Author: J Cleveland Payne

Four Daily Habits To Consider If You Need A Boost Toward Success

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There are no shortage of lists of things to find on the internet. If you follow entrepreneurial or personal development feeds in social media or have stumbled upon one of those email newsletters that you can’t seem to unsubscribe completely from, then you have undoubtedly read your fair share of lists of tasks that successful people always follow that ensure their success.

We are skipping the lesson on correlation, causation and coincidence to later in this article, but there are some general consistencies that are at least anecdotally simple to spot in people who have some level of success and the habits and rituals that they perform religiously. Add the notion that these rituals are completed as early in the day as possible, before the monotony of daily tasks begin, and you can see how easy it can be to get yourself psyched up for a tough day by working through some of the possible stresses before they can form.

This article highlights four rituals consistently mentioned as key by those we view as ‘have made it.’ Remember, there are no guarantees that you will find fame or fortune by adopting any or all of these. But they certainly can’t hurt your efforts.

Meditate Without Getting Distracted By Semantics

The goal of daily meditation should not necessarily be about chakras and becoming one with the vast expanse of the universe. The goal is to spend a little quiet time with yourself, maybe with some positive thoughts, or even in quality conversation with your creator. Find a quiet, comfortable, and distraction-free place, and start with just five minutes of trying to keep your mind clear. If you find soothing background sounds or music necessary, add it. If you need a little help keeping your thoughts clear, download a guided meditation. If you fear you are opening up your soul to bad vibes, say silent prayers of protection. If you are completely lost on what you should be doing, just close your eyes and repeat to yourself in very low tones, ‘Thank you.’ Meditation should not hard and does not need to be that serious.

Get In A Workout Regardless Of Your Sweat Level

A popular excuse for not getting a good workout is a simply a lack of time. Many people are not blessed with free blocks of hours and access to classes, treadmills and Smith machines. While this does pose a problem for people working toward elite level fitness, a two-hour gym session is not necessary for the average person just trying to maintain a good level of strength and agility. In fact, your body doesn’t know the difference between a 50-minute aerobics class and five 10-minutes calisthenics sessions spread over the course of the day. A mile traveled is the same distance and mostly same effort, whether run in 6 minutes, jogged in 12, or walked in 20. You can get a lot of fitness mileage out of knocking out a quick set of pushups and jumping jacks, and you will not get too sweaty in the process. There are too many benefits from exercise and too many simple and quick ways to work it into any busy schedule to not do it.

Read Something Other Than Your Social Media Feed

People can make the argument that we collectively read more thanks to the invention of social media. Many people you know will boldly proclaim to have not read a physical book since high school while proudly showing off the random list of articles skimmed and ‘liked’ in various feeds on their mobile phones. The problem is the content being compared is not comparable. A quick list of 10 things made mostly of pictures is not the same as what is found in a bound book, regardless of the book’s content. From salacious romance novels to detailed autobiographies, even the shortest book will take a good amount of effort to create, which in turn requires a good amount of time to consume. A book can be a quickly read, but still a deeper read than a ‘you’ll never believe what happens next’ article. Set aside some time and read a few pages. If lugging a physical book is a problem, download a book reading app on that fancy smartphone you are so proud to own. Then, you can read as much ’50 Shades of Grey’ as you want in public with no shame whatsoever.

Make A List, Baby

One of the most powerful tools you can keep in your personal development toolbox is a daily checklist. The optimal way to work a checklist is to create it ahead of time for a specific need, such as a list of your important tasks for your workday created the night before. Creating your list gives you a game plan to work through, and a tool to reconcile your progress or lack thereof at the close of your mission. Tack on a regularly scheduled appointment with yourself for a detailed review of all your work and you will find you have created the ultimate progress report for yourself.

