The extra two months were partly due to the broken wrist I ended up with from a fall out of my brother’s girlfriend’s hammock, partly due to the unexpected wedding of a friend in Las Vegas, and partly because of a detour to the Grand Canyon. But the delay was also because I discovered the world has so much to offer. It made me hungry to see what is around the next corner. I met so many exceptional people and was exposed to businesses that taught me important lessons.

I didn’t look at the businesses through the eyes of a professional so much…more as a person who is curious about the way people survive and thrive in their lives. In the end, I found the thriving part is really what matters about business. More than ever, I could see that businesses exist for people. Businesses support dreams, love, curiosity, self-challenge, fun, sport, ego and more.

I like to think about all the people i met: the woman who manages a retro motel in Kanab, Utah. The married couple who turned down opportunities to grow their hand-blown glass business into a corporate conglomerate, just so they could remain in their beloved space in old-town Chandler, Arizona. The cafe owner in the town south of Zion Canyon who had the best four-berry pie I’ve ever tasted. Their stories are rich and colorful, even as they slog through the days doing the same thing over and over.

In my mind, the difference between these business people and those who struggle and complain is a conscious choice to see the entire experience as an adventure. These people are my fellows in the belief that we have a choice to look at each day with hope and curiosity. We have a right to believe we will succeed. Our destiny is as much to have fun at our jobs as it is to make money to put food on the table. All we have to do to claim that destiny is make a choice to embrace it–and have faith, really have faith.

When I set out on this adventure, it was simply to visit a client in South Florida, then swing over to see my brother in Houston. The possibilities grew as I traveled, and all I did to grow this treasured experience was follow the possibilities. I worked from the road full time and kept up with my obligations, because that also is a part of making adventure a reality.

The most important thing I did was give myself permission to explore. Some days I wandered with no thought to my destination. Other days, I discovered I felt a great desire to see a specific place, so I worked my way there.

You could look at all of it as a metaphor for business. Give yourself permission to wander aimlessly toward adventure some days. Other days, allow yourself to indulge a desire to head a certain direction, then pull up stakes and just go. Take care of business along the way to make it a reality, then follow your nose to what could be the greatest adventure of your life.

What was our newfound key to busting out of nonsensical thinking? Questions. We started asking ourselves and each other questions. We asked all the questions we could think of, without filtering them for reason and sensibleness. Here are some of the questions we asked:

• What was she trying to say? What could she have been trying to say?
• When did she start saying that?
• How did she phrase it?
• Who else is involved? Could that person have put a spin on it she wouldn’t normally put on it?
• What is the main concern for all of us?
• What is her motivation?
• What is our motivation?
• What day is this conclusion due?
• What will happen if we don’t sort this out by then?
• What other situations have we been in that are like this situation? How did we sort those situations out?
• What matters most to me? What matters most to her?
• How would someone we admire sort this out?
• What’s the first step?
• What will it look like when we get it sorted out?

Sometimes you can break through the nonsense with nonsense…or what seems like nonsense. Unhook your brain and start getting crazy as you talk about your situation. Let’s say you can’t figure out what information your attorney needs to file a suit against a neighbor for damaging a fence. You are afraid you will forget something important to prove your neighbor’s liability.

As you sit down and make a list of information the lawyer needs to know, push your brain. For now, include crazy things: the fence is brown, there’s an anthill at the bottom of the north post, it’s difficult to cut the grass against the fence without damaging it with the weekwhacker, your son hung a water balloon target on the fence during spring break, a board came loose last year and your neighbor fixed it from his side because his dog was getting out, the supports for the fence are on the neighbor’s side, etc.

Allowing your mind to wander through all kinds of seemingly unimportant, crazy facts about the fence could lead you to important information you hadn’t thought of. Knowing your son hung a target on the fence during spring break could help you remember when the fence was damaged. Recalling that the neighbor fixed the fence could show he took responsibility for it then, and make a good case that he should take responsibility for it now. The difficulty you have cutting the grass on your side could explain why the neighbor got so close to the fence with his riding mower and pushed the fence down accidentally. You get the idea.

Ideas can be slippery little devils, and sometimes you need to use creative methods to coax them into submission.

