This is my 600th blog post for this blog, and I feel pretty good about that. Not many people actually reach 600 posts, based on statistics, so I’m in rare air. And yet, as I’ve reached this number, I find myself at an interesting mental crossroads.

First, let me give you the only statistic I can give you, which is the main topics I wrote about this past six months, since post #500 was in February. I’m only giving the categories that reached double digits:

You’re probably asking how a category gets 1/2 a point. Twice in the month I felt a post fit two categories rather than one.

As I said, those are the only statistics I can give. Back in September I changed themes on this blog. The one thing I forgot to do was move my Google Analytics code to this theme. Thus, it hasn’t been tracking any information since September 26th; what a shame. Actually, if I track the time before that, it seems that my healthcare articles have garnered the most attention, which makes sense with all this fighting over whether this country will have a healthcare plan for everyone or not. However, the article that got the most attention, way more than any other article, still concerns what’s known as RAC Audits, which are audits the government is doing on hospitals trying to recoup money they believe they shouldn’t have paid. I wrote it in March of 2008, yet it’s still a big deal even now.

I’ve decided against looking back to see which posts are my favorite for the past month because I’d rather do something different here. I want to follow up on my last post where I asked if people have lost their passion. I think it’s fitting since, in the last 100 posts, motivation has been the second highest topic that I’ve written on.

I think people would answer this one differently than I would, if only because I work for myself and most people work for someone else. That question is how do I find the passion in some of the work I do that will also generate a very nice income for myself? Notice I didn’t say nice; I said very nice.

Like many people, the thing I have the opportunity to make most of my money at isn’t my passion. Not really. As an independent consultant, one of the things that happens sometimes is I get a new gig and have to travel to some place for 3 to 6 months. Frankly, that’s not necessarily cool. Sure, I’ve been to some neat places, and I had a great time when I worked in NYC for 3 months doing all sorts of things in the evening. But the part I hated was driving there on Sundays and then driving back home most of the time on Friday afternoons. That doesn’t leave a lot of time at home, and, well, it’s quite the haul. If it was something I did for a couple of weeks and then was home, fine, but the grind can get to you.

Flying doesn’t change it either. I’d have to say that flying across the country for only the few weeks I did this work in Reno at the end of the year was grueling. Unfortunately, I have a “first class” sized body that can only afford to sit in coach. Five hours at a time in a little seat, trying not to crowd out the person next to you, isn’t comfortable at all.

Anyway, after writing yesterday’s post, I started to think about this passion thing a bit more. What am I passionate about? I’d told my wife I wasn’t passionate about anything right now, but that’s not really true.

Defining passion isn’t the same as defining what you love to do all the time. For instance, I love playing poker, and if I could afford it I’d be there every day. But I wouldn’t say poker is my passion because I wouldn’t want to live the life of a poker player. Except in extreme circumstances, I think if I were playing it all the time I could only tolerate it for a couple of hours at a time; that’s not quite a passion. And I certainly don’t think I could make significant money doing it.

Here’s what I want, my passions, the things I really want to do, and something I want to strive to do in the next 100 posts, and get paid for.

First, I want to do more blogging and get paid for it. I’ve been doing writing for others a lot lately to make my living, and though it hasn’t been bad, one of the problems I have with it is that it can be constraining. Blogging is much different; I can write pretty much what I want to on any topic, on any day, in my own style or whatever style I choose to, and move on to the next post. I actually write a blog for one other person; I was writing two but one guy canceled his contract after 3 months. That’s something I want to do for more people; that or get paid advertising on this and my other blogs. That wouldn’t depress me one bit.

Second, I want to do more charge master reviews. I actually love this work, looking at all the detail, the numbers, and making my corrections as needed. I love talking to the people at the hospital about the charge capture process as well, helping them understand it so they can make a lot of money. And it’s a relatively quick process; if all factors fit well, it’s about 3 weeks of work for pretty good money. I want to get at least one of those under my belt, if not a couple.

Third, I want to do more speaking engagements. I actually have one scheduled for February and another scheduled for April, but those are both local and I’m not getting paid for them. I want to get paid for speaking, and I want to travel. I need to get the word out better on that one; those of you who read this, help me spread the word!

