finite speck

This is an excerpt from Donald Miller's StoryBrand on providing your customers clear action steps on how to do business with you using a plan. "A good plan will do one or both of these things: It will clarify how somebody can do business with us. It can remove the sense of risk somebody might have if they’re considering investing in our products or services."

I really enjoy giving gifts. But I don't know how good I really am at it. I tend to gravitate towards things that are unique and potentially higher quality and cost. That's what I like. The question is whether the one I'm giving the gift to will like it? My wife on the other hand, would truly be happy if I didn't get her anything (really) or if it was something really meaningful that had little actual dollar cost to it. Quality isn't necessarily a big deal to her. She would prefer time with me or a thoughtful note or gesture. So what happens when the gift giver and the receiver don't align? Well... it can create some fireworks OR it's an opportunity for grace and thankfulness. It's also an opportunity to talk and understand the other person better. How do you approach giving a gift? How do you handle receiving a gift?

I enjoy a good alliteration. I tend to notice them a lot in sermons, but in any talk it's can be a helpful way for me to remember a point. There's just something about starting all words with the same letter sound that makes the phrase stand out more to me.

I'm not really sure what the fox says, but my son who turns 2 this next month can tell you a lot about animals. He can identify them, tell you what sound they make, and identify them by sound. When you think about it it's really amazing, because 1 year ago he couldn't say much of anything and within less than a year he's started to develop a whole vocabulary and is now just starting to put together sentences. Between words, sounds and images there is a strong connection and it's very obvious with animals in the case of my son. It makes me think of marketing as well as I think of words, logos and jingles. They all work together to help you remember something.

We had a big snow storm last night and right now I'm trying to get myself psyched to go outside and shovel the driveway. We have a double car car garage in back of the house, a long drive way leading up to it and a snow shovel. So, it takes a while. It's at these points when I think it'd be nice to have a snow blower, but that's about the only time I think about it.

It is so easy to search for homes today and get a lot of information and even see what the home looks like. All of this has come with the internet, but the internet still hasn't replaced the physical part of actually going and looking at the house in person. I had an experience yesterday where my wife found a house to look at that I thought sounded too small and didn't really look that good online by the photos. But, we went and looked at it and I was floored. It was way bigger than I thought it was and way nicer overall for the price. This just emphasized to me the idea that "you can't judge a book by it's cover." In a day when photos are everything, photos still aren't everything.

The best part of Black Friday for me was at the end of the day at my in-laws. It started with my sister-in-law playing "Duck, duck, goose" with all the kids. The kids, especially the younger ones, 3 and under didn't really understand the game, but they had a blast. Once a kid said goose they all got up and started running around in a circle. This turned into all the adults playing "Duck, duck, goose" with the kids, which turned into "Ring around the rosie", then "The hokey pokey", which then turned into "The action dance". Sometimes it's the little things. It doesn't take a lot to have fun with kids. A song or game with some actions is all it took.

With over 20 million users, 60% which are under the age of 20, spending an average of 51 minutes a day, the app Houseparty is definitely getting screen time. Yet I'd never heard of it until yesterday. I asked a parent of teenager what the biggest challenge on devices was for their family was and she mentioned the Houseparty app. Of which I had to ask more questions because I knew nothing about it. She said her daughter who is 13 could spend up to 2 hours on the app in a day on it with up to 8 other friends video chatting. The mom mentioned some of the time they just point their device at whatever they are watching on TV and the other kids might watch it. It looks like it was just launched on the App store this year and is similar to FaceTime or Google Duo, but there's the ability to talk to up to 8 people. You can form "parties" which others can technically even sneak into, but I believe there's enough visibility that you are notified if it's someone you d...

Today as we celebrate Thanksgiving I want to just spend time reflecting on all I'm thankful for. It's an exercise that I should do more and helps get my heart in the right place. I'm thankful for... warmth of a home clothes to wear freedom to worship God freedom to share ideas my kids my wife loving parents sisters co-workers Precision Planting Bethany Baptist church in-laws food in our fridge grocery stores that have all kinds of food available lights to turn on when it's dark cars to go places my kids when they snuggle with me doctors that can help diagnose sickness coffee in the morning ability to read and write clean water garbage services restrooms that get rid of my waste photos that can capture moments I might otherwise forget friends that keep in touch over years people that challenge me musicians that continue to make good music those that write stories and create movies shoes that protect my feet toothbrushes and floss to keep ...

