How many of you own a membership for something?  Maybe a country club, a gym, a yoga studio?  What motivates you to buy a membership?  Is it due to exclusivity?  Is it because you get certain benefits?  Is is because you’ll get a better “deal”?

From Wiktionary membership means:

The state of being a member of a group or organization.

I think that memberships used to be real.  For example in the days of private golf and country clubs you had to be a member in order to have access to the course or dining hall or activities.  These types of memberships still exist today.

Membership or Over-rated Coupon

However, I feel that our society has taken advantage of the word membership and turned it from “being a member of a group or organization” and turned it into “you’ll get a better deal if you have this”.  Take for example most fitness clubs.  If you go to Club Fit or Fitness World or any other huge fitness club you’ll see that there are different methods of paying for your visits.  You can get a day pass, or a week pass, or a monthly or yearly membership.

The memberships or passes typically have ZERO benefit except monetary.  The odd fitness gym membership might give you access to an exclusive changing area, but that’s about it.  You don’t get in the front of the line for classes.  You don’t get first dibs on a machine.  You don’t get any special or preferential treatment.  You do get a “deal”.

However, the ONLY way to realize this “deal” is if you go the gym a certain number of times to make it worthwhile.  For example, if a regular visit costs $10 and a yearly membership costs $1000, you’ll have to attend the gym at least 100 times to get your value back.  If you go 200 times then you’re looking at $5/visit and you’re benefiting from your “membership”.  So is it a membership of a coupon that only is validated after 100 visits?

Here’s the catch

The gyms know that 95% of the people will not go even the 100 times.  They’re going to make more off of you per visit than if you just went every time you felt like going.  Did you know that most big gyms make 90% of their revenue in January feeding off the “New Years Resolution’ers”.  Think about it.  Is it really good business to give EVERYONE a discounted price?  Of course not!

They know you’re going to get “busy” or “life will get in the way” and you’ll forget about it.  The money is already spent, so you’ll just drift off back in to your day-to-day life etc.  Why?  Because your motivation for getting the “membership” was the deal, it was the emotion involved when someone behind the counter asked you if you felt your body was worth it?  Because you bought it for the wrong reasons – you’re NOT going to use it!

The moral side of a membership

Now I get it that fitness centres etc. need to make a profit, need to make money etc.  They’re running a business.  So they maximize their profits by finding consumers that they can convince to purchase their product.  Unfortunately the convincing is typically the shady part of the business…

So my question to you is why are you going to the gym?  Are you going to feel better OR are you going to get a deal?  If you’re going for the latter, you’re just going to fail.  If you’re going to feel better, then do you really need a membership?  You shouldn’t have the pressure of a membership (or the deal) to motivate you to get you in to the gym.  Instead your motivation should be increasing your fitness, improving your health, feeling better about yourself?

Are you not worth more than a shady gym membership deal?  Are you not worth more than a coupon?

My challenge

I’d like to propose a challenge to the various “wellness” centres out there and especially yoga facilities.  Get rid of your memberships.  Get rid of passes.  Get rid of deals.  Charge one price per hour or per session.  Keep track of the people who enter your facility like you always did, but here’s the twist.

Keep an escrow from every purchase in the bank and for your repeat customers, give them a weekly or monthly or yearly kickback.  Tell them, “Thank you” for choosing us.  Tell them, “We appreciate your business”.    If keeping an escrow isn’t plausible, then after a customer has spent the same amount as a membership or monthly pass, then let them in free for the balance of time after they break the threshold.

Why should they do this?