When you’re deeply involved in the day to day operation of your business, it’s not always easy to stop and think about the future. I have that problem constantly. I need to be thinking about getting new writers documented and briefed on the Foster Writing way of doing things. I need to establish more solid financial and sales goals, then take steps each day to reach them. I’m doing it in fits and starts, but it has to get smoother. If it doesn’t, how long can I expect my business to last? Are you thinking about the future? How long will your business last?

The truth is, every business that exists now will someday be a ghost town of activity. That’s just a fact of life. Businesses come and go with the people who run them. Even if you have a plan for someone to take your place when you retire, within a generation of two or three, the business is likely to be nothing but a memory.

Our job, I would say, is to make the years that our businesses do survive as prosperous and meaningful as possible. One of the best ways to add meaning is to keep talking and writing about what we are doing and what we want to accomplish–or what w want to contribute to the world. The web has helped us document our businesses through blogs like this, as well as articles, web site copy and more.

It used to be that the only things written about a company were found in one brochure, maybe a frmed newspaper profile article, and a business plan that only the bank or investors got to see. Now, we have all kinds of ways to ruminate on our business activity, motives, dreams, philosophies and more. All of this requires that we know how to express ourselves through writing.

How do you feel about your writing skills? Wouldn’t you rather be able to write your own messages than have a writer speak for you? It’s possible for the most literarily challenged person to learn this important skill. Especially since we don’t expect anyone to write perfectly these days. We just want to read or hear what you have to say. Being able to write authentically about your business could be one of the things that lengthens it’s life.

Foster Writing is all about helping people say what they mean for important reasons, such as keeping businesses alive. Stay tuned to this space for ongoing tips and tricks for writing in such a way that you might br able to put off the ghost-towning of your business a little longer than expected.

Other examples of writing for scanners are abbreviated signs, pictograms, the use of “posts” instead of rambling emails or—heaven forbid—hand-written letters. This world of scanners requires a different kind of writing. That’s not to say we don’t need our full set of traditional writing skills when it’s called for. But we’re acquiring a whole new set of writing skills for scannable writing. Here are a few helpful tips:

• Get to the point quickly. Scanners are looking for the nugget of truth in what you have to say—not just the main point. If you don’t have a nugget of truth to offer, don’t write anything at all.

• Don’t abbreviate everything. Use complete language to give context in the beginning, end and selected parts of a piece that’s long enough to accommodate such traditional language. If you don’t do this, some pieces can become impersonal, and the message suffers.

• Use bold and underline to indicate the most important parts of your messages. A scanner’s eye will stop on the things you’ve marked. One exception is titles. We often scan over titles, taking it for granted that what we read after the title will repeat what’s in the title.

• Include irresistible visuals. A scanner’s mind is programmed for visual clues, so you can draw them in with an interesting visual. It’s an art to choose an image that both tells enough to be interesting and leaves enough out to make them curious—the result is irresistible.

• Keep everything simple and short. That means short sentences, lots of white space, smaller paragraphs and NO unnecessary words. Hint: You rarely need the word “that”, except in instances like the ones above where you are referring to something you just described.

• Don’t try to cram everything into a short format. It’s a mistake to write everything for scanners. Sometimes even scanners need to read a complete message. However, when you do write a longer message, make sure you have something important to offer. If you share something of true value, it’s worth taking the time to read complete thoughts—such as in this very valuable piece of writing about writing effectively for scanners.

About the photo: I took a picture of this floor sign in a McDonald’s restaurant where I was working. In this sign, scanners see the shape and color of the sign first, which tells them it’s a wet floor, because we are used to seeing these wet floor signs. In case we don’t immediately get it, we see a pictogram of a person falling. For good measure, the sign includes a logo. Because it appears on a sign that helps keep customers safe, it communicates a reinforcement of what McDonald’s stands for–caring about our safety. It also reinforces McDonald’s’ reputation for easy-to-access messages and organized management.

On the other hand, being able to show my true self (or what I believe at this stage in the game is my true self) has led to miracles, some of which you can read about in these pages. I just finished reading The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, and I believe a greater part of his message is that our businesses will be truly successful only when we are true to ourselves.

