From Dublin to Duluth with the Ford Ranger
My 2011 Ford Ranger Sports Truck was purchased used and modified to be a one-guy outdoor truck. As a 76-year-old fellow who mostly hunts by himself, I do not need, or want, a huge pick-up truck. The Ranger that I purchased was equipped with a ... Views: 2297
Muddling Mondays
You have returned to work on Monday after making a presentation at a trade show and a 4-to- 12 hour flight back home.
After making a presentation at a trade show or other event and a long flight back home the body, mind and spirit are going to take time to recover, whether ... Views: 2054
Starting Another Business While Working for Someone Else
Ethical ways to start another company or create a new job while working for someone else.
“When you take the King’s shilling, you are the King’s man.” Is a quote from Old English that still resonates today. When you are employed by ... Views: 1190
From Creation to Realization: A Case Study
I consulted with a client who had a large number of business ideas, but did not have the equipment or skills to properly present them to potential backers.
The client being discussed will remain anonymous, but his experiences are not unusual ... Views: 1130
Crystallography as a Way to Discover the “Unknown Unknowns” Regarding any Process or Question
Crystallography with its rigid rules of form and symmetry provides a way to consider undiscovered facts and properties of complex problems.
Crystallography is a course that is dreaded by Geology ... Views: 1121
Working Through Sick Days
How you can continue productive work through your annual bout with colds, flu and sinus infections.
An annual debilitating fight with colds and other respiratory diseases is something that impacts everyone from the CEO to the worker who is contracted to clean the ... Views: 1118
Ask for a Raise or Change Jobs?
Mid-level employees with two years or more of experience have never been in a better position to ask for a raise.
The percentage of the U.S. labor force that is working is at the highest in decades, companies are looking for workers, there is a real ... Views: 1098
Increase Your Wealth and Happiness by Tapping Multiple Sources of Income
Generating multiple income streams through starting several small-scale businesses can help you keep your paychecks coming in this rapidly changing economy.
As a writer some of my efforts are along the theme of ... Views: 1090
Wrap Up Wednesdays
Consolidate Plans for End of Week Presentations.
Everything regarding your coming presentation to the public or company officials needs to be checked and finalized. If postponed until the day before there is a danger that in the rush to pack up that a needed piece of ... Views: 1083
Jobs for Laid-Off Assembly Line Workers
Automation has replaced hundreds of thousands of assembly line workers and Human Resource Departments have not succeeded in finding jobs for many of them.
All too often assembly line workers are considered by management as “interchangeable work ... Views: 1081
Regular Order According to the Dog
All actions by my humans must be done the same way every day.
Just as the sun rises and sets each day, our canine companions feel that their humans should also keep the same schedule and become disquieted when we are not compliant with what they view as ... Views: 1077
Choose Your Partners as Carefully as You Would Choose Your Parents
While sex appeal and lust-driven emotional responses likely played a large part in your being conceived, such responses need to be set aside when taking on a business partner. Maybe a sex partner can be a business partner, ... Views: 1065
Wm. Hovey Smith is a registered Professional Geologist in Georgia. He is also a member of several writers’ organizations including the Professional Outdoor Media Association (POMA), the Outdoor Writers Association of America (OWAA) and the Georgia Outdoor Writers Association (GOWA). He is the ... Views: 1033
Truck Drivers as Potential Entrepreneurs
A life on the road teaches many things that are useful for starting new businesses.
The image of the American truck driver as a white, cigar smoking, fat, bigoted slob, is unfortunately what comes to mind to most potential employers when they see ... Views: 1028
Avoid Financial Disaster when Selling Your Company
Is selling your company going to reward you financially or leave you with a bankrupt company and debts that you cannot repay?
Thus far your entrepreneurial enterprises have gone well. You started a company, made it a success, ran it for ... Views: 1027
Foreign travel on an intercontinental scale is time consuming, tiring and expensive. Flight times from the U.S. to China can be 30 hours and 12-15 hours to most locations in Europe. Those living in Australia, New Zealand, Africa, South America and India also face many hours in an aircraft to ... Views: 987
Writing Fiction while Sitting by the Bogwood Fire
Bogwood.n. Darkly colored wood that may be 10s of thousands of years old recovered from marshes and bogs in typically northern latitudes that is dried and used for fuel in areas where other wood is scarce or absent.
