Today, I am on the road. Almost literally, I’m a passenger in a van headed from North Carolina to Georgia on a 3 hour drive. I have my laptop and my air card and dramamine.

When I type on the computer while driving, especially on winding road, I sometimes get a little car sick. Not so much that I’d have to worry for the safety of my keyboard, but sick enough that I feel dizzy and need to pamper myself for an hour or so until my equilibrium returns.

So this trip, I’ve taken a dramamine and am hoping that this will help keep my physical human system running long enough to get some work done on my computing system. It’s a kind of silly thing, but at the essence of it, I am using dramamine as a performance enhancing drug. I do not do this regularly. In fact this is my first time ever.

I doubt that dramamine will prove to be a gateway drug for an expansion of performance enhancing drugs or procedures. I can not see myself taking drugs normally prescribed for ADD or ADHD like many executives do from time to time.

That said, I have had my eyes lasered several years ago and that was a bit of a performance enhancing procedure.

Last night I watched the All Star game and had pause to consider just how bad it is for ball players or athletes to really take performance enhancing drugs. Don’t get me wrong, some of those drugs are un-tested and have serious and dangerous side effects. I’m not suggesting that they should be used. However, maybe efforts to prevent the use of all performance enhancing drugs is off base. Maybe the emphasis should be on driving science and medicine to find safer performance enhancing drugs for both athletes as well as regular people.

I don’t think twice about boosting my performance by purchasing more RAM for my computer or picking up a faster system or better software. My brain and my body are the most important systems I have so why should we consider ways of improving their performance that include diet and exercise and the application of science to give us an assist from time to time.  I’m not a big fan of the concept of diet pills like Leptitrex that are essentially something like speed.  But all in all there just seems like there should be a better way out there awaiting discovery and application and possibly a shift in cultural attitude.

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Here is another one of my reflections while I’m on the road. As I write this, I’m heading down the road on Interstate 75, heading north from Atlanta to St. Louis. Right now I’m just outside of Chattanooga Tennessee, I’m driving a new Toyota branded Scion Xb. I’ve got my laptop setup on a portable desktop surface the type of desktop surface you probably see when your kids are bringing you breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day or Father’s Day.

I’m driving down the road into the smoke of a vehicle fire coming from the opposite lane of traffic there is a fire or full flame burning fortunately it’s not on my side of the road. It looks like there’s a gentleman sitting alongside of the road and he doesn’t appear to be emergency personnel related so I’m hoping that he is actually the driver of the car and that he is safe and sound he didn’t look harmed in any way. Of course traffic is backed up now for miles behind this fire. Leading cars have to inch through because the flames are literally leaping across the right-hand lane of traffic.

When you’re on a road trip there are two things that you don’t want:
1. You do not want to be in an accident
2. You don’t want to have anyone that you know be hurt either
3. You also do not want to see or be apart of anything that might back traffic up for miles.

So anyway I’m driving down the road utilizing Dragon NaturallySpeaking and I’m definitely getting the hang of this road trip dictation. I learned how to navigate the file structures of Microsoft office with Dragon NaturallySpeaking finely. This is helping me avoid situations where I run out of the memory for particular dictation session, I can jump from one new document to the next saving them as I go.

Everything is nice, safe, and sound. I can use great big long file names so I know exactly where it is later on. I do not need to look at anything, and all in all, I’m falling right back in love with the software all over again, not that I ever really tell I love.

I’ve been driving for about two hours with a one-hour break for a business meeting outside of a Wendy’s, it was a phone conference. The entire road trip is supposed to take about nine in half hours so I have about 7 1/2 hours to go. That means I should be arriving at my destination at about 10 o’clock Eastern time or nine o’clock Central time.

This is a combination business/personal road trip. It’s majority business and partly personal, but that doesn’t mean I’m not and I have a little bit of fun.

My cousin Casey is getting married this weekend on Saturday and I’m going to be heading to her wedding tomorrow night. After that I’m heading to Illinois where I’m hoping to start recruiting paid interns. I’m going to show college students how to establish their own Internet businesses.

More specifically I will teach them how to be pro-bloggers and Internet marketers. When I was in college years ago, I took a paid internship for a student painting company. I was called a branch manager, but basically I went in and I set up a business. I worked as a painting contractor, I set up my own painting contracting company franchise built out from and supported by a greater organization known as Triple A student painters.

