My Experiences

Sorry I have not been around much lately, but have been attending some personal matters; this by the way will be part of what I will briefly go over on this post. No matter what you do or fail to do, life continues. It doesn’t stop or slows down waiting for you to catch up; it just continues its path, with you or without you.

When you decide to run a business, whether it is large or small or whether you have 200 hundred employees or it is just you, you must plan for the unexpected. Call it “Plan B”, “A what if” or whatever you want to call it, but you must always be prepared just in case it starts to rain on your parade.

For a few weeks, my eBay business began to build momentum and everything seems to be looking up. Not that I was getting rich by any means, but was making progress and still have plenty of time to pursue other hobbies. By the way, you should not get so involved in your business that you begin to neglect everything else, because sooner or later you’ll pay the price; more on that later.

Anyway, just when I though everything was going as planned, my wife became gravely ill. Attending to her issue took much of our time; leaving little time to run my eBay business and attend other matters. However, we had a plan B and began to concentrate our efforts into the urgent an important things. Let me ask you a question; do you think that taking care of the urgent and important things is a good strategy? Well, I believe it is and I’m sure most of you will agree as well. However, do you know what is urgent and important to you? That’s one of the most important questions you should ask yourself before beginning any business endeavor.

Taking care of wife was urgent an important and so was taking care of my business, but what about my health? Was my health important? Probably now more than ever; if I got sick who was going to take care of my wife or the business? For the first time, I began to realize something I’ve learned a long time ago, “one must know what’s urgent and important”.

In the book, The 7-Habits of Highly Effective People, the author talks about urgent and important, and the not so urgent or unimportant. You may want to read the book to understand it, but basically we spent much of our time doing urgent but unimportant things. Here’s an example: Is exercise and nutrition important? The answer is obvious, of course they are. But are these things pressing on you at the moment? They are not, which is why they are so easy to neglect. But what if the doctor told you that if you didn’t watch your diet you’d die within a year? I’ll let you answer that to yourself.

What’s urgent for most of us, including top executives and professionals? Phone calls, emails, etc.; Are these things important? Probably. Are they urgent? Probably not. That phone call might be important, but probably not urgent; besides, we could easily use a recorder.

At any rate, for three weeks my wife and I concentrated our efforts in doing the urgent and important things, and we both succeeded. I sold over $500.00 in merchandise, again not riches by any means, but an excellent start for a beginner. My wife begun to feel better and I managed to stay healthy. We did what was necessary to manage and overcome the obstacles in front of us, without going into a panic mode; but it takes planning.

One more thing, make sure you stop to smell the roses or “sharpen your saw”. That’s another excellent lesson from The 7-Habits by Highly Effective People. You can just work and work without taken care of yourself or everything else. Suppose you use a computer for your business, which is what you’ll be using if trying an eBay business. Now suppose you use your computer day-in and day-out without deleting unnecessary files, removing accumulated dust, keeping your anti-virus or other software up-to-date, and so forth. Sooner or later your computer begins to fail, until it completely breaks down and crashes. What’s next? Panic mode, frustration, irritation, and probably a few angry costumers.

Believe it or not, that’s how many people run their business. They are so concentrated in production that they fail to take care of the machinery that is part of that production. If you want to know more about these topics, visit The Seven Habits.

I know I was a little bit off the subject on this post, but the circumstances called for a little change in content. I promise to get back to posting about running an eBay business on my next post. Take care. Happy computing to all!!