All posts by Mitch Mitchell

I'm an independent consultant in many fields, so I have a lot to share.
Business

Criteria For Hiring – A Rant

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I’m going to admit something up front; I’m writing angry right now. I’m angry for a business reason, not a personal reason, and I don’t believe my anger is misdirected. However, it’s something to think about overall, which is why I’m writing about it.

For close to two weeks I’ve been working on landing a project out of state. It would have been a big project that could have lasted upwards of six months or so. Overall it’s the kind of project that can make or break a good financial year.

It started out strangely, seemed to end but didn’t, then picked up steam once more. I have the credentials for the job. I have the skills for the job. It was supposedly me against one other person, and the other person’s skills turned out to be lacking; seems she’d never done any of the work they needed to have done.

But I have, multiple times. I’ll tell you that it was a health care project, and I do have the skills for it. Let’s just say that I helped one hospital earn an “extra” $736 million in one year, and I actually created the product that was needed in my field for a 5-hospital system in another country some years ago. I’ve been doing this particular type of work for almost 25 years; I’m easily qualified.

On Wednesday I spoke to someone about the gig and it went really well. You know, whenever you speak to candidates about something you just get a feeling on how it goes. I knew my stuff; heck, she knew my stuff. We discussed tactics and the like and what the overall scope of the project was. She said it was a lot and she couldn’t handle it; I said I could.

Once that happens you have to wait. And I did, all through yesterday and into this morning. I knew that if the call came through I was going to have to scramble to get everything collected because it was going to be kind of far away. But I was mentally prepared for anything.

Except not getting it. Just a little while ago I heard that I didn’t get it, and for what I’d have to say is a very stupid reason. My qualifications aren’t in question as to whether I can do the job. What’s in question is whether my skills can translate to a larger organization like theirs.

And you know what the kicker is? The person that made the ultimate decision has no clue what I do. He works in a department that has nothing to do with what I do, but since they’re missing the person in the position that would normally make this decision he made it. Pure idiocy, and I’m angry.

I get it; people make decisions every day on stuff they don’t know anything about, or may not know much about. The reasons we do this is because we need stuff but can’t know about everything. I know nothing about plumbing, roofing, electricity, etc. So I have to hire someone I don’t know, whether I get a recommendation or not.

At the same time, I understand that there are sometimes other, outside factors that might lead us to not want to hire someone or to work with someone. If they’re unkempt and work a job that doesn’t keep them that way we might be hesitant. If they smell or seem creepy, and y’all know that happens, I got it. If you get a bad vibe and the Spidey senses are telling you to beware, that makes sense as well.

But if you don’t have those issues, and all things are equal, at least make sure your criteria is sound. I’ve given leadership presentations to as few as 10 people and as many as 250 at a time. Does that mean I’m not qualified, if I got lucky enough, to speak in front of 500 to 1,000 people at a time? If the message is the same and the information is the same do the numbers really mean all that much?

So let me ask you this. If you needed services and a person’s qualifications were sound and you checked references or previous work and it all came back stellar, but you didn’t really fully understand what these people were going to do for you (kind of reminiscent of our SEO discussion some months ago) would you just make up criteria based on a flawed perception or would you take into account what someone with the skills and knowledge (like the woman I talked to) had to say about it?

Yeah, I’m at the end and I’m still mad, but less so now. lol

Diabetes

The Water Experiment

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Many of the regular readers of this blog know I’m diabetic. What a lot of folks don’t really know is that I run a group on Facebook for the support of Type 2 diabetics, which used to be called Adult Onset. It’s not called that anymore because unfortunately many kids that aren’t born diabetic are going that way as obesity figures around the world are increasing.

Last Sunday myself and another participant in the group decided we were going to try an experiment. The experiment was the brainchild of another member of the group who I’m not sure is diabetic or not, but he’s one of those health foods guys who loves, well, weird foods; yeah, I called it out. lol Anyway, he stated that if we drank only water for a week and didn’t change any of our other habits that we’d lose our cravings for sweets and desserts. He also said we could still eat whatever we wanted to, including desserts, but that by the end of the week we wouldn’t be craving it anymore.

