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Give the Gift of Safe Water

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Carlos Whittaker has blogged about an initiative of Water Missions International to provide clean water to as many of their remaining communities as they can through text donations of $10.

Water Missions International is an engineering relief and development Christian nonprofit that seeks to provide sustainable and safe water solutions to people in 40 developing countries and disaster victims worldwide. They currently have 125+ communities waiting for funding to get safe water, with the communities averaging around 2500 people. This initiative is focused on providing the funding for as many of those communities as possible.

A Right Understanding of Strengths

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This is from an Amazon review of Marcus Buckingham’s DVD resource, The Truth About You. It describes what a strength actually is very well:

Buckingham’s advice to success is simple: Work on your strengths. But it is his definition of “strength” that makes a world of difference.

To him, strength is not something you’re good at but something that excites you, something that you look forward to, something that makes you strong. The idea of focusing on how it feels when we’re doing something rather than on how well we perform it has changed the way I look at my life and my work for the better. Now I don’t feel embarrassed that I’m not good at math or regretful that I did not follow my teacher’s advice (you’re good at writing; therefore, you should be a lawyer). Instead, I give myself permission to concentrate on using what I’m good at in ways that make me feel accomplished and fulfilled. That does not necessarily mean it will translate into buckets and buckets of money. However, it sure beats waking up every morning to go to a job you do well but dread and hate.

Related to this is my post from a few months ago, “Your Weaknesses Are Not What You Are Bad At.”

For those seeking to get a better picture of their vocational direction (and I mean first of all in your current job, rather than finding a different job), I would recommend Buckingham’s DVD set.

The most helpful thing about it is actually this little book that comes with it in which you record, over the course of a week, the things that weakened you and the things that strengthened you. By reviewing going through this exercise and then reviewing your entries you can get a better idea of your strengths and weaknesses (and remember: your weaknesses are not necessarily what you are bad at; they are what drain you).

If you are interested in a more in-depth treatment of strengths and how to get a better picture of what your own strengths are, I would also recommend Buckingham’s book Go Put Your Strengths to Work.

The Task of Defining Your Work

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From David Allen’s latest newsletter (which you can subscribe to here), explaining why the world of work often seems so much harder now:

More and more these days I find that people in my seminars are resonating to the importance of defining our work. The challenge many of us face is to not only track, but accurately label all of our projects, and hang on to those “stakes in the ground” while the rest of the world seems to want to blow us away from them like we’re in a hurricane.

How many of you don’t have time to do your work, because you have so much work to do??!!

How many of you, in your jobs, are only doing what you were hired to do? (I never get one affirmative response in any group I query!)

I credit the late Peter Drucker for framing this issue better than anyone, from the macro perspective. He indicates that whereas fifty years ago 80% of our work force made its living by making or moving things, that number is now less than 20%. And that “knowledge work” demands a completely different paradigm of focus than we have been trained in as a professional culture.

The good news about making or moving something is that when you come to work, un-made and un-moved things make it real easy to know how to spend your day. You do not need “personal organization” other than the work that is obviously and visibly at hand. The bad news is that these days only a small percentage of us get to work and know what to do. The rest of us have to make it up. And very few (if any) of the people we interact with seem to be supporting our agenda.

So, it becomes critical for each of us to maintain a complete and accurately defined list of Projects, and to ensure that we review these at least weekly with real sincerity of focus, creating and capturing all the “oh yeah, that reminds me, I need to…” kind of next actions that need to happen to make our “work” happen.

This needs to include all the professional and personal projects about which you would like ideally for something to be happening during the course of an operational week. “R&D new camera”, “Finalize budget implementation”, “Refinance house”, “Reorganize office”, etc.

We were only trained and equipped in our culture to show up, and deal with the work at hand. We now have to train and equip ourselves, create our own targets and goal-lines, and tie safety ropes onto those outcomes to keep steady in our course against the winds of the world.

Microfinance with World Vision

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It looks like you can also do microfinance through World Vision, and that their approach is similar to Kiva (which I’ve mentioned before a few times).

Here’s the summary from their site:

World Vision Micro lets you fund life changing microfinance loans for hardworking entrepreneurs in need helping to alleviate them from poverty.

Here’s more info from their About page and more detail on how it works.

If You Get Poor Cell Reception in Your Home with AT&T

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It might be worth considering AT&T’s 3G Microcell:

AT&T 3G MicroCell acts like a mini cellular tower in your home or small business environment. It connects to AT&T’s network via your existing broadband Internet service (such as U-verse, DSL or cable) and is designed to support up to four simultaneous users in a home or small business setting.

We live squarely in the Twin Cities metro area. Nonetheless, I get only 2-3 bars of coverage on the main floor of my house, and only 1 bar in the basement. Just about every call that I take in my basement is bound to be dropped if it lasts more than 5 minutes, which is a problem because that’s where my home office is. So I’m eager to see how this works.