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Killed it. Over the past week, that’s what I did. I finally found the focus that had been alluding me. I’m really get at getting things done, just not always the most pressing things. The past 2 weeks have been different though. Last week was especially good. I finished Chapter 3 of my dissertation, finished the literature review for my dissertation, finally got out the remaining videos from the Olympic trials that need to be digitized, finished up a couple photo shoots for some pictures for a pole vault book I’m helping out with, finished the usual week’s worth of training plans for clients and HPC Elite team members, and started progress on a new ecommerce shop for the company store.

The MOST impressive part about this though is that I did it all while getting totally and completely addicted to LOST (the tv show). I had been told for some time that I would really like it but 1) I’m not really one to watch much tv and 2) after season 1, then season 2, then 3 and 4 passed me by I didn’t want to try to come in in the middle of what I had heard was a deeply sequential story. Last Saturday, for some odd reason, I happened to be on the iTunes store looking for some NPR podcasts to download so that I could listen to something on my weekly Sat-Sun trip to my wife’s family farm (where there’s no internet, cell phone reception, and I stay up late as usual to do work). While there I found a purchased Lost season 1.

Well over the course of a week, I’ve now watched all of season 1, and half of season 2 and I would be in denial if I said I wasn’t thoroughly addicted. The odd thing is that what would seemingly be a diversion has matched up with one of my most productive weeks in the last couple years. I’ve got 2 and a half seasons left to watch before I’m ‘caught up’….hopefully I can continue this stretch of focus for the remainder.

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Just a quick word on last week’s election- I’m happy Obama won. It feels good. I liked the McCain of 12 months ago but not what he had become over the last couple months. Don’t get me wrong….I’m not Barrack fanatic or anything but I think that he represents something much bigger than himself. He’s become an icon of sorts. I’m not just talking about race (although that certainly is an important part of it). I’m mainly talking about a change from what has brought us to our current low in American international standing, finances and politics; a sense of hope that can be seen across almost the entire country; and a renewed feeling of pride in what it is to be an American. Hopefully for our and his sakes he can live up to the grand expectations that have already been placed on him. I’m sure it’s only normal if he looked out over the tens of thousands of people at his acceptance speech all crying, hollering, and cheering his name to think ‘Oh Dead God….can I possibly live up to the expectations?”

Only time will tell. One thing I do know is that an Obama presidency is definitely the better one for a small business owner like myself. And while that was not the first thing I put on my list when I cast my vote, it certainly is refreshing that even if he does nothing of substance about the economy, his win seems to have given much of the American public hope that dreams can come true and that things are on the mend. This is something that can’t be discounted because after all, perception is often reality.

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It’s all for good reason though. I’ve been busting my arse trying to get some serious writing done on my dissertation. Yesterday I finished the final research chapter of my dissertation. As with most things, my fatal optimism and perfectionism got the best of me. Fatal optimism in that I had actually been telling myself “I’ll be done with this today”….for about 3 weeks. Part of the problem was that I ran in to some snags that forced me to redo a big part of it but the delay was also due in large part to my OCD of getting things PERFECT. All in all though, I sent it out to my advisor yesterday afternoon and hopefully won’t have too many revisions to make on it.

Now I just have a conclusion for the three research chapters and then I have to wittle down my literature review a little more and I’m ready for defense. I can’t wait to be finished. I’ve been unusually focused on it the last couple weeks as I’m approaching ‘crunch time.’ The last day I can defend this semester is December 19th and I need to give my 5 member dissertation committee at least 4 weeks to read it before then. So that means if I assume a defense date of the 15th (since no one will likely want to sit through a dissertation defense on the last day of a semester) that means I really need to be done writing some time around a week from today. That’s good and bad. Good because I definitely work better when I’m ‘under the gun.’ Bad in that it leaves me little time for anything else, including errors.

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I’m feeling the pressure of finishing my dissertation. I had a stats section mixup that I had to go back and fix and then had to rewrite quite a bit of the discussion. This took some time I didn’t feel like I had. I’ve been getting a ton of writing done but my mind is racing about it all day. I need to finish this thing so I can move on with my life but my OCD perfectionist traits are eating up some time. I think since I’ve started running more I’ve been able to focus much better than usual. I’ve had 2 nights this week with under 5 hours sleep. In both cases, I actually went to bed, found my mind still racing (at 4am!) so got up and started working again. Today I’m starting to feel it though. My brain is lagging and I’ve got a little bit of an aura coming on. I haven’t contributed much to elitetrack in the past couple days, haven’t blogged here, and have pretty much been isolated other than a couple hours of play time each day with my daughter. Sorry if that was a rambling post. Thought it would be good to update the site and do something other than my dissertation for a couple minutes.