By the way, to flesh this out, he said that diet sodas and any drinks with artificial sweeteners make us crave desserts because they make us think we’re having sugar without having sugar and suddenly our bodies want real sugar. I’m not really sure I go along with this theory, though I’d read it somewhere else, as studies are conflicting about it; aren’t studies always conflicting?

Y’all know I love my sweets. I’ve talked about my chocolate and love for my Doubletree cookies and peanut butter desserts and such. And of course I’ve talked about my love for cake and the way I must eat it properly.

I also love my diet drinks. Unlike a lot of people, I’ve always liked diet soda, except for Tab; did anyone besides Bobcat Goldthwait really like Tab? The day I was diagnosed as a diabetic I gave up regular soda and started drinking diet soda and other non-sugar drinks and never looked backwards except for the super-very-occasional grape soda; no one’s ever made a good diet grape soda.

It is with this in mind, as well as a mindset that’s always seen certain drinks going with certain foods, that I entered into this experiment. I’m always up for a good experiment as you know.

The first day went well. I actually like water, as cold as possible mind you, and I transitioned into it well. After all, like much of the rest of the country it’s been pretty hot here, and very cold water felt right.

The second day I ran into my first challenge, and it wasn’t a dessert craving but a mismatch of food and drink. I had a salad, and in my mind, salad and salad dressing and water don’t mix. I absolutely hated my salad so I only ate a little bit of it. However, though I always prefer diet soda with my pizza, that went fine. I still had dessert, but I wasn’t craving it.

Truthfully, that’s how the pattern went for the next three days. I was drinking a lot of water because I drink lots of liquids anyway. The guy who came up with the challenge, named Dave, started wondering if I was drinking too much water. You know this deal about drinking 64 ounces of water a day, or at least consuming that much because we get water from some of our foods? Phooey! I drink close to 128 oz with each meal, no matter what I’m drinking, and then I’m a casual drinker during the rest of my day. I always have been, even when I was a kid. He started worrying that I was washing nutrients out of my body and that it might affect the experiment. Hey, the experiment said drink water, not how much, so it was what it was.

The sixth day was problematic, and I know it was really mental. I had my first true dessert craving in a week and I knew what I wanted; yeah, that’s it to the left. lol I was also starting to really want to get done with the water thing, and I determined that I wasn’t going to fully hold myself to it on the seventh day. After all, what would one more day change things anyway, right?

On day seven I drank water up until around 7PM, when I ordered Chinese food. I broke down at that point and had 4 cans of Diet Pepsi Vanilla that my friend Scott had brought me; yeah, that was nice, and it totally enhanced my food. For me, the experiment was over, and I quit with only 5 hours to go. Earlier in the day I went to an outdoor tweetup with the heat around 90° and thus water was feeling really good because it was ice cold.

How did the experiment go overall? Well, not totally according to plan.

One, I really did only have cravings on one day, but I also knew I could eat dessert whenever I wanted so I’m not sure if my feelings were muted because of that.

Two, I gained 4 pounds, and I’m not quite sure how that happened. I didn’t work out all week, though, because of injuries I suffered the day the experiment started during a nature walk I partook of.

Three, I almost started to hate water, and that’s not good. At this point I’ve struck a nice balance between my diet soda, Wylers drink mix and water that I can live with. And I’m going back to the gym, having healed sufficiently to work out again. I need to drop what I gained and then drop even more.

Believe it or not we’re going to try the experiment again next week starting Sunday, but we’ll change up some of the parameters. One of those will be no dessert for 5 days; yeah, that’s all I’m promising for now. Another will be certain foods that we promise to give up; no potatoes, grits (that one’s for me), rice or pasta. I don’t have a problem with the pasta but rice… ugh. And for the 5 days no regular wheat, only whole wheat bread; there goes my favorite bread. We’re still debating on the Ritz crackers with peanut butter for my evening snack; I might lose that one as well, which means I’ll have to get creative on what I can snack on.