Try Them All, Or Try Them One At A Time

The four habits presented here can do a lot to advance you on the path of success. Or not. You must first remember to not let getting any of these things done get in the way of getting your regular stuff done. Second, getting back to that lesson on correlation, causation and coincidence we promised earlier. While correlation does establish a connection between two things based on their co-occurrence, correlation does not imply causation. That means just because it happens together, does not mean one always triggers the other. That is just coincidence, just the circumstances of events, with no real connection. Daily meditation will not make you as spiritual as Deepak Chopra. Daily workouts will not make you as intense as Tony Horton. Daily reading will not make you a quoted as Malcolm Gladwell. And making your daily list of activities will not make you a billionaire like Oprah Winfrey. Doing the work should help you toward greater success. You still have to rely on your hard work, a little bit of luck, and the pursuit of a solid and obtainable goal.

Tell Your Story (Someone Will Listen)

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Someone out there needs to hear your story. Unfortunately, that does not mean your story is worthy of becoming a bestselling novel that gets optioned for a summer blockbuster movie. That’s what keeps most people from putting the words to paper to preserve their stories in their purest forms (from their most recent memories) for the world to share and future generations to savor. Because most of the world won’t put forth the effort to share them, and the future generations will probably not care.

But there is someone out there that needs to hear your story. Your particular story. They may not be famous or influential, but the words that spin a tale of your life, with fear and faults, and successes and celebrations, are destined to be told to someone or a few some ones.

As I work to help people ‘master their message,’ formulating their stories to present to mass audiences, I look at my own life and my own story, and the frustration that more people don’t seem as interested in my life as I happen to be. I have an interesting life. More real than any B-list actor trying to keep their fame alive and mortgage paid by living a semi-scripted life on a Reality TV show. Few people care about the details of my life, and fewer want to hear me tell it to them as a way to be entertained on a Friday night.

My story may not be the greatest ever told, but I intend to make sure it is told with as much splendor as I can muster every time my daughter hears it. And every time I get the chance to share a few tales of my experiences, I give a performance as clear and concise as possible. Because I have learned one thing from listening to so many stories in my lifetime, and now training others to share their stories over the past decade. You never know what tidbit of information or what sound bite of advice is going to resonate with other people. You never know what small shred of your story someone else will actually remember. I know I am surprised by the bits as pieces of stories I have heard that I actually retain.

So save your complaints about a lack of an audience. There is an audience. There is always an audience. Craft your words. Master your message. Tell your story to anyone who will sit still long enough to listen. Keep telling your story as they stand up and walk away. Someone will listen. And someone needs to hear it.

Things I Learned From Publishing My First Book (And Second) Book

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In 2014 I published two books, “Welcome to your Monday” and “So Forty Happened.” Their success was relative, as in they successfully exist in physical and digital form and are available for purchase. Critical or financial success wasn’t expected, but the $20 I declared in my 2014 taxes as royalties was a very much needed source of amusement to what turned out to be a very hectic year, personally and professionally.

The experience also became a turning point in my life as an ‘expert’ on things. I didn’t necessarily acquire any epiphany worthy new information to share with the world in 2014, but the new existence of the title ‘published author’ was enough to impress a few people for a few weeks. And it got others who have spent years purposely ignoring what I had to say to take just a moment and actively listen.

So what did I really learn from publishing my first two books last year? Well, here is a list. I hope it helps you, as it did me a lot of good just writing them out:

The Hard Part Was Getting Down All The Words – The truly difficult part of the journey into publishing a book, whether on your own or with the backing of a corporate entity, is getting started. Looking at a blank screen waiting to craft words with no real idea how it will end is frightening. People who participate in National Novel Writing Month every November are required to reach a mark of at least 50,000 words to count their book as ‘complete.’ That’s about 200 pages, which was the mental ‘standard’ I had to shake off to publish my first books. But before you can get to page 200, you have to complete page one, with the ability to ensure the narrative can still make sense on that final page.

Editing was a pain, but it couldn’t happen until the initial batch of words were finally put on paper. And editing just made the work better (whether it was good from the start is relative). Self-publishing through Create Space and Kindle Direct Publishing took trial and error to get the finished product as close as you desire, but you are just filling and re-filling forms.

