I was thinking about the state of American business owners yesterday and came to the conclusion that there is a general paradigm that business owners seem to have fallen into that I call the 50 x 5 Trap.
Here it is:
- We work 50 hours per week
- For 50 weeks a year
- For 50 years
- We're only 50% engaged in our work, and
- When we're 50, we look back and wonder how we didn't achieve what we set out to
This is a sad state. Business owners usually start their businesses for one of 5 reasons:
Positioning is something many people have heard about, but haven't properly implemented in their companies. Positioning is determining how you fit into the overall market, and has the following characteristics:
One of the companies I coached recently introduced me to a website that I think is totally cool. 
Today more than ever, people have lost the art of personal contact. Sure, there's FaceBook, LinkedIn, and a host of other social sites to connect, as well as email. But these media are flat compared to the richness of a face-to-face conversation where you can see the other person smile at your joke or show their concern for you in their eyes. Smilies just don't cut it.
I wasn't looking forward to it, but my wife needed help, so I took some documents to edit and headed for her classroom. She's an English as Second Language teacher, and she has to administer a lot of tests in the Feb-March timeframe. She didn't have a proctor, so I offered to help - reluctantly.
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