Because if they actually cared about their customer, they wouldn’t be pushing the deal on them, rather they’d be saying come when it feels right for you.  Please do this for your body and your wellness.  This is what Yoga facilities preach every day in their mantras, mission statements, etc.  So why not practice what you preach on the business side of things as well and get rid of coupons like these:

The 90′s

I spent the first half of the 90′s afraid and searching for myself. You can consider those years Junior and Senior high. I was small, I was smart, I fought my battles with words. I had no real friends. In the second half of the 90′s I found myself. I found the outgoing, creative, leader. I found this person by joining a club in University which gave me people to look up to and learn from; a few years later I was the president. I was still young. I liked the power, I didn’t take the opportunity, as much as I should have, to teach those who were coming up the ranks. In the late 90′s I discovered a sport called Adventure Racing.

The 2000′s

I spent the first half of 2000 living the life of a dream student. I had a full scholarship and I was part of a program that we were able to travel the world for robotics competition. I could sleep in every day, I had minimal work to do, yet I was essentially being paid to go to school and play with robots. I followed my robotics life to Medicine Hat, where I’d meet my future wife, and where I’d perform robotics research for 5 years. I hated Medicine Hat and my job and begun looking for new financial adventures. I began investing in real estate, we have properties now all over Alberta. I realized in the end it was necessarily for me, but lesson learned. Eventually the unhappiness in Medicine Hat took me back to Edmonton to work in SR&ED with the CRA. Also kind of dull but at least I was out of Medicine Hat. Little did I know how much I didn’t exactly like Edmonton either. After 2 years in Edmonton we were off to North Vancouver to begin the 2010′s. What a difference this has made!

In 2002 I raced in my first adventure race, by the end of the 2000′s I had raced across the world, won a world championship in endurance mountain biking, put together teams, took teams apart, etc. I have raced with amazing people and met so many incredible athletes. Just recently I have realized it’s not the racing that drives me, it’s the people, it’s the relationships.

What did you do the past 20 years?  More importantly what do the 2010′s hold for you?

So the past 20 years have contained more than a life time of experiences, and things are just getting started in my mind. More adventures to come, more experiences to have, more relationships to build. I’m very excited for what the 2010′s bring.

The reason I’m sharing all of this with you is because of a blog written by Seth Godin this morning, basically asking the question, What have you been up to and more importantly what are you doing next?

Seth Godin wrote this on the subject:

Hindsight is 20/20. People are already looking back on the 1990s and wishing that they had had more courage. When you look back on the 2000s, what will you have to say for yourself? [The following is reprinted from 9 years ago].

Here’s a question that you should clip out and tape to your bathroom mirror. It might save you some angst 15 years from now. The question is, What did you do back when interest rates were at their lowest in 50 years, crime was close to zero, great employees were looking for good jobs, computers made product development and marketing easier than ever, and there was almost no competition for good news about great ideas?

Many people will have to answer that question by saying, “I spent my time waiting, whining, worrying, and wishing.” Because that’s what seems to be going around these days. Fortunately, though, not everyone will have to confess to having made such a bad choice.

While your company has been waiting for the economy to rebound, Reebok has launched Travel Trainers, a very cool-looking lightweight sneaker for travelers. They are selling out in Japan — from vending machines in airports!

While Detroit’s car companies have been whining about gas prices and bad publicity for SUVs (SUVs are among their most profitable products), Honda has been busy building cars that look like SUVs but get twice the gas mileage. The Honda Pilot was so popular, it had a waiting list.

While Africa’s economic plight gets a fair amount of worry, a little startup called ApproTEC is actually doing something about it. The new income that its products generate accounts for 0.5% of the entire GDP of Kenya. How? It manufactures a $75 device that looks a lot like a StairMaster. But it’s not for exercise. Instead, ApproTEC sells the machine to subsistence farmers, who use its stair-stepping feature to irrigate their land. People who buy it can move from subsistence farming to selling the additional produce that their land yields — and triple their annual income in the first year of using the product.

While you’ve been wishing for the inspiration to start something great, thousands of entrepreneurs have used the prevailing sense of uncertainty to start truly remarkable companies. Lucrative Web businesses, successful tool catalogs, fast-growing PR firms — all have started on a shoestring, and all have been profitable ahead of schedule. The Web is dead, right? Well, try telling that to Meetup.com, a new Web site that helps organize meetings anywhere and on any topic. It has 200,000 registered users — and counting.