I’m wondering what Evelyn is going to have to say about this one; heck, I’m wondering what the rest of you think about experimenting like this and if any of you want to try this experiment with Greg and I; Greg’s the other guy who went along with me on this journey. Any takers?

Software

Why I Left Firefox For Chrome And Why I Came Back

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Last weekend I finally had it with Firefox. After one more crash because it was blowing up my resources I decided it was time to give up the ghost and I switched to Chrome.

I had two other alternatives, of course. I could have gone to Opera, which has always been pretty fast, but it just seems so sparse. True, one should probably only think about using a browser to browse the internet, but many of us are looking for certain things from our browsers to enhance the user experience, if you will. I also could have gone to IE8 but decided I just don’t want to go backwards, even though I’ve heard good things about IE9, which I haven’t loaded yet.

Anyway, Firefox had suddenly decided to go nuts on me. It was using some major league resources on my computer, once to the tune of 1.8GB; that’s a lot. It was regularly going over a gigabyte, and that was way too much. Then it started crashing all the time, asking me to send crash reports to Mozilla. Last Sunday it crashed the 7th time in one day and that was that.

So I made Chrome my default browser. I had been thinking about it anyway, but not without some reservation. It’s a Google product, as you know, and almost anything related to Google wants to track you. I wrote a post in 2010 telling people that if you use Google Toolbar it tracks your searches and then you start getting targeted advertising. I know they try to tell us it’s for our benefit but I just don’t feel the benefit if you know what I mean. At least you can turn it off for Google Desktop.

I used Chrome for about 4 days and started to feel that, though it had been running better than Firefox, it had issues as well. For instance, every once in awhile it just hangs for a little bit. I went to check the resources and found that it was using a gigabyte of memory as well; what the hey? It seemed to handle that much memory a little better than Firefox but not entirely; that was shocking.

Then I started missing some of my customization. For instance, I was able to modify the look of Firefox to what I was used to in the past; you can’t do that with Chrome. Also, certain plugins that make using a browser that I’ve come to like aren’t available on Chrome. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t figure out how to get anything onto Chrome whatsoever. Well, I did finally get one thing to work, but that was it.

Yup, I started missing Firefox, but I had to do something to help it stop crashing. I decided to take a look at all the plugins I was running, along with other things, to see what I really didn’t need anymore. I ended up disabling, then removing, a lot of things that I noticed didn’t even work anymore. Firefox 5 automatically disabled some thing it said it wasn’t compatible with, but I use both Stylish and Greasemonkey and it turns out some scripts with each of those weren’t working anymore either, and could have been causing a conflict.

The verdict is pretty good so far. The highest recorded memory since I made the changes is 525MB, which is easily more manageable. The browser hasn’t crashed since I started using it again and I’m happy about that as well. Maybe it’s finally going to behave; one can only hope, right?

But customization is really what puts Firefox ahead of every other browser, and in the end that’s really why it’s my favorite. That’s my story; what’s yours?

Marketing

Why People Unsubscribe From Your Lists – The Answers

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Our buddy Sire recently wrote a post titled Why Do People Unsubscribe From Your List. It was an intriguing little post that asked the question more than attempted to answer it. He’s fairly new to the list game; I only have one email list, and that’s for my own leadership newsletter.


by Bàrbara Bessa via Flickr

Still, I’ve had it for about 8 years now (man, no wonder I’m tired), and I’ve been on many other lists. Initially I thought that maybe he asked the question wrong. My thinking was that people don’t unsubscribe from lists, per se, but from newsletters or blogs or other types of things. Then I thought about it and using “list” or “lists” covers all of these things, so I came back to it.

Back to the topic; why do people unsubscribe from lists. It’s an intriguing question; let’s come up with some answers:

1. Too many emails. This is probably the biggest reason people unsubscribe; I know it’s the biggest reason I’ll drop out of something, usually pretty quickly. We don’t mind information, but we don’t want to be overwhelmed since it’s almost always some kind of sales pitch that we’re receiving at that point.

2. Subscribed to get something and now we’re satisfied. This is kind of disingenuous but it happens all the time. Many people that offer something if a person signs up for a list know this is going to happen, but since by that time most of those lists are automated anyway they really don’t care.

