Aurelius on Objectivity and Focus

“The first rule is, to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.”

–Marcus Aurelius (121–180)
Roman emperor and philosopher

Prune. Not the fruit. The verb.

To prune a tree is to remove the branches and shoots that don’t serve its growth and vigor. But it goes a step further.

A diseased branch or low performing shoot not only doesn’t serve the tree – it drains the energy that can be used elsewhere – the energy that can produce more fruit, more flowers, and stronger branches.

When did you last evaluate your sales day activities against what’s most important to you succeeding (e.g., getting new customers, retaining current customers, driving profitable revenue)?

212 thought: Removing just two diversions from your sales efforts each week eliminates more than 100 distractions throughout your sales year.

The Need of a Good Basemap

I found this blog post on basemaps over at the 41Latitude blog (if you aren’t following this blog you need to start right now) to resonate with me.

perhaps, in trying to make a basemap that’s optimized for everything, we’re actually creating one that’s optimized for nothing.

We all see it quite a bit these days.  Some data overlaid on a default Google Map and you can’t read a darn thing.  Working for the GNOCDC, we picked the Terrain map as our basemap (even though there is no “terrain” in NOLA) because it was the least cluttered basemap.

gnocdc-terrain.jpg

Over in the ESRI world, I’ve had a couple people ask me to put their data on the Esri Topographic web map servicebecause it looks so good.  Now I do agree, it is a beautiful basemap, but it isn’t one that lends itself to being a basemap.  Esri should be offering a muted basemap and allow for the most important part of the data, the information being overlaid, to stand out.