The general manager of our company, Justin Kauffman stopped by my desk yesterday and showed me a new book he purchased. It was Seth Godin's new book "This is Marketing." He then proceeded to open up the book cover and show me the inside of the cover. It was covered with a couple hundred portraits of individuals and smack dab in the dead center of all of the images was our general manager's portrait! "Can you believe it?" he exclaimed. I was floored. We talked about how that could have happened. Was it a marketing tactic where anyone that pre-ordered the book was smack dab in the center of the inside of the book cover? He then went on to tell me that after seeing it he made a trip to Barnes & Noble to check the inside of another book cover to see if it was more than his book copy that had his picture in it. Sure enough, his portrait was in the same place in the book covers at Barnes & Noble as well. Then he remembered sharing a photo of himself afte...

What is it about air fryers that has made them THE big kitchen gadget for Christmas the last 2 years? I think there's a few things. One it saves cooking time. Two it saves time cooking greasy good food that otherwise you would have to cook in a deep fryer, pan, or oven. Three it feels healthier because you use less oil with a similar result. Four I think some of the allure is even in the name "air" fryer. It sounds like I'm making a healthy choice using air to fry my food instead of a bunch of grease. In the end this gadget will probably go the way of other kitchen gadgets and be part of everyone's garage sale, like the George Foreman grill. But for now it appeals to some "real" needs that people have; cooking fried food fast with "air" instead of lots of oil, making you feel like you're making a healthier choice.

A friend of mine mentioned a company he'd worked with recently saying,"They're really smart." I questioned him and said, "What exactly does that mean?" He went on to say that in working with them they sum up a project with 1 of 4 different words. That 1 word is then given to those working on the project as the end goal of what needs to be communicated. 2 of the words were wisdom and rugged. The details of the project could have been anything, but if it didn't deliver in the end to communicate the 1 word, rugged for instance, it failed. This brought a lot of clarity as well as creative freedom to those working on the project because there was no question what the end game was supposed to communicate. So what makes a company really smart in this example? 1 simple word that everyone can understand. What's yours?

We have started a tradition in our home of alternating between colored lights and white lights on the Christmas tree. My wife and now my daughter like colored lights and I prefer white. So... we decided to alternate between each every year. This year is the colored lights year and there's something about it that I kind of enjoy knowing that it's what makes my wife and daughter happy. I don't hate colored lights I just prefer white. My preference when combined with my love for my wife and kids creates a compromise that makes something I wouldn't have preferred still enjoyable because of who likes it. I'm glad we don't all like the same things. Some things just aren't negotiable, but there's a lot of things that are preference. So try to find ways to see something in what others like too.

I had no idea until about a month ago when I first heard about this technology that the majority of the music industry uses a technology called Auto-Tune to make sure they have perfect pitch both in recording as well as in concert. It's a technology that's taken a lot of heat, but sounds like it's here to stay. Auto-Tune is an algorithm, invented by Andy Hildebrand, a geophysicist. It basically takes the pitches of a singer or guitar and finds the nearest perfect pitches and corrects it, even in concert as the musician is singing or playing. Which brings up the question of how good are the artists today really? Do they actually have a good voice or do they just know how to use Auto-Tune really well? Artist are saying that Auto-Tune has become the Photoshop of the music industry. Some artists are calling for honesty in live shows with a campaign called, "Live Means Live", so the audience knows there's no Auto-Tuning happening.

I stumbled across this antisocial campaign in a magazine last year and thought it was really clever. Created by Mike Campau, a digital artist. Social media is another one of those love and hate type of things. There's a lot of great applications, but there's also an aspect that each one of these apps can be an isolating and unrealistic representation of ourselves and others. My challenge today on social media would be to be real and share things that matter.

Really good ideas. I mean the really good ones, are like a bubble your kid blows outside. The big idea forms really quickly, the wind starts to take it away and you watch it for a few seconds and then POP it's gone. Why do I bring this up? I think it's important to realize how quickly some of the best ideas come and go in our heads. Somehow we need to force ourselves to remember these ideas. Take a picture, write it down, record a voice memo, somehow capture that moment in time so you don't forget it later. The other question you may ask is whey wouldn't I record it if it was such a good idea? Glad you asked. Most of the time the really good ideas come when you're not prepared to capture them. Like when you're in the shower or driving to work or exercising or doing something else that's not sitting behind a computer, at your desk or somewhere when the typical tools to capture an idea are available. So always be ready.