3. Subscribed then realized it’s not what we thought it was going to be. I’ve subscribed to some things and then noticed that I wasn’t getting what was promised so I drop out.

4. You run out of time. This could be for many reasons, such as getting too much other email, not enough time to read what you’re being sent, you’re participating in other things now that you weren’t before… time can be a killer, especially if you’re subscribed to a lot of things.

5. The frequency isn’t what you want it to be. Do you want weekly newsletters? Maybe something every two weeks or so? When you’re putting out a newsletter, it’s hard to figure out sometimes just how often you should be doing anything. If you’re the reader, it’s possible that every time a newsletter or whatever comes to you it’s more irksome because you weren’t expecting it and eventually you decide it’s time to leave.

6. You’re tired of it. Maybe you’ve been subscribed to something for a few years and now you’re just tired of it. It’s not that you don’t like it but you’re ready for something new, something from someone else.

7. You’re on too many lists. Many years ago I subscribed to a lot of things. I eventually created a new email address so I could shunt everything there instead of my regular email address. Then I realized that I just couldn’t, or wouldn’t, keep up with it all and I started cutting a bunch of them. At this point I only subscribe to two email lists, and it’s eased my load a lot.

8. The other person dropped your list. This one might seem petty, but it happens often. Heck, I know I’ve done it; people leave me and then I leave them because the only reason I was a part of their list was because they were receiving what I was sending out. That was years ago; I don’t do that anymore.

9. You didn’t subscribe to begin with. Man, is this irksome. I meet someone and they just add me to their list that I didn’t ask for. Or suddenly I’m receiving stuff from people I don’t even know, and I figure someone bought a list with my email address on it and just started pumping stuff my way. Some folks say you shouldn’t unsubscribe to these things because all you’re doing is proving that email address is accurate. Heck, spam’s coming anyway, so you might as well unsubscribe because it’s possible the person sending you something will have some ethics and remove you from that list.

10. You’ve irked the reader in some fashion. I had this happen to me where this guy reacted to a newsletter I wrote about my dad’s time in the military with a rant against the American military and government. Eventually, after I tried to have a conversation with them because that wasn’t what the newsletter was about, he threw out a parting shot and left. Frankly, I wasn’t unhappy he left.

There’s 10 reasons for you and Sire; do you have anything more to add?

Books

Always Like The First Time – A Book Review

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I don’t do a lot of book reviews on this site, though I’ve done a couple. I’m going to start sharing more of them because I’ve read a lot of books, and I know some of them will help folks that come to this blog. Some are just enjoyable as well. This book I’m highlighting today is a bit of both.

Always Like The First Time

A disclaimer up front. The author of this book, Kathryn Pape, is one of my web clients. I also helped edit this book before she sent it to the publishers. I mentioned her in February when I wrote a post about some new blogs I wanted to share that I’d helped to create. Still, this is an unbiased opinion of the book; that’s just how I roll.

I have to admit that I wasn’t sure what I was going to be reading when I started out. Kathryn talks mainly about color therapy, something I’ve learned more about since I manage her site and actually created the page, but something I didn’t really know as much about when I started helping with the book; it’s not a brand new book by the way.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book as I was going through it, even though it was also sad. Kathryn tells the story about going through both the treatments and eventual passing of her 3-year old son from cancer, and how she came up with her beliefs in color and how they could make people feel better both mentally and physically.

She talks about how we all have the choice of feeling better and being positive or negative in our lives based on how we view the word “like” and when we decide to “like”; no, this has nothing to do with Facebook. lol In general, she talks about these 5 principles, in order in the book as:

No one tapes/thinks in your mind but you;

Your thoughts drive and direct your energy;

You feel your thoughts;

Positive thoughts create patience and time;

Influence is an opportunity; you are your cause

This isn’t a long book to read, and after she sent the book to the publishers I got a regular copy of it as well. I think a few people could benefit from this book as it’s a feel good book handling a tough issue. You can visit her site, see what she’s about, and buy it from her products page.