New Host, DBA & James Ray

October 18, 2006

Hallelujah! Well I have a few things to which I must sing praises tonight. First, I believe all the chaos of my site transfer is over. I was expecting it to happen Wednesday morning, but as I wrote the note to explain that, BLAMO, it happened. Then for hours the domain was resovling to both hosts because I had sub-domains and redirects on both. Lord was that confusing. I had to rebuild my blog three times. Anyway I believe the dust has settled and things are working again. If there are broken links, ping me.

I made the change to a new host because I’ve purchased a very neat PHP-based product/account system called aMember. aMember is going to allow you to not only buy templates, but it will also maintain your access to them as long I keep the system running. It has a bunch of other really neat features too like subscriptions, coupons, integration with PayPal (and many other carts/payment processors), newsletters and (WOW) single-signon with my WordPress blog. Now that was a cool feature/add-on that I had to have. If you already have an account with my blog, and let’s say you go to buy a product, aMember will check your email address to see if it already exists in the blog and then synchronize your accounts. If you don’t have an account in the blog already, aMember will make one for you. Cool stuff.

And that brings me to my experience as a new DBA. So I fired up aMember for its trial run this morning and hey, I created my own account cuz I like to have the login ID of suzanne of course. Well aMember did its thing, found me in the WordPress database and like magic, synchronized the accounts. The only bugger in that equation is that I have the default user role set to “subscriber” and ha ha very funny, when I went to log in to WordPress to write this note, I was met with, “You do not have the permissions to access that page!”

Well the nerve! :D Frankly I thought that was funny but then I thought, “Egad if I have to reinstall, configure and load the data one more time I’ll just puke.” Oh wait, I have access to the raw data! I’m more of the front-end geek you know – it’s not normal for me to consider mucking with the data in the database, but fortunately the light shone down from above and I was able to make my way through phpMyAdmin to get things straightened out.

THEN, tonight, a friend and I made our way to see James Ray. Some of you may know him from the movie The Secret. This guy knows some good stuff – of course like any good speaker, he baits you in hopes that you’ll sign up for his weekend seminars. I hate the sales crap but the guy has to make his money. I’ll give him that, but it’s somewhat unfortunate that the laws of physics require people like him to jerk emotions simply to get YOU to be fired up enough to believe that YOU actually can succeed at something. I suppose you have to make your way through his “get on board” boot camp and after that you’re working with people who really are motivated to find ways to accomplish things in their lives. He said some very interesting things tonight that I’ll highlight here.

He made this comment after running everyone through a “greet three neighbors” exercise… three times! Each time he said, “No, I mean really greet your neighbor.” The third time he said, “No, greet them like you haven’t seen them in 20 years, you’re dying to see them again and it’s totally going to make your day!” Well of course everyone is hugging… one guy gave me a high-five and did some strange handshake. So his point is, you are received in the same way that you greet, you receive no more than you offer and you very well cut yourself off from that which you desire simply by refusing to offer it yourself.

I feel I’ve done well with this concept in my life, so hearing this again tonight was a good reminder that it’s important to be and convey that which you would like in your own life. Even my experiences bringing these early iWeb templates to people has been a great example. Despite the fact this is my hobby, not my livlihood, many of you continue to write to say, “Thanks for putting all that stuff out there!” Which brings me to the next quote.

So he’s always telling these stories about people who handle their work in really neat and unique ways. If you ever get a chance to see his Quantum Something Or Other (I forget the title now) DVD, he’ll tell a story about the very creative flight attendant who turned he routine pre-flight speech into a crazy, roaring comedy routine.

Anyway, where was I? Little things mean everything. Now I agree with this, but to execute upon this key principle successfully is really a form of fine art. There’s a psychological response in humans that says, like the little devil on your shoulder, “Kindness means weakness.” While some kind people inevitably are manipulated by those who would seek to exploit them, and some people seek kind people for this very purpose, they should not be mistaken for those who have genuinely embraced a philosophy that to find pleasure in good service is a strength, not a weakness. They will indeed encounter the one who seeks to exploit their offers, but the difference between those who “get suckered” and those who do not is a collection of wisdom, intelligence and frankly, a bit of cunning. A true mystic understands that to hold ideals like this, you must also know the ways of the misguided, and they do.

Now to some extent, that quote makes you go, “Hum…” I said, “What?” Well after I thought about it more, I understood what he meant and this was an important point that I’m not sure most people were willing to embrace. Maybe they were, but it would seem that most people want the quick fix or the key to just having what they want. They’re really not willing to work for it. His point was, success in life comes with predictable “overhead”. These are my words now, not his. You can’t be really wealthy (money-wise) without putting in the effort. You can’t even win the lottery without having to deal with the publicity and continual appearances of long lost cousins you never knew you had. So his point here was, stop fighting the natural and often inevitable ways of things and instead, focus your energy and growth into your ability and capacity to effectively manage such things… i.e. use some of that lottery money to pay for a permanent press secretary :) Some of this wisdom is kind of, “Duh,” but it’s amazing how many people really fail to embrace even that.

This is related to the previous concept and it’s also something that really has hit home for me over the last few years. Many of you geeks, artisans and composers will understand this part. You know that nagging perfectionist that lies within you? You know the one, the one who says, “NO, I can’t check it in tomorrow! I’m not finished refining the process loop!” Well I too was one of those perfectionist developers, perfectionist artisans and perfectionist composers. I guess if you’re a perfectionist at one thing, it carries over into anything you do. At any rate, I reported to a very brilliant guy a while back – a mastermind in terms of technology, but in the business strategy world as well. He could play both sides of the fence so well; it was really fascinating to watch him work and a gift to have him as a mentor. I recall at one point a conversation I had with him about “my stuff not being ready” and he said, “Look, I know it was ready two weeks ago, you’re just doing all kinds of stuff to it now that literally NO ONE will every know about except for you. The business people care very little, if at all, whether your product is absolutely perfect under the hood. The care less if it’s extendable for 10 years or even two years. All the care about is whether you delieverd what they asked for by the date they expected. If you achieve that, they won’t care about much else, even if you tell them you have a few things to touch-up. It’s not your definition of perfect. It’s theirs. There was more to the conversation, like my protests, but…

With that, like a beam of light from heaven, I suddenly got it. I suddenly realized the other half of the equation and this is where many brilliant people fail to pass. Your ability to be so perfect with your craft might really go unnoticed. It might prevent you from ever succeeding in the eyes of those who might enable your progression to greater heights. Your definition of perfect belongs only to you and frankly, it’s a useless concept other than to bring you a sense of satisfaction that lasts a very, very short time. Every perfectionist knows that when you succeed personally with your little projects. The effect does not last long. You quickly look for the next problem to solve and you begin the exhausting process to achieve prefection yet again. For whom? For what?

To return to the quote above, you grow in direct proportion to the amount of resistence you can sustain and dissapate. Until you learn that your contributions to any effort, and the definition of their success, are set by the participating members as a whole, you will never move beyond this obsession for a personal definition of perfection. In this case, your own obsession is the resistence, but resistence can come in many forms. The point is, learn to observe and understand the various forms of resistence that occur in the various efforts in which you find yourself. When you learn to recognize them, then you’re ready to learn how to handle them – literally sustain yourself appropriately and dissapate them as well. Now that’s an art form to master.

Okay I’m going to leave it at that cuz I’m off to bed and I wish you all a fond good night.