Tiffany Sunday

Author | Speaker

The Historical Impact of 2016

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Of all of the events occurring in 2016, the defining historical event was overlooked.  On Wednesday, January 11, 2017, Thomas Friedman’s article, “Online and Scared” appeared in the New York Times.

He marked in time the tipping point, a point in history when humanity reached a critical mass online.

In 2013, while writing You Posted What!?, I could the see the formation of the Digital Prairie on the horizon.  Research for the book revealed trends and patterns, an early warning of a digital tsunami rushing towards the shore disrupting everything in its path.

We’re all pioneers in the digital economy.

Early settlers grasped the impact of moving a society online and quickly established digital communities.  During the Industrial Revolution, millions of individuals migrated from the farm to the city.

This time is different. Thousands of individuals are left behind, unable to move to cyberspace.

Age does not dictate your status on The Digital Prairie.  Our children and teens can operate the devices more efficiently, yet they do not understand or comprehend the rules digital settlers create on the fly.

Social, employment and government contracts disrupted as the unimaginable becomes the new norm.  Business models of the past are washed away to reveal structures build in the digital realm.

Amazon settles ahead of the crowd to build the ultimate Digital Prairie general store providing a means to purchase everything of need conversely providing an open market for new settlers.

Finding a way to thrive instead of surviving has always been a pioneer’s goal.  Businesses today big and small must search for a new place to settle on the Digital Prairie.  What works today is discarded tomorrow as technological advancements alter our world beyond comprehension, without warning transforming our global community until the next disruption.

Brexit. Virtual Reality. Fake News. Hive micro drones. Self-driving trucks.
What will 2017 Bring?

The first rule for the digital future is to eliminate complacency.  Find a means to always sell to your customers regardless of their location. As customers and clients search for a place to settle on the digital frontier, think of their needs, consider how their behaviors are evolving, and determine how your business will operate as a digital pioneer.

Creative Obsession – Never Give Up On Your Art

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Creative Obsession by Tiffany Sunday Two weeks ago, the creative obsession kicked in as I shifted my attention back to a fiction novel I am writing. Along with the book, I am adapting The Digital Prairie manuscript to a play.

After two books, I’ve learned when my behavior shifts the manuscript is ready to be written.  The awareness is more significant with the third book.

Almost overnight, every part of my being becomes consumed with writing.  I eat the same lunch.  I wear black and listen to the same song on YouTube not once or twice but 50 times or more.  My ability to singularly focus on one task is amazing.

I am a vehicle for something greater than myself.  My soul is determined to write and refuses to allow anything to get in its way.

Artists and entrepreneurs are made from similar DNA.  Launching a business, writing a book, and creating music is art.

All of these endeavors are part of the creative process. 

I am learning to honor and accept my quirky behaviors.  I write at late at night when my mind has the freedom to explore what is hidden beneath the surface during the day.

The creative obsession has been the focus of many studies as researchers work to determine why creatives become obsessed with their work.

From personal experience, my brain doesn’t like to focus on clothes or food because when you are in a creative flow, making decisions is annoying.  Which, I believe explains our need to eliminate non-essential decisions.  I imagine my brain, taking its arms and sweeping everything off the table that is irrelevant to the creative process.

During the creative obsession, you search for a time to create.  For many, it is either the stillness of the night, early in the morning or both.

This fall, I’ve discovered the peacefulness at 4:30 am which is unmatched by any other time during our 24 hour period. It’s when everything, all our worries and the world’s chaos, seems for a brief moment to fade into the background. The new day is beginning, it’s fresh and clean.

When I’m alone with the computer, songs playing over and over in my ear buds, I savor the time. I protect this time.

Our creativity is our humanity.

In the depths of the night, I came across an interview with Pat Benatar and her husband, Neil Giraldo, at 2016 SXSW Music session. Pat talked about the importance of protecting our art.  Our creative expression is a freedom that we should never take for granted.

I write with urgency. I write with a purpose. I write because I need to express what is in my soul.  Sleep feels unimportant until the words appear on paper.

