Fed up with the ever growing range of technologies and websites your business needs to know about? Is that information overload getting you down? Or what about the need to get training and development for all manner of new devices and online systems, such as Twitter or Google Wave? The chances are if you go to business networking meetings, or attend webinars or teleconferences, you’ll hear person after person telling you that they never had so many problems before the Internet.
In fact, people are regaling you with more tales of how business life was much simpler and more straightforward without the Internet. We are entering the period of Internet disillusionment.
Every new technology goes through a cycle of cynicism, then excitement and then disillusion before we get to the “bedded-in” period of acceptance. Business owners and executives appear more frequently to be “talking down” the Internet and it’s clear there is increased disillusionment growing.
But…it’s time to stop the moaning. The problems that the Internet bring your business are nothing; it’s the attitude to the Internet that causes the difficulties. Whatever the difficulties that the Internet causes your business they are little, if anything, in comparison to the problems Richard McCann has had to face up to in his life.
Today, he wowed the Annual Convention of The Professional Speaking Association with his keynote speech showing how he has overcome a tirade of difficulties. At the age of 6 his mother was murdered – the first ever victim of The Yorkshire Ripper. Prior to that he’d been in and out of care and on the “at-risk” register. Not a great start in life. Then, when returned to his drunken father, he was beaten black and blue several times. As a teenager he took to drugs, became a dealer and spent a while in prison – the same prison The Yorkshire Ripper first went to. Prison reformed Richard and he joined the Army, only to be kicked out deemed psychologically unsuitable to being a soldier. I won’t tell you the rest – you can get his book, Just a Boy, for the full – unedited – details.
But the fact is, Richard is happily married, a father and a hugely successful author and speaker; something he could not possibly have imagined when he was told “Mummy has gone to heaven”. So, I put it to you: if Richard McCann can overcome some of the most testing difficulties anyone can face, how come you are still moaning about a handful of problems the Internet causes you? Pah! Whatever problems the Internet causes you – put them in perspective. Almost never are they really problems.