The other part of his message is that we have to learn how to communicate transparently to others what is so meaningful in the work we do and what we have to offer them. Our authenticity and dedication to the Franchise Prototype of our businesses, along with a genuine dedication to the needs of customers as THEY percieve them, will win the day. This is not about products and services. It is about ways we can live our own lives and connect with others authentically. We can’t be successful until we figure out what makes us happy and fulfilled today, and then express it in a way that creates more of it.

When I left my hometown last December with money from the sale of my house underneath me in the form of a supercool red Jeep Commander, I had a vague sense of running away from some of that heartache I mentioned above. However, it wasn’t long before I found myself running headlong and hungrily toward adventure. I couldn’t consume enough new scenery, hear enough new voices, or wonder about enough new mysteries of the worlds I was discovering to satiate my ravenous curiosity.

Finally, I became comfortable with the hunger and saw it as an end in itself. Eventually, my appetite for adventure and new places became a primary building block for my business. I’ve done some of my best work from the road in the past few months. I rarely feel unsettled or lonesome. I haven’t even felt homesick, unless you count a growing itch to get back on the road after I’ve been parked in one place for more than a week or so.

I have to admit I miss family, friends and clients at home, especially my adult children and friends Eddie and Maggie, but somehow, thanks to modern modes of communication, I almost feel closer to them now than I did at home, because I am so happy. I am so myself, and these blogs have given me such a joyful way to share what I am discovering about our country: It’s a beautiful place, full of proud, capable, spirit-full people, glorious traditions and freedom in the form of hundreds of thousands of viable, passion fueled businesses.

I know for a fact my dad (and my mom) are proud of the way I am living my life as an open book, with pages I am writing myself from the road. I also know my clients and colleagues are benefitting from this new me who is truer to me than I’ve ever been, as well as infinitely more committed to them.

I suppose I should’ve been frustrated or worried or sick about what I would not be able to do, but I couldn’t help looking at the broken wrist as another part of my adventure. I’m really not a masochist. I’m just so energized by the lifestyle I’ve chosen in the last few months that it’s pretty hard to get me down. There’s no doubt it cost me some work time. On the other hand, some good things came out of it.

First, it gives me a great topic to blog about. My travels would be boring if there weren’t some obstacles to overcome, right? Second, the downtime I was forced into gave me a chance to spend quality time with a dear friend. Finally, even though I can type with my exoskeleton cast, the awkwardness of it has encouraged me to fire up my voice recognition software, Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I haven’t used it for awhile, and I’m pleasantly surprised with the quality of the new edition. In fact, once I spend some time with the program and become more adept at commands and dictation, I think I can even use this while I drive.

Don’t get all huffy, you mothers and compulsive caretakers out there! I’ve already done it with Nuance’s iPad app. If the road noise is not too great, the dictation is accurate enough that I can get the gist of my message down, then correct it later. Right now, I’m dictating at a McDonald’s where the background noise includes a television set over my right shoulder, Muzak over the loudspeakers, and people laughing and talking in the background. If I can do it here, I’m guessing this program will work great on the road.

That’s good for you, readers, because it will make it possible for me to create more blog entries. The whole experience has been good for me, because I’ve known for a long time that I need to become proficient with the voice recognition program. I have mild arthritis in both hands, and the doc says one of the best things I can do is minimize their use. No doubt, I have many more typing miles to go, but I don’t mind putting off that moment someday when I’ll find it too difficult type, and therefore too difficult to write.

I don’t mind telling you some of the other things that are pretty difficult to do with one non-dominant hand: wash your hair, pull up your jeans, fasten your belt, brush the offside of your teeth, and pull your hair into a ponytail. I’m actually pretty proud of myself for looking at this positively, making the best of it, and turning it into a decent blog entry.

I guess this is a good example of making lemonade out of lemons. I don’t want to be preachy, but hey it’s a good lesson for everybody to learn, right? If I can deal with a broken wrist while I’m writing blogs, you can deal with grouchy customers, evil bosses, bad service at fast food restaurants, and business coaches nagging at you to set goals. I promise to take my own advice next time disaster strikes, because I know it will. Me and my Dragon are ready.