Your Book Should Have A Purpose Other Than ‘Hopefully Will Make Me Rich – I have been actively working on publishing a book on something since High School, I just needed the right material to make it come together. After having crafted 18 months’ worth of weekly Twitter-sized missives, I had the perfect amount of source material to write “Welcome to your Monday,” and the right spin to make the book an enhancement to the material already released online. “So Forty Happened” answered a few challenges. The first challenge was to write a book about my view on my world and the greater world around me. It also stands as a legacy writing for my kids to someday cherish or be embarrassed by (only they will ultimately make that choice, and I intend to be dead by then so my vote won’t count for much at that point).

But none of these books were created for the sole purpose of putting money into my bank account, or they would have been complete failures. I intend on using what I have learned from the first two to ensure future book are more commercially viable, but if the point is just to make money, there are easier ways to do that which don’t set oneself up for as much public scrutiny, or can make so much money with little effort that you don’t particularly care. As a big fan of money, I’ll sell you as many books as you want to pay me for. As an effort spread a message to allow me to achieve some sense of intellectual immortally, that task is done.

You’ll Never Make Any Money If You Keep Giving Away Books – Friends and family need to help support your endeavor not by just reading your book and telling people about it, but by buying a few books and suggesting that other people buy them as well. To hit The Wall Street Journal’s Bestseller list, you need to sell about 3,000 copies of a book in the first week. For the New York Times Bestseller list, you need to sell about 9,000 copies of a book in the first week. By the nature of the internet, making Amazon’s Top 100 list is much easier, selling about 1,000 copies of a book within the first few days of its release, and top five titles average sales of 1,094 print copies sold across all of Amazon’s channels on a ‘typical’ day.

The current trend to make yourself into a bestselling author is to offer copies of the book ‘for free’ to your ‘tribe.’ Here, free equals cost plus shipping and administrative handing and the optional a slight markup so that you do make some money if you can get away with it. So this quote from Patrick Snow stating, “Bestseller” is a manipulated term. If you want to be a bestselling author, take out a $100,000 loan and buy 15,000 of your own books from Amazon,” is entirely too true. Unless you’ve got the backing of an established company trying to game the system, you need as many real people to buy your book as possible to make a blip on the radar for mid-level to major sellers to pick it up and give it a shot.

You’ll Never Make Any Money If You Are Not Willing To Give Away Books – See what I did there? You absolutely cannot hand out books like candy at a parade. But if you give a book to a person with real influence, along with a few extra copies for them to share and give away, you’re doing marketing and promotion, not just giving away the inventory. Your influencer will talk about your book and tell the members of their ‘tribe’ just how grand it is. And if they are paid for the endorsement (which most seemed to be these days), you can expect a glowing one, to be followed by a slew of low rated reviews from people who will on the back end feel scammed by the influencer. This is the nature of the game, but you get your sells and status, the influencer gets some cash and status, and the consumer get a product to consume, although it is your job initially to make the product worth consuming.

Trust me on this one. I work in radio, and have seen firsthand that the more tickets you give to a station to give away for an event, the more times the event gets mentioned. It is not free advertising. It is not ‘giving away a seat for free that I could have sold for full price,’ as many of our less successful promoter clients think they can convince us to believe. It is the most cunningly effective promotional vehicles that one could dream up. If you can provide a good enough product that people who can’t win will want to buy outright, those that don’t win will talk about it. And the more people you have actively talking about your event and asking questions, the greater the pool of potential full-price buyers grows, quickly outpacing the ones who just beg for more chances to win your comp tickets.

The More You Work At It, The Easier It Gets – Again, better is a relative term that is based solely on the person holding and reviving the product, but the ability to produce the product gets easier as you make more and more of them. The first book came out in the spring, and while the process wasn’t difficult (allowing just about anyone with the ability to put 200 pages worth of words in book form the ability to publish and sell books), it did take a little time to figure out how to do it so that the final outcome was as appealing as possible. The first printed and e-book product were nowhere near perfect, but when I set out to abruptly publish the second book in the fall, it was much easier to process the information and set up the look and feel of the book to produce a better looking (but still not publishing house perfect) product.