Maybe you already have a clipping on your mirror that asks you what you did during the 1990s. What’s your biggest regret about that decade? Do you wish that you had started, joined, invested in, or built something? Are you left wishing that you’d at least had the courage to try? In hindsight, the 1990s were the good old days. Yet so many people missed out. Why? Because it’s always possible to find a reason to stay put, to skip an opportunity, or to decline an offer. And yet, in retrospect, it’s hard to remember why we said no and easy to wish that we had said yes.

The thing is, we still live in a world that’s filled with opportunity. In fact, we have more than an opportunity — we have an obligation. An obligation to spend our time doing great things. To find ideas that matter and to share them. To push ourselves and the people around us to demonstrate gratitude, insight, and inspiration. To take risks and to make the world better by being amazing.

Are these crazy times? You bet they are. But so were the days when we were doing duck-and-cover air-raid drills in school, or going through the scares of Three Mile Island and Love Canal. There will always be crazy times.

So stop thinking about how crazy the times are, and start thinking about what the crazy times demand. There has never been a worse time for business as usual. Business as usual is sure to fail, sure to disappoint, sure to numb our dreams. That’s why there has never been a better time for the new. Your competitors are too afraid to spend money on new productivity tools. Your bankers have no idea where they can safely invest. Your potential employees are desperately looking for something exciting, something they feel passionate about, something they can genuinely engage in and engage with.

You get to make a choice. You can remake that choice every day, in fact. It’s never too late to choose optimism, to choose action, to choose excellence. The best thing is that it only takes a moment — just one second — to decide.

Before you finish this paragraph, you have the power to change everything that’s to come. And you can do that by asking yourself (and your colleagues) the one question that every organization and every individual needs to ask today: Why not be great?

On top of everything I do, I also have a day job. It pays the bills, it allows me the freedom to do more of what I want to do. One of the values at my work is, “We encourage a balanced lifestyle with family first.” It’s funny though how at tax season it’s a hard core push to work, work, work. Nigel Marsh has an excellent message on living a balanced lifestyle and the way society should truly measure success.

Oh how the years have flown past…

There were the pre-elementary days where hardly any of you knew me.  There were the days in Elementary School at Katherine Therrien Elementary.  Next up was Junior High at St. Edmunds and High School at Archbishop O’leary.  Of course the entire time I was hockey focused and had a few odd jobs along the way, including paper route, John Ducey, Sport Chek and Save-On-Foods.

University Days – breaking free from the shell

University came around and I was there for 8 years.  Over those 8 years I did a ton.  B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering, but more importantly some great work experience with co-op jobs and of course with the ESS, the EE Club, and the Robocup Team.  I travelled the world and met a lot of great people.

“Professional” days

The professional life finally hit me in 2003 working at AST, then for DRDC in Medicine Hat.  Next up was CRA and now I’m out here in Vancouver working for MNP.  Of course I’ve had my own businesses as well including Real Estate Investing, YJ and coaching and mentoring.  Oh how the years fly by.  Athletically I switched from hockey to outdoor sports around the late 90′s and haven’t looked back.  1 World Championship in 2007 and many podium finishes along the way.

I need your help

This is the very rudimentary start for an autobiography I have set out for myself.  It’s for me to write to learn about me and I need your help.  Please post below any memories you may have of me (good or bad) so I can reflect on them and where I was at that time in my life.  Some of you have only known me for a few months, others for decades.  Thank you so much for having an impact on my life and helping me get to where I am today.

If you could place a story or two below I would greatly appreciate it!

Thank you

Sean Verret

Just recently a colleague of mine decided to quit his job.  Unfortunately he quit his job without giving notice and without finishing off his work that was due in less than 3 weeks.  Instead, in the heat of the moment he quit, took his 2 weeks of holidays in lieu of notice and was gone.  Now by the sounds of things he already had another job lined up, but that’s hearsay at this point.  Similarly there are other rumours flying around but there’s no point commenting on them.