Troy works for S & D Towing and Auto Repair, the Benson company Verizon contracted to tow me into Tuscon. As we talked on the way to Tuscon, I discovered Troy has an avocation that at first seems inconsistent with his life as a trucker, auto repairman and biker. He’s a minister. He has performed only a handful of weddings so far, but that’s the reason he got his license. He doesn’t lead a church or perform other ceremonies—just weddings. He never charges for the weddings at which he officiates. He considers his service a gift to each new couple.

Although Troy doesn’t think of his ministering as job or business, it’s interesting to think that people can do jobs that seem outside of our expectation of them. He doesn’t look the part of a minister, whatever that look might be. But there’s something else. Troy is really proud of what he does—he’s passionate about it. It was so important for him to do weddings that he spent money to get the license, he spends a generous amount of time with the couples planning the vows and ceremony, and he’s willing to do it for free. You should see the glint in his eye when he talks about it. I don’t know what Troy would say, but I get the feeling he identifies with his ministering, in a way, more than his work at the garage.

I suppose that’s not unusual. We all have to do jobs sometimes that we don’t identify with strongly, because we have to put bread on the table. The lesson I learned from Troy is that you can receive fulfillment from the thing that captures your heart, even if you don’t do it every day, even if you don’t get paid for it. It seems obvious, but how often do we discount the things that are the most important to us? What if there is a way to make the things we love a bigger, more regular part of our lives? Maybe, like Troy, we should put a little more effort into those things that will put a glint in our eye.

We spend a lot of time and money on professional development, special equipment and business development, because we expect it to pay off in profit—dollars. We want the dollars because we believe it will help us enjoy life. That’s what we think of as fulfillment, but maybe we’re looking in the wrong place for fulfillment. I’ve felt as fulfilled as I ever have over the past few months of traveling. That’s without a home (we sold it, and I used part of my money to buy the Jeep I travel in—when it’s working). It’s without a regular job, and without a huge income. This lifestyle is not for everybody, but it’s inspiring to me. It’s energizing. I wouldn’t have thought, years ago when I took my first corporate job, that my real passion would lie in the life of a gypsy.

I don’t suppose Troy knew years ago that he’d find his passion as a minister. I imagine there was a moment when he realized it was something he wanted to do for real. The only difference between him and people who never realize their passion is that he took steps toward it, placing it in his life as a priority over money, or at least alongside money in its level of importance.

As Americans, my generation was brought up to believe that the more money we made, the happier we would be. I can tell you from experience, and so can Troy I’m guessing, that it’s a fallacy. It’s not the money that makes us happy. It’s that thing that creates the glint in the eye.

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To talk with Troy about ministering at a wedding or connecting with the Hawg Ridin’ Fools, contact him at TroyRogers@ymail.com.

Look! I'm adapting to the pink rock! I'm a good adapter.

Silly me. You already know the answer, because I gave it away in the title. There are actually PINK rattlesnakes here! I’ve seen one…in a park ranger’s slide show. At first I thought it was a joke, but the ranger told the story of how the rattlesnake was found. A ranger saw it in the canyon, caught it with a stick, quickly grabbed it’s neck, carried it at arm’s length up the canyon, carefully transferred it to his other hand, held it out the window as he drove to the ranger station, boxed it up and sent it to the San Diego Zoo, where they confirmed it was a new species.

It had evolved its own color to help it blend into the color of the canyon’s orange/red walls. THAT is adaptability at its finest, right?

The story of the pink rattler, whose nickname is Pinky by the way, made me think about how fundamental adaptability is to business. We think we are adaptable by doing things like changing our hours to meet our customers’ needs, putting anti-bacterial lotions in restaurant bathrooms and offering weather or Twitter feeds on our websites. Those things are not bad, but they are only surface adaptations, like birds raising their young in caves when a forest fire wipes out the trees.

We convince ourselves doing these surface things will help people see that we are doing things to meet our customers’ needs. We think these things are part of building relationships, and the ultimate goal is to make more money from it. Those adaptations are easy enough to accomplish, and that is maybe the reason they aren’t really adaptations.

