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Today’s thought may be a little different in that some may consider it a little negative, but what I’m exploring here is what makes something go viral against all odds, or what seem to be negative odds. Right now as I write this post I’m sitting in the Java Surf Cafe in Indialantic FL next to what has become a cultural phenom, at least for a place like South Brevard County, that has no culture.

The cultural phenom for Indialantic? It’s a pizza place called Bizarro’s and, okay here comes the negative part, they serve slop. Really, they serve the worst pizza I’ve ever tasted, but people flock to this place like they’re giving away free money or something. The pizza has the most flavorless, thinnest, white flour crust you can imagine and the subs are equally as appealing, yummy. It’s one of those things that just doesn’t make sense to my wife and I.

When I used to work at BellSouth, one of our artists used to rave about the place as lots of people do around this area. It kind of makes you wonder why anything goes viral at all on the net, in society, in fashion, whatever. However, I think the message here is you can’t really make something go crazy viral and instantly get filthy rich or suddenly become the next guru in your niche. Either it will happen or it won’t. However, it certainly will never happen if you aren’t being serious about what you’re doing online.

You have to be creative in your online endeavors and work like you want it to happen though. The odd little pizza shop hole in the wall over here on the beach didn’t become famous by sitting on their backside and then one day decide to start selling subs by asking people on the boardwalk if they were hungry. They had a plan, built a restaurant, hired employees, ordered food and performed a thousand other duties necessary to open their business. I don’t think they planned to be one of the top pizza places in the entire county, but they built the foundation for their business as if it were going to happen.

Even though their product leaves a whole lot to be desired, Bizarro’s had every intention to be successful. What about you, do you want to just make a quick buck on the net, or are you planning to be successful for the long haul? Without at least some plan, you stand a zero percent chance of making that viral jump.

Relaxing At Java Surf Indialantic

I love Sundays because it’s a great time to get almost completely away from my duties on the web. Jean and I go to church in the morning, I play in the band, we come home and eat lunch and we’ve started going out to Java Surf over in Indialantic Beach, Florida to have a coffee, a snack and spend a couple hours reading and relaxing. Java Surf has sentimental memories for me because it used to be Shaggs Surf Shop, owned by the former wife of East Coast surfing legend Dick Catri. Shaggs was a place I visited quite often as a young surf rat many years ago.

We used to do our relaxing at home on Sundays which usually ended up in us taking a 2 hour nap and then not being able to sleep Sunday night. This wasn’t a good way to start out the week. We figure if we get out of the house on Sunday afternoon and go some place where it’s probably looked down on if you sleep in public, we stand a much better chance of sleeping at night and getting a good start on the next week.

It helps me tremendously to just get away from the web for several hours on Sunday and read something stimulating and avoid taking that nap. Today I read the transcript from the Ray Kurzweil interview by Glenn Beck this past Friday evening on CNN since I didn’t have the chance to watch it. Ray has 16 honorary doctorates, is a genius’ genius and knows just about everything about everything. Really, it was absolutely fascinating and reading such as this can help you see way beyond any mental boundaries you may have.

So the though for this Sunday is, what are you doing to relax, get away from the ordinary daily web grind and expand your thinking to new horizons?

Today’s Sunday thought is about Memorial Day and being thankful to live in the United States. Officially, Memorial Day is tomorrow, but today is just a great time to think about what this country means. I’m thankful for both the men and women who have given of their time and their lives to to see that we are free from tyranny and oppression.

In much of the world, because of the lack of freedom, people don’t even have the opportunity to surf the web, much less make money from it. Unfortunately a lot of people in the world are lucky if they even get a meal every day. In the United States we have an nearly unlimited opportunity to do whatever we want and we have so much money and leisure time we get to really enjoy life and make a better one for ourselves if we choose to work hard and smart enough for it.

This is an amazing country we live in and I salute the men and women who have served in the US military, are serving at the present time and to those who have paid the ultimate price for our freedom. Thank you.

This week’s Sunday’s thought is one of the shortest, but most meaningful quotes I’ve blogged about. Jean and I had a fantastic dinner with some friends we haven’t seen for some time and one recurring theme kept coming up in the conversation. It mainly had to do with your marriage and family relationship, but it is certainly apt for any part of your life.

The simple quote is:

Don’t survive, thrive!

What implications that has for all aspects of our lives. Are you just trying to survive your relationships, job, school, exercise routine, online money making opportunities or even a single day at the office. How much better would your life be if you were thriving at these things instead of just trying to get through them because they have become routine?

If you don’t like what you are doing, you have the power to change that and you also have the power to change your attitude about the things you can’t change. Jean and I are beginning to use this statement now about our relationship, our attitude towards each other and what we’re doing with our lives. When one of us is down or makes a negative statement about something, we’ll say to the other, “Are we surviving or thriving?”

What do you want to do, survive or thrive?

I’ve been reading and thoroughly enjoying Aaron Wall’s SEOBook mainly because Aaron takes a very honest look at building businesses on the net, providing value for your visitors and what it takes to make a successful web site. In reading SEOBook I came across a quote that’s by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Internet (sorry Al Gore, the net wasn’t your baby). Aaron quotes a longer passage by Tim of which I’m only using a couple of sentences:

Core in my upbringing was a value system that put monetary gain well in it’s place, behind things like doing what I really wanted to do. To use net worth as a criterion by which to judge people is to set our children’s sights on cash rather then what will actually make them happy.

While it is apparent to those of us who either work at home or are striving to do so, that working at a job and climbing the corporate ladder probably is not the thing that will make us happy, we can be equally as culpable in the things we strive for in the Dot Com world. I’ll be the first to raise my hand, not very high, and somewhat sheepishly exclaim, “guilty”. The prevalence of the get-rich-quick mentality on the Internet can be a detrimental influence that must be tamed.

What about you? What’s your perspective on the things that really provide happiness?