Unprofessional

What my colleague did was unprofessional and left a lot of people, including myself, left to clean up the pieces.  This will affect many of the members of our team and their respective families by increased workload, added stress etc.  What my colleague didn’t think about was the wake he left in his sudden departure.  This wake (or karma) will be with him for a long time whether or not he realizes it.

Karma

The thing about karma is it’ll always catch up to you.  If you’re doing things right, eventually karma will come around and help you out.  If you’re doing things wrong, eventually karma will come around and bite you in the ass!  Similarly, in the small professional world, things like this are sure to get around and the worst part is that without the whole truth available, and maybe not ever available, rumours will spread and the situation could look even worse than it actually is.

Don’t be afraid of your boss

Quitting a job in an emotional, non-thought-out way is never right.  Bridges get burned and they don’t easily rebuild.  Making decisions based “as it seems to be” only on monetary gain are typically not the best reasons to make a decision.  Most employers will gladly discuss any and all options with you before you make any rash decisions.  Don’t be afraid of your boss!  Unless you own your own business you most likely answer to someone.  That someone may seem intimidating, but most likely they were in your shoes at one point in their life.  They understand.  So talk to them.  Let them know your situation.  Let them know your frustrations.  Let them know why they should value you.  It’s amazing what can be solved with a simple discussion.

I had a friend of mine who was terrified of telling his brand-new boss that he had already planned to go home for Christmas and was going to be away for 3 weeks.  It was 3 months away and his plan was to tell his boss right before he was going to leave so that he wouldn’t get fired right now and he’d at least have the job for the next 3 months.  I asked him, “how would that make you feel if an employee of yours did that to you?”.  He answered, “he’d be pissed”.  I said, “exactly”, and explained to him about giving way more notice than necessary and to come right out and explain to his new boss the situation he was in.  Sure enough the boss was extremely thankful that he had come to him with so much notice and the boss was able to plan for his absence.

Give more notice than the norm

When I quit my last job, I gave a whopping 6 months of notice.  I explained to them why I was leaving.  I explained how I was prepared to train any new hire that they may attempt to get.  I explained how all of my work would be completed and/or handed off.  My boss(es) were very thankful.  The kicker is, I didn’t have another job lined up, I didn’t have a plan.  I was moving cities and nothing was prepared.  I just trusted karma to take care of things.  Did it ever!

Within weeks of announcing my departure, the phone starting ringing.  People hearing about the way I was leaving had left it’s own wake.  A good wake.  People wanted to help.  People wanted to work with me.  Sure enough before I left, I had arrangements for work, for our move everything.  It was all taken care of.  I was extremely grateful.  I was lucky.  But I attracted it by doing things right!

Doing things right!

If you’re going to make a big decision in your life, do it for the right reasons.  The right reasons come from your values.  Mine include, honesty, integrity, professionalism, adventure, family, etc.  When we moved to BC, we did it encompassing all of these values and our lives have prospered.  If you do things right.  If you look after everyone, karma will only help you on your way!

Well I think I finally have it.  For those of us who can’t hire someone to do our web work (yet!) it takes a bit of testing to get everything right.  I think I’ve got it.  My blog uses WordPress as it’s backend and I’ve finally settled on two modules to post the blogs to my Twitter account, my Facebook personal page and my Facebook fan page.  The two modules are Wordbooker and WP to Twitter.  Similarly I’m using the Twitter for Pages app on Facebook to post any of my Facebook page updates directly to Twitter.

Social Media isn’t easy, but once you find the right apps to help you, it sure can make your life a lot easier and give you a lot more time to do the things you love.  So for those of you out there with the same troubles, I hope this helps out.