Think about what had to happen for the pink rattler to adapt its color to the canyon. Time had to go by—a lot of it. It had to be totally committed to that environment only. And here’s a thought: it happened naturally. The rattler didn’t make it happen. It just happened as the rattler lived the life it was meant to live. (Photo courtesy of the National Park Service, by the way.) 

I’m learning something about the potential of adaptability in my own life, by accident. I finally had it with life and trying to make it turn out the way I wanted it to, so I just chucked it all, bought a Jeep and took off. Why? Because I couldn’t not. The gypsy in me finally won out over children, parents, hometown, love and security. Adventure and change are the deepest parts of me, and through a series of events they finally weren’t pressed down, so they sprang up.

I have never been happier, or more successful.

What if, in our businesses, we stopped trying to make things happen? What if we decided to open ourselves up to what we really are, what we really want as people, and what if we allowed our businesses to adapt to that? I wanted to go the Grand Canyon, so I went, and my business has been naturally adapting to this environment for the past five days. What do you want to do with your life? Not what you think you should do, but what you REALLY want to do? What if you really did it?

I think businesses try too hard. It has got to be easier. It just takes time. It takes focusing on one thing that means the most to us. And we’ve got to stop trying to make things happen, and instead let them happen naturally. Before we know it, our skin will be turning the color of the canyon we live in.

I camped while I was at Zion (yes, sleeping in the back of my Jeep, for those of you who wonder). When I woke up in the mornings—three of them—my first sight was of gigantic rocks so tall, they seem to suck air out of your lungs and draw it up like a sprite borrowing your breath. It’s a great way to wake up. All of that upward focus pulled me out of my Jeep bed to a standing position, with a big smile on my face.

During the days, I drove and wrote. The word that most often came out of my mouth was “Wow.” Actually, not many other words came out of my mouth, because I was on my own and rarely talked with anyone, which at this stage of my life I love. I navigated the switchbacks, vertigo curves and tunnels as if I was dancing. Every now and then I dipped myself into a pullout to exit the Jeep and take in a particularly amazing sight, almost reverently, and silently except for the wows.

When I found a particularly peaceful or grand spot on the road, I’d stop and work. I have a small table that fits in front of the passenger seat of the Jeep. It’s just right for my laptop, and I use my phone as a hotspot to connect to the Web. I can also place my iPad on the console to pull up websites for research or emails with project instructions. I have an Apple charge cord that works on both my iPhone and the iPad, and I bought an inverter so I can plug in my laptop. I researched to make sure it doesn’t hurt the Jeep to idle it while the inverter is in use. I was in heaven, and my fingers flew on the keyboard.

All of this, all of this grandeur and happiness and smoothness of logistics, was going on in spite of. My hip hurt (an old car wreck injury), I had forgotten to take my thyroid pills for three days so I was dragging, my skin was so dry it hurt and it took forever (so it seemed) to get the Jeep situated so I could work and sleep in it at the campground. I discovered there were no showers, unless you pay for them in the nearby town of Springdale. I was worried about one of my tires that has had a little less pressure than the others. I wanted to play, and for the first time in a long time resented my work—just a bit. I discovered a lot of the places I wanted to work were out of range for the hotspot.

But I was still happy. I still got a lot done.

The point is that the grand outweighed the bad. Is that a principle we could use in business? If we are doing what is really meaningful to us, whether or not it directly relates to our work, it helps us slide over the challenges like they are covered with a layer of silicone. I almost didn’t notice those bad things down there. All I could see was the magnificence of the canyon, the blue sky, the freedom and the need of my clients to say what they mean.

I arrived at the Grand Canyon today after a drive along the Arizona Strip, a long ridge of impossibly tall cliffs of impossible red rock. When I got to the park, it had fallen dark, but the moon was almost full, and everything I looked at was saturated with milky moonlight. I decided to pull into one of the observation points and see how far the moonlight dipped into the canyon. All the way. It was another exceptional sight in a trip full of exceptional sights. The terrain was so bright with moonlight both below and above, I could drive slowly along the edge of some parking lot rails without my headlamps on and see everything. It was light enough I could feel a gentle, pleasing vertigo. I felt like I was flying above the earth, a ghostly bird above a spirit earth.