It's in the low 30's outside and I'm alone with kids all day in the house. What am I gonna do? That was the question yesterday as I took the day off from work to watch our kids so my wife could work yesterday. The stretch from wake up until nap time can sometimes be brutal, but yesterday we hit the jackpot. I don't remember exactly how we made it to 10AM, maybe it's because we were all looking forward to going to Bass Pro Shop right when it opened, but that's what we did. If you've got little kids and you need something to do in Peoria for an hour or two that's free, go visit Bass Pro Shop. Especially during the holidays, November through Christmas. My kids loved running around in the big store, seeing all the animals, fish, and playing with the toys set up in the Santa Claus area. They're highlight though was the lady in the bowling alley that gave them fish temporary tattoos. We were there for an hour and it went by super fast. Oh and one mor...

Well I'm just getting to my post tonight. I didn't get up quite as early as I normally do and by the time I opened up my laptop to start typing I heard my son wake up. At that point I knew my chances were pretty much over of getting this done in the morning. What I didn't know though was that I would forfeit silence and typing for about 10 minutes of my son just curling up in my lap and snuggling with me. I wouldn't have traded it all. Who knows how many more of those I'm going to get! So this morning was just a reminder to cherish my kids for the short amount of time that they're in our home and take advantage of the opportunity I have to parent them.

Logos are a powerful tool that anyone can understand. I think of both of my kids. One is almost 2 and the other if 3 and a half. They both know what the Chick-fil-a logo looks like. In fact, on our way to Chick-fil-a last week my oldest saw a billboard and asked if that's where Chick-fil-a was. Then as we got closer my son who is not even 2 recognized the Chick-fil-a restaurant and started saying, "Chick-fil-a". A couple more examples of this happened just yesterday in church were my older daughter was looking through the church bulletin and pointed out the "Awana" logo and a QR code mark, which she equates with videos right now. I think these example just show how it doesn't take very many times of seeing a logo/mark and being able to associate it with something. Now say that Chick-fil-a or Awana didn't have a logo and my kids saw the text Chick-fil-a or Awana. I doubt they would know what to associate that text with. The logo does some powerful wor...

I felt like I sometimes do when shopping with my wife yesterday, but my wife wasn't there with me. I got specific instructions at Kroger to use our Kroger card and buy the max amount of shredded cheese that was marked down to 99 cents as long as you loaded the deal on your Kroger app. Well, I scanned my Kroger card at the checkout and scanned my shredded cheese but the price didn't change. So then I'm thinking what did I do wrong? I'm going to pay triple the cost and can't do that because I failed to get the deal! So I waited until a Kroger employee came over to the self checkout area. I'm not good at waiting. I start to feel embarrassed. Embarrassed because others are waiting on me and then I have to tell the employee that I'm not getting the amount off that your promotion says I should. But, I waited... A nice employee came and asked me what I was trying to do and the proceeded to scan back in everything I purchased, all 5 bags of cheese. She had to do...

The Nike swoosh when first created in 1973 by a graphic design student wasn't received very well. It was more like, "I guess that one will work." But over the long haul, through advertising, through it being placed on a good shoe it gained popularity. Graphic designer, Michael Bierut says, "Logos are really about being empty vessels and then you pour the meaning into them." He argues that people getting into arguments over logo design are misguided. "They think they're engaged in judging a diving competition, but really they're in a swimming competition. It's not what kind of splash you make in the water, but how long you keep your head above the water." Logos need to be designed for the long haul not for a few people that get to vote on it to like today. What makes a truly great logo? This makes me think of the updating of Precision Planting's logo that happened about 4 years ago. I believe it was necessary, but perhaps not for the...

Email. It's something that's probably not going away anytime soon and it has tremendous value, but it also tends to distract very quickly and can really own me if I'm not careful. I'm guilty of being a slave at work to my email inbox. I've also been a slave to trying to file everything away, only to never ever look for the email filed away again. I wish there was a way that would just read my mind and take care of my emails once I've read them in a way that makes sense to me, but that doesn't exist. I wish there was a way to always find the exact email that I remember seeing a few days earlier or months ago, which sometimes I can find and sometimes I can't. I don't think there's a perfect system, but I have found in the last month some help in checking my email less frequently and placing emails I don't have time for at the moment into one of three folders, Answer, Hold or Read. Everything else gets responded to when I check my email beca...

I'm lovin' it. What's in your wallet? Eat fresh. Nothing runs like a deer. Eat more chicken. Just do it. Think different. These are just a few that came to mind for me quickly. There may be others for you. But my guess is that you could tell me what brand each of these lines is associated with. How did this happen? How many times did we hear each one of these messages to get it in our brain that I should associate Subway with "eating fresh" or that Nike is all about "just doing it"? My guess is a lot of times. Research says at least 8 times to recall something, but I would say in these cases you've heard it a lot more than 8. I've said it before, but there is power in repeating the same message, but it also has to be the right message and the other part is it has to be simple. Notice anything about the lines above. The longest one is 5 words and shortest one is 2, yet they each get across the main message of the company.