How Dyslexia, Thingy, and Being Brave Are Connected

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Codpast Image

October is Dyslexia Awareness Month.  This post is dedicated to fellow dyslexics around the world.

Name must your fear be before banish it you can.
Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back

I overcame my fear of failure, in elementary school, after thousands of failed starts in reading, writing, and spelling. Since then, I have developed a confidence in my abilities to overcome challenges and solve complex problems.

Even with my dyslexic brain’s savvy abilities, I encounter language processing misfires every day. There are some days when I feel it is impossible to spell a correct word.

These misfires include using the word “thingy” for everything, talking backwards, and collapsing sentences to increase processing speeds. When this occurs, small talk goes out the window. My brain focuses all of its energy on what it deems critical communication.  What surprises most people is that I have a fear of writing in public. Either on social media or physically in front of another person.  As a writer, this fear can present problems when your business is based on creating content.

When I was in high school, I wished, someone would have helped focus my energy on developing strategies to manage these road bumps instead of increasing my fear of making a mistake.

Since writing Dyslexia’s Competitive Edge, I’ve learned a lot about myself.  I’ve discovered how dyslexia encourages us to be brave.  Our bravery occurs when we write on a whiteboard, answer questions in class, or participate in an extracurricular activity that requires us to read out loud.

Dyslexia teaches us to be brave as we think of ways to respond to tacky comments.

Like I said before, if I had a dollar for every time a person corrected my language errors or dyslexia’s misfires, I would have an island next to Richard Branson.

It’s hard to explain to others why our dyslexic brain will never figure out how to correctly say or spell a word.  Often they think we’re not trying hard enough.  We need to support dyslexic teens and remind them often to focus on developing strategies and ignore naysayers.

My dyslexia brain is evolving to become a mentor, encouraging me to move past this fear.  I’m instructed to write online, develop a small talk strategy, and write in front of people.  Each brave action makes it easier for the next action.

Even though small talk can be mentally draining, I am developing workarounds to manage the stress of retrieving the correct word.  Small talk is different than speaking at a conference or like my TEDx Talk.  As a professional speaker, I spent hours memorizing the presentation.

No Fear 

I decided to embrace my fear and became a board member of my son’s high school band organization.  Each week, I volunteer at football games and competitions.  I am most vulnerable when helping at these events.

I write down numbers, names, pronounce student names, and manage on-demand communication with moving variables.  Imagine participating in the Olympic Game of language processing.

The real test was this past weekend.  I was a band chaperone for an all day competition. My dyslexic brain rose to the demands and quickly created adoptions and shorts cuts to efficiently process information.  However, by late afternoon I experienced word retrieval problems, talked backwards, and collapsed sentences down to two or three words.

Instead of feeling embarrassed or frustrated, I kept going and if someone asked I said, “I’m dyslexic and am experiencing language misfires.”  I work each day to stop criticizing myself for these errors.  I know it’s impossible to stop the word “thingy” from happening.  I have learned it’s a message from my brain telling me it’s either overloaded or tired.

My message to dyslexic teens and young adults – Do not let your fear prevent you from doing what you love.

Be brave and work to develop strategies, tell people your dyslexic, and then share with them how they can help you process information.

I believe we only gain the results we seek.  When we are willing to face our fears, take action only then can we eliminate the fear.

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A Runner’s Daily Meditation – How Planners Are Mostly Ineffective

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What Matters Most Must Never Be At the Mercy of What Matters Least.
Goethe

Blog Photos 017As an avid runner, I’m run six days a week in my neighborhood. Today’s run was a treat, a beautiful fall morning, cool and crisp with a slight dampness from the dew. My pace was faster as my body adapted to the chilly temperature. Fall is my favorite time of the year to run.

My mind is most creative during my runs and I am always thinking about something.  My mind settles into a quiet meditation on the longer runs as I have sorted through my thoughts by the third mile.

This morning, I was thinking about Work Simply by Carson Tate, a book I picked up at the library two weeks ago.  At first, I read through a couple of pages and put the book down.

I thought, “just another how to be productive” book.  I always give books a second chance, and while waiting for my son at band practice, I opened the book again and started reading. I realized Tate’s book was different.