Tomorrow, I know I’ll feel more grandeur when I see the canyon in daylight. I’ve seen it before, and not that long ago. But I believe I’ll feel like I’ve never seen it before. It’s that big and that deep. Big enough to bury my type-weary, achy hands and arms. Deep and beautiful enough to blur the fact that I don’t have enough money for a burro ride to the bottom.

The ground in the median of the Interstate was black—was the dirt naturally black and hard, or was there some kind of dirt on the dirt. Road grime, maybe? Nah. There was too much of it. Maybe they dumped black dirt on the red dirt to fill in the median when they built the road. Little tufts of desert plants looked like they were thriving there.

As it all went whizzing by me, I realized I was soon going to be missing spectacular scenery after sundown. I had planned to arrive at Zion National Park after dark and allow myself to be pleasantly surprised by nature’s big show in the morning, but I didn’t want to miss what I thought I might see on the way to the canyon. So I decided to stop.

At first, I looked for campgrounds using my iPad. All I could find were RV parks. They aren’t all Jeep-sleep-friendly, so I hesitated. But then I came over a rise and saw Mesquite sparkling below me. It was bigger than I thought it would be. At the first exit, lo and behold, there was a casino. (I AM in Nevada, just an hour or so north of Vegas.) I decided to drive down to see if they had a cheap room.

The Casa Blanca Casino looked very nice: tall palms, water falling off of spotlit cliffs, an opulent u-shaped cobblestone drive. They only had a king smoking room for $99. Another day, I would have taken it, but my cold has hung on too long, and even the thought of a smoky room made me think I had to cough. They have a sister property, though, not far away, and the rooms were only $41.95. I made a reservation sight unseen, and headed over here.

I’m sitting in the bowling alley of the Virgin River Casino. It’s not quite as nice as the Casa Blance (thus the difference in price), but it will do just fine. Just finished a burger (very good) and chips. It’s league night, and I have a great spectator’s seat at a table behind the teams. It’s so much fun to watch the bowlers and think about how they might know each other, where they’ve come from, and what they might do for a living. It’s obvious they are from all walks of life, all ages, all dispositions.

The thought strikes me that bowling is one of the few places so many different kinds of people can mingle and get along just fine. I’m sure there are other places, but all I can think of right now other than bowling is weddings. That’s probably because I just came from a Vegas wedding. One of my best friends and her now-new husband invited friends and family to join them as they stood in a downtown wedding chapel and tried really hard not to giggle and cry as they said their vows.

It was a perfect wedding. We had people of all kinds wearing the same purple T-shirts that said “Barbie and Ken, 2/29/12.” There was a young up and coming actress, a retired Marine, an insurance account executive, a farmer/trucker, an 18-month-old live cupiedoll, two brave women in wheelchair (one missing an arm and two legs), an attorney, an apartment maintenance man, a nurse, a hearing aid specialist and a microbiologist. And a writer. After the ceremony, we went bowling and absolutely, truly had a blast. My purple T-shirt was an extra large, and longer than my dress, so it looked like I was wearing nothing but a T-shirt with black nylons and bowling shoes. Most of us really sucked at bowling, but we were the bomb when it came to getting along.

The thought crossed my mind that if we can all get along at a wedding, it should be easy for us to get along in other places. At the wedding, we got along because we were there for Barbie and Ken. We got along because we chose to.

At work, whether you work for someone else or yourself, you could make the same decision. If there is someone who rubs you the wrong way, you could decide to let it slide. And then you could make the same decision every day. When I have a client who is difficult, I can resign the account, or I can decide to let it slide and just do the work, bending to let annoyance slide off of me like raindrops off of a leaf. (That’s a Buddhist metaphor.)

Now that I think of it, there’s another time we all seem to get along: a funeral. Ironically, the second of my two best friends texted me 15 minutes before the wedding ceremony to tell me her father had just died. Life turns and turns. A wedding is like a mountain in the glow of a sunset. A funeral is like a vast expanse of hard black dirt on top of red dirt. You don’t know if it’s real.