This concept, called the 40% rule, is used by the Navy SEALS to increase mental toughness when they get to a place where they feel like quitting. In summary the idea is that when you hit a wall and you're mind says "I'm done", you're actually only at about 40% of what you're capable of doing. The example was given that 99% of those start a marathon finish it and everyone that does a marathon knows that you hit a wall at some point, yet you still push through it and finish. This idea is fascinating to me and is an encouragement to push myself in areas when I say, "I can't." or "It hurts too much." or "It can't be done." It might be really hard, but there's more in the reserve tank than I think.

Popularity. Why do certain things become so popular and others don't? What does it take for the masses to like something? Why is it that the most little girls get into Disney princesses? Why in a culture that prides it self on being an individual do we gravitate towards many of the same things? Don't get me wrong. There are more options today than ever before of things to "like", but the interesting thing is that in the multitude of options most people gravitate towards a select few. We want to be unique, or think that we are, yet we tend to like what the everyone else like.

Idols aren't just manmade statues that are worshipped. An idol is anything that we love more than we love God... anything other than God that we rely upon for our happiness... anything other than God that we depend upon for protection against our fears... anything that receives the first fruits of our time, the first fruits of our resources, the first fruits of our commitments. So I ask myself the questions. Am I loving anything more than God? Am I relying on anything besides God to make me happy? Am depending on anything other than God to ultimately protect and provide for me? Am I giving anything other God the very first of my time, first of what I have, first of what I commit to each day? These are great questions to ask yourself each week. It is so tempting to worship the created rather than the Creator, but creation can never ever give us what the Creator alone can give. The created things are not in themselves evil, they are actually good and are signs that point us to ...

Just last week a friend of ours received  2 Sports Illustrated magazines that evidently were lost in the mail for 26 years. They were delivered wrapped in plastic with a message printed on the outside of the plastic that says "WE CARE" and a letter from the postmaster about the damage to the mail during handling and because of the great volume and rapid processing this sometimes happens. There's so much to this story that I'm curious about. How did this piece of mail surface after being mailed out originally in 1992? Did it fall behind some wall and just resurface after some remodeling at the post office? Is there some sort of code that makes the postal workers responsible for any mail no matter how old that hasn't been delivered if found that must be delivered? How often does this kind of thing happen? According to an article back in 2012 the U.S. Postal Service handles over 160 billion pieces of mail a year, which is over 6,400 items a second. It's amazi...

Every few months JC Penney does a $10 OFF $10 or more coupon that typically gets our family in their store to try to get a couple FREE items. We usually are able to come pretty close to getting $10 worth of goods for about $1 (you have to spend over $10 to qualify). This strategy of discounting definitely gets us in the store, but we typically don't spend much more than we have to in order to get in on the deal. So... in the case of JC Penney who is really struggling to make it these days I wonder how well this strategy of giving away $10 to any customer that comes in every few months is working out?

I've noticed my daughter in the past month has started singing the station identification jingle for one of the radio stations we listen to frequently in the car. I think she knows this better than just about any song she might hear on the radio and she's 3. This got me thinking where did this whole thing with station call letters start? And then why do they use jingles? Glad you asked. Call letters started back in the early 1990s with wireless telegraphic signaling between ships at sea and stations on land. The stations adopted "call signs" to help identify each other. In 1912 each country was given certain prefix letters. The United States was given K, N and W. Later when commercial radio took off these prefixes were used as a way to identify each radio stations. The next problem to solve as commercial advertisers became involved was how know which radio stations had the most listeners. They did this based on ratings through a survey. Listeners had to recall t...

"What I’ve found is this–after people get to posting #200 or beyond, they uniformly report that they’re glad they did it." Seth Godin I can already say writing every morning has become part of my morning routine and I'm starting to enjoy it. I don't know that my writing is getting any better or that I'm communicating clearer, but I can say it's been an exercise that's been positive and I'm surprised that I've already hit the 1 month mark. The above quote is something for me to aim for as well as hitting 1,000 posts (about 3 years from now). I know that hardly anyone reads any of these and I'm fine with that. I've heard Seth Godin talk a few different times about regularly blogging and in the back of my mind I'm holding on to the idea that this exercise produces something that he describes as "magic" the more that you do it. So here's to another 31 days.