December 2008 From Kevin Knebl

Hello again to my friends, family, colleagues, and clients. Many of you know me personally through work, networking or through one of my speaking engagements related to sales skills, effective networking and personal development; and some of you may know me only by email and telephone. Welcome to everyone that’s new to this distribution list.

There are a lot of very smart and interesting people that I am fortunate to network with. We share books, movies, music and ideas that stimulate us. I'm always interested to learn what other people that I respect are reading, watching and listening to. This is my monthly email newsletter with books I’ve recently read, movies seen, music devoured, ideas and other things that may be of interest to you. If you find this interesting and would like to pass it on, please feel free to do so. If you’d like to be removed from this list just let me know. If someone forwarded this newsletter to you and you would like to be added to this distribution list or if you’d like to view previous newsletters, please email me and let me know.

Thank you for all the great feedback on this newsletter. I always respond to all comments and am pleased to say that this newsletter goes out to readers all over the US, Canada, China, Singapore, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Finland, England, Spain and even New Jersey (Joizy….what exit?) and a few other remote places.

I use LinkedIn.com for business networking, Facebook.com for social networking and Plaxo.com for keeping track of contact information. Through LinkedIn, I have been able to refer a tremendous amount of business and connect many people for business and social purposes. If we are not already connected on LinkedIn, please contact me to connect and if I’m able to refer business your way, I’ll be happy to do so. Please also consider connecting to me through Facebook as it is a fantastic way to keep up to date (and a lot of fun) with your friends all over the globe.

A number of people have asked that I insert an announcement indicating whether I have any upcoming speaking engagements that are open to the public. I do have a few public speaking engagements this month. If you have an interest in dates, times and speaking topics, please let me know.

Santa time! It’s already snowing here in beautiful Colorado Springs. The mountains are white and Pikes Peak looks great. The holiday lights are up at The Broadmoor and it looks like a castle out of a Disney movie. It’s hard to believe that 2008 is coming to an end. It’s been a wild year. God bless us…one and all.

TWO BOOKS TO PUT ON YOUR MUST READ LIST
Love is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends- Tim Sanders
My friend, Woody Nash, in NJ, turned me on to this book back in 2003. There are a handful of books that I often comment on in my talks and this is one of the books I most frequently refer to. When I first read this great book, I though, “here’s an author that isn’t an MBA-toting, look at me I went to Wharton, I interned on Wall Street type.” I liked that. A lot.
Tim Sanders, former director of Yahoo's in-house think tank, believes love is the crucial element in the search for personal and professional success. In Love Is the Killer App he explains why. Sander's advice is to be a "lovecat," which despite the cutesy moniker is his sincere and surprisingly practical prescription for advancement both inside and outside the office. It starts with amassing as much usable knowledge as possible, which he explains can be done by religiously carving out time to read and then poring through as many cutting-edge books in your field as possible. It follows with an emphasis on networking to the extreme. Sanders offers concrete suggestions, from compiling a super list of contacts to ensuring all are regularly stored in an always-accessible format. And he concludes by advocating a true mindset of compassion, which he says involves sharing this knowledge with those contacts and ultimately helping anyone who in one way or another may ultimately help you. Through identifiable anecdotes and specific recommendations, the book promotes an undeniably feasible yet decidedly offbeat program that has worked for the author and could prove equally favorable for others who apply it. I’ve been using his system for years.
Here are some of my favorite excerpts from Sanders’ book:
· Here, then, is my definition of love business: the act of intelligently and sensibly sharing your intangibles with your bizpartnes. What are our intangibles? They are our knowledge, our network, and our compassion. These are the keys to true bizlove.
– Hide quoted text –
· If you don’t build a brand, you risk being commoditized- in other words, you risk becoming a human switch, someone who performs a function that has yet to be automated, but probably will be at some future date.
· Be distinct or be extinct.
· There’s no such thing as a commodity- only a person who thinks like one.
· Don’t be fooled. Lovecats are not soft and vulnerable. We are glowing, powerful, and respected by our peers. And we are careful about whom we love.
· Our business stronghold is no longer grounded in a physical workplace. Today it is based in our fellow humans: If you build a stronghold centered on the caring people who support you rather than on the company itself, you’ll have something to fall back on if things go awry. Although the rules of business have changed over the years, people haven’t.
· To create that stronghold, you have to put in some real work. By that I mean: Accumulate enough knowledge that you can share it with others- so you can enable them to profit from your knowledge as much as you do.
· When people appear to be something other than good and decent, it is only because they are reacting to stress, pain, or the deprivation of basic human needs such as security, love and self-esteem.
· The purpose of collecting contacts is to give them away- to match them with other contacts.
· Bizlove means never having to say “You owe me.”
· Eventually we are all going to build our own personal Internets and enjoy the same increasing returns provided by the existing Internet.
· The bigger it gets, the bigger it gets. The same is true for your network. Through the powerful word-of-mouse, love springs eternal in the connected world.
Between Love is the Killer App and Endless Referrals (by Bob Burg), I think that anyone that wants to become a networking black belt and a love ninja, can do so. As Burt Bacharach says, “What the world needs now, is love, sweet love.”
http://www.timsanders.com/

