What Are Your Big Rocks?

from First Things First by Stephen Covey...(I will give you the abridged version).

In the middle of a class on time management, the teacher said, "Time for a quiz." He pulled out a jar and set it on the table. "How many of these rocks do you think we can get in the jar?" he asked the audience.

He put one rock after another, until no more rocks would fit. Then he asked, "Is the jar full?"

Everybody said, "Yes."

"Wrong" he said. He pulled out a bucket of gravel, dumped it in the jar, and shook it. The gravel slid all around in between the big rocks. He asked once more, "Is the jar full?"

The students said, "Probably not."

Then he reached under the table to bring up a bucket of sand. He started dumping the sand in the jar. He looked at the class and said, "Now, is the jar full?"

"No," everyone shouted back.

He then grabbed a pitcher of water and began to pour it into the jar.

Then he said, "Ladies and gentlemen, the jar is now full. Can anybody tell me the lesson you can learn from this? What's my point?"

One of the students spoke up: "If you try, you can always fit more into your life."

"No," the teacher said. "That's not the point. The point is this: if I hadn't put those big rocks in first, I would never have gotten them in."

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The More I Learn, The Less I Know

When it comes to the business of being in business, you've got to stay on top of your game.

I try to keep tabs on the latest and greatest tools on the market. If there is something that will improve my efficiency, I can complete the project faster and get paid faster.

I try to keep up with relevant blogs and articles that come my way about business in general, as well as the industries of my client base, because it pays to know what your clients know - and assorted other topics like social media, search engine optimization, HTML for websites, etc.

And in addition to reading articles and books, I try to attend as many networking events and seminars that my already overly full schedule will allow.

But it seems that the more information that I gather from these sources, the more I realize how much more there is out there to learn.

I've only just barely started to scuff the surface - not even scratch the surface yet - of SEO (search engine optimization) for the company website.

Every day I figure out a more appropriate way to handle a situation in the operation of the business.

Almost hourly, I will see where someone has "tweeted" about a blog article that I need to read about something that might be unnecessary or trivial to someone else, but it's something that I've been meaning to investigate anyway. For instance, just today, I saw a link to an article that showed me how to create and configure a custom icon for our website.

So I encourage you, if you are a business owner, or want to go into business for yourself. Be prepared, you may have to lose some sleep in order to keep up with all the research and study that will be required because as a business owner, you are officially enrolled in the School of Ongoing Education.

A real close friend of mine, you might even call him a mentor, told me that the human brain is like a body of water, if it doesn't continue to progress, it stagnates. And the stagnant mind or a stagnant business - STINKS!

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