"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."
Genuine Curiosity
Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.
Is something eating you?
If you're a regular visitor to this blog, you may have noticed that I no longer have any of those hover popup windows coming up for any of my links. Those originally came about out of my fascination for futzing around with things, and went away because of something that happened today.
Here's what went down: I got an email from Eric, who told me that he was very annoyed with them and asked if I'd consider taking them off. No problem - I figure that his one complaint could represent numerous other folks who find them annoying, so they are gone.
As he pointed out, he could have simply moved on and stopped coming here. Instead, he chose to let me know so I would have the opportunity to make this site a more enjoyable place for him. I love that.
It's unlikely people will fix things if they don't know they're broken
Is there someone in your life that's bugging you, but you haven't let them know? If they don't know it's a problem there's not much hope they'll do anything to improve the situation, is there?
What can you do? Here are some possibilities:
- Complain about the person who's annoying you to someone else
- Bottle it up inside and tough it out
- Wait until things reach the boiling point and unleash the rage
- Walk away and give up
Unfortunately, none of these is likely to make the situation much better.
Take responsibility for your own well-being
From time to time, I'd venture we could all take a cue from Eric.
If someone is doing something that annoys you: In the spirit of wanting to make things better, let them know you're not satisfied with the current situation, and tell them how you'd like things to be.
Sure, the popup thing was a pretty small issue for me to fix. But Eric's approach works for the big stuff, too. And who knows - you just might get what you ask for.
Read MoreNow, type with your hands
Today on Talking Story, I'm a guest author with a post on learning - thanks to Rosa Say's focus on learning this month. In the post, I talk about why I'm glad I was required to take a typing class in high school. The post is more about learning than specifically about typing, but I've gotten a couple of comments (on and off the blog) about people who wish they'd taken typing (or paid more attention in typing class).
If you are not happy with your current typing skills, all is not lost. I highly recommend the Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing as a means to rapidly improve your typing skills. This is a very well done, interactive teaching session that adapts its lessons based on your initial typing ability and progress as you use the product.
You start with a test to establish a baseline and guide you to the appropriate starting point. At each step of the way there is a nice mix of instruction, practice, and testing. And, you can do it in nice little chunks, as required for your schedule. I got it a couple of years ago, at the advice of David Allen, and improved my accuracy while improving my typing speed by about 25%.
Or, you could always use the speech-to-text product I mentioned in my last post. But I still think typing is a foundational skill in today's environment.
If you try out (or have tried) "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing", I'd love to hear how you like it.
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Read MoreFresh Gear: Type with your mouth
A few months ago, I purchased a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. If you're not familiar with it, Dragon is a software product that allows you to talk to your computer, then types what you say.
When I began considering NaturallySpeaking, I needed to create a talk track for some PowerPoint slides. I found that when I sat down to type speaker notes something was lost from the way that I normally presented the material. To help make my speaker notes more conversational, I picked up a copy of NaturallySpeaking.
At first, I was a little skeptical, thinking, "Is this thing really going to work? After all I used to have a Newton and it never recognized my handwriting?" Nonetheless, I decided to give it a try.
I must say, I have been very pleased with the results. I haven't used the product that often, but there are certain circumstances in which I feel typing stifles my creative flow. In those situations (usually involving presentations) I fire up NaturallySpeaking, and start talking. And, I find I'm beginning to use it more often.
When you first install the product, you calibrate your headset microphone (one is included, but I've purchased a Logitech one that is smaller for travel, which I also use with Skype). You then go through a brief training session in which to read some sample text so the program can get used to hearing you speak. It then creates a user specific profile so that they can learn from you and get better or recognizing your speech over time. Even during the initial usage period, I've found NaturallySpeaking to be very accurate, and it gets better over time.
Now I can type pretty quickly, but I find I can produce a heck of a lot more text with NaturallySpeaking than I can in the same period of time typing of course, more is not always better, but I can't help think how much easier it would have been to write those papers in high school if I'd had NaturallySpeaking.
After a couple of sessions of using the product, you get used to saying punctuation words like "comma" and "new paragraph" as you speak, and it becomes very easy to remember all of the editing commands and other tools that are built in to NaturallySpeaking. By using the product's interface to perform the corrections, you help it improve its accuracy over time.
So, if you are a frustrated, hunt and peck typist (or you just want to let your hair down and start talking to let your muse flow) you might want to take a look at Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
By the way, this whole post was written in about eight minutes using NaturallySpeaking. And the only manual editing I did was the insertion of the hyperlinks and the image. I'm sure there's a way to do that with a NaturallySpeaking, but I have only really started using the product in the last couple of weeks and there are a whole host of commands I haven't even tried to figure out yet.
Read MorePlaying to Your Strengths
I had my annual performance review with my company's CEO last Friday. On Tuesday, I received a copy of the "review" to prepare for the meeting.
Our CEO's style is direct and open, and that style carried through to my review. My review was about a page and a half, summarizing major accomplishments from the last year, a few paragraphs summarizing some of the "360 feedback" he'd asked for from folks I worked with (mostly positive), and a couple of lines about an area where I can improve. And, there were no surprises in the review.
When we got started in the discussion, his conversation mapped pretty closely to those proportions: lots of time spent on accomplishments and positive feedback, but only a few minutes on things that didn't go so well.
I mentioned that I'd like to spend some more time talking about the areas where I'd had challenges or failures during the past year, so I could learn from them.
His reply really struck me. Here's what he said:
"Sure, we can discuss what you've learned from those challenges, but I don't want to spend too much time on that.
"One of the things I've learned in my career is that we all have areas of strength and areas of weakness. A 10% improvement in a strength can make a huge difference; a 10% improvement in an area of weakness probably won't have nearly as much of an impact.
"Let's focus on how to make the most of your strengths and make them even stronger."
I think this is good food for thought for anyone. When I think about the times I felt really proud of my results, it was when I was using my strengths.
You only have so much time and energy. Where will you invest your 10%? Always strive to make choices that put you in situations where your strengths can make a real difference.
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