root causes of what would block a new change, chances are you’ll remove obstacles in other areas of your life that you’re not even thinking about right now.
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