And fourth, I want more reasons for having to leave the house. I really don’t have many reasons for leaving the house. Lunch, maybe dessert, and that’s it. There aren’t networking events every week, and when one works for themselves out of their homes, there’s not a lot of interaction with others. I need more of that, I believe, so I need to figure out how to get it.

I think that’s enough; this post is turning into a tome. I’m in 600 posts now, and if things stay as they have been, come March or April I’ll be giving an update as to how things went with the previous 100 posts or so. Stick around; hopefully, the best is yet to come.

Almost to the year of the last one, I’ve made another theme change to this blog. This time around, I’ve decided to make it look a bit more like my business website.

The reason for the theme change? Well, to tell you the truth, I loved the look of the other one. It was called Redwood, and I thought the rustic colors worked really well. The problem with it is that I couldn’t get things to go where I wanted them to go. Sometimes, things wouldn’t show up properly. A blog theme should look as you want it to look because it represents you, and that one, though I felt it had a lot of me in it as far as look, just wasn’t going to get it done.

So, I’ve gone with this theme, which is the same theme I use for my finance blog. Only, this time around I’ve made more changes than I did with that one. I’ve added my main business logo to this site to prove that it’s a part of my main site. I’ve also changed the background color. And I’ve changed the colors of the links.

Now, I need to warn people who think about tampering with themes that, if you’re unsure what you’re doing, it’s a bad thing to try. While customizing this bad boy, there were a couple of things I did that make it go haywire. However, I knew what I’d done, and I just reversed the process then did what I really wanted to do in the first place.

Why change the theme now? I’m getting close to post #600 on this blog, and I figure it’s time to bring some things back in line with my original version. In another part of business that I do, as it concerns SEO and social media, I tell some clients that they should add their blog onto their website in a subdirectory, so that it helps the website attain better prominence. I also tell them that they can alter their blogs so that it looks somewhat like their websites. Yet, I’d never done it for my own site, so I figured it was about time I did it. And this particular theme, which is known as Simple Balance 2.0, allows me to customize it to look as I wanted it to; that is, as long as one knows what they’re doing.

And there we are. If you read this early, you’ll notice that the Adsense thing looks a bit, well, out of place because of its color. The Adsense site is down right now, so I can’t change it over, but I’ll be getting to it as soon as possible. And, in case you visit the blog often, you’ll notice that the ads you see on the side changes every time you come by.

I hope you like the theme; let me know your thoughts.

The time and date of the worst tragedy in American history. This was worse than what happened at Pearl Harbor; this was on our own soil. This was in New York City. These weren’t soldiers. These were men and women going about their business, doing their thing. These were visitors on top of the tower, looking out like many of us did countless times at the top of the towers.

This was also the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, where a bunch of brave people took one for the team and sacrificed their lives so other lives could be saved. Talk about the needs outweighing the needs of the few.

I’m not writing long and hard on this one. I just wanted to say something for the day. Eight years ago, our country changed. And as much as many of us would like to believe, it hasn’t ended yet. We haven’t gotten over it yet. And it may be a long time until we do. Peace be with you today.

Today is the day the United States celebrates Memorial Day. Memorial Day is when we give tribute to all those who have given their lives in the service of protecting the United States in some military fashion. There are memorials everywhere today, at almost every graveyard in the country. Those running the facilities will often go out and add little flags to the graves of military personnel, whether they were killed in service or not; at least they do where my dad is.

It’s an odd thing to think about, the possibility of losing a family member during a war. I wasn’t alive when my dad was in Korea, but I was when he went to Vietnam. It was a strange time, 1969, because we were just into the period where, after Walter Cronkite “outed” the government for not being truthful with both the death and injured stats, it looked like the numbers had drastically jumped. As a 10-year old, I used to watch the Friday evening news with my mother to see the death and injury tolls, always hoping that we wouldn’t be having someone visit us to give us bad news.

At least that’s how it’s done now. Based during World War II, people received letters in the mail, the old “We regret to inform you,…” letters that were so impersonal that it engendered more hate than remorse. The military does a much better job now of working with families to honor their own.

