Dabbling

There is a difference between a job and a hobby. When you decide to do something for fun, to help you relax or to take your mind off your problems, you don’t have to do it well and you don’t have to do it forever.

These are revolutionary ideas to most people.

My friends love to talk about the number of things I’ve quit. I used to take ballroom dance lessons, but I quit. I did some painting, but I gave that up, too.
I strung beads on wire and made my own jewelry for a while. I took a camera out into the woods and photographed nature. Ten years ago, I took up sewing. I made a dress and two skirts, but I haven’t sewed anything since.

These are what I call hobbies. Hobbies aren’t things I ever want to do professionally. I don’t need to be good at them.

I can spend every spare hour for weeks on a hobby, and then abandon it and never go back.

I dabble.

So often, other people seem to feel the need to apologize for dabbling. If you ask someone whether they play golf, for instance, most people will say either yes or no. Yes, if they work hard at the game, play regularly, take lessons and generally care about it. No, if they don’t do all these things.

People don’t understand the freedom of dabbling.

I can sit down at a piano and pick out a simple tune, but I can’t really play. The pleasure I get from my simple tune is just as great as it would be if I could play Beethoven’s Fifth, which I never will because I don't care that much. It takes dedication and passion to accomplish that. You can't dabble your way to Carnegie Hall.

There's nothing wrong with dabbling when it comes to golf or photography, but if you are a consultant, you can't dabble at networking. You can't dabble at maintaining your skills. You can't dabble at managing you career. Or rather, you can, of course, but you are giving up success and security.

There's freedom in dabbling with your hobbies. With your job, the freedom comes when you stop dabbling.

Search Engine Optimization

If you've got a website, you've probably already heard about SEO. This is the next big thing that fledgling business owners have to care about if they want to be successful, or so the twenty-odd persistent sales pitches I've received would have me believe.

Just in case you haven't incorporated recently, or registered for a sales tax certificate or joined your Chamber of Commerce or rented office space, I'll explain SEO. Search Engine Optimization is basically doing things inside your web page's code that aren't visible to your visitors but ARE visible to the programs Google, Alta Vista and all the other search engines use to find your page and decide when to include in their search results.

As an example, I entered "consulting skills training" in Google just now. There are about 27,000,000 results for this search. Our site, www.consultingstance.com , does not appear on the first page. Shocking. Oh, wait. We haven't paid $1,500-$5,000 to an SEO consultant to optimize our website so that it will appear on the first page. In fact, it appears on page 6 (61-70 of about 27,000,000). If you're a casual visitor who is shopping for some training, the sites on page 6 aren't any more likely to attract your attention than the sites on page 106, right? We might as well not have a website at all. So we'll probably pay for SEO.

But here's my question: What happens when 60 other companies who sell consulting skills training also pay for SEO and we are back on page 6? What if they already did and our investment is wasted? How can we possibly expect to compete in a business where we have 26,999,999 competitors?

Seriously. I'm asking. The answer to that question would be worth $1,500 to me.