I started a business last year and was trying to find a good solution for my business taxes, I found www.thetaxclub.com as a referal from legalzoom.com as I setup my LLC. Legalzoom is totally legit - unfortunately thetaxclub - well, read for yourself below, I just sent this in today.
Please cancel my Tax Club account for the following reasons:
I haven’t seen anything that even comes remotely close to the value of what I’ve paid for this service at any point.
Every “call” or “meeting” I’ve had has only been to sell me more of your services, never to truly explain, help or do anything related to my taxes.
The only stuff that has gotten done is stuff that I’ve had to do - not the point of me paying you to do it.
I didn’t sign up with this service to fill out more tax software, I can spend $80 once a year and get BETTER software than your lame tool. (I spent over $1,000 for the tax club.)
Please cancel my account immediately and stop scamming people.
Sincerely,
Keeping tabs on Email is a struggle for a lot of people. Here is a great article from Mrs. Lifehacker herself!
Remember: New messages that come in today get priority over backlog. Your new empty inbox habit will be the key to keeping your inbox clutter-free from day to day. Once you’ve read a message, decide what to do with it on the spot. Don’t leave anything in your inbox, and you’ll thank yourself every time you read the words “You have no new messages.
I was recently reading through Guy Kawasaki’s book The Art of the Start in which one of the best learnings for me was to kill mission statements in place of having a powerful Mantra. Most mission statements are long, boring and use empty words that don’t really translate a full meaning. Most of us have a mission statement because we think it is part of the magic bullet leading to success. I like mantra much better.
For me it is like being able to describe “what you do in a sentence or less.” If what you are doing hasn’t been focused and clarified enough to fall within a sentence to a few words, it is too general and you need to work on it.
As a way to expose the essential emptiness of words. With all this talk about participation and conversation, it is good to be mindful that sometimes actions speak louder than words. Although often declaring you are going to do something publicly can help keep you on track with actually doing it, the resolution and resilience you may need to pull through are built first in your mind.
For the longest time I sat passively back expecting the best in life, education, relationship, and opportunity to just randomly find me if I was “doing the right things.” This is a false and ridiculous notion, and yet a majority of us live that way.
Keying on our move from Ohio to California to learn and connect with the staff and leadership of Saddleback Church (without a job or anything) - a big transition occurred in my life from a lazy “getter” to a smart taker. Now my choices are intention and and specific. Not just any graduate college will do, I want to get into the best one I possibly can. I can’t assume that someone will notice my “inner brilliance” and want to start mentoring me - I had to ask .
[side note: taking a chance and asking someone who is legit to mentor me has yielded the greatest payoff I've ever seen. Not all have said yes, I even asked Seth Godin to mentor me once and he graciously replied but said he didn' t have the time (which was totally fine I was just impressed he would actually reply to my email).] Check out the article below from Seth that is saying the same things. Life is too short to wait on the random and arrogant assumptions we have that we will passively get the opportunities we are looking for… Get out there and take it!
A few people, not many, but a few, take. They take the best education they can get, pushing teachers for more, finding things to do, exploring non-defined niches. They take more courses than the minimum, they invent new projects and they show up with questions.
Lifechurch.tv continues to innovate in using the technologies of the internet to move the church forward. And the way they do it is just brilliant. They aren’t building a platform to sell resources and have an online store. They aren’t requiring that everyone just listen to them. They are creating a universal platform and encouraging others around the world to OPENLY share their messages and teaching with each other. Instead of creating a profitable pipeline they are opening a universal channel for the good of everyone. And it will succeed because of the openness and execellence they continue to exhibit. Check out the video below.
This is pretty cool - though it sucks I couldn’t share all the songs I had recently purchased from iTunes. (Coldplay, Regina Spektor, Missy Elliot, Rage Against The Machine).
Building the value and tools for listening into your organization is essential to operate in the social media / new web landscape. But there are an obvious list of questions surrounding listening:
Who do we listen to?
Where is it best for us to put our “ears”? (blogs, social networks…)
How to be we measure what we are actually hearing and reflect that?
Who is in charge of listening and who is in charge of hearing? (two different things…)
There is a great article below that is full of links and ideas on the Science of Listening - it will help answer some of these questions and probably bring up some more. But this will become some of the standards and values your organization is based on in the next 5-10 years both online and off.
Measuring and monitoring are critical. To successfully understand the conversation in its many forms, corporations need to effectively mine data. For larger companies this can include databases of information stored up over extended periods of time. This enables a company to see trends evolve over months, even years.
I am the Online Community Organizer at LifeChurch.tv. You can check out our Internet Campus, Life Groups and Second Life Campus. And you don't want to miss out on YouVersion. An online bible software with the social network cooked in - built by our AMAZING Digerati Team! However, everything here is my own personal opinion and not necessarily the opinion of my church.