They taught me how to go out and estimate jobs, and close on house painting contracts. I then hired crews and trained them on how to paint a house. We’d go paint houses, house to house sometimes in the same neighborhood sometimes across three different counties. It was extremely valuable business experience and I learned a great deal from it.

One of the most important lessons I learned is how to say no to a job that’s just too small. Sometimes it’s just not worth the money to go do a job. In business, especially when you’re starting out, you want to take every bit of work that can come to you, but sometimes if you take a job that is to small you’ll lose money and that will cause you and your client problems.

In this endeavor I am hoping to provide a number of experiences that teach college students how to start and run their own business, I’m also hoping to help them use Pro blogging as a tool to identify what they’re passionate about and maybe that will help a few of them zero in on the major that really gets them going in the morning. A lot of times people choose majors by default and eventually just to complete college they find themselves a little bit trapped in a career that isn’t the best fit for them.

Working as a pro blogger, students can fully develop their perspective on what a topic requires and covers. If a person can write about a topic on a weekly basis for an extended period of time maybe even on a daily basis odds are they’re fairly passionate about it. That passion should be able to translate into a happy and successful career. If they get tired of the subject (this is known as blog fading in the blogosphere) they might drop that topic and find something new to tackle. That could save them and their parents thousands of dollars in tuition for a major that they may ultimately drop anyway.

With that in mind my target market for potential paid interns will be constituted primarily of college students in their freshman sophomore and junior years. I’m hoping to help the people that are still trying to make up their mind who they are, what they’re about, what’s important to them and what’s really interesting to them.

The great thing about Pro blogging is as they figure out that they can earn money building up their business skills in ways that are probably going to be as viable as some of the information they are learning in college.

I’m really looking forward to this trip and I’m really hoping to find some great new bloggers to enter the blogosphere utilizing their skills and knowledge that the rapidly acquiring in school.

With the skills and with the extra money they’ll are I’m hoping to help these college students find their voice and learn how to leverage that to get things done and achieve their goals. They might choose to spend the money and wise ways building up their business or they might even be frivolous and might spend my booze or I’ll call or they might do something practical like paying the rent or car payment, or maybe buying more education so that they can go to law school and become a New York personal injury lawyer. Regardless it’s their choice and they’ll learn from their decisions on how to spend their money just like to learn from a number of other experiences. I sure had my fair share of learning experiences at using money wisely and frittering so that money away.

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This morning my family and I woke up early and headed to a local park in Gastonia, North Carolina where there was a short 5K run for cancer scheduled.

I didn’t think about it much at the time, but I woke up and threw on the MindManager T-shirt I received from Mindjet a couple months ago.

My wife and I and our oldest 2 children, Zoe 4 and Corbin 9(yellow shirt above and behind me a bit-just after the end of the race), all ran in the event.

We were standing around after the event awaiting the awards ceremony. 

No awards for us, we were there just for the race, cause and fun.

There was a guy wearing work boots and jeans in the park with the other participants.  There was a band stand playing some seventies disco.

My youngest daughter who had been hanging out with grandma and grandpa, was thinking about dancing but not quite swaying yet.  Mya is 2 years old. 

The guy in jeans and work boots was smoking a cigarette and dancing to the disco.

Now this was an event to raise money and awareness for cancer treatments and cancer survivors, so smoking a cigarette seemed a little out of place bordering on taboo.

The guy may have been a workman, he might have been homeless.  He might have spent the night in the park and called the park home, pleasantly surprised at the celebratory music and free donuts in his living room that morning.

As I sporadically watched the guy dance a bit and looked down to my daughter to see if the mood was taking her too, I thought that the guy dancing in the park possessed an insight that many of the runners for the event had gained and then lost.

We runners had experienced a good time and had lived in the moment of the race.  Then we seemed to lose the moment, even though the memory of the positive feelings lingered with us as we awaited to cheer on the people that had won an award, trophy or medal in recognition that we had all tried hard.

The man dancing and smoking a cigarette was living in the moment however, while the rest of us watched it slip by.  I thought of these things while I was standing there.

I thought momentarily at that moment about the t-shirt I was wearing.  Not just a piece of corporate advertising passed out to spread the message about a product, but also something that represented the achievement of a family that had survived cancer multiple times a decade earlier.

