The Invisible Mentor

Posts Tagged ‘Social media’

I have never given museum curation much thought, and I first learned about online curation in the fall of 2010 from Social Media Examiner in their post How to Grow a Following With Other People’s Popular Content. However, during Social Media Week Toronto, I attended an excellent session titled Curation vs. Curation, where the panel compared curation in the context of museums with curation online.

The big question is, are online “curators” true Curators?

According to Dictionary.com, curator [cu•ra•tor - kyoo-rey-ter] means “the person in charge of a museum, art collection.” Museum curators are also responsible for choosing and acquiring the pieces displayed in the museum, as well as deciding how the pieces will be displayed.

Content curators on the other hand, “review and filter articles and blog posts from across the web.” At the Social Media Week Toronto session, the panel emphasized that for true curation to take place online, the curator has to add their insights to the information that they have reviewed and filtered. Mark Farmer, Website Redesign Manager, Royal Ontario Museum one of the panelist remarked, “Curation is the value you bring to a set of information.” Having a list of links to excellent content is not true curation, you have to add your thoughts and reactions to the content that you have reviewed and filtered.

I found this distinction quite helpful in clarifying who is and who isn’t a curator. This is another instance where one idea is transported from one industry and used in another creating innovation. What idea can you transport from another industry to innovate the way in which you perform your work?

In the session, they also talked about crediting the source of the original information. You can easily do so by linking to the original source. I use the Zemanta and Scribe SEO plugins to enhance my blog posts, and I tend to stick with photos in the public domain and those I have taken myself. When using YouTube videos, at the end of the post, I usually have a link back to the person who uploaded the video to YouTube. I am slowly going through my old posts to ensure that I give proper credit.

In How to Grow a Following With Other People’s Popular Content, they mention Cadmus, PostRank, and Yahoo Pipes as great content creation tools. In addition to reading many blogs to keep informed, I use Google Alerts, and SmartBriefs, to learn about really great content. I have tried to add value to blog posts and create a multimedia experience by adding relevant videos, when appropriate, as well as further reading. Now that I know more about “true” content curation, I have to pay more attention to how and where I place the additional content such as the video, so that it brings maximum value to the blog post.

Where you can find content curation tools

Best Free Content Curation Tools 2012

30+ Cool Content Curation Tools for Personal & Professional Use

Content Curation Tools for B2B Marketing

The Best Tools for Content Curation 

Can you use content curation in your work? How about if you curated content that senior level executives in your organization would appreciate and add your thoughts before you forwarded them?

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Interviewee Name: Chris Kulbaba, Career and Employment Counsellor, Public Speaker

Company Name: London Employment Help Centre

Website: http://linkedinheavyweight.com  

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Chris Kulbaba:  I consider myself to be first and foremost a family man so that’s really my focus. I have six children between my partner and I so family is very important. The next thing is that I consider myself to be a helper and a collector. I was told very recently that I collect people and information, and I thought that was a very appropriate description of me. And the last thing is I consider myself to be a social media fanatic – I love that stuff.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Chris Kulbaba: A Monday to Friday typical day means getting up at six o’clock, taking my two dogs out to do their business, then having my breakfast while I’m updating and connecting with all my social media channels. I usually leave the house at 7:45 am, so it’s about an hour in the morning that I am doing social media. A day at work is never truly typical however because I do several things: I facilitate workshops, I do individual counselling, I also do group intakes, and I teach several different workshops.

So day-to-day I could be in a workshop, or doing personal counselling, or writing resumes, or doing resume practice, or discussing life skills with clients. So in that mix of items I see clients until about 4:30, from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm is my regular work hours, then of course I come home and I like to have dinner at home. I like to talk to my family and see what their day is like and somewhere between 9 and 10 pm usually for a half-an-hour to 45 minutes I am updating and connecting on social media.

