Notes from the Bed

I feel like crap.
I'm just getting over a cold. I've spent the day honking and taking pills, and my back is sore from all the coughing. I've done, therefore, the only sensible thing -- I'm in bed.
Here's what I've got with me:

• Laptop: Toshiba Tecra
• A  60 gB iPod, which has somewhere north of 5500 songs on it.
• A Cingular 3125 phone, with a Plantronics-enabled Bluetooth headset
• A DVD of Cream's farewell concert at Royal Albert Hall in 1968
• A copy of Pablo Neruda's love poems
• Copy This! -- Paul Orfalea (founder of Kinko's) biography
• A bottle of Crystal Geyser sparkling water
• Three bandanas -- one green, one orange, one yellow

Now, about an hour ago, I was also IMing with a colleague of mine, and I was doing something I often find myself doing -- explaining myself.

I've been sick. I've had a lot of stuff going on, and I woke up this morning with the overpowering feeling that I just could not deal today with much of anything, and I especially couldn't deal with talking to anyone. This happens to me every once in a while. It's a Wednesday morning, everyone else is merrily heading off to work, and I do not want to talk to anyone. ANYONE.

So I don't.

Now, for a lot of people, this is a little disconcerting. We are, as my sick-in-bed list seems to indicate, doing business in a 24/7 world. People use Blackberrys (Blackberries?) while driving. Everyone is supposed to be accessible around the clock. Just checking out seems like a kind of heresy.

But I really need to do it. And, and here's the point, it works for me.

This is a blog about business development. There's all kinds of stuff in here about different Biz Dev approaches, techniques, issues and so on. But in the end, the only thing that matters is whether it works for you.

Business development is where, in even the biggest organization, everyone is an enrepreneur. And you have to build the business around your personality, your strengths and weaknesses, and your nature. You can't conform to someone else's idea of how you should work -- you have to do it your way. It's your business. And I've learned the hard way that if I don't do this, if I try to jam my own round peg into someone else's square hole, I will accomplish nothing. So I check out. I tell anyone who's involved what I'm doing, and if they're interested, why, but I still do it.

The bottom line: does whatever your using to develop business work for you? Forget whether it works for someone else. Does it work for you?