I thought of the book, The Cancer Code.

I thought a bit how mindmapping had changed my perspective on a number of things and how it helped me to capture the moment, the now inside my head on a visual static snap shot on my computer screen.

These days I live in the moment much more than I have for many years.  By mindmapping out my thoughts and plans, experiences and knowledge, I have gained a new found confidence, appreciation and understanding of who I am and where I am going and that enables me to focus on the here and now just a little bit better.

Sometimes, my here and now is online or in a computer screen and that is a bit of a weakness or flaw, but its also an opportunity for me to move on and do better in the future.

All of these thoughts went through my brain in the park today and some of them trickled in the rest of the day.  Clearing out the BS, a kind of neural colon cleanseing like experience.

I think all in all, it helped me recognize something that I had been missing the last couple of weeks.

The shirt, my family, the guy dancing carefree in the park, it all mapped out in my head a clear knowledge or understanding of that particular point in time.

For that point, I was connected to myself and that made the day perfect.

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I am the type of person that often wakes up in the middle of the night with the idea that solves a problem that I’ve been pondering all day long.  I also come up with some very good ideas while I am taking a shower. 

Today I came up with an idea in the shower and knew that I had to copy it down somehow before lost the idea.  It was just a little too fragile.

The problem was that my computer was locked up somewhere else, of course I’m in the shower and not prepared to go running out of the house and grabbed my computer out of the car right to crank it up and then capture the idea, the neighbors would probably complain, the cops would be called, I’d go to jail, and the idea would be lost.

I’m also that same type of technological idiot that doesn’t keep a piece of paper and a pen around.  I was off for a high-tech solution.  Today that created a real problem.

It didn’t stop me for long however, I got out of the shower and I thought to myself, there’s a perfectly good mirror in front of you.

The mirror was fogged over to my shower.  I quickly turn the exhaust fan also would pull the steam out of the room and erase my potential future mind map, and I began mind mapping on the mirror and the steam.

It didn’t take me long to capture the idea on the mirror.  However, when I was done I realize I’m still the same dilemma that I was when I first stepped out of the shower.

Now I should mention that my wife doesn’t use lipstick very often, but I had the notion that if I could find some lipstick I could trace back over the finger marking diet made on the mirror.  So I quickly began hunting through the bathroom vanities in the house attempting to find some lipstick.

Hang in there and, there’s a point to this story

I eventually found some lipstick, it wasn’t my wife’s lipstick.  It was actually my four-year-old daughter’s lipstick, simply stuff that she had received somewhere. I think it might have been one of those sample type things and maybe a relatively given it to her to play with.

I taught myself it would be bad to user lipstick.  She’d be upset that I used to lipstick on something like work when she could be used in it for play.  I rapidly reasoned that I would be making up for all the times that she had used markers crams pens and pencils on our walls at home in the turnabout is fair play even with a four year old.

So I outline the mind map with the lipstick and everything was rosy, literally.

This is when I had my second idea of the day.

Wouldn’t it be useful to have an optical character recognition tool that could capture the essence of a diagram from a photograph. 

You see I was being lazy or reliant on technology again.  I wanted to take a picture of the mind map and run the image to an OCR tool, which would then convert that image directly and to a MindManager mind map.

Now your average business user isn’t going to need an opt or character recognition tool to copy images off of their bathroom mirror.  However, it could be very useful to deal with copy an image off of a white board or even a piece of paper and have it interpret into a mind map.

So if you’re a developer or programmer and want to take this idea and run, go for it you probably will make a fortune with.  I’m going to make a fortune with the other idea that I captured and don’t have time for this one.

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Since I started working primarily from a home office, I’ve been able to eliminate a number of things from my life as I simplify.

First, I got rid of my car (I kept a small motorcycle for short local trips.)

With the car I got rid of a number of things that go with the car.

I sold my radar detectors at a garage sale. I gave my CD holder to my son, dumped the extra local maps, hands free gadgets, ice scrapers, tire pressure checker thing(digital of course) and a bunch of other things including my car insurance plan and twenty pounds in Dunkin Donuts, donuts and croissants!

All those things cost me about $500 - $600 per month or about $6,000 - $7,200 per year. If the rest of the US could emulate that type of experience, the economy would simplify or contract by about $1.8 billion per year. . . . . .

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