In the book, she talks about how we’ve been trained to use planners and the amount of time we can waste managing our to-do lists. Her words started working their way through my mind as I thought about what she was saying.

During the run, I kept thinking about how much time we waste inputting data in our planners, especially scheduling every tiny detail of our life down to five minutes to meditate, five minutes to walk around our cube, five minutes to plan a strategy for clients.

Back when we were transitioning from the farm to the factory, managers were taught that workers could not be allowed to think for themselves.  We, the workers, must be told what to do every minute of the work day. This mentality has lead to our modern day busyness, must stay busy, must stay busy…

We are obsessed with busywork in American.

It is our badge of honor, the Holy Grail of cubeville or Starbuck’s.  We write in our emails and text messages – “I’m slammed!, My bandwidth is tapped!, and I’m swamped!” We work diligently to complete our planner checklist.  We compare notes on how many emails are in our inbox as if it is a ranking in our importance. More emails = higher pay?

Our ego and self-worth are wrapped up in our busyness. Being busy is not the same as being productive. There is a difference.  I think about the productive individuals who lived hundreds of years ago.  They did not have any cool tech tools to help them and they produced an enormous amount of work.

Dozens of thoughts filled my mind as I connected the dots and I thought “what if, we didn’t assign time to projects? Before you freak out, I know what you’re thinking, “How could we bill clients? and “How would we know if we’re profitable or not?”

What I am suggesting is that we work on the projects instead of spending so much time writing down every detail into our planners. What if we spent time focusing on the project and what needs to be done? No fancy rules just focus our time on what is important.

Since reading Tate’s book, I’ve stopped scheduling ridge time slots for client work; I am referring to work completed outside the client’s office. I am more relaxed and can focus on what I need complete instead of feeling guilty for ignoring my planner.

We’ve been brainwashed to believe the only way we can be productive is to create highly detailed strict; factory styled schedule to dictate our day.

We think there is no other way to work.  I question every part of how I plan my day.  I have two whiteboards in the office. One board, I write my weekly schedule. The second whiteboard is where I list critical action items such as add Google Analytics to the new website, schedule my car for service, and so forth.  You get the idea.

I have greater confidence in my ability to get work done.  This past week, I have started writing in the mornings immediately following my runs.  I know without a doubt this is the most creative time of the day. I have written more in three days in less time.

 Our brains are not binary, we need time to think.  We cannot turn our thinking on and off like a light bulb.

I believe our planners are obsolete as we are not factory workers anymore.  Our world and how we work is undergoing a significant transformation.  We’re knowledge workers and innovation and growth are not derived from breaking our day into tiny slots of time. Innovation comes from our creativity and having time think and solve difficult problems.

To-do lists have a place when organizing specific tasks and projects, these lists are not meant to be carried with us each day, depleting our mental energy along the way.

Nor will our productivity increase by using more planners, more scheduling apps, or creating more busy work, these are all leftovers from the Industrial Revolution Era.

I’ll leave you with a thought – a person can be organized without writing and scheduling every detail into a planner.

Learning to Work Within Constraints Can Become Invaluable Trait

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When we think about working within constraints, we often think about startups without investor funding. There are dozens of articles written about founders and how they used their given resources to build a successful company.

Learning to work within constraints is a necessity regardless of your profession. Although we live in the most abundant time in human history, we encounter limitations every day.  How we learn to manage these constraints and overcome challenges can become an invaluable trait.

The root of the matter is your perception of the challenge. Do you wait for something or someone to find a solution or do you problem-solve?  How we elect to manage, these challenges will determine the success of our business, organization, and life.

Strategies for the Top Four Constraints
Time

In my office, I have a small poster with an ocean view.  Written at the top is a quote, “Time is life’s most precious commodity, use it wisely.” The source is unknown.  We often forget during our busy day that time is a non-renewable commodity.

Three years ago, I read the book, The Road Less Travel, by Dr. Scott Peck.  He talked about how our parents, teachers, and peers can directly or indirectly influence how we value our time and ourselves.  This influence becomes evident when we reach adulthood and must manage our work and professional life.