“Uh-Oh”- Robert Fulghum
Fulghum reminds me of a modern Will Rogers. He writes great books that show his unique perspective on the seemingly mundane (Seinfeld did this is in a brilliant way with his humor). Fulghum writes with wit and wisdom about small lives with big meanings. Fulghum’s stories about ordinary life remind us that within simplicity lies the sublime.
Here’s an excerpt from Uh-Oh:
Uh-oh is not in any dictionary or thesaurus, and is seldom seen in written form. Yet most of us utter that sound every day. And have used it all our lives. "Uh-oh" is one of the first expressions a baby learns. "Uh-oh," or something like it, has been used as long as people have existed. And it may be the first thing Adam said to Eve after he bit into the apple. She knew exactly what he meant, too.
Across the history of the human family, millions and millions of distinct sounds have come and gone as we continually reach for ways to communicate with one another. Often, the most expressive words we use are not words at all, just those shorthand sounds that represent complex thoughts-grunts and moans and snorts and clicks and whistles compounded by facial expressions and physical gestures: "Uh-huh … no-no … mmmnnn …. huh … hey … oops … OK. . . yo … ah … ha … humpf. , .- and an almost endless number of others whose meaning and spelling cannot be conveyed with letters on paper. "Uh-oh" is way up near the top of a list of small syllables with large meanings.
We say "uh-oh" to a small child who falls down or bumps his head or pinches his finger. It means that we know the child hurts, but we also know the hurt is temporary and that the child has the resources to handle the hurt and get up and go on about his business. As the child learns, he will not need to turn to a parent to kiss-it-and-make-it-well each time he scrapes himself-he will know where to find the bandages on his own. "Uh-oh" is the first wedge in weaning, a child away from us into independence.
The older we get, the more experience and knowledge we have, the more able we are to distinguish momentary difficulty from serious trouble. The more we know that something is "uh-oh," not 911. If I had a chest pain, I might go to an emergency room thinking "Oh my God, heart attack!" It my doctor had the same symptoms, she might think, Uh-oh, gas pains, take an antacid, and go on with her work. What to me is the last gasp of my old truck is a repairable electric problem to my mechanic. "Uh-oh, there's a short in your ignition wire." One might even come to feel the same way about things that cannot be fixed. From the cradle we know about "Rock-a-bye-baby" and what happens when the bough breaks. In kindergarten we are reminded about these conditions. All the king's horses and all the king's men could not put Humpty Dumpty together again. I'm familiar with death, having been around it often in hospitals and cemeteries. If I see my own death coming, my response may well be "uh-oh."
"Uh-oh" in this sense is a frame of mind. A philosophy. It says to expect the unexpected, and also expect to be able to deal with it as it happens most of the time. "Uh-oh" people seem not only to expect surprise, but they count on it, as if surprise were a dimension of vitality.
"Uh-oh" embraces "Here we go again" and "Now what?" and "You never can tell what's going to happen next" and "So much for plan A" and "Hang on, we re coming to a tunnel" and "No sweat" and "Tomorrow's another day" and "You can't unscramble an egg" and "A hundred years from now it won't make any difference." "Uh-oh" is more than a momentary reaction to small problems. "Uh-oh" is an attitude–a perspective on the universe. It is part of an equation that summarizes my view of the conditions of existence: "uh-huh" + "oh-wow" + "uh-oh" + "oh, God" = "ah-hah!"
If everyone read a little Fulghum everyday (Put one of his books in your reading room. You know- the one with the porcelain reading chair.), the world would be a better place.
Fulghum was in Denver recently giving a talk and I missed the event. I won’t miss the next one. He’s a national treasure.
http://www.robertfulghum.com/

