{"id":133,"date":"2008-09-18T13:43:00","date_gmt":"2008-09-18T13:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hazelrider.wordpress.com\/2008\/09\/18\/open-the-dern-door-already-hm-column-attached"},"modified":"2008-09-18T13:43:00","modified_gmt":"2008-09-18T13:43:00","slug":"open-the-dern-door-already-hm-column-attached","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hazelbasil.com\/wordpress\/2008\/09\/18\/open-the-dern-door-already-hm-column-attached\/","title":{"rendered":"Open the DERN door already! HM Column attached"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>To encourage and inspire!<br \/>And open the DERN door already!<br \/>Let&#8217;s not be Van Gogh about it either;<br \/>by that I mean you&#8217;re dead before you even recognize your potential<br \/>and even receive the recognition or blessings<br \/>because OF your talents, WHILE you were alive!<\/p>\n<p>I get HM&#8217;s column once a week &#8211; see this week&#8217;s below <\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212; Forwarded Message<br \/>From: Harvey Mackay &lt;alerts@harveymackay.com&gt;<br \/>Reply-To: &lt;alerts@harveymackay.com&gt;<br \/>Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2008 07:00:51 -0400 (EDT)<br \/>To: &lt;hazel.rider&gt;<br \/>Subject: Harvey Mackay&#8217;s Column&#8211;Open the door to your hidden talents<\/p>\n<p>Open the door to your hidden talents<br \/>There was a man who played piano in a bar. He was a good piano player.<br \/>People came out just to hear him play. But one night, a patron told<br \/>him he didn&#8217;t want to hear him just play anymore. He wanted him to<br \/>sing a song.<\/p>\n<p>The man said, &#8220;I don&#8217;t sing.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But the customer was persistent. He told the bartender, &#8220;I&#8217;m tired of<br \/>listening to the piano. I want that guy to sing!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The bartender shouted across the room, &#8220;Hey buddy! If you want to get<br \/>paid, sing a song. The patrons are asking you to sing!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>So he did. The piano player who had never sung in public did so for<br \/>the very first time. And no one had ever heard the song &#8220;Mona Lisa&#8221;<br \/>sung the way it was sung that night by none other than Nat King Cole.<\/p>\n<p>He had talent he was sitting on. He may have lived the rest of his<br \/>life as a no-name piano player in a no-name bar, but because he had to<br \/>sing, he went on to become one of the best-known entertainers in America.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a lesson here for all of us. We all have hidden talents. Good<br \/>companies understand this and give their employees opportunities to<br \/>try different jobs and learn new skills. They never know when they<br \/>might discover another Nat King Cole.<\/p>\n<p>As proof, I offer you the array of reality television shows that<br \/>invite contestants to sing, dance or perform their professed &#8220;talents&#8221;<br \/>(which some actually possess) for a panel of judges and viewers. <br \/>I give the contestants credit for trying!<\/p>\n<p>I have a friend who is constantly asking me, &#8220;When is the last time<br \/>you did something for the first time?&#8221; He wants me to stretch myself<br \/>and to experience as many new adventures as I can.<\/p>\n<p>I often advise people to learn and try as many skills as they can<br \/>handle to make themselves indispensable to their companies. <br \/>There is another benefit: You just might find a talent you didn&#8217;t know you had,<br \/>or discover a new job or career to pursue. Companies like 3M allow<br \/>their researchers time to try their own projects, whether or not they<br \/>are related to their regular jobs.<\/p>\n<p>One local television reporter has been job swapping with viewers\u2014among<br \/>her experiences, she&#8217;s been a fire fighter, dog trainer, city manager,<br \/>florist, baker and sanitation worker. She has demonstrated some hidden<br \/>talents, along with a terrific sense of humor. So far, it doesn&#8217;t<br \/>appear that she is ready to abandon her TV gig.<\/p>\n<p>I also advise people to take up hobbies or volunteer to give their<br \/>brains a break from their regular routines. The hidden benefit there<br \/>is that a change of scenery can stimulate your creativity, which in<br \/>turn helps you discover other hidden abilities.<\/p>\n<p>If you don&#8217;t expand your wings you might end up like the eagle that<br \/>thought he was a prairie chicken. There once was a hiker who found an<br \/>eagle&#8217;s egg high on a mountain. Not knowing what kind of egg it was,<br \/>he carried the egg down to the prairie and placed it in the nest of a<br \/>prairie chicken.<\/p>\n<p>The eaglet hatched with the brood of prairie chicks and grew up with<br \/>them. All his life, the little eagle, thinking he was a prairie<br \/>chicken, did what his fellow prairie chickens did. He scratched in the<br \/>dirt for seeds and insects to eat. He clucked and cackled as they did.<\/p>\n<p>And he flew no more than a few feet off the ground. After all, he told<br \/>himself, that&#8217;s how prairie chickens are supposed to fly.<\/p>\n<p>One day the young eagle saw a magnificent bird flying high above in<br \/>the cloudless prairie sky. The magnificent creature moved across the<br \/>sky powered only by an occasional flap of its powerful wings.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;What a beautiful bird!&#8221; exclaimed the young eagle to one of his<br \/>prairie chicken brothers. &#8220;I wonder what it is.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s an eagle, the king of birds,&#8221; clucked his companion. &#8220;But<br \/>don&#8217;t get any ideas, you can never be like him.&#8221; So the young eagle<br \/>never gave it another thought. And so he lived out his life, close to<br \/>the ground, thinking he was a prairie chicken, never daring to soar.<\/p>\n<p>Mackay&#8217;s Moral: How will you know if you don&#8217;t try?<\/p>\n<p>Miss a column? The last three weeks of Harvey&#8217;s columns are<br \/>always archived online &lt;http:\/\/www.harveymackay.com\/columns\/&gt; .<br \/>More information and learning tools can be found online at harveymackay.com<br \/>&#8212;&#8212; End of Forwarded Message<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\"><img width='1' height='1' src='' alt='' \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To encourage and inspire!And open the DERN door already!Let&#8217;s not be Van Gogh about it either;by that I mean you&#8217;re dead before you even recognize your potentialand even receive the recognition or blessingsbecause OF your talents, WHILE you were alive! I get HM&#8217;s column once a week &#8211; see this week&#8217;s below &#8212;&#8212; Forwarded MessageFrom: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6RKYn-29","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hazelbasil.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hazelbasil.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hazelbasil.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hazelbasil.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hazelbasil.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/hazelbasil.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hazelbasil.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hazelbasil.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hazelbasil.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}