Each day, I think about how I spend my time.  Not, which appointment to schedule next or which task to add to a list of busy work.  During my morning runs, I mentally allocate where I will use my time and energy for next 12 – 18 hours.  Each day, running, writing, and enjoying “just being” are priorities, not an afterthought.

I follow Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp and his life and work philosophy is similar.  As I wrote before, “being busy” or “slammed at work” is not a badge of honor it is a misalignment of priorities.   Busy work accomplishes nothing.

Financial

If you are a startup or have worked for one, you know about financial constraints.  Every day, the founders and key team members worry about money.  You worry about sales; you worry about reaching your hurdle rate.  As a small business owner operating in a sea of regulations and growing competition, worrying about cash flow is a constant stress.  There is no escape.

Last year, I read an article in Inc. Magazine.  A successful business owner was a guest columnist and wrote, “Looking at your sales every day and how much money you’re making or not making will drive you crazy.  It’s a marathon, what you earn over a 12 month period or longer.”

He went on to talk about how it is important to be aware of where the company is from a big picture perspective for cash flow, but the constant worry will do more harm than good.

I have thought of about his advice.  I believe when we become hyper-focused on the lack money, we send out negative energy.

If you believe the sales and customers will support your business, then this faith in yourself and the business comes through.  Most people do not like to work or buy from businesses or organizations that are collapsing or believe they are failing.  People can sense the negativity.

Recognize financial constraint is a given. Develop a system to keep tabs on the cash flow without becoming consumed with daily worrying.  If you are too focused on this constraint, you will most likely miss an opportunity.

Leadership

Leadership is a combination of innate talent and skills developed over time.  Leadership is difficult and cannot be learned in a two-day seminar.  We often write and talk about leadership, yet it tends to be a mouthpiece to satisfy something that has no meaning. It requires a unique combination of skills and a certain personality.  Most businesses and organizations do not have the luxury of having a strong and gift leader.

In these cases, employees and team members will need to determine how they create strong leadership at the bottom without insubordination.   Which isn’t easy either, how do you create leadership within the ranks while continuing to support an ineffective leader?

This is when creative problem-solving becomes curial. I often tell my son that to be a good leader; integrity must be at the core with an understanding of coaching people with grace.  When I say or write, these words people’s immediate reaction is that the approach is too soft, which is incorrect.  This approach involves structure with empowering team members.  Leadership is about building effective proactive teams.  These teams can work to achieve the organization’s goals even when dealing with unfavorable constraints.

Resources

Constraints we encounter to do our work and run our business is constant.  For my business, I need to upgrade the computer system.  The operating system is dated which creates problems with the software programs I use for client work.

An entrepreneur friend, once said, “Don’t make any large purchases or hire employees until the pain is absolutely unbearable.” Based on his advice, I continue to develop a work around to delay purchasing a new computer.  There are some of you who may disagree, and that’s fine.  Between working for startups and being a small business owner, I’ve learned to protect the second most valuable resource – cash flow.

Of three constraints I’ve discussed; I believe where most people fail to placed importance – is time. For us, time feels unlimited as we get up each day and do the same thing again.  It’s only when we start looking back at how we spend our time do we realize its real value.

The Beach House (Working Title)

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The Beach House

The story is evolving and the original working title, the Beach House is now obsolete.

Sarah and Ryan are the two main characters in the story.   Sarah is a single mother and Ryan is her son.  The story is set in New York City and in a small coastal community.  Ryan inherits a sailboat from their elderly neighbor, Thomas.

After going through a divorce, Sarah begins to think about her life and questions many of the beliefs she thought were true.  As she works to rebuild their life, they are faced with challenges and an unexpected tragedy.

Sarah gains strength from her experiences and her new independence. When her family discredits her efforts, she makes a decision that shocks everyone including herself.  Through the heartache, Sarah refuses to give up and learns to trust again.

When Sarah least expects to find romance, she meets two men.  As these two relationships develop, Sarah is torn between what her heart feels and what her mind is telling her.  Whom will she choose? The man who represents her past or a new friend who could change her life?

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