“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”

– Ernest Hemingway

Great advice! Difficult to achieve. But I am working on it.

I am making a concerted effort to write in a more compact style. One that is better suited for blogs and for reading on-line. It requires a lot of work – just as anything worth achieving does.

As part of my study, I have been researching a variety of blogs.  One of the best is “Seth Godin’s Blog.” Simple, direct, compelling.

Click here to read his post on the difference between “urgency” and “importance.”

I mean no disrespect to Stephen Covey – he devoted 50 pages to explaining and illustrating this concept – but Seth captured the essence in just these few words:

“Add up enough urgencies and you don’t get a fire, you get a career. A career putting out fires never leads to the goal you had in mind all along.

I guess the trick is to make the long term items even more urgent than today’s emergencies. Break them into steps and give them deadlines. Measure your people on what they did today in support of where you need to be next month.

If you work in an urgent-only culture, the only solution is to make the right things urgent.”

Brilliant!