DAY 4 of 31 Days to Radical Excellence

Radical Excellence for Writers Who Want to be Authors

By definition, I suppose an author is a writer who has been published. In my opinion, the willingness to run the risk of rejection is the first step in becoming an author. You need to have courage to put your writings up for inspection in the public square. Furthermore, you must savor the risk as much as the reward.

In this electronic universe in which we live there are several ways of being “published.”

• Use the various Social Media sites to write something more meaningful than, “Took the kids to the park today.”
• Write articles for ezines such as ezinearticles.com.
• Create your own blog or website.

Obviously there are many more avenues that can be used to get your work out there, but those would be good starters.

The most important step is the first one… get something out somewhere!

Prime the pump.

Let it flow.

By the way, if you don’t know what “prime the pump” means, talk to somebody old.

 

DAY 3 of 31 Days to Radical Excellence

Radical Excellence for Hopeful Online Entrpreneurs

 

Building an online business is not easy. By now I’m sure you have found that out. It takes time, energy, persistence and patience.

The simple tip for today is something we all likely know, but often get so busy or distracted that we ignore it.

Put simply…

Make Sure You Do SOMETHING PRODUCTIVE Every Single Day!

There are a multitude of active things to do, but here are a few that will produce a growing and efficient web business.

• Continue writing page content
• Write and publish one market-oriented article
• Make one response on a relevant blog

Just think. By doing one simple action each day, your website will be continuously growing in quality and quantity. Keep the content flowing, market and expand your reach.

As you have the persistence and patience to keep at the task, your business is bound to grow.

 

DAY TWO: How We Got to this Awful Place

 

On this second day it is critical that we understand fully why and how we got to this awful place, this place where mediocrity is the norm… and very few people care.

One of the contributing components is what I call

The Flat Screen Generation

Students today are being raised by flat screens. TV, videos, computers, movies, video games, and cell phones create a concentrated culture of flat screens carrying messages that require little thought or meditation. Almost everything kids watch today is at the shallowest, most emotional level of interaction. Car chases, dragons to slay, and videos with startling images enter the eyes, titillate the emotions, and quickly transition to the next intense image. Nowhere does the watcher have the time to relax, muse, ponder or repeat. Should we wonder, then, why students struggle with criticathinking issues, panic when in-depth analysis is required, or shut down when readings contain polysyllabic words?

Flat screens rule.

Not only do they rule, they consume. There was a day when little children woke up in the morning and did something. They played, they read, maybe even went and bugged mom and dad. Now, even very young children slip quietly from their bed, find the remote and sit transfixed on the floor as the every-morning cartoons (or worse) enter their eyes and infiltrate their minds.

As kids consume a continuing diet of visual stimulation followed by emotional reaction, they can kiss thinking goodbye.
Ray Bradbury predicted it. In Fahrenheit 451, the elimination of books had essentially demolished thinking. The burning of books had essentially removed the concept of vision from the minds of people. Hope arose when Bradbury writes, “…Then he met a professor who told him of a future in which people could think…and Guy Montag suddenly realized what he had to do!”

We don’t need to burn books now to keep kids from reading. We don’t even need to hide them. Just give the kid a TV-remote, iPod or video game player and the books go unread.

Personal Peace and Prosperity

Francis Schaeffer warned us in The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century that “… men will end up owning only two values…personal peace and personal affluence.” By personal peace he meant that men would hold to the concept of “let me do my own thing. Don’t bug me.” In Schaeffer’s mind, personal affluence meant that men would have the economic ability to make entertainment and easy enjoyment very affordable.
The movie Star Wars launched an exciting new generation of graphics, and in so doing, may have generated a whole new way of absorbing information. One amazing special effect after another kept us on the edge of our seats, not thinking, but reacting. Movies started advertising the special effects, often even more than plots or story lines.

So what’s the big deal? What’s intrinsically wrong with great action? What can be harmful about amazing car chases or explosions?
For starters, God wrote to us. He really did. And books require reading. I know that’s a simple thought, but it’s true. It isn’t just God-words, either. Ideas are communicated by rather lengthy written discourse. For example, the philosophies and ideas of an American Revolution did not occur by a series of ten-second sound bites on the evening news, but were transmitted by extensive publication and distribution of revolutionary pamphlets.
People read books and pamphlets… and the world was changed.

On DAY ONE of 31 Days to Radical Excellence, it’s important to understand the real meaning of the term Radical Excellence.

I know this sounds like an old guy ranting and raving, but as a classroom teacher now in my forty-ninth year (how time flies when you’re having this much fun!) I have seen a progressively declining ability to achieve a substantial degree of excellence in my students. More and more, I see students obsessed with EED’s (Electronic Enjoyment Devices) and simultaneously accepting a level of mediocrity that reeks of apathy.

Tortured Idealists.

Harry Blamires is one of my favorite authors, and in his book, The Christian Mind, he says, “Idealists are the most tortured of all people.”

Well, I admit to being an idealist. Definitely not a perfectionist, but an optimistic person who almost always looks on the best of any student or situation. Thus I hold to an unswerving hope that we can rekindle the desire and ability to become a nation of thinkers and doers.

I am most hopeful, that we can reach levels of excellence in anything we want.We can reach levels of excellence that so far exceed the norms of today that it’s considered radical.

There is no magic bullet, no cheap and easy way, to do this. But there is a workable way.

Interestingly, whatever we do we can perform much better if we start by returning to traditional values. Some of those values that produce excellence are as follows.

• Integrity
• Timeliness
• Patience
• Persistence

As we go through 31 Days to Radical Excellence I will give specific examples of how those characteristics will lead to Radical Excellence if properly applied. Even though I will address several different areas of living, you will find something of benefit in each section of being alive.

Join us on a daily basis as we share various hints on how to achieve what perhaps you have only dreamed of.