Well, you're just a busy beaver, aren't you?" You've either heard or used this cliche, but what do you know about beavers? Let me tell you about something I learned.
One night on the Discovery Channel, I watched a scientist determine how beavers knew where to put the sticks to build their dams. It's by the sound of water, he discovered. A recording of running water would soon have the beavers busy covering the tape player with sticks. He could get them to build useless piles of sticks anywhere he wanted.
What a great metaphor! Aren't we often building useless piles of sticks? We keep busy, responding to whatever drives us, but without doing anything truly productive. My personal favorite is making redundant to-do lists, or adding something already done to my list, just to check it off. Talk about a useless pile of sticks!
Efficiency Versus Effectiveness
It's worth noting that the beavers were very efficient at piling sticks on tape recorders. It didn't help the dam construction one bit, of course. Efficiency clearly doesn't equal effectiveness, but is it so obvious in our own lives?
Sometimes when we look deep enough we find that we are busy building nothing. For example, a man can be efficient at his job, and think he's effective, maybe because sales are up. Then he sees that he doesn't like the job, and isn't building the future he wants. The company may love him, but his effort is producing nothing more than a pile of sticks, as far as he's concerned.
Even the tape player gets to be part of this metaphor. Don't we sometimes follow our own internal "tapes," and do useless things as a result? We don't have to though. It's time to take a look at our daily routines. It's time to be an effective beaver instead of a busy beaver.
Why A Team For Real Estate Investment?
I had a hard time at first with real estate investment. One of the reasons was that I tended to be a "lone wolf," trying to do too much myself. I've since learned that to really do well investing in real estate, you need to have a team of people you can trust and rely on. Here are some possible team members, and what they need to be on the team.
Wilderness Survival Backpacking Tips
Why should you learn wilderness survival skills just for backpacking? They may save your life someday, and for ultralight enthusiasts like myself, skills replace gear, and therefore weight. The best reason, however, may be that it's just a good feeling to know you can deal with whatever comes up. It makes you feel more at home.
Writing Persuasive Articles
You may be wondering what persuasive writing has to do with articles. After all, you're not exactly selling something with an informative article, are you? Yes, you are. You at least want persuade the reader to keep reading until he gets to your link at the bottom. Use the following tips to get more traffic by writing persuasively.
