 Hi, so a few weeks ago I had a couple of interesting things happen and I wrote about it on my blog but I wanted to give a quick down and dirty here and then if you want to go and read the actual full post where I put a whole lot extra stuff in it, you can follow that link back to the blog. In essence, I had a guy reach out to me and I wasn't really sure why he reached out because what he was doing was announcing that he had come up with a list of top bloggers on the topic of leadership and he was mentioning to me this lady named Lolly Daskell that she had finally made the list. Then as a sidebar he said to me, I didn't put you on the list because you tend to write about other things besides just leadership but I enjoy reading your blog and I thought at the time, wow that's an interesting backhanded slap. Okay, so you like the blog but it's not good enough to go on your list. Now for those of you who don't know, one of the things I do for business is I do leadership and diversity training in anything that has to do with employees. So I have written two books on the subject of leadership. I've got some other products that are concerned with leadership and evaluations of employees and such things. So leadership is something I'm very big at. On my other channel, mainly it's about leadership topics or topics that are related to that. And so on the blog post, I wrote basically all this stuff where I said, okay you're saying that I don't write specifically about leadership but let's look at all these other things that in my opinion are a part of being a good leader and there are a whole lot of them. And so I put that out there and then I talked about just basically blogging in general and rankings and all this other kind of stuff and I basically closed with this thought and this is what I'm going to expound upon a little bit here. Which is that all of us get to come out here and basically do what we want to try to do. And I'm making these videos and hoping that people like them and that maybe they will help me to enhance my visibility so that, you know what, I help myself to get speaking engagement. That's why I have my other channel. Or that maybe someone will contact me and want to hire me to either write for them or come speak to them or even teach them. On my other channel I talk about leadership but I also talk about healthcare finance because I'm a consultant. I mean this is what I do. I consult and I write. Those are the two main things I do but I really want to travel and be a speaker. And I thought about it at the time and I said, you know, what we don't allow or what we should never allow is other people to define who we are and then we're trying to be that. And the reason you have to think that way is because it's rare that anybody, other than your mom, it's rare that anybody actually sees you as higher than what they believe. Most people will look at you and they're going to put you in this corner. Oh, you're a writer. You're a blogger. Oh, you just do vids. You know, you're only on LinkedIn. You're only on Twitter. You're only this. You're only this. You're only this. And so then you show that you have a little bit more depth than that and you can do other things and they kind of now say, well, now we have to dismiss you because obviously you don't care enough about this because you're doing this other stuff. And I find that incredible. When Serena Williams was winning all these majors in a row, people were trying to find a way to beat her down. Now, some idiot in Germany decided to beat her down by saying that she won all the time because she was more manly than all the other women to which I thought, okay, you're just a punk. But other people were saying, well, how could she be that good a player when she's so distracted doing all these other things? I mean, the woman's got a line of fashion designing. She designs fashion. She designs a whole lot of other stuff. I think she's got a magazine or something. I mean, she's doing a ton of stuff. But a lot of these people could see her as was a tennis player. They're not used to people having other interests. I'm sorry. That's the way the world is. And I look at the thing about creating. I write a lot. I write five blogs. I write a lot. I write for other people. I get paid sometimes to write for other people. Most of them I get paid. I do sometimes write for other services. But in essence, I will get paid for it. And yet people every once in a while want to kind of pin you down and say, well, you're only this and you're only this. And I'm here to tell you, you're not only nothing. If you want to do your videos about video games, do your videos about video games. If you decide one day, you know what? I think I'm going to do a puppy video, because I got a new puppy. I want to put it in there. Then do the video with the puppy. And if someone comes out and says, hey, I came here to watch video games. I didn't come here to watch you put up a puppy. Forget them. Because I don't cuss. I'm thinking something, but I don't use any bad language. So I just say forget you. Or ignore them or bounce them. Because you don't need those types of people in your life. I certainly don't need those types of people in my life. And I know this guy wasn't trying to be mean. This is not a video bashing him. But maybe someone with a different mindset would have taken that in a bad way and said, geez, maybe I shouldn't be writing about all these different things or whatever. Maybe I should only be writing one subject all the time. No, I ain't like that. Another one of my friends has kind of changed up how she does things a little bit. Because she had some guy tell her, well, you're all over the place. And you need to be focused on one thing in order to make money. And whereas she at least still has enough talent to be able to write on this thing or whatever, I'm thinking, well, I never really had thought that she was all over the place. But in essence, she did have one thing going against her, which was she had people asking her to provide services that she didn't really want to do. So in that vein, I would probably say, well, OK, if that's not what you wanted to do. I'm personally of the opinion that you were doing well. People loved you. And people still love you. And it didn't matter whether you were writing that other stuff or not, what kind of effort does it take to tell someone, no, I don't want to do that? And look at me. You know what? I can code. I can write code. I can build websites. I don't want to do that anymore, though. I really don't want to do that anymore. I do it for myself. I do it for some people I know. But no, I don't want to build websites. I don't want to write any more code for anybody else. Just don't want to do it. So if I get asked, no, don't want to do it. I don't want to fix any more computers. That used to be something I did. I do it now for just a couple of people, friends of mine or family. But I'm not doing it for anybody else. I make money in other ways. I don't want to do that. And I have no problem telling someone, no, I just don't. We all get to determine who we want to be. And whether you want to be a personality or whether you want to do videos on blogging or writing or video games or finance or the news or religion or you name it. Whatever you want to do, whatever you want to write about, however you want to make money, however you want to feel good, do it. Now, if you have certain goals and you're not hitting those goals and you think you might need to change up, that's a different story. But still, that's you getting determined, that you being able to determine how you want to do it. That's you saying, this is something I want to do. You are defining who you are. You're not allowing someone else to define who you are. Pretty much one of the reasons why I do the videos the way I do and I don't go back and edit. Okay, I don't know how to edit. But this is who I am. If I was doing a public speech, I would probably be rehearsing. When I go out and do public speaking, I rehearse a lot. I practice and practice and practice over and over again. I'm not doing that for the videos. I'm certainly not doing it for the videos this month with as many videos as I'm doing. So I know my topic and I come out here and I do this thing for you guys. And partly for me as well. But this is how I am. This is me. This is about as real as you get. Well, that and the fact that I'm going to eat this cookie. So let me know what your thoughts are on that. Do you feel you have the right to be you in your own space? Let me know. And I'm going to eat this cookie. Bye.