Just as the captive ... Views: 982
Increased Productivity in the Time of Coronavirus
Writing is by its nature a generally solitary occupation where for many of us a self-isolation is generally desired during at least part of the process. Now being 78 and a widower it is just me and Hector, my Lab, at home, and I do not have ... Views: 980
Ads for Your Business or Services that Pay You Money
You can have ads for your business or service that circulate worldwide, contain exactly the content that you want, stay up forever and pay you money.
Money- generating advertising can have graphic, written, video and audio sections ... Views: 970
Canine Supervision: Natural Law According to Your Dog
For the safety and wellbeing of the household no human should be allowed to work except under the close supervision of one or more canine supervisors.
Because of the pitiful lack of basic sensory functions in humans such as the ... Views: 966
Stay or Move with Your Job: Increasing Your Options
When you work for the largest company in your city or town and they decide to close their production lines and move elsewhere, do you move with your job, or stay put and hope you can find work at another company? When you went to work for a ... Views: 949
An Older Guy Balances His Physical, Intellectual and Social Life
Writers don’t retire, they just die. I am one of that tribe. At 77 I find myself living alone in Central Georgia while facing the tasks of earning money, keeping up my house, fighting off the ills of an aging body, maintaining ... Views: 945
Pick Up Tuesdays
Most creative people who are not endowed with the “neatness gene” live a messy existence. Pick Up Tuesdays budgets one day a week to restore a degree of order to their environments.
To the frequent dismay of those whose motto is, “Everything has its place and everything is ... Views: 931
An extract from my forthcoming book "Make Your Own Job
Anytime, Anywhere, At Any Age" to be published in February, 2020
Writing a Book
Often the most rapid way to establish credibility in a field is to write a book about a hot topic and use this book as a springboard to access members of ... Views: 930
Presentation Fridays
Days that involve travel to an event followed by a presentation are often the most stressful.
It is helpful if you can arrive the evening before a presentation to give you, and your body, a chance to unwind prior to the event and eliminate the stress that some ... Views: 927
Age and the ills that go along with it happen. At 78 with the loss of agility and stamina in my leg muscles, I can no longer do the run-and-gun style of turkey hunting that I did as recently as five years ago. In addition, the social distance requirement of the corona virus outbreak keeps me and ... Views: 918
Recommendations for Reducing Depression While Recovering from Potentially Deadly Accidents and Diseases
Interesting, exciting and productive intellectual work can help reduce feelings of depression and lessen the need for drugs while undergoing treatment and rehab.
A former U.S. Marine ... Views: 915
You can overcome self-doubt and knowledge deficiencies to increase earnings by designing a job that fits your unique mix of talents and abilities.
All of us have a unique set of knowledge and experiences. In modern regimented business models it is common to attempt to place people into jobs ... Views: 914
Overcoming Shyness in Life and Business
Perhaps the best example of a person who has overcome shyness is the performing artist who stands naked on stage and presents his art before an audience of half-drunk New Yorkers in the wee hours of the morning.
Whatever the artistic merit of the ... Views: 906
Protecting Yourself and Financial Position from Coronavirus
A five day trend for worldwide stock market plunges in reaction to the threat of the Coronavirus caused a fall of 1,000 points on the New York Stock Exchange’s on the news of new cases of the virus being located in Iran and Italy. At ... Views: 903
Recreating a Sicilian Terror Weapon of
1000 B.C.
Luigi, The Claw, one of the characters in the novel I am writing, Father of The Grooms, has been an active Mafia member since World War II. As a boy he participated in the resistance against the Germans and suffered the loss of his left hand ... Views: 901
Untangling Life’s Knotty Problems
Wm. Hovey Smith, Nov., 2019
“Don’t sweat the small stuff” is an often heard admonition. Cleaning up after a camping trip brought this lesson into focus in a powerful way as I attempted to untangle a knot of three different sizes of ropes and cords after a ... Views: 900
Entrepreneurship As a Means of Combating the Epidemic of Loneliness
Useful work to fill the hours of our days is what your body would tell you it wants if it could speak.
