Charity Begins With You Giving - 25 Day Challenge

"You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.” ― John Bunyan

Each day leading up to Christmas, I will provide you with one or two things to do during the day. Call them acts of kindness or call them acts of just being nice. Each will only take a few minutes and are very easy to accomplish. Try them and then let me know what you did and how it went by leaving me a comment.

Day One - Hope On A Lamp Pole
Day Two - Allowing Others First
Day Three - Calming Automobile Rides
Day Four - Picking Up Litter
Day Five & Six - It was your weekend, what did you do?
Day Seven - Smile, You're on Life's Camera
Day Eight - Holiday Treat For Others

Day Nine - Charity Begins With You Giving

Get ready for all of those new things you will be getting during the holiday season. New clothes, a new toaster and maybe a new clock radio. The gifts you might receive are boundless.

The question is, what will you do with the old and slightly used things? Will you throw them in the attic or worse yet simply into a garbage bin? How you handle these used items is boundless.

Why not take the challenge to take these items and donate them to charity. There are lots of great organizations out there to take your items to which will get into the hands of those less fortunate.

So go through your attic, your garage, your dresser drawers and closet. Find those items you have not used in over three or maybe six months. Make a pledge to take donate these items to a charitable organization.

Let me know how it went and stay inspired my friends!

EMC World 2014 - Now Back To

"You can focus on things that are barriers or you can focus on scaling the wall or redefining the problem." - Tim Cook

It is the end of the week, EMC World 2014 is over and we can all return to our normal lives. Or can we?

During this IT conference, customers, analysts and others heard information on how the storage industry is being redefined. The traditional second IT platform is going the way of the buggy whip and horse-drawn carts. There will still be quaint horse-drawn carriages around the park on a Saturday evening.

But the Lotus F1 of third IT platform is here.

To borrow a quote from a Stephen King novel, "Get busy redefining or get busy dying." EMC is changing and redefining how storage is done and how companies are going to meet the challenges of the third platform. This week in Las Vegas at EMC World, we clearly marked that beginning.

But will you go back to your regularly scheduled programming? Or will you be changed? Will you redefine the way you think about storage and your way of doing business in this new third platform?

Better yet, will you redefine your life?

Changing the way you do business means dropping what has gone wrong, what has been slow and what has been holding you back. Changing the way you do life means doing the same things. Drop what has gone wrong, slow or held you back. In other words, REDEFINE how you approach life going forward. Do not let the past define you.

Do not return to the regular scheduled programming. Redefine yourself, do something for others, help others redefine themselves and see how life gets redefined, gets lifted, to a new and higher platform.

Redefine your business for life in the third platform and redefine your life for something better. Stay inspired my friends.

How can you redefine things in your life?

Check out Charity: water

EMC World 2014 - Safe Water

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today marks the final day of EMC World 2014 here in Las Vegas, an annual get together of the most brilliant minds in the IT industry. And I am talking about you, the attendees that truly make the industry run and perform as well as it does.

In all of the hubbub of everyday work life, conferences such as ours, we spend an awful lot of time trying to solve business problems. That is a good thing because business drives the economic life of the world, your city and your household. Without it, we would be scrambling to find those basic needs in life such as food, clothing and shelter.

Without it, we would be searching for clean water.

Water, that is what I am here to talk about today. How much do we take it for granted that we can turn on a faucet and drink clean water. To step into the shower and have water to bathe in or to fill a pot for cooking.

An organization named Charity:Water thinks about that everyday. Everyday they know that 90% of the 30,000 deaths that occur every week from unsafe water and unhygienic living conditions are in children under five years old. That diseases from unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. They also know that over 3.6% of the global disease burden could be prevented simply by improving water supply, sanitation, and hygiene.

So how can you REDEFINE your life?

You can take part of your time, your money and your talents to help organizations like Charity:Water help those in need. You can change your way of thinking by changing the way you think about others.

We get a limited lifetime and the greatest reward you will ever achieve is in helping others. Now that is life REDEFINED.

Stay inspired my friends!

Six Degrees

“No one has ever become poor by giving.” ― Anne Frank, diary of Anne Frank

There is an organization doing what it can to help others. Sure, there are many other great organizations doing the same thing. Same, but this one is different. It is called www.sixdegrees.org and owes its roots to a game.

A popular trivia game called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon in which you played a connection game that ultimately led each participant to be connected to a celebrity by the name of Kevin Bacon.

In an attempt to turn it into something for a better good, Kevin took the idea and turned it into doing something for others. Six Degrees is about giving people the opportunity to promote charities which help others. That is the whole idea.

From their website they state, "Any one person (including me, Kevin Bacon) is connected to any other person through six or fewer relationships, because it's a small world. SixDegrees.org is about using this idea to accomplish something good. It's social networking with a social conscience. Through this web site, you can support your favorite charities by donating or creating fundraising badges — as well as check out the favorite causes of other people, including celebrities."

Here you have another opportunity to involve yourself, another opportunity to make a difference. Not only can you donate to your charity but now you can promote that charity. Just another way to make life a little better for those around you.

So get on board, find a charity and get it posted. You'll do good and in turn, goodness will come back to you.

Stay inspired my friends.