My daughter is finishing up her sophomore year of college, feeling the quintessential end of the year burnout – studying for exams, finishing assignments, packing, moving out, securing summer research. She’s got the staying power, and she’ll pull it off as she always does. But her situation has inspired me to reflect about the many times in my life when I found it difficult to finish projects with the same enthusiasm as I started. We’ve all experienced that.

Failure is inevitably the result of losing steam. I like to think of it like this – If I do a project well 90% of the way, and then slack off during the last leg, I somewhat wasted my 90% effort. The best example I have that comes to mind involves a woman who used to work with me at a bank. She felt trapped in her administrative assistant position, and after talking to her about it, I learned something very interesting. She went to college at night for 6 years and got burnt out, so she took a semester off before finishing the very last class she needed to earn a BS degree in Business. One semester turned into 2, then 3 and 4, so two years passed since her last class and she still had not finished her degree. After contacting the university to re-enroll, she discovered that the program’s requirements had significantly changed, and she would have to go back to school for 2 more years at night to meet those requirements and earn that degree. She couldn’t bear to do it. Ah, if only she had stayed on course . . .

She never finished.

How would it look if she put on her resume that she almost had that degree? It’s better if she never mentions that she attended the university. Would you hire someone who completed 98% of her degree and never went back? I wouldn’t.

Every time I feel sluggish about reaching a goal, I recall her decision to not finish what she started. I like to look at projects as time well spent or time wasted. Being a successful finisher means refusing to settle for incomplete, unfinished or mediocre. Refusing to waste time doing a project part way is the best motivator.

It’s fine to take a break, regroup, stretch a bit. But finish what you started as well as you can. And save the celebrating for after the job is done well.

“Winners never quit and quitters never win.”

- Vince Lombardi

1. While walking my dog early in the morning, I saw an elderly woman sweeping her driveway. She had a fancy teased up hairdo and was wearing a formal cocktail dress, dangling diamond earrings and necklace, high heels and a butcher’s apron smeared with animal meat.  What was that all about?
2. It is February and almost 90 degrees in Miami today. What is up with that?
3. A strange man at Starbucks told the Barista that I was ordering my tea wrong and it was a sin to serve it that way. He shook his head in disgust. (I asked for hot peppermint tea and a cup of ice, so I could turn it into iced tea.) When he left the coffee shop, he looked at me again and shook his head. What is his problem?

The Top 10 New Year’s Resolutions (according to the people I know):

http://wordplay.hubpages.com

1. Lose weight
2. Workout more
3. Get control of finances/spend less/save more
4. Change jobs/careers/get job
5. Spend more time with family/friends
6. Remove oneself from toxic people (friends/spouse/co-worker)
7. Get rid of clutter/downsize
8. Take up a new hobby
9. Take an exotic trip
10. Become more decisive/take action

What’s wrong with people?

Yesterday afternoon, while walking the dog, I passed a house 3 blocks from mine, where a mother and daughter were taking down their Halloween decorations outside. I’ve walked past this house hundreds of times, and I’m sure the owners have seen me and my gigantic poodle before.

“Did you get a lot of trick-or-treaters on this street?” I asked. “Because I live across that street (pointing) and we only got 10 trick-or-treaters this year.” The daughter, who I’d guess to be about 8, looked at me. The mother peered at me out of the corner of her eyes but did not turn her head in my direction, as if to be completely and totally horrified that I asked her this question.

The daughter felt uncomfortable her mom was not responding, so she said hesitantly, “Yes, we got a bunch.”

With that her mother pursed her lips and gave her daughter a nasty look and said something under her breath like, “How dare you talk to her!” The mom was still not looking at me.

What the -? You’d have thought I asked these people what size undees they wear or if they wanted to give a million dollars to the Hari Krishnas.

What is wrong with people? If you know, please share.

The day after my 51st birthday:

1. I still cannot believe that I am actually this old.
2. I am all sugared out after eating 2 chocolate bars to celebrate the occasion.
3. I am grateful for my husband, daughter extended family, friends and poodle.
4. I am the in the best shape I’ve ever been in my life.
5. I plan to use the next 51 years wisely.
6. I realize I may need stronger reading glasses.
7. I don’t feel all that much different than I did at age 16.
8. I feel as though something new and very positive is in my not-so-distant future.
9. I want to make each of the next 365 days special in unique ways.
10. I don’t care to deal with toxic people, users, whiners and other losers any more.

Lunch celebration yesterday, albeit a blurry photo, at least it’s a happy one.

After the day I experienced yesterday my theory about what is wrong with the world was solidified.

Most people cannot communicate well.

The inability to communicate wreaks havoc on all that could otherwise be good. And as a writer/author/speaker, who makes a living by communicating, I am all the more frustrated by people who do not communicate well with me. To communicate is to share information. If you are the only person who knows something, you are not sharing anything, so you are certainly not communicating. Family feuds, divorces, job/client firings and even wars are often the result of poor communication.

