Farming in my own backyard

One of the more rewarding activities I have been up to in the last year, was to start a veggie garden in my backyard. Last year I started with spinach and carrots and it was a huge success. This year I have expanded.

Growing your own vegetables, and then harvesting and eating them, is a huge satisfaction to me. I just love it, and I have been blessed because my veggies come out huge, my carrots last year was what my daughter called huge mutant carrots. This year my pumpkins are growing at a huge pace and I will start harvesting this weekend.

Doing a veggie garden isn’t that much work, but the rewards are amazing. Not only do you get to harvest your own crop, but you get the satisfaction of working in the garden for more than just adding beauty. On top of that it is also a family project, so I get to spend some more time with my kids doing fun things.

In these recession times, with money being tight, with stress all around, it is great being able to fetch your own veggies from your own garden. It has got me pondering about how the economy would look like if more and more people started growing veggies and even trading veggies with neighbors. An idea I love and would like to see come to live in our world today.
Just as a note I am neither a competent gardener nor farmer, but I do try the best I can to keep my patch nice and clean and now productive….

Night owls on the Prowl

Again it is midnight and I am sitting supporting one of my client’s systems, something broke and Mr. Fix-It is on place in front of the computer screen and sorting the issue out. Over the years I have done more support than development, funny how it goes, we end up doing more of what we don’t like compared to what we love and desire.

I have spent some time these last couple of months looking at how I do business, what my model is and what can be improved. The main issue is that I am a one-man show, and that is in general never a great idea in the IT industry. You end up doing everything from highly motivating and complex tasks, to writing procedures on how to use a software tool.

We all have this issue one time or another, we try to do everything, we say yes to all requests coming our way, we know we can do it best and trust no one else, and the list goes on and on and on. And by the way so does your hours and your stress and your backlog of tasks. Personally I have come to the end of the road, I have decided that I will hire an assistant, train this person in my field, and reduce my annoying tasks.

Since I am a contractor/consultant/one man show I am paid by the hour I work, so I don’t mind working through the night, over weekends, and in holidays. Well I used to not mind, now I am starting to want a social life, spending time with the kids and grandkids. Taking up fishing again…

But selling the idea of having an assistant isn’t always easy; many customers are worried about the quality of work from the new resource. But in the end it boils down to more work done, reduced costs, and for me the most important thing starting to get a life again……………watch this space it is for a recovering work-o-holic….

And so the story goes…….

How many times have we not all set goals and then just lost track of them, or just the traction we had in them. It has happened to me so many times; sometimes I think I am the master of planning and the joker of completing......

But anyways, this blog came up and was supposed to be a good channel for me to give my ideas and my inspiration to those that needed. I had clear goals on creating weekly content; make sure it was up-to-date and relevant. Most is also based on my own experiences, which should make it easier to write about.

So it has been some months since I wrote, but I am back again. Now my notes will be shorter, more concise and might be more general about the life in South Africa and on this earth. Life is what you make it to be; sometimes we will make it more complicated, more difficult, and more dangerous than what it is. But that is entirely up to you.

Anyways, this Viking will try not to be that lost anymore and have more regular updates, and one of the updates is that I have cut my hair….making me less VIKING?

Daily Actions Towards Your Goals

We all have dreams and goals for our lives, we have ideas on how to reach them, we know there is always a lot of work involved…and it seems we wait until the last possible moment and then try to do one million things in a short period of time…and we fail…well most of the time. And we think ‘We can’t reach these goals we have’ or ‘we are not good enough’ or ‘we are not smart enough’… or something in that general direction.

It has always amazed me how I in school, high school, college, and university kept waiting with assignments until the night before they were due. Lots of time I was thinking ‘it is insane with this huge workload’. But instead of spreading the work over the semester, I did crunch work, over and over again. I most likely lost some of my GPA on that, though I had fairly high GPA, I guess I could have been even closer to 4.00 in University as well as 1.00 in college had I done what I told myself every semester I would: Take action on a daily basis to finish of the big tasks.

And so is it in your life as well, you can reach your goals, you can live your dreams, maybe not today or tomorrow, but in time with actions taken on a daily basis you will. It is a simple task, or rather so it seems, taking daily actions towards your dreams and goals, but so few do it. Many try it for a week or two and then fall off and go back to crunch time once or twice a year again. I have many times tried keeping up with this daily action towards your goals, but so often stopped after some months.

Now I am back on track, and have been for a while. I wake up in the morning and have a list of things I need to get done that day, written the night before. I have a review of my goals and targets each week, I plan my months ahead of time, I measure my progress to my goals, and most importantly I take daily actions to reach them.

It is easy, my friends and readers, so darn unbelievable easy. But action is the main word of this article; you need to take action on a daily basis. And in order to remember the things I need to do, I use everything from calendars, to software, to notebooks. Yes I write a lot, I have my MS Outlook calendar for important milestones and appointments (now I am looking at maybe using iCalendar from Google instead), I use my desktop calendar, I have a year calendar on the wall which I write on, use my personal organizer, and use my calendar on my iPhone. I use them for different things, iPhone calendar is used for daily tasks and reminders, MS Outlook for major milestones, meetings, and tasks, wall calendar for overview of the year, notebook for daily tasks as well as one for ideas and one as a diary.

