The death tolls are nearing the hundreds of thousands. Survivors are living on ramen noodles and rice balls with no running water or electricity. I’m fervently hoping that our Japanese exchange student, Takao Kawamura, and his family are okay.

On a personal note, we were also a little worried about whether we would have any effects from the tsunami since we live on the water and they had been issuing high alerts in our state. That’s our house there in the photo, and during super high tides and other events of nature (which, thankfully, are rare), that water sometimes rises right up onto the deck. Nothing ended up reaching our inland waters, but I know some of our coastal towns in Washington, Oregon and California suffered some pretty severe damage. No loss of life that I’ve heard of so far, thank goodness.

It’s so horrific and my heart goes out to the people of Japan. My wish today is for all of us to take a moment of quiet and send them every single one of our prayers and positive thoughts.

We can each of us do something to help as well by sending a donation to the Red Cross. You can donate directly on their website, or you can text the word REDCROSS to 90999 and your $10 donation will show up on your next phone bill.

Please, do this… right now. Can you imagine how grateful you would be for the help and kindness of strangers if it were you and me this had happened to? You are not going to miss that $10, but I can tell you this: your humble act of generosity will come back to you, and you will forever carry in your heart the love and goodness you extended to your fellow human beings in their time of desperate need.

We are our brothers’ keepers. What happens to one of us, happens to all of us.

PS: Unplgged compiled a great resource with additional ways you can help, get involved with relief efforts and find missing family and friends

PS: Today is the last day to save…

Prices going up next year, plus select items on sale… get ‘em now before it’s over >>

Rather than resolutions per se, I tend to do a quick mental check of a few goals I want to achieve and things I want to focus on.

Like this new year, I have some projects that will be finally completed and I plan on taking more time out for the activities that I had temporarily put on the back-burner. I hadn’t done nearly as much bike-riding this year as I normally do. This will be a year of taking more time out, getting back to focusing again on my own business around second or third quarter, and enjoying all the hard work I put in these past four (five?) years of the VACOC.

Oh, and VIDEO! Yes!

What about you? What kind of goals or resolutions or focuses do you have for the new year? What are you excited about for 2011?

Prices going up next year, plus select items on sale… get ‘em now before it’s over >>

I have a free gift for everyone who subscribes to our weekly ezine, “The Portable Business.” To get yours, just go to the Virtual Assistant Chamber of Commerce website and submit the subscription form in the upper right corner of any page.

Also, here’s a fun little holiday video I put together–enjoy! (And be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel here).

As Louis C.K. says, all of us should be constantly shouting, “Omigawd!!!! WOW!!!!” for all the extraordinary access to technology and the unlimited possibilities, choice and opportunities we have to captain our own lives.

May you have a warm, fuzzy and deliciously abundant and grateful Thanksgiving!

All “like-minded people” do is breed sheep. They don’t upset the status quo. They don’t give you meaningful feedback; they give you “nice” feedback.

You don’t grow from surrounding yourself with “like-minded” people. You grow from surrounding yourself with BUSINESS-minded people who will challenge your beliefs, challenge you to think bigger, raise your business consciousness and tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear.

As I’ve mentioned a few times over the past several months, the VACOC is getting a new name and new site, thus making my old VACOC Facebook page obsolete. We’re finally moving and shakin’ on things with all that so I thought I’d better get my accounts migrated and transitioned as well.

I’d love to see you there!

I think Virtual Assistants/Administrative Support Consultants totally embody what Seth Godin spoke about in his blog post today: Whatever Happened to Labor?

With so many businesses merely commoditizing work, the humanity of it, the skill and craft of it, gets lost and trivialized and dehumanized–thus devaluing it. But with us, the relationship is our product and the work our craft. We are in business exactly as Seth states it: to use our hands, our backs and our heads to do work that helps our clients move forward and do important things in the world. Our work is not menial. It’s not mundane or trivial. It’s important and requires skill and expertise and craftsmanship.

Having fun on a day like today is an expression of gratitude for being able to do just that. So go express yourself!

For one thing, I’ve always created my own opportunities. Like when my daughter was a little less than a year old and I was ready to get back in the workforce. I was still really young and at the time, the job market wasn’t that great. I ended up hearing about a volunteer opportunity at a family services organization and I thought it would be a great way to brush up on my existing skills, learn some new ones and gain some more recent references.

And it turned out to be just that… a really wonderful experience and opportunity all the way around that eventually helped me get into a great job working for the city/county and later, an even better job working for a labor union. I have always been proud of the fact that I created my own opportunity in that respect, as well as the fact that even though it was a volunteer position, I treated it as if it were a paid position. I showed up on time, every time, on the three days per week that I committed to work. If the organization had had more money in the budget, they would have hired me in a heartbeat, but even so, I gained an enormous amount of respect and admiration (and references) because of the dedication and helpfulness and skills I demonstrated while I was there.

Another thing I’m really proud of is the fact that I always pay those who do work for me. I got to thinking about this from a conversation I had recently with my guy. Somehow we got on the topic of this one really icky client I had way back in the day. I tried making a go of things with this client for about year, but I finally realized his lack of honesty and integrity simply wasn’t going to change.

This was back when I was still doing bookkeeping, in addition to administrative support, in my practice. This guy was always paying vendors late, he wouldn’t submit employee monies to the agencies they were supposed to go to, etc., etc. For example, he had a couple employees who were having their checks garnished for child support. Well, he was having the money taken out of their checks, but he wasn’t sending it in to the agencies. (I did the bookkeeping and completed and filed the various tax/business forms and reports, but he wouldn’t let me do any actual bill paying or transferring of funds.) And it ended up causing some very serious, stressful problems for these employees.

He also wasn’t turning in the social security, medicare and other taxes to those agencies. I tried to impress upon him that these weren’t monies that were his to play with. They belonged to the employees and it was really going to end up coming back to haunt him if he didn’t take care of these things. He was already going through employee turnover like crazy because of his shoddy treatment and practices. And all the while, he was buying himself Harleys, living in a condo beyond his means, and generally not depriving himself of anything whatsoever while stiffing everyone else. He’d make a show of acknowledging what I was saying whenever I brought it up, just enough to make me think he wanted to make things right. Always wanting to think the best, I ended up being strung along for far too long because the bottom line was he didn’t care who he screwed over or how.

Anyway, we were talking about that situation and it reminded me of how I have always paid everyone I’ve ever worked with. I’ve never stiffed anyone, tried to cheat them, or made them wait for payment. I think that is absolutely wrong and I’m proud of myself for always living up to that value and walking my talk.

So those are just a couple things I’m proud of myself about. What about you? What kinds of things in your life or business are you most proud of? I’d love to hear your stories!