I have at least three planned releases for 2015 (and yes I am very much behind on the sequel book, “Welcome to More Mondays”). The steps to get this thing done are now, well, all done. Oddly enough, the real holdup for this mostly completed work is finding the time for proper editing and reformatting. As I said earlier, the hardest part is getting the words out, but it doesn’t make the finishing of the product a cakewalk by comparison.

Once You Hit ‘Submit,’ It Now Exists, For Good Or Ill – “Welcome to your Monday” and “So Forty Happened” are available for purchase on Amazon.com. There are a few dozen physical copies circulating the country, a few hundred living as data in the cloud of the Kindle e-book system, and a box of each title tucked away in a corner of my living room. Both books have ISBN numbers to make them ‘real.’ And As I mentioned earlier, I have received royalties for the purchase of copies of the book from people other than myself. So no one can take away my title as ‘Two-Time Published Author,’ even if that title means very little beyond marketing of myself.

On the flip side, my words and opinion at the time of their publishing are now an official part of the public trust. I cannot delight the stories I put into those books as false after stating in their initial publishing as true without severe consequences. After facing four awkward exchanges with girlfriends from long ago inquiring on whether I was writing about them as either ‘the one who really broke my heart’ or ‘the one who really got away,’ I was reminded that for a guy who couldn’t keep a steady girlfriend in the past, I did date a significant quantity of women. But what means something to you reading this is the reminder that the words you say, write, or imply at the moment meant something specific at that moment. If you have them documented, you better mean them. And if you no longer mean them, you better have an explanation for your then words and your now words. You will never know how far in the future you will be questioned on them.


This post can also be viewed as a part of a collection at Medium.com.

The Power Of “No” (And 4 Good Reasons To Say It More)

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There is so much good that can come from saying ‘no’ more often.

Your typical response to a ‘yay or nay’ question says a lot about the way you handle leadership, and or importantly, your life. Your ability to both manage an orderly schedule and maintain it to near perfection can go a long way in building your image in the world of business. It also makes life move much more smoothly at home in those off hours with the family.

You are living with outdated business wisdom if you believe that you have to jump on every opportunity to excel (problem with no real solution) or extended period of flux (someone’s short sidedness leading to a severe shortage of staffing). Twenty years ago, pulling super heroics at work made you look like a superhero, and attracted accolades, bonuses, and promotions. Today, where the workplace treats just about every employee as expendable to some degree, it makes you look like a chump that couldn’t figure out how to get out of the extra work.

Trust me. I’m often the guy that looks like a chump that couldn’t figure out how to get out of the extra work because I often get stuck having to pull super heroics just to get basic things done.

Or do I?

With nearly 25 years of working life experience, I have seen firsthand the way a person who tries to say yes to every request is just setting themselves up for repeated physical and emotion beat downs. It doesn’t have to be this way. The only fix for this is to learn what Nancy Reagan tried to teach the children of United States back in the 1980’s. To “Just say no.”

The power of saying no requires the discipline to say no, some mental and verbal gymnastic to maneuver around those who would insist you say yes for their benefit and the ability to believe that what you are doing (or maybe not doing) is serving you a greater purpose. There will be plenty of disappointed faces as they receive their knows, but you free yourself up for some surprisingly joyous faces that are not used to getting your yesses when you start to offer up a few. So consider the power of a no as it would effect:

– Your Family: I know I will not be the only person on their death bed who will mull over whether they would have liked to spend more time working, I do understand the importance of being there for your family, along with being there with your family. Saying no to that project that you know is destined to fail at work, or to a useless outing with the boys to be present for those you love shows you are more than just the person who pays the mortgage or for groceries.