GREAT MUSIC
Sleep Through The Static- Jack Johnson
Jack was raised in Hawaii and is the son of a famous surfer and was briefly a pro surfer himself. He had a serious surfing accident at 17 and received almost 150 stitches and left surfing. He had been playing guitar since he was 14 and had written many songs by this point. He went on to film school in California and continued playing guitar.
Jack Johnson may be a former pro surfer, but he ain't no Beach Boy. Where the songs of Brian Wilson (who never actually surfed, remember) celebrate the rush and exuberant triumph of catching a wave, Johnson draws on the sport's solitary, Zen-like side — the gentle, rolling rhythms of his music match his simple, nature-inspired language. Over the course of three platinum albums, plus the bulk of the chart-topping 2006 soundtrack to Curious George, this laid-back worldview has been enough to make the affable Johnson an unlikely pop sensation.
This CD is a mellow recording and his songs often have a reggae feel to them. The songs are simple with sparse instrumentation. This is not a CD for rocking to. If you’re looking for a CD with a smooth, easy groove, this is it. It’s perfect for a lazy afternoon hanging out and chillin’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbLIRGW9ta4

GREAT MOVIE
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Karin and I really enjoyed this movie. We had both read this book a few years ago and really like the film adaptation. Most people have read or heard of Mitch Albom’s well-known book, “Tuesdays With Morrie”.
After the success of Tuesdays with Morrie, Albom's next foray was in fiction. His follow-up book was The Five People You Meet in Heaven published in September 2003. Although released six years after Tuesdays With Morrie, the book was a fast success and again launched Albom onto the New York Times best-seller list. Selling over 10 million copies in 35 languages, The Five People You Meet In Heaven is the bestselling hardcover first-time novel ever. In 2004, it was turned into a television movie for ABC, starring Jon Voight, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Imperioli and Jeff Daniels. The film was critically acclaimed and the most watched TV movie of the year.
The Five People You Meet in Heaven is the story of Eddie, a wounded war veteran who lives what he believes is an uninspired and lonely life fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, Eddie is killed while trying to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a location but a place in which your life is explained to you by five people who were in it who affected, or were affected by, your life.
We often don’t realize the impact that our life may have on others. There are times when we feel like perhaps we aren’t making much of a difference or that we are just taking up space. Don’t be fooled. It’s all a comedic drama and we all play a part whether we know it or not.
Some people may think that this is a sappy, silly story, but as Paul McCartney sang, “What’s wrong with silly love songs?” This is a tear jerker that goes great with someone you love, a big bowl of popcorn and the lights turned down low.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0400435/

WHAT MOVES!
There was only one James Brown. The man was a genius. He taught Michael Jackson, John Travolta, Milli Vanilli and me all that we know. (Alright, Milli wasn’t really in our league)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l89xJPi2U_Q&feature=related

DOLPHIN RINGS
This clip is from my “Some Animals are Smarter than Some People” file. My cool Aunt Marie from Atlanta sent this one to me. Dolphins are amazing and this clip is beautiful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMCf7SNUb-Q

VERY COOL VEHICLE
I want one of these. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? It looks like a blast to drive and wouldn’t take long at all to learn how to navigate. I wonder if you could pop a wheelie in one of these?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ3xrNUPjic

To your success,
Kevin