I don’t remember how I came about finding Inc.com but it must’ve been through Twitter, through someone’s RT. Last night, as I was up late and couldn’t sleep, I started going through all of the entries that were still in my RSS feed in my email.  Amazing, amazing, amazing writing and very informative and it doesn’t waste your time. They are spot-on. This is definitely the best information source if you own your own business or are an entrepreneurs, follow retail, follow news stories that have to do with tech, social networking and all kinds of marketing.

So, this will begin my FIRST edition of summarizing and noting the great links from INC.com. Now, some of these you might’ve already heard about because they are older by a few days, but I have some things to discuss. 

From July 11th:

Time productivity. As a writer, going by a time schedule is definitely needed for me, as I like to get lost in details and certain parts where I’m very interested. I have to pay attention to deadlines, planning is a definite for me. When I did NaNoWriMo, I HAD TO have a schedule. You have 30 days to write, you have to write certain amount of words per page in order to be done by the 30 days with 50,000 words. I over estimated myself, threw my whole life into this book and finished a few days early. As an entrepreneur or business owner, you are more likely to have the freedom of having the whole day to do things. Get up early, write a list of things to do, get them done and then you will feel so much better in the afternoon. You’ll have time to rest and probably get caught up wherever else you are needed.

We run into this problem: A woman was fired for refusing to dye her gray hair. We come to this one problem: image is everything. If you don’t look a certain way, are a certain size or have what the company’s ‘eye image’ is — you won’t be looked at twice. Unfortunately, this is a terrible, terrible way to play especially while the economy is the way that it is. I completely understand that if you are on TV for commercials, direct response, fitness, news or whatnot — you have to be a certain size. That’s known. But to fire someone over a certain hair color or because they dress their age? Terrible. By doing this, companies are really missing out on excellent workers — ones that are potentially NOT robots.

In the July 11th, Inc.com daily email, they write about  Employees Losing Their Identity. Have you ever been in this situation? I think that anyone who doesn’t love what they’re doing, their identity gets lost a little bit each day. This makes me think about my mistakes from the past. I was in college, getting ready to head into my third year, having had almost all of my classes behind me and a few away from my two year degree. I had an excellent two semesters then, I got a job working retail. I threw myself into my job and lost the focus of what I really wanted to do. I left college because I thought I wanted to do retail. Wrong. Four years later, I pull out of retail and become an administrative assistant / eBayer then… now, currently, I’ve been unemployed long enough and will take pretty much any job. But, with that, I’m not losing focus again. I want to be a writer, I want to find my way to an English degree so I can professionally write and better yet, do social media along with it. Then, I can finally join the wonderful direct response industry that I love so much… and WRITE COMMERCIALS FOR THEM.

Here are some other articles to read for good measure: 

Did you hear about the new patent laws?

This is just depressing. A chart about employment… and the downfall of.

Are your current business plans falling through? Take a look at this, five steps on why you need a new business plan.

The Downside of Traditions - While traditions are nice in a business, they are also holding your company back from staying in the times.

Has it really come down to this? Firing someone for eating leftovers? Are we desperate, ignorant or what?