There are several methods out there for creating goals. I feel that goals are very important in order to create a blueprint for where you want to go. Unfortunately many people set goals but never achieve them. This is usually because their goals aren’t specific enough or maybe aren’t realistic. Or, an even bigger reason could be because they’re not really their goals or they’re not for the person setting the goals. Figuring out the reason for setting a goal based on your story is an even bigger task.

I’ve recently come across some good models for creating goals and I’d like to share them. Anyone is free to use one model specifically or mix and match at their convenience.

Method 1: S.P.E.C.I.F.Y.

• Sensory Specific. “What specifically will you see/hear/feel when you have this outcome?”
• Positive Language. “If you don’t have the old problem, what is it that you will have?”
• Ecological. “What else will change when you have this outcome?”, “What situations do you want this outcome in and what situations do you not want it to affect?”
• Choice increases with this outcome. “Does this outcome increase your choices?”
• Initiated by Self. “What do you personally need to do to achieve this?”
• First step identified and achievable. “What is your first step?”
• Your Resources Identified. “What resources do you have to achieve this outcome?”

Method 2: S.M.A.R.T.

The acronym SMART has a number of slightly different variations, which can be used to provide a more comprehensive definition for goal setting:

• Specific, significant, stretching
• Measurable, meaningful, motivational
• Action-oriented, agreed upon, attainable, achievable, acceptable
• Realistic, relevant, reasonable, rewarding, results-oriented
• Time-bound, timely, tangible, trackable

Goal setting areas:

Many people set goals in different areas of their lives as well. Some of the most common areas include (I’ve attempted to group similar ones together):

1. Relationships, Family, Friends
2. Business/Money/Financial, Professional/Career, Job
3. Health/Wellness, Fitness, Mind/Body/Spirit
4. Faith/Contribution
5. Fun
6. Growth, Personal Development

At the end of the day the most important thing to understand when setting goals is that setting of goals is NOT a task, but rather it’s a process. It’s something that might take a lot of work and effort the first time you sit down and do it (do it for real that is), but afterwards it’s something that you visit often and you REFINE often. Things change, priorities change, directions change and your goals should reflect your ever-dynamic life.

I worked for the federal government for 7 years.  The first 4-1/2 doing robotics research for the Canadian Forces (DRDC). The next 2-1/2 administering the Scientific Research & Experimental Development program from the technical side of things (CRA).  Inside of the first 6 months of working at DRDC I was told about the pension and I had it figured out that I could retire on Sept 3, 2033 with a full pension, or on Sept 3, 2038 with my maximum pension.  I was off to the races…….

Wait a minute!

6 months in to a job I was already looking forward to a pension 30-35 years down the road!  You have got to f$%*#&g kidding me.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but that could not have been the job for me.  It took 4-1/2 years but I got out.  I got out, but I stayed in the federal government.  I kept those pension dollars a float!

2-1/2 more years!

I stayed in the federal government for 2-1/2 more years.  I heard a lot about pensions.  Nearly every person in my group was retiring in the next 1-5 years.  Pension, pension, pension… I could do nothing more than think about the illustrious pension…  I enjoyed my work at CRA but I came to find that my passion was not working for the federal government.  The job security, the low stress, the work environment, the people, the PENSION were all fantastic, however, the motivation, the lack of inspiration, the all too often sung tune about the pension drove me crazy.

Remove the Golden Handcuffs

For those of you who don’t know, golden handcuffs are a system of financial incentives designed to keep an employee from leaving the company, e.g. a pension.

If you are working in a job only because of financial incentives and you truly do not  feel motivated, feel inspired, feel passion by what you do then you’re there for the wrong reasons.

Most people work 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, 2000 hours a year.  Most people spend 25% of their life from the ages of 20-60 at work.  35 years of 2000 hours per year is 70,000 or nearly 9000 work days.  If you’re going to put in that much time in your life in to your work.  Please, PLEASE do it for the right reasons!  Make sure you know “why” you work where you do!

If you want to know “why” maybe read my last post.