Stephen talks about how many successful people he’s interviewed don’t equate their success to lots of goal setting and how people become stressed by goal setting. Likewise todo lists can become a real burden and get in the way of what needs to be done. Stephen keeps a short todo list with just the top priority items on it. Then he has a can do list for everything else. Items move across from the can do list to the todo list as necessary. I do like the sound of this.

Other concepts Michael and Stephen discuss include “Use a Compass, Not a Map” where you find the intersecting point between passion (what you love to do), skills (what you are good at), and value (what creates value – for you and others). If you can achieve the right amount of passion, skills and value you can be successful in whatever it is you want to achieve.

I’ve always been passionate about what I do and what I deliver to my customers. And I’ve always felt I deliver real value. Skills is where I come up short. Not in in the ability to create good products, but in my abilities to be a great marketer and salesperson. People that run small business’s need to be skilled in many different areas, which is simply a fact of life, so we do the best we can and get on with it.

I’m sure you will find SavvySoloCAST #29: Goal-Free Living With Stephen Shapiro a great way to start your week.

There are many ways to organize data: labels, lists, categories, taxonomies, ontologies. Of these, ontology — assertions about essence and relations among a group of items — seems to be the highest-order method of organization. Indeed, the predicted value of the Semantic Web assumes that ontological successes such as the Library of Congress’s classification scheme are easily replicable.

Those successes are not easily replicable. Ontology, far from being an ideal high-order tool, is a 300-year-old hack, now nearing the end of its useful life. The problem ontology solves is not how to organize ideas but how to organize things — the Library of Congress’s classification scheme exists not because concepts require consistent hierarchical placement, but because books do.

Clay has some interesting insights about Social bookmarking systems such as del.icio.us and the problems faced where people classify the same information in very different ways. All in all a very good listen with lots of interesting content. I’ll look forward to hearing more from Clay in the future.

Many years ago I had the good fortune to talk to Dan and these things tend to stay with you. It was at the time I was in contract negotiations with Lifeboat Software (a division of the US company Programmer’s Paradise) to publish our ED for Windows product. Lifeboat was publishing Dan Bricklin’s Demo program and suggested him as a reference I could call. It took a bit of courage on my part as I new of Dan and all the impressive things he had accomplished. Anyway I did and we had a short but memorable (at least on my part) conversation. After Lifeboat took on ED we exhibited at Comdex, Software Development and other shows, but I never did get to catch up with Dan.

If you have any interest in software development, entrepreneurship or computing in general, I recommend you listen to this Podcast. I hope you get as much out of it as I did.

PS. Dan’s site and Blog can be found at: www.bricklin.com/

The articles starts with:

Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR firms tell them to.

He points out that most of what we read is provided by PR companies and that journalists rarely go out and find information for themselves, they simply don’t have the time or resources.

Later in the article he mentions the effect that Blogs are in their small way having:

You can’t see the fingerprints of PR firms all over the articles, as you can in so many print publications– which is one of the reasons, though they may not consciously realize it, that readers trust bloggers more than Business Week.

I was talking recently to a friend who works for a big newspaper. He thought the print media were in serious trouble, and that they were still mostly in denial about it. “They think the decline is cyclic,” he said. “Actually it’s structural.”

In other words, the readers are leaving, and they’re never coming back.

Fo me this is definitely true, maybe not quite so much with newspapers, but definitely with television. TV stations customers are their advertisers and they seem to care little about their viewers. They keep moving our favourite shows around to different time slots, stop showing them for a few weeks (which just happened over Easter), or just pulling them altogether. Customer loyalty must be at all time low as more and more of us turn off and find other ways to entertain ourselves.

A Podcast I listed to recently talked about a newspaper in a US town starting more of an interactive paper, where they set up a web site to enable readers to comment on stories. These comments would in turn influence how the paper followed the story in the days ahead. Whether this is genuinely usefull or not isn’t the point. The point is that they are trying something new and involving their readers (dare I say customers) in the process.

Pauls articles concludes with:

PR people fear bloggers for the same reason readers like them. And that means there may be a struggle ahead. As this new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate. When I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the traditional media, I can’t imagine they’ll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they can figure out how.

Everything is changing. Getting publicity for products like the ones I develop is more difficult than ever. Folks are being pulled in every direction to do all sorts of things they didn’t have to do a generation ago. Time becomes more precious for everyone. We simply don’t have the luxury of spare time that we used to have. And so we need new ways to get our message out, ways that don’t ram rubbish down peoples throats and don’t treat them as crash-test-dummies.

Podcasts like the web cover a broad range of information and interests. To date my focus has been on listening to marketing and business related podcasts.

The thing I really like about podcasts (apart from the content) is that I can acquire information without having to sit in front of my PC.

I download podcasts and copy them to my HP iPaq PDA. Then plug in the headphones, start the music player playing the podcast and put the PDA in my pocket. Most times I listen while I’m doing chores around house, or I’m out for a walk. This is great because I don’t have to try and find some free time which doesn’t exist anyway and I get to feed my brain during times which it otherwise wouldn’t be doing much.

In addition to Podcasts you’ll find audio books available on the Web which are played just like a podcast.

The Podcasts I’ve enjoyed listening to the most so far are by Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba over at Church of the Customer. The content is fresh and interesting and Ben and Jackie have an upbeat very easy to listen to style. Their most recent podcast is Word of Mouth Summit highlights and interviews which I’ll be listening to today.

I’ve been looking at a few programs that enable you to subscribe to podcasts and automatically download new ones as they become available. So far none have particularly grabbed my interest. I’ll likely write more on this later.