Learn Entrepreneurship from the Princess

My six-year-old daughter and I had the opportunity to preview Disney’s latest princess movie, “The Princess and the Frog.” Princess Tiana, the first African American princess created by Disney, works hard to save money to open a restaurant in New Orleans. Unlike other Disney princesses, Tiana is not interested in waiting “someday for her Prince to come.” She makes sure her life’s happiness does not depend upon anyone else – including a Prince.

It’s refreshing to see a Disney Princess story line that shows a woman does not have to  lie  in wait for her rescuer. Tiana is enterprising. She knows what she wants and seeks out the people who will help her get it. Even if it happens to be a Prince.

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Why the Tiger Should Have Roared

The first rule in public relations 101 is When In Doubt, Say Something!

When Tiger Woods’ Cadillac Escalade hit a fire hydrant and a tree in the wee hours on Black Friday, the 33-year old golf phenom decided  to take the vague route when asked, “What happened?” He didn’t even bother to answer the police.

A note to all of you who want fame and fortune: If the media comes after you and asks questions you don’t want to answer, answer them anyway…or at least tell them when and what time you will talk to them.

When you say nothing, the public and the media begins to speculate. You don’t want that to happen. You want to stay in control and when you don’t talk, the media has the upper hand.

Tiger posted information on his Web site. But that may have been too little too late. The media has already gotten into the public’s minds. The rumors started to fly through the air before Tiger could swat them with his nine iron.

“His wife caught him cheating and ran after him with a club,” “She knocked his window out trying to knock his head off,” “Tiger was raised by a black man who always told him never to hit a woman, so he fled instead.”

These are all speculations.   We won’t know the real answer to what happened that day. Unfortunately the rumors will continue to fly.

Until the Tiger decides to roar.

Just for Your Safty

That’s just what I saw in an ad in big, bold letters, sprawled across my computer. “Just for Your Safty…” I could not read beyond the word “safty.”   My first thought was, “Hmmm, that typo is huge! How did it get past the editors?”

Most bloggers, Facebook enthusiasts, marketers and people who love to write, don’t have editors. Editors check your words before you put it out there. They make sure that your audience will understand what you say and that your message  makes sense. They are the ones that, if you’re writing about our nation’s safty, what the audience reads is information about their safety.

No one is perfect. That’s a given. But when you’re putting your stuff out there for all the world to see, make sure that it’s tight and it’s right. Have someone look it over. Ask them to proofread it for errors – typos, sentence structure, dotted i’s and crossed t’s. After that person reads it, give it to someone else.

I once worked at a major newspaper. In our department we wrote classified ads. The nature of our job was to type as fast as we could what the person on the other line dictated. One of our biggest fears was to leave the “l” out of the word “public.”  Guess what? Our fears were often realized.

One way to proofread spelling is to read the words from right to left instead of left to right. Most people miss words because they know what they wrote, so they skim over the words without truly reading them. But when someone else reads it, they see, ”all there money was lost,”  and “the dogs were baking all at once.”  Spellcheck can’t check this.

The best of the best make mistakes. The challenge is to make sure that you at least do all that you can to not make them. If you do, at least you can say that you covered all the bases. It’s for your own writing safety.