Getting Out of Debt: The Bucket List Goal to Make All Other Goals Possible

Posted by On Filed under Bucket List, Money
Getting Out of Debt: The Bucket List Goal to Make All Other Goals Possible

This post was previously published on the BucketList.org blog in September 2014.

I’ve been racking up debt since college. A few years after graduation, I had over $42,000 of it, from student loans, a new car and the day-to-day reliance on credit. Over 1,500 BucketList.org users have “getting out of debt” as a goal, so we are not a small tribe.

After getting out of debt in 2013, I can definitively say that this is the one goal that will make many other goals possible.

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Non-Profits and Facebook Audiences

Posted by On Filed under Marketing 2 Comments
Non-Profits and Facebook Audiences

No one has been exempt from Facebook’s “curation” of our News Feeds. At any given time, you’re seeing 1/10th of the posts from all of the pages and friends you’ve liked, possibly even less.

As a non-profit (or small business) marketer, you’ve seen the flip side of this coin: your Facebook posts are going out to 20%, 10%, 3% or even less of your Facebook fan base.

If you’re on top of all the changes, you’ve improved your game by:

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100 Greatest Books (and more): A 28 Year Project

Posted by On Filed under Books
100 Greatest Books (and more): A 28 Year Project

Six years ago, I combined several 100 Greatest Books lists and began reading my way through some of the greatest literature available.

Read about the journey so far here.

It’s been a truly rewarding experience, especially as I begin reading through the older Pulitzer Prize winners. Andersonville, by MacKinley Kantor (1958), for example, took me a month to get through, but the characters have continued to live on very vividly in my imagination. The Way West, by A.B. Guthrie (1950), too was a refreshing migration-westward novel.

Others were a bit forgettable or, rather, it was interesting to ponder why they’ve become so iconic (ahem, The Old Man and the Sea).

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Getting to Zero Waste: Q4 Results and Year 1 Summary

Posted by On Filed under Voluntary Simplicity / Minimalism
Getting to Zero Waste: Q4 Results and Year 1 Summary

For the past year, I’ve been trying to minimize the amount of garbage, paper, plastic and glass leaving my home and heading for the landfill or recycling center.  While I’ve long been a re-user and recycler further down the waste stream, this has been my attempt at reducing my footprint from the point of consumption.

In the first quarter of the year (January-March), I realized I was a long way from zero waste. Although, at an average of 0.79 lbs of trash per day, I was also a long way off from the average American household, which disposes of 4.4 lbs of trash per day!

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The 100 (or 300) Greatest Books

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The 100 (or 300) Greatest Books

I’m slowly but surely making my way through my list of “100” greatest books of all time. I put “100” in quotes because I merged several top 100 lists and recently added the Pulitzer Prize winners in the Novel (1917-1947) and Fiction (1948-present) categories. This leaves me with a list of the 300 greatest books from varied sources.

The list is below. The titles in bold are the ones I’ve read. With 65 out of 300 read, I’m at 21.67%. I’ve been working on this list since 2008, so if I continue at this pace, the list will provide me with good reading for the next 20 years.

That seems both daunting and delicious.

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My Dan Pallotta Inspired Halloween Costume: I’m Overhead

Posted by On Filed under Doing Business Differently, Pause for Reflection
My Dan Pallotta Inspired Halloween Costume: I’m Overhead

I’m personally and professionally fascinated by analytics and the idea of return on investment (ROI). I spend my working days in Google Analytics, Facebook and YouTube Insights, e-newsletter stats and more.

When it comes to my personal giving to non-profits, I’m just as intrigued by numbers.  I tend to “invest” my thoughts, energy, time and finances quite vertically: I drive deeply down into issues and give there, rather than here and there to many causes.

In doing this, I come across terms like effectiveness, efficiency and overhead, which are very often cited by non-profits as reasons to believe an organization is “good.” This is, of course, in addition to (and sometimes an after-thought to!) the actual impact an organization has.

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Why LinkedIn “Skills” Are Useless – and What LinkedIn Can Do About It

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Why LinkedIn “Skills” Are Useless – and What LinkedIn Can Do About It

LinkedIn makes it very easy to add new skills to your professional profile – and this is what makes this section of the site irrelevant.

As of today, I have 11 skills for which colleagues have endorsed me. By clicking “Add to Profile,” these words will quickly appear on my profile and position me as an expert in Facebook, WordPress, Teaching, Research and more.

Facebook? Yes, I’m a pro. WordPress? Yes, I’m very good at that too. Teaching?  Well, I’ve run some good workshops and I enjoy mentoring, but I dislike most forms of “teaching” and wouldn’t use that word to describe my skills. Research?  Hmm, I like to learn and I Google a heck of a lot of stuff every day. Does that make me skilled at research?

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