Reflections on Collaboration, Blogging and Other Stuff

Recently Graham Edwards and I finished our blogging series, Ten Questions to Help You Mind Your Business. It was an interesting and enjoyable experience that taught me a few things about myself and proved a few things I already knew. Below are some thoughts on my experience.

Deadlines motivate: Nothing can motivate you like a deadline. I work in a deadline driven industry, and sometimes that’s a bit stressful, but nothing forces action like your commitment to meeting a deadline.

It’s great to have an accountability partner: Graham and I have been meeting regularly since we met on beBee over a year ago. We discovered we enjoy having someone to set goals with and neither of us is inclined to disappoint the other by not committing to our goals.

I like doing what I say I am going to do: If people are depending on me to do something, I really don’t want to disappoint them. I try very hard to meet my obligations and do good work. That’s important to me, which brings me to my next observation.

People make time for things that are important to them: Trust me when I tell you that my life has gotten very hectic and complicated in the last several months. Times are changing quickly for me, and sometimes it is difficult to keep up. I am driven to meet my commitments, so I take a deep breath and try to clear my mind, and miraculously, I manage to squeeze in the time to meet my obligations. It’s all good. I’ve discovered that we all do what is important to us and we put off the things (and people) that are not aligned with our priorities.

Answering 10 questions is a great way to develop content: If you are ever at a loss for blog content, just think of ten questions your customers or readers might want to ask you. The answer to each question is a blog post. When you are finished the series, compile the posts into an e-booklet. Take snippets and post them into tweets, memes or those really cool, no frills LinkedIn updates that seem to be gaining more notice on LinkedIn than other content.

beBee members are pretty cool people: We have such an engaged community on beBee. What writer doesn’t love to receive insightful, positive feedback? The beBee community is alive and well!

Graham and I aren’t really that different: My buddy, Graham, fancies himself a contrarian and a unicorn. I’m not so sure he’s as different as he thinks. As we answered each question, I expected to see very different answers, but more often than not, our answers were similar, but expressed differently. Graham is actually a pretty cool guy. He’s smart, dependable and very disciplined. He’s also very decisive and somewhat set in his ways, but I can forgive him for not always agreeing with me. Great collaborators need a little push and pull in order to get the best out of each other. I think our blog series demonstrated that perfectly!