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Here’s part of the letter I’ve sent to some companies.

I work for a company called Human Performance Consulting. XYZ
gave me your contact information. The reason I’m writing is because I was
wondering if XXXX would be interested in either a sponsorship or
collaboration with my company. We are an athletic development company
that coaches athletes, educates coaches, and performs sport science research.
XYZ actually worked as a researcher for us before joining XXX.
We present an opportunity that I believe would be beneficial for both you
and us. We can present you with the opportunity for some high profile
exposure,especially within the running and track and field community. We are
commissioned to work with USATF as it’s official sport science provider
and as part of this we put a crew of 25+ employees on the field for the
entire duration of the USATF National Championships and we have no restrictions
on what we wear. If you were to be the company’s official sponsor you would
have the opportuntiy to put your logo on our shirts / shoes / shorts as
large as you’d like out on the field at what is the second biggest and
best (to the Olympics and World Champioships) track meet in the world.

In addition to this, we also have a club of elite level athletes who have
been very sucessful and are increasingly gaining both national and
international exposure. Although our track club is only 15 months old, in
2008 we sent 3 athletes to the USATF Indoor national championships, our
sprinter turned in the fastest time in the world in the 55m (and world
ranked times in the 60m and 200m), and we sent 3 athletes to the USATF
Olympic trials (2 made the finals in the Triple Jump), one athlete
competed in the UK Olympic trials, and another athlete took second in the triple
jump at the Estonian national championships. These athletes could wear
your equipment to help increase exposure for your company both in the U.S. and
internationally. We actively market these athletes on our youtube and
vimeo channels (see http://youtube.com/hpcsport and http://vimeo.com/hpcsport).
They would also be willing to participate in product testing if that is
something that would interest you.

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If you’re a regular reader of my blog you know that I’ll be setting up my business somewhere in the next month or two. In my last blog entry I mentioned that Raleigh, NC may very well be the current front runner. I’ve done a lot of research on where to do it to have the best chance of success and also live somewhere I want to live. I’ve had quite a few emails asking about what cities are on my shortlist. Here they are in no particular order:

1. Raleigh, NC
2. Charlotte, NC
3. Atlanta, GA
4. Austin, TX
5. Jacksonville, FL
6. Tampa, FL
7. Irvine, CA (probably ruled out now)

I have some very specific criteria I am looking for when I chose these cities? Can you guess what they are?

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Had a great week. Got a lot of things done. Not as much dissertation writing as I would have liked but a lot of other “nearly as important” things. On top of that, this week has brought some interesting opportunities that should be unfold in the next month or so.

The first one came about as a result of a random email I received a while back. I get a lot of those. This one however was from a former attendee of the baseball clinic that my company put on in 2006 out in California. The guy is from around the Raleigh, NC area and has just started a performance training center that focuses on baseball. I remembered him from the clinic and I respect what he’s doing. He was looking for a person to replace his speed and strength coach who left for another job. Well, long story short is that Raleigh is one of the 6 cities on my short-list of places to set up shop with HPC when I’m done with my dissertation so I wrote him back interested in seeing if we could perhaps work together in some manner. We’d been playing phone tag for about 2 weeks but finally managed to talk this week. At the very least we will be working together on some collaborative projects and it looks like we may very well partner to work out of Raleigh. I’ll be taking a visit there in the next couple weeks to check out the scene and see if it meets what I’m looking for in a business location.

The second opportunity that came up this week was the potential to become a professor at my Alma Mater. I guest lectured 2 classes this week at Ohio University and my advisor for my MS said that I could be a faculty member for their online education classes as soon as I finish my dissertation. The attactive thing about this is that it allows me to stay connected within academia (although in a non-traditional manner), it provides me with tons of freedom (because I can actually live whereever I want), and it would provide a steady stream of income to supplement whatever I’m getting from my business.

Kinda funny how things can just fall in to your lap sometimes.

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Since leaving my ’steady’ job about 4 months ago I’ve tried to become increasingly active on social sites like digg, facebook, and twitter. Why? Anyone who knows me, knows that while I’m not introvert I’m certainly not an extrovert either. Is this a change of character? Heck no. I’ll be the first to say that I’m doing it for marketing my business. I have to. I don’t have a marketing budget and can’t really even afford to put much in to advertising beyond the occasional use of google ads. Using social sites like those in the right hand column help to increase your or your businesses exposure, enhance traffic to your main sites by increasing exposure and enhancing search engine strength (which is largely based on incoming links to a site), and even help to build your business network (using sites like linkedin). So far, I can say that it’s been worth the additional time for me.

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