I don’t know if you support the United States policies on war or not, but whether you do or don’t, this isn’t about you today. This is about those people who lived up to the conviction to do what they wanted or needed to do for the rest of us. I give them all a big salute; I hope you do also.

No one can say I don’t support my friends. Check out the information on a seminar being presented locally on May 5th by my friend Marc Tarbay:

No, it’s not my industry, but this is what friendship is all about, helping to promote where I can.

Yes, the look has changed once more. It seems that the other theme just wouldn’t hold its format, and it finally went bad on me today,even with the update to Firefox 3. I just couldn’t continue having that problem, so I’ve changed to this one, which I think is pretty nice looking, and a little bit different than the norm.

Anyway, I hope you like it, and I’d like to know your thoughts on it. Next time, more good stuff.

I encountered real poverty head on when my dad went to Vietnam back in 1969. For some reason, when he went overseas we couldn’t live in on base housing; I never learned the reason why. So, last minute we ended up moving to Kansas City, Missouri, to live with my grandmother.

When my grandmother had bought her house in 1957, it was considered a nice, middle class black neighborhood. As the years went by the neighborhood deteriorated, and by the time we got there it was on the fringe of the slums. By fringe, I mean that on our immediate street on the block there were still some fairly nice looking houses, my grandmother’s house included, but in between there were some squalor houses. At the front end of the block was a former Red Ball Moving Company lot, with the remnant of a trailer on a rock lot that had been torched and tortured to the point that you knew what it had been, but it had obviously been used for other purposes. The rock lot was chopped up, as if someone had taken a sledge hammer to it, and the building was empty, though all the windows had been broken out of it.

The front end of the block offered some salvation, in its own way. If you turned right on that main road and drove about 15 or 20 minutes, you were in downtown Kansas City, where all the tall buildings were; if you went 15 or 20 minutes to the left, you ended up closer to the suburbs, where there was a Boys Club and actual fast food restaurants, none of which existed where we lived. There was a little general store one block to the left, and two blocks up was the elementary school I went to. The back end of the block began the true slum part, houses with boarded up windows with people still living in them; trash in the yards, beaten up old cars and no real place for kids to play except the streets. There was no baseball or football, or even basketball; the only basketball court was at the school, and it was fenced off except during gym class. It had to be; this was a dangerous neighborhood where fights and gunshots went off all the time. The Black Panthers had a purple van with a black paw that they used to drive down the streets from time to time. And we even saw a man running from the police this one time, who decided to run down the side of our house, and as the police officer pulled his gun and yelled something at the man, we all thought the gun was being aimed at our window and we jerked back; talk about being scared as a 10 year old kid.

At my school, at least a third of the kids came to school often wearing the same clothes every day. Our teacher, Mrs. Johnson, used to spend the first 45 minutes to an hour taking kids into the bathroom, which each classroom had, and washing them up; she didn’t believe that being poor meant you couldn’t be clean. Some kids had holes in their clothes and in their shoes. Many kids didn’t have money for either lunch or breakfast, but this was before they started having school breakfast programs; luckily, we did have a school lunch program, and for many of these kids, it might have been the only real meal they got during the day. The school was way behind me, so I got no attention in school, but it didn’t matter. There was no homework ever, because the school didn’t want to take a chance on the books not making it back to school. They had a library that was rarely used, mainly because they had a hard time teaching many of the kids to read. They weren’t dumb kids, they were just unmotivated; what did they know? What did they see everyday when they went home?

I learned a big lesson one particular day. My best friend, named Odell Jones, used to come over to my house to play my games. Seems I was the only person who had any games; I didn’t know that at the time. One day we went for a short walk, and for the first time I ended up on the street at the back end of my block. We walked up about halfway, and he pointed out his house. It was a tiny ranch house, no glass in the windows, only a curtain pulled across. His parents were sitting out front in rocking chairs. His father was blind and didn’t work; his mother didn’t work either. Both were sitting on the porch in dirty clothes. There were 4 other children around them, but they weren’t playing in the yard, but sitting on the porch with their parents; until that time, I thought he only had an older sister, as he’d never talked about his family. As I looked up the street, I saw many other houses like this one; I was confused and scared, and we didn’t go any further. I’m usually a curious sort and like to look around, but I decided not to take any chances. I didn’t fit in already, and I didn’t want to draw any more attention to myself than I already had in school, where you can believe I wasn’t overly popular. We weren’t rich by any means, as the military doesn’t pay great, but comparatively, I was living well.