So enough with my rant. Let’s talk solutions. You cannot change the way others communicate, but you can change what you do to improve your own communication habits:

1. Cover Your Bases – Assume the person you are communicating with knows nothing about what you are thinking or doing. Explain it all. Don’t patronize, but be clear.
2. Cover Your Ass – Put your important words in writing and email/mail/fax them to the recipient. People have a tendency to forget what you say verbally, but once it is in writing, it cannot be disputed later. You cannot be accused of not communicating.
3. Be a Good Listener – Don’t ignore what others tell you and assume it is okay to do what you want without repercussions.
4. Ask the Right Questions – “Are you saying that you want me to ____?”
5. What is Not Said is as Important as What is Said - If you are meeting in person, look ticked off, yawn through a meeting or show other negative body language, your listener will know. On the other hand, if the person you are meeting with shows negative body language, be aware of what that person is trying to tell you.
6. Don’t Assume Anything – Just because you may have been clear about what you said, don’t assume the “listener” heard you correctly or even comprehends what you said.
7. Encourage Feedback – “What do you think about that solution?” This way you’ll know if the person you are trying to communicate with understands what you said.
8. Repetition is Your Friend – It is okay to repeat yourself (in non-annoying ways) to make sure your voice is heard. This is particularly true when you need to communicate events that are going to take place in the not-so-near future.
9. Kindness Goes a Long Way – Above all else, be kind. People don’t want to be friends/married to/related to/do business with nasty, combative people. If you have ever been unkind, especially in business, and told yourself “people will get over it,” you’re only fooling yourself.
10. Dig Out Your Sense of Humor - No matter how careful you are at communicating, there will be times when confusion ensues. When you get over the frustration, find a way to laugh about it. After all, there is nothing you can really do about it after the fact.

19 years ago, my husband and I spent an entire night squatting in our hallway protecting, our then one-week-old daughter, from the wrath of Hurricane Andrew. We live north of where the eye came ashore, but we sure got a lesson in wind power that night as our giant ficus tree fell on our house and through a window the first 10 minutes of the storm. We had just moved into a big old house with plaster walls and wood floors, with barely any furniture inside of it. The wind travelled through our crawl space and whistled so loudly that it hurt our ears. It seemed like it would never stop. I hated that night, even though we were very lucky that we did not lose our house like so many thousands of others further south.

This week those memories of Andrew (and the many other hurricanes I’ve been through) came back as I watched a loop of the Weather Channel report on Hurricane Irene pounding the east coast. What came to mind was the fact that we may have sophisticated radar systems and tracking methods, but so far there’s not a darn thing we can really do to stop a hurricane from coming – or a tornado, earthquake, tsunami, volcano or blizzard for that matter. Sometimes bad stuff happens, and there’s just no stopping it.

The sky from my front yard as clouds from the outerbands from Irene skimmed past South Florida

But what about the bad stuff that happens that we create ourselves? There’s really no person on this earth who is exempt from this. We make decisions or take actions that sometimes result in negative outcomes. And sadly, some people do this more often than others and cannot seem to learn from past mistakes.

Extreme examples of this would be a man who commits a violent crime and spends his life in prison or a teenage girl who drinks and drives and kills a pedestrian. These disasters are not natural, rather they are man made. They are results of bad choices made.

Not so extreme disasters are made, for example, by parents who spoil and do not discipline their children and create badly behaved, unproductive offspring who search for happiness their entire lives but rarely find it. And what about a husband who cheats on his wife and break up his family when the truth comes out, all because of the decions he made? Or a woman who is negative about nearly every aspects of her life, and some day in her old age looks back on her attitude only to regret it all? Again, these are  self-made disasters, personal “hurricanes.”

What I’ve learned over the years is that it’s important to let go of the bad choices we’ve made in the past and focus on staying in control now to make well-thought-out decisions today and tomorrow. That’s the key to a productive life, resulting in the least number of regrettable, self-made disasters. Then when the natural disasters occur – and you can bet on them occurring – it is easier to get through them. It’s normal to feel frustrated knowing that you didn’t create them and cannot control them, but there is comfort in realizing you can work through them to get past the storm and then be grateful for all the good things you’ve created in your life.

Have you ever taken a family vacation and loved the place so much that you thought about moving there? Well, that’s exactly what my friends, Randy and Rene Arrowsmith did. And not only did they move far away, but they changed their lifestyle in every way imaginable. Read all about it here.

The extreme frustration I felt today with my wireless network not working well at home was actually a culmination of annoyance from weeks of difficulty getting and staying online. Unfortunately as a writer, you’ve got to be connected during all waking hours and have working email accounts. (I’ve also had problems with my remote control and the cordless phones in the house.)

So tonight I let myself imagine what my life would be like if there were no internet, social networking, cell phones, ebooks, readers, MP3 players etc. In many ways it would be inconvenient to not have these inventions, yet in others it would be pure heaven. Here’s the upside to not having them:

• More privacy
• No expectation of being able to be reached 24 hours per day
• Not marketed to during business hours
• No technological malfunctions
• Less radiation?
• Only real books you can hold in your hands
• Small mom and pop shops still in business (because lack of internet would mean less competition)
• Less time spent on getting elecronic stuff to work
• Libraries and book stores would not be extinct
• No email scams and spams
• No more stupid email joke or high memory photo forwards
• Less frustration
• Less sitting at a desk
• Less theft of electronic items because no one would have them
• Less time wasted reading useless stuff online
• Newspapers would still be in business
• Journalists would have their jobs

As I write this, it all sounds good – even though I know I’d flip if I could not go online for a few days. But for today – just today – I think I’d enjoy the peace and quiet and lack of technological malfunction!

I’m off to bed to read a real book I can hold in my hands.