It can sound like a lot of work but it really is not and the great thing about it you keep looking at your goals from different time perspectives and angles, the daily tasks that link up with your monthly tasks, your monthly tasks that link up with your yearly tasks etc.

But this system works for me as I can remind myself the whole time, my late wife called me the clumsy professor, and for good reason. So I keep myself in the game by making sure I know where I am going and how I am getting there. The road can sometimes take an unexpected turn, but I still know where my destination is going to be, or rather where I hope it will be.

So do me one favor take an action today towards your goals, and another one tomorrow, these do not have to be huge life changing actions, but small ones that take 10 minutes or an hour. But they will get you one step closer to your dreams, one step closer to your life goals.

Don’t forget to breathe….breathe in….breathe out

I have been sitting for about 45 minutes starting writing this post over and over again, every time wiping out what I was thinking I should have written. I am not sure why, just every post seemed not to be the right one. Then it struck me, breath boy breath. So I decided to write a short post, just some lines.

And yes this is about the importance to take a time out every now and again. I surely do. There are times when all seems to fall apart, when nothing seems to work, when everyone seems to be counter active of what you do and want to achieve. You might feel that adding some more hours, adding even more resources, postponing other tasks, will allow you to get it all done, will allow a perfect result. You might think so, but sometimes we need to just scream STOP!!!!

These times, these timeouts that we take, these are the times we can reflect on what is going on around us. We can sit back and understand why things are not falling in place, what we need to do to prepare us for when things are falling in place. It is so important to take these timeouts and get a clear overview, but yet we so rarely do it. It happens mostly when we are forced to do it, for some reason or another.

I urge you; take some timeout every now and again. Get a clear overview of your situation; know where you are going, then start moving towards your goals. Make sure you take one step every day, even if it is a small step.

And don’t forget to breathe in …… breathe out

Keep moving forward…Keep your eyes on the prize

We all have a dream, at least I assume you have a dream, and we all want to attain that dream, but in this world it is so easy to get side tracked. Small things that are bumps in your lives will take your focus away from keep moving forward distract you from keeping your eyes on the prize at the end of the journey.

If you know what you want in life, I have a philosophy to take daily strides towards that goal. Every day you should at least do something, however small, to get one step closer to achieving your dream. But in order to know what steps leads to your dream you need to know exactly what your dream is, you need to know it in detail, you need to feel how it is to live that dream, the smells, the sounds, the light, the whole KAABANG….

Many people do not even write down their life goals, they keep it inside their mind, not exposing to the outside world, allowing themselves to fail without anyone knowing. Most of them are setting themselves up for failure. Personally I write down my goals, my life goals, my goals for a business venture, and my goals for today. I know what steps are required to move towards my goals. But remember goals can change as the circumstances changes and you need to adapt to them.

If you are young your goal might be to get a certain education, ride a certain car, and these may at the time seem like your life goals, but as you grow, as you reach your goals you will add to them. Even if you have your goal of a house by the beach, as you get closer you might even add to the goal or change it, maybe being too close to the beach is not really what you want. Feel free to change your goals, but don’t cheat yourself. Like changing a goal from being financially independent to just making sure you make it month to month. You might need to increase the time horizon, but don’t short sell yourself with the goals you are choosing and aiming for.

When you know what you want then I divide the end goal into milestones I need to reach along the way. These milestones I divide into step by step goals and I work myself towards where I am today. Then I know more or less what I need to achieve every month in order to get closer to my end goal.

And it becomes easier to take small steps towards your goals on a daily basis, knowing that following those steps you will get closer to the goal tomorrow compared where you where yesterday. But action and taking continuous action is the key to moving closer to your goals.

How to get ahead in life?

You want the secret of how to get ahead in life? How to get back on your feet from where you are currently struggling? It is an answer most people do not want to hear so in fear of upsetting too many of you here I give my little 2 cents on how to get ahead in life.

Work hard, focus on what you do, and be determined. There is no thing as a free lunch in life, but there is always possible to get a huge discount on the same lunch. Many people say you must work hard and long and you will get ahead in life, but that is not the truth. The truth is that you must work focused, determined, never be afraid of working hard, and never give up.

Many times people are just focused on the situation around them, on the problems in their lives, their short comings, their failures in the past, etc etc. But it is important to have a clear focus on what you really want out of life, by knowing what you really want in life, knowing it in detail, knowing how it feels, knowing what you would do if you where there, you are half way there.

Many people have vague desires or dreams in life, like “I want to be rich”, “I want to live well off”, this just aint good enough my friends. You need to be specific, you need to get the feel of how it would be to have it, imagine yourself in it, and then focus on getting it.

I know I know, there is a lot more than just this to get there, but this is the start, and this is how you start getting out of the hole you are in, or start getting where you want to be faster. I have been on a rollercoaster in my life, from ups to downs to ups again. Most of the time the things hit you out of nowhere, but there is always a blessing in any situation. Ask me I know.

But the most important thing in life I have learned is to keep those you love and who love you close, tell them as often as you can how you feel, share a smile, laugh a lot, live life happily, enjoy the joys of life. Focus on start doing that and you will not only improve your life but also those that live around you.

I will go into other elements I have learned over the past years later, but know this, you have a destiny that is unique and great, don’t forfeit it by choosing not to reach for your full potential.
Just note I am not an expert in this field, I am rather a battle hardened soldier sharing his stories of the fighting in the trenches.