That’s what I do Mondays to Fridays! Saturdays I try to set aside some time for my blogging, usually for an hour in the morning before anyone gets up.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Chris Kulbaba:  When I looked at the questions, believe it or not this was the hardest one I found to answer. I try to empathize with all of my clients because I was also a job seeker several times and I remember the feelings that came with that position. So the most important thing for me is to sit myself in my client’s shoes when I’m dealing with a client, and I try to do that with many of my network contacts. I try to imagine what I can help them with, and who do I know that can help them.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Chris Kulbaba: I have asked myself this question several times. And I don’t know if I would do too many things differently because the mistakes I’ve made have helped to shape my attitude, my beliefs, and my goals so knowing what I now know I would honestly say that I wouldn’t do much differently. I am who I am because of the struggles that I’ve had so I don’t know if I would do anything differently if I could still come out the other end knowing what I know and feeling what I feel and believing what I believe. I might have stayed in school a bit longer for more formal education, if I had to choose one thing that would be it.

Avil Beckford: What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

Chris Kulbaba: I discovered the true impact that social media can have. A quick story, in the past year I’ve helped people become Canadian citizens from India that had reached out to me through LinkedIn and that was pretty significant that I could do that for them for free. That was a very significant discovery I made about the true scope and reach of these tools. It’s a global tool.

Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Chris Kulbaba:

1. I work for a community service agency so one of the threats to that particular business is the impact of the economic crisis. We are having a very difficult time helping our clients find jobs. One of the strategies we are using is networking actively with employers to try to understand what they are looking for in a job seeker so that we can further help to coach our clients to be successful.
2. Another threat that is coming to my personal business – The LinkedIn Heavyweight, the things I’m doing with LinkedIn – is the challenge to show other people, how effective it is and unfortunately social media is not a silver bullet. So after actively using this tool for several years now and learning, changing and strategizing, I’m finally able to point to specific successes that I’ve made through network contacts through social media, then I’m further bringing other people in front of me explaining to them, “this is some of the impact that this communication tool can have.”
3. The final threat is having people challenge me when they do not get immediate results, they point that out. Again I have to come back to the fact that social media and communicating and networking in this way is an organic process and like anything organic, you need to nurture and feed it. So the first thing I now do with clients at the beginning is ask them a few quick questions such as: What is your end goal, what do you want to accomplish? How much time are you willing to commit to this? and How are you going to nurture and feed your network so that it grows into a vibrant organism.

Avil Beckford: So Chris, have you gotten any business through LinkedIn?

Chris Kulbaba: Absolutely, it hasn’t been business in the sense that I’m making a profit, so when I say that I’m having business through LinkedIn, I’ve been able to interact with several different people and give them very pointed feedback to increasing the effectiveness of their LinkedIn profile. So at this point as I’m strategizing my own business I’m doing some A, B, C testing so I’m trying Strategy A, Strategy B and so on to see which one is generating the results I want. So at this point, my definition of business and my definition of success are measured by the number of referrals that I’m getting from these first few clients. I’ve made some profit but it’s quite negligible at this point. My goal wasn’t to make a profit, it was to determine the saturation of what I can offer inside the market, to see if people want to buy. The answer so far is yes.

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Chris Kulbaba: What’s unique is that I bring it forward to job seekers and I help them to envision themselves through a different lens. So utilizing social media as a broadcasting platform for your personal brand is one part of it, but it’s also determining your features and benefits. So what I do is use the analogy of a car. When you bought your last car did you buy it because it has four wheels, windows, doors and a trunk, you probably didn’t buy it for those features because they are on every car. Maybe you bought the car because the design was what you wanted, maybe you bought it because of the heated seats, there is a feature that attracted you to that car that’s unique, and then the benefits to those features. So maybe the car was a nice colour, and it was a nice design. Job seekers are the same, as a person you have a feature, so how does that benefit the employer? How can you tell people about the features that you have and the benefits to them. How can you engage them in conversation about your features and benefits?

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?