In 2018 the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the CDC, declared that loneliness was the second most significant ... Views: 898
Taking Control of Your Own Life: Making the Transition from Punching Bag to Fighter
A fighter who quits can never win. A fighter who stays in the ring may win and will learn from the experience. Wm. Hovey Smith, Author of Create Your Own Job Security.
If you ever played high school ... Views: 897
Alternative Reality: True, False or Somewhere in Between?
Alternative reality is an opinion that may or may not be supported by facts.
A new phrase, alternative reality, entered the language with the Trump administration. It is used to describe statements often issued by the president that ... Views: 892
Job Options if You Are/Were a Shutdown Impacted Federal Employee or Retail Worker
If you were one of the 800,000 Federal workers involved in the recent, and maybe continuing partial government shutdown or are a former Sears or K-Mart employee and have lost your job, you are joining tens of ... Views: 883
Create Your Own Job with Your Present Company, Another Company or On Your Own
With today’s rapid advances in IT technology, science, marketing and an ever-evolving art world it is possible to invent marketable jobs to capitalize on in a variety of ways.
Company owners and managers ... Views: 870
Be Prepared for YES
Proper prior preparation prevents piss poor performance. Rule of the seven “Ps,” U.S. Army, c. 1970 and possibly long before.
At a hospitality suite during a two-day business seminar, those hosting the event are obviously promoting their products to the attendees. ... Views: 863
Property Rights: Natural Law According to the Dog
What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is mine and what’s theirs is mine if I can get it.
Our canines’ views of property rights are quite different from the usual Western legal constructions where property is transferred by sale, exchange, ... Views: 860
Generating Scenes
The Backbone of the Screenplay
Making a movie begins with a concept, then this idea may be captured in a novel, and the third stage is often a screenplay. Sometimes the novel stage is omitted, and the writer/s go directly from concept to screenplay. If you are fortunate ... Views: 825
A Georgia Spineless Eatable Cactus as
A Potential Source of Animal and Human Food
In a YouTube video titled Reconciliation that was published in December, 2020, I described my finding and cooking an unusual species of spineless cactus, and said that I would attempt to propagate it. This ... Views: 815
The Case for a Child-Parent Hunt
Wm. Hovey Smith
November 4, 2019
By the end of the third day of Georgia’s Primitive Weapons hunt on Ossabaw ... Views: 815
Stay at home rules and closing colleges has interrupted educational activities for many people. However, resources are available to enable you to learn how to write a movie without being on campus. I have completed a 30-minute video listing books, a writing program, and two college courses that ... Views: 798
Reaching potential audiences where they are with business books is best done by offering products on a multiplicity of platforms as author Wm. Hovey Smith has done with his new business title, "Make Your Own Job: Anywhere, Anytime, At Any Age." which was nearly simultaneously published as a ... Views: 766
The Return of Coal
Straight off the Graveyard Shift the 6-foot 200 lb. guy on my back steps was at the point of tears. The contrast between him and me at now less than 5-foot 7-inches and about 165 pounds was striking as I opened my back door in response to his rap. I appreciated that he had ... Views: 747
It has been a week since I had my second shot of the Covid-19 vaccine at my local VA hospital in Dublin, Georgia. There have been two problems with administering this vaccine. One has been reluctance by some to take the shot for fear of having an adverse reaction to it and another has been ... Views: 746
Incorporating Outdoor Materials into Novels
Wm. Hovey Smith
“Write what you know,” is a hackneyed piece of advice usually given to students in grade school when they are assigned their first story to turn in at the end of class. Fast forward 70 years and the novelist sitting at his computer ... Views: 703
When institutional buyers are considering purchasing books for their organizations, libraries, or bookstores, the thing that they are NOT going to do is to sit down and read every book they might consider. In fact, some buyers almost never read books, and are not going to lug them around at ... Views: 700
An Effective Library Appeal For Your Book
In the 1970s, before the internet, the standard way for an independent author to publicize his book to libraries was to send a copy to the institutions’ Acquisition Librarian. It helped if the author was a faculty or student member of the ... Views: 699
As a writer I have written more than 20 books on outdoor and business topics. "Until Death Do You Part: An American Family Meets Their Sicilian Relatives" is now available as an audio book and is to be followed by an e-book, softcover, and perhaps ultimately a movie.
My novel whose progress ... Views: 670