– Your Work: Let’s not back away from that project that you know is destined to fail at work just yet. Since you know your limit to what you can do, cannot do and cannot do well, your role in a projected disaster can have instant effects to your career. You could be seen as a hero stepping up to a challenge to those who realize it will be a losing effort. You could also face a management team with selective memory which will see you as the scapegoat they need to draw the blame of failure away from them. If you have the power to dodge one of these bullets, consider what side of history you may reside on when the smoke clears and the cleanup does begin.

– Your Reputation: If your word is supposed to be your bond, and you set yourself up with so too many projects competing for your time and attention, you are bound to fail some of them. And that means soiling the good nature of your word. The time spent building your reputation can be rendered a waste in a matter of moments when you fail the wrong person or project. The time you need to rebuild trust could double or more, and may only reap half or less of the original level of trust. If you doubt you can deliver, don’t take on the risky business.

– Your Health: In the summer of 2013, I had two week-long stays in the hospital about two weeks apart, suffering from what was best described as near kidney failure. Watching my year-old daughter toddler around the hospital rooms was a serious wake-up call for me. Your body has limits and it reminds you of those limits well before you will get close to the breaking point, but you have to listen and respond appropriately. There is no master project at work you can spearhead if you are not healthy enough to go to work. And for me, I won’t be able to walk my daughter down the aisle at her wedding if I can’t live long enough to see her get married.

No is a simple word that many have a simple fear of saying, or at least saying to the wrong people attached to the wrong project. Learn to face this fear, and you will find freedom in not accepting a few less responsibility that come with a constant stream of saying yes. This will do you mind and your body good.

J Cleveland Payne’s Top Ten Medium Articles For 2014

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In 2014, I was blessed with the chance to do a lot of writing, but cursed with the number of options to post my writing as I chased readers. One of my more successful depositories for 2014 was Medium. Medium had a shift in focus mid-year that made it even harder to be featured, and was tricky to get featured in the first place. But I am very proud of my results from Medium and will put an extra focus on using the platform more effectively in 2015.

That said, here are my top ten Medium articles for 2014, as determined by reads per day.

  1. My Wife & I Don’t See Eye To Eye /1.25 Views Per Day
    https://medium.com/@jclevelandpayne/my-wife-i-dont-see-eye-to-eye-9cfd973eefa4
  2. Edison Only As Good As His 10,000 Failures? /0.76 Views Per Day
    https://medium.com/@jclevelandpayne/edison-only-as-good-as-his-10-000-failures-9c8c4943dfd7
  3. Three Mental Exercises To Fight Being Overcome By ‘The Grind’ /0.30 Views Per Day
    https://medium.com/you-already-know-the-answers/three-mental-exercises-to-fight-being-overcome-by-the-grind-78d3525c79eb
  4. My Writing Checklist /0.08 Views Per Day
    https://medium.com/@jclevelandpayne/my-writing-checklist-c9c96497e48a
  5. Five Investments All Small Business Owners Should Be Making /0.07 Views Per Day
    https://medium.com/@jclevelandpayne/five-investments-all-small-business-owners-should-be-making-f086a101f6e2
  6. You Can Lead A Horse To Water… /0.07 Views Per Day
    https://medium.com/@jclevelandpayne/you-can-lead-a-horse-to-water-3ab2d679fcd6
  7. Let Cliven Bundy Continue To Speak /0.06 Views Per Day
    https://medium.com/@jclevelandpayne/let-cliven-bundy-continue-to-speak-5b38a1b83eed
  8. I Don’t Want To Handle The Truth /0.05 Views Per Day
    https://medium.com/you-already-know-the-answers/i-dont-want-to-handle-the-truth-e4624e9b069
  9. There Is Always A Tomorrow /0.05 Views Per Day
    https://medium.com/@jclevelandpayne/there-is-always-a-tomorrow-b37f3d7f6e87
  10. The Guru Is A Fallacy /0.04 Views Per Day
    https://medium.com/@jclevelandpayne/the-guru-is-a-fallacy-2ee00bc0c39c