Chris Kulbaba: The major challenge I had in life was figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I worked in a factory for 16 years and I didn’t realize that I could do something different. I was making good money and I had full benefits and I thought that was as good as it was going to get, and then the factory closed and I was very lost and very hurt.

I met some people form the community services and I fell into the world of career development, and not only that, I learned that I had a natural aptitude for the work and that it was just so rewarding and enriching to help people solve pain that I was experiencing and that I had experienced, and for me that was a huge challenge to figure out what I wanted to be and how I wanted to do it.

I started off with information interviews. I had never written a resume until my mid-thirties because every job I had had until then was through a family member. The major challenge was how to write a resume when I’m here trying to help people write resumes and I don’t know how to write one myself. So I had to figure out what I wanted to do. As Coordinator of the Action Centre, which the government funded under contract after the business closed, I was able to network and learn and I was also able to define myself slowly as a career development practitioner. I was also slowly able to create a niche for myself in this industry by listening, investigating and taking action through a strategic process. I’d say it took me two years of effort to fully immerse myself into this sector to feel comfortable in it.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Chris Kulbaba: I would have to say my big break was Coordinator of the Action Centre. A mentor, the HR manager was advocating for me to get that position. That was a huge break and it really set me up for everything that has happened in the last four-and-a-half years.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Chris Kulbaba:  My biggest failure in my life was my marriage. It takes two to make it and it takes two to break it. So what I learned out of that was any relationship, whether it’s personal or professional is going to wither and die if you don’t feed it. If you do not use the F word once in a while, and that is feedback, you have to ask the other person are they getting what they need and then you have to decide if you can or can’t provide it. When I started to apply those lessons, and I still stumble and fall,  I learned that nurturing a relationship is a lot of effort and a lot of work but of course the more you put into it the more you are going to get out of it whether it’s personal or professional.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Chris Kulbaba: The toughest decision I had to make was to leave the Action Centre and start looking for other work. I was running the Action Centre helping people, some of them had high school, some of them were in their fifties and had a grade nine education. They were looking to me to help them and their families. As I looked around the Action Centre and tried to ask other people to take part of the role that I was doing nobody was willing to do it. I had a very difficult decision about stepping out of that role so that I could provide for myself and family while at the same time trying to train a successor and trying to ensure that everyone was still getting the quality service they needed. It was very, very difficult.

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

Chris Kulbaba:

1. The first event happened when I was just a young person. I was 15 years old and we were on vacation in the Cayman Islands and I learned of my thirst for travel and other cultures, how deep it was within me simply by experiencing a wonderful place that was so different from my own. So very early on I had a real desire to learn about cultures, different places and to visit other places.
2. Another event was failing university, and when I say failing, it’s not failing academically. I failed to choose education-wise a career path that was right for me. In university I had taken music education. At the age of fourteen I was playing with the London Youth Symphony, at aged 16, I was invited to play with the Western Symphony Orchestra, so I thought this makes sense and I didn’t really investigate it. When I got to university and started taking the schooling, in the middle of it I realized it was a really bad decision, this isn’t something I should have done.
3. The third moment that really impacted my entire life was when I insulted a friend of mine. We were at the factory working the night shift and he was doing day trading, real estate and he was working at the factory. So I said to him, “Why are you at the factory, you really do not belong here?” He was very angry and turned to me and said, “Who the hell are you to tell me that I do not belong? What are you doing to improve your life?” I thought about what he said and he was right, so for the next 11 years I took continuing education courses at college and university.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Chris Kulbaba:  This may sound a bit hokey, but I’m really proud of my children. That’s a big accomplishment for me to listen when we’re discussing life decisions and hear how they rationalize their decisions, and to hear their values and to see their interactions with other people. They are polite, very intelligent, that’s a huge accomplishment to me to know that as a father and a parent I have helped them to make good decisions.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Chris Kulbaba: They are still mentoring and still influencing my life. It was a very difficult process because I was being mentored without knowing that I was being mentored by several people. And when I finally stopped pushing against the flow of information and I started to accept and embrace it that was when the true learning began. Since then I have tried to use my ear twice as much as my mouth, something I still struggle with. The return on that investment by my mentors has been enormous. One of the other influences of mentors is one of my mentors telling me that I can mentor other people.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Chris Kulbaba: There are four people I would consider as mentors and the biggest message I received is to stop getting in my own way.

Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Chris Kulbaba:  Always walk you talk. If you are going to say that something is important then that’s the way you should behave.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Interviewee Name: Mary Schnack

Company Name: Mary Schnack & Associates

Website: http://www.maryschnack.com

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Mary Schnack: I was born on a farm in Iowa, played basketball in school, and was a journalism major in college. I was a practicing journalist for eight years before I went into public relations. Now I have my own public relations consulting business. I’m based in the Washington DC area after living in Los Angeles and Arizona for almost 35 years. And I also travel around the world doing speaking engagements and communications training: Business communication training like PR, media training, crisis communications, and branding at conferences, and seminars that are particularly set up for a business audience or for women’s groups.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Mary Schnack: I love it that I don’t have a typical day and that keeps it really interesting. I generally work pretty long hours because I enjoy the work I do. I usually meet with somebody for one of the meals and write during the day. At night I might be going to a movie, having dinner with friends, and hopefully I’ll have some time to get exercise in. And the other thing I want to add to my day is I want to do some meditation.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Mary Schnack: Oh that’s a great question. I think I motivate myself by doing for others. I get really excited when something happens for somebody else. It’s great when something happens for me too, but maybe a tool that I taught them, a communications tool had a positive effect, or somebody has grown their business, or somebody found a job, or a kid had his success in school. I like to hear about other people’s success and that maybe I was a bit of an inspiration for that.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Mary Schnack: Well for one thing I hate to go back and look at things that way, I’d rather look forward at what I’m going to do and change moving forward. However that’s also a pretty easy answer for me. When I started my business, I would have had a business plan based on financials that would’ve been a roadmap as much as a marketing plan. I think I went more by marketing than by finances and what I’ve learned over the years is how much you have to manage your business by finances as well.

Avil Beckford: What’s the most important business or other discovery you’ve made in the past year?

Mary Schnack: I think the importance of inspiration, being inspired and inspiring others.  I went through my seventh cancer surgery this year and it really threw me into a depression. I guess it took seven times to get me down but what it took to get me out of that and like your earlier question what motivates me and really taking a look at that, so I think being inspired and being inspiring.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the biggest advances in your industry over the past five years?

Mary Schnack: Without a doubt that would be social media. Social media has changed public relations and has changed outreach. And at first when it was happening, I thought, “Thank goodness I’m older and I don’t need to learn that.” Well wrong, but it’s been fun learning it, and it reminded me how much fun it is to learn new things and to incorporate the new ways of outreach. And now that’s one of the areas of specialty for my business.

Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Mary Schnack:

1. One big threat to my business is the recession and people having a lot less money to spend. The way that I’m handling that is by getting out there networking at an accelerated frantic speed. The more people I meet, the more people I touch, reconnect with, the better it is.
2. A second threat would be my seventh cancer surgery. It’s really hard to be getting a trajectory with your business and then be out of commission for one to two months and then emotionally what that does to your energy and your motivation, so that makes it hard. What I’ve done for that is like I said looking at inspiration, what inspires me to move forward.
3. The third thing would be the fact that I moved. I moved from the west coast to the east coast. You know a move is always difficult and costly, but I always look at this as the reason I moved is to be in a more vibrant business environment. That’s why I’m here and of course it is true there is hardly a place more vibrant than Washington DC. Sometimes you just have to keep reminding yourself why you have done the things that you have done and that’s what I think sometimes I’ve had to do with the move.

