Due to the challenges of managing multiple blogs - here, wordpress, Amazon, Red Room, Facebook, etc. - I have consolidated.

Please check out my blog at bethehero.wordpress.com.

I post there every day. I hope you’ll visit and leave a comment.

It used to be that news was something you could get for an hour per day. Thirty minutes for local and thirty for national and international. If you missed it, you could read the paper the following day. So when a tragedy struck somewhere outside of your neighborhood, your intake of that tragedy was limited to an hour of news and usually less. After all, the news programs had to deliver everything that had happened that day in just one hour, and without any scrolling text at the bottom of the screen to feed our hyperactive minds.

That’s the way it was, and much though I hate sounding like a crotchety old man, that’s the way it should be. Not just for watching a tragedy like the one now in Haiti, but for any great sadness, disappointment, or frustration in our lives. Ruminating and playing the same negative tape over and over only serves to reinforce anxiety, anger, and hopelessness.

We should stay informed. We should not ignore the problems in our world. But we should limit our exposure to them. Give yourself a half-hour to get caught up on the news today. If you are frustrated or angry with something in your life and you feel you must experience that anger, allow yourself a few minutes to dwell on it. Then push yourself to move on. If you have a hard time moving on, try completing this sentence 10 times:

I am so incredibly lucky because . . .

BTW, I wrote yesterday about ways to help Haiti including my personal recommendation to text “haiti” to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross’s International Response Fund. If you did, you weren’t alone. Turns out the response was historic.

A few months ago I wrote a post about a heroic response after tragedy. Today and in the days to come we will need many heroic responses after what has happened in Haiti. There are many ways to help, but perhaps the easiest is to text “haiti” to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross’s International Response Fund.

Please consider donating today. The weeks and months ahead will require a massive effort to first get out of danger and then try to return to some kind of life as usual.

I am both afraid and hopeful for the news that will come out of Haiti today - hopeful for good news in general and for heroic responses to the inevitable bad news.

There will be many people praying for the lives of loved ones in Haiti over the next days or altruistically praying for those we don’t even know. I encourage everyone to join in those prayers.

My hopes go beyond pulling people from the rubble. Maybe this is the moment that enough attention is cast toward this poor country that something shifts other than the tectonic plates.

My wife’s family is Haitian. I have heard for years how gorgeous the land was when they lived there, before they fled under the first President Duvalier.

I don’t know what it will take. But my hope today is that Haiti receives something out of this earthquake that enables it to pull itself up from the tragedy of this moment and also from its tragic history.

So you need to motivate someone. What is the #1 best thing you can do to increase their feelings of commitment and eagerness for their work? The answer may surprise you.

For years I would have said recognition. Public, private, on a boat, with a goat. Just recognize them however you can. Turns out there’s something better.

One of my undergraduate professors, Teresa Amabile, has an article in the Jan/Feb 2010 Harvard Business Review about a study she conducted showing that the #1 best motivator is . . . progress.

Turns out people love to feel their work is moving forward. Road blocks and stagnation frustrate them. Moving the needle excites them.

So remove the hurdles and roll up your sleeves. Apparently, nothing beats progress.

A few weeks ago I was given the opportunity to offer my book, Be the Hero, to one of my own heroes, Seth Godin. A few days ago he wrote a post titled, “The Victim.” I couldn’t help but wonder if it was inspired in part by his reading of Be the Hero. I know the language and sentiment are neither original to my work nor new to his writings. But I wondered.

In either case, he offers a terrific lens through which to determine when you might be falling into victim mentality.

Keep in mind this is a way to determine WHEN not IF you are being a victim. I speak to many people who try to convince me that they really do maintain a heroic mindset. (Though they always know other people who are in dire need of this advice.) The truth is that we all fall into victim mode at times. Seth Godin has simply offered us a useful test to recognize when we are there.

Recently I was asked to guest blog on Sources of Insight. I find the host, JD Meier, to be an interesting guy with valuable thoughts to share.

So what did I write about? How to be heroic of course. Here it is.

Note to the business world: consumers still haven’t learned. Note to consumers: when will you learn? So long as we keep buying stupid stuff, companies will continue to sell it to us. Case in point: Burger King Japan recently introduced a 7 patty Whopper. Just thinking about the normal Whopper gives me heart burn.

CNN listed this Whopper among their Dumbest Business Decisions of 09. But it isn’t the Whopper they criticize, it’s the fact they named it after Microsoft’s Windows 7.

I disagree with CNN. The name may sound stupid to me, but if people are buying them who are we to criticize Burger King. No. My beef (sorry) is with the consumer. When will we have finally had enough of seeking too much?

Of course, until the consumers wise up, businesses should remember - we are still living in the age of bigger, louder, more extreme is better.

Crazy is good. Without crazy we’d have no entrepreneurs. Without crazy we’d have never had any explorers. There would be no inventors.

Of course, sometimes crazy is just crazy.

Happy new year all you polar bears.

It’s not just a new year, but a new decade. We’ve seen events and changes over the past several years that we once might have said would be impossible. We’ll see more of the impossible in the years ahead. Some of it will be good. Not all.

The question is - How will you respond?

In the year ahead when your budgets are cut, how will you respond?

When your boss (or your spouse) criticizes you, how will you respond?

When you get passed up for that big promotion or lose the big sale, how will you respond?

When you get stuck in traffic on the way to an important meeting, how will you respond?

When your kids do their best to drive you crazy, how will you respond?

When you are at your wits end, how will you respond?

Make this year heroic. Don’t ever let yourself become a victim. This choice is yours. In those most dire moments, ask yourself what the heroic response would be. Then go be a hero.