The Guy With The Solar-Powered Flashlight

I just got done watching a video blog by the founders of Kiosk, the web hosting company that provides infrastructure for a lot of online businesses, and I must say that I like what I saw – a couple of guys just having some light-hearted fun. It made me stop and realize something really important that I think often gets forgotten in the daily shoulder-to-the-wheel-nose-to-the-grindstone things of working and building a business.

Sometimes you’ve just got to take a break and have a few laughs. Stop taking things so seriously and just let your hair down a little!

As time passes and things change – they always do, that’s just part of the package – I’m realizing more and more that if you’re not too careful you can focus so hard on making a living that you can forget to make a life for yourself.

In the world of business, we’re led to believe that we have to be dead serious about everything all the time. And of course, sometimes the things we have to do in the course of making a living aren’t all that much fun. They have to be done, and so we do them. But I’ve always found that if you can find some way to make a tedious task fun it always seems like it takes less time to get it done. It may not shorten the actual amount of time to do it – it just makes it seem that way.

One good example of this is our My VM Team Blog Talk Radio broadcast on Friday June 27th. Now I’m not saying that doing the radio show is tedious or unpleasant – far from it. But there can be a certain degree of anxiety and self-imposed pressure in figuring out what to talk about for a one-hour broadcast 3 times a week. But the good Lord always seems to provide us with things to talk about. But this show was different.

Jim, Steph and I were well into our planned program when we got a call from a fellow who said he needed help with his business. He told us he was really excited about the product he was promoting, but he told us he faced a lot of ridicule from people he talked to about his product and he wasn’t seeing a whole lot of results - he was getting discouraged.

Of course all 3 of us immediately went into “detective mode” to see if we could find out what the source of his problem was, and in the course of our questions the fellow revealed that his product was a solar-powered flashlight. Very environmentally-friendly, he said, long-lasting, and worked wonderfully – as long as there was enough sunlight available to power it! It wouldn’t work at all in the dark!

He did a great job of making it sound like he was dead serious – so well that it took us some time to understand what was really going on. We got so wrapped up in trying to solve his “problem” that it took a while for us to realize that there was really no problem at all! The guy was just having some fun with us, and we fell into his “trap” of taking things – ourselves included – perhaps just a little too seriously.

Then along comes the video blog from the Kiosk guys. Like I said, it really got me to thinking about how seriously we take ourselves and our businesses – maybe too seriously sometimes. We were enjoying doing our radio show that Friday so much that we extended it by a half hour – something we’ve never done before.

And I think one of the reasons that it “felt so good” is that all of us sort of climbed down off of our “expert” soapboxes and just started having a conversation with each other and with our audience. The guy with the solar-powered flashlight had injected something into our show that it needed.

Humor.

As you go about building your business, meeting and talking with new people and building relationships with them, please try to remember not to take things too seriously. Try to keep the door open to letting a little humor into the conversation. It can go a long way.

When you get someone to smile it means you’ve made them happy somehow - even if it’s only for only a moment or two. It shows them that you’re a real person and not just a walking talking robot spouting business all the time. It helps to “break the ice” and make people more comfortable – on both sides of the conversation, yourself included. It will attract people to you, because people want to smile and have an occasional laugh. It’s a very valuable part of the human condition, and can have an amazing effect on not just your business, but on your whole outlook on life.

And if the guy selling solar-powered flashlights happens to read this - please get in touch with me...

I want to buy one from you!