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Mary Schnack: What is unique, are three things: One is that you have fun working with us, we don’t believe in real serious business. Of course business is serious, people want good customer service and to get their money’s worth, but you might as well have fun while you’re doing it. And number two is that I think we are very creative, we think out-of-the-box, even though that statement think outside-the-box is not creative, but we are very creative and we don’t look at the standard way of doing things and that’s why we were one of the early adopters of social media. The another thing is that we really believe in working as team, we don’t believe in working as a vacuum, and I believe team work is the basis of good business, so those are the three things I would say.

Avil Beckford: What do you observe most people in your field doing badly that you think you do well?

Mary Schnack: I don’t think they have great customer service for a long-term client. We want to be new and fresh every day, and so what if you’ve been our client for two years. We’re doing the things that have been successful and hopefully will remain successful, but we also want to look at what’s the new, fresh approach we can take as well.

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?

Mary Schnack: I needed to be flexible and I needed to look at the reality of my situation. I lived in a beautiful resort community Sedona, Arizona, and as wonderful as it was to live there, the reality was if I wanted to grow my business again it wasn’t going to happen from that location.  I couldn’t sit there and feel sorry for myself, I had to look at how I’m going to move on and create a good life for me elsewhere where I could also grow my business.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Mary Schnack: I’d like to think I gave myself the big break by applying things I learned to present-day situations. I would say one of the biggest breaks I had was in starting my business in 1992. I had worked for eight years at two hospitals in Los Angeles, and we handled a lot of crises at these hospitals. Well we handled a lot of crises in that if there was a train crash at LAX the victims would come to our hospital. When there was the riots in Los Angeles in 1992 the most famous victim Reginald Denny the truck driver came to the hospital, plus 99 others the first night. We were one of the busiest hospitals, and I was able to take what I had learned in journalism and make it be very successful as far as outreach for the hospital in those crisis situations. So when I started my own business, I had this very strong reputation for the work I had done, and again it was to move ahead on the successes that I had had. What have you done, and acknowledging what your successes are, and how you can use those as a platform to keep moving up.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Mary Schnack: I don’t think anything is a failure, I think everything is a lesson, and we can learn as much, if not more from the tough lessons as we can from the bigger ones. When the dotcom crash happened, overnight we lost $20,000 to $30,000 a month in revenues. Literally we lost that much within 30 days. You want to make sure that you never put too many eggs in one basket, that you can be spread out so if one type of business goes away, you have other types of businesses to back that up, and that you’re always looking at the next piece of business coming in. And you’re always looking at how to satisfy your current clients. Like I said before, do not take them for granted, and figure out how you can move on and continue to build business.

Avil Beckford: What has been your biggest disappointment in your life – and what are you doing to prevent its reoccurrence?

Mary Schnack: The hardest thing I’m going through in my life is cancer and having it return so often. I don’t think there’s anything I can to prevent its reoccurrence, but what I must do is keep up on my check-ups, keep up on my exercise and healthy eating, and my positive attitude and live as good a life as I can, but not be in denial, and to know there is a possibility that it will come back again and what I am doing about that.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Mary Schnack: One of the toughest decisions was I had a business partner in Los Angeles and I had to decide whether to stay with the partnership or not. We knew we had a few years age difference so when my daughter was graduating from high school she was just getting engaged and ready to start a family. It was a very hard decision to break up the partnership, but our lifestyle goals were not the same any more. There are positive things about being in business alone, but on the other hand it was good having a partner to work with and to grow together.

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

Mary Schnack: One is definitely the cancer and I’d say two becoming an entrepreneur and three is my daughter.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Mary Schnack: Definitely my daughter! She is 28 years old now, and she has some learning and emotional disabilities but she is basically living independently, and that’s been a lot of work and a lot of direction, and a lot of heartache, but she is extremely happy and that’s definitely the thing that I’m proudest of that I raised her to be independent and not to lean on her disabilities as a crutch.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Mary Schnack: Mentors influenced my life and continue to influence my life. I have two or three probably more different mentors that I work with all the time, and thank goodness I have those sounding boards, the people giving me advice. I would say they’ve had a great influence both in living my life personally and businesswise.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Mary Schnack: I continue to receive messages from them. One of the first messages I received was to continue to learn, to continue to expand. With something like social media, you think, “I’m too old for that, I don’t want to deal with that.” We have to continue to learn, and continue to be educated, and grow as people, and grow as businesses, and it’s also a lot of fun.

Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Mary Schnack: My one piece of advice is to really look at your successes and let people know what they are, and that doesn’t mean sitting back and bragging about yourself. But it does mean sharing your wisdom, and having people understand why you are sharing that wisdom because you have that experience. When I do my speeches overseas, we also hear this in the United States, but when I do my speeches overseas even more so, “My culture doesn’t allow that, I could never do that.” And my response is “By you sharing your successes there might be a 10-year old girl out there that hears your story and says, ‘Wow, I can go after my dreams.’” And what a shame it is if you miss the chance to inspire that 10-year old girl.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

In the webinar “LinkedIn Fundamentals”, Jan Vermeiren author of How to Really Use LinkedIn shared a few tips that I’d like to pass on. To be honest, I haven’t spent a lot of time learning about most of the functionalities of LinkedIn, but after “LinkedIn Fundamentals” I made a few changes and will make more tomorrow.

1. We’ve all heard the phrase that givers get, so a simple way to give is to add a Slideshare presentation with helpful information. This reminded me that I have not created a presentation in over a year.
2. With over 17 years research experience I know that one of the ways to narrow search results is to use the Advanced Search feature, and this is the same for LinkedIn. So for instance if you’d like to create a list of marketing managers in a specific city, you can narrow your search by using Advanced Search.
3. Use LinkedIn as a research tool and not as a contact tool. This sounds counterintuitive, but with the proliferation of social media and networks, communication can often be impersonal. Let’s say you are trying to reach the Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) within a certain industry in a specific region, conduct your search, identify which of your contacts know these CMOs. If more than one of your contacts is directly connected to any CMO, get in touch with your contacts that you have the best relationship with by telephone, and gather information about the CMO, then ask for an introduction by email. This makes the process a bit more personal.

What are some LinkedIn tips that you would like to share with us? How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

There are many experts who give us the magic formula for how to become successful, but the truth is that success is very personal and each of us has our own definition of what success means. Last week at Social Media Week Toronto, there were sessions on how to engage fans, how to brand your business, how to become a blog star and so on, with the underlying theme geared toward increasing the bottom line.

With the popularity of social media, many are hanging out online hoping to strike it rich, forgetting that it’s still important to network offline to build relationships. But as the most successful people know, business transactions are still very much conducted face-to-face.  Business is about relationships. Most people who have made a significant amount of money using social media, have a strong offline presence as well.

So how do you become a Star?

From the many interviews that I have conducted, and the seminars and workshops I have attended over the years, there is a basic formula for worthwhile success. What do you want from life? What is your true purpose, what are you passionate about? What are your strengths and weaknesses? What skills, knowledge and experiences do you have that you enjoy using?

After you have figured that out, develop your plan including action steps. What are potential obstacles? What steps do you have to take to eliminate those obstacles? Which influencers can you enrol to get you where you want to go? Then you have to work really hard to realize your dream. Achieving success takes commitment and hard work. Remember the tale of the turtle and the hare? It’s not about the swift, but those who can endure, so what’s your level of endurance?

In the Social Media Week Toronto workshop How to Be a Blog Star: The Artistry of Your Personal Brand, session leader Sean Ward says that you have to be authentic, communicate so people take notice, be prolific, and consistent. This is good advice for non-bloggers as well.

Worthwhile success and happiness go hand-in-hand, and you cannot achieve them unless you pursue your purpose in life and do so doggedly. If you are doing what you were meant to do in life, you will take the necessary actions to get you there. Are you ready to be the Star that you were meant to be?

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.