Or was I? Sure, I had some things, but my grandmother’s house had deteriorated in its own fashion after so many years. It had rats and mice, roaches and huge water bugs. My mother spent all her time in her bedroom upstairs; she rarely came out and rarely went downstairs. She drove to the air force base nearby for her foodstuffs, and kept everything in her room so she didn’t have to leave. You know she wasn’t used to living this way either. My grandmother is the type who can get by anywhere; all she wants is a place to sleep at night, even now.

After a year of that my dad came back from Vietnam, and we moved to Maine, where we encountered a much different kind of life. It took me a long time to get adjusted to it; how does one go from a predominantly black slum area (we had one Mexican kid in school, otherwise it was all black) back to military living, where there are no hardships because food and supplies on a military base cost less, life is easier, the grounds must be maintained so there is no squalor, and of course I was once again back in the minority? It was tough, for sure. I always thought back on my experiences in Kansas City, and it gave me a better appreciation for what I had, as well as a compassion for those who don’t have as much as I have. I have always given money when I can, though I admit that I don’t volunteer as much as I probably should. I feel I have a unique point of view whenever I hear someone talking about poverty and sloth and the educational system and Medicaid and food stamps and putting people down who live in these kinds of conditions. Nobody asks to live like that; sometimes, those are just the circumstances people face in their lives.

In 1999, I had an opportunity to go back to Kansas City for the first time in almost 30 years, and I said I wanted to go back to the old neighborhood. It might not have been safe, but I wanted to go anyway. Oddly enough, it’s probably safer now, though it’s no less a ghetto area. More than half of the houses on my old street have been torn down, and all that remains is a paved over area where basements used to be; one of these houses was my grandmothers. The school I went to is also gone; I can’t believe they tore down an entire brick building, but they did, and there was nothing there at all except more slab. The store was gone, but, oddly enough, that same lot was sitting there empty, the one with the old Red Ball trailer; that was gone, though. It was summer, but I didn’t see any people. Then I had to think back; I rarely saw people when I lived there. So, it was a different kind of poverty; this poverty could hide behind doors, but it was still there.

I was sad; after 30 years, it wasn’t actually worse, but it wasn’t better. How does that happen in America? For that matter, how does it happen anywhere in this world of prosperity? I guess I’ll never know, and no one else will ever know, but it always reminds me of that one line from Jesus Christ Superstar, which is not a direct quote from the Bible, though many people think it is: “There will be poor always.”

If you get a chance, please go to my other blog to read what I wrote there on this same topic today.

Tomorrow is Blog Action Day. Its purpose is to highlight the problem and issue of poverty around the world. A Blog Action Day website has been set up to help track everyone who says they’re going to participate in this action. I’ve decided not only to participate, but I’m going to write a different post for each blog tomorrow, which is the 15th, in case you’re reading this from elsewhere.

For an idea of what your page might look like, though I’m certainly not going to this kind of extreme, check out this post. By the way, you can also donate money to the cause or help promote it in other ways also. Just click on that first link above.

Why not take a stand and have a say? I hope all of you participate in some way.

Back in April, I wrote something called Mitch’s List, which was my “thank you” list to all the people who had helped me through the past year in achieving my goals, both professionally and personally.

So, I’m writing this one, hoping people will go back and read it, and think about creating their own list of thanks to all the people who have been crucial in their past year. Yeah, it’s a little self serving, but if one can’t be self serving while thanking others, when is there a good time for it?

Today is Blog Day, but this year I have two blogs with different focuses. So, I’m going to recognize some blogs here that have to do with one type of thing, then some blogs on my other blog that have to do with what I talk about over there. I’m not sure it’s cheating or not, but hey, recognizing people is always a good thing in my opinion. And, just like last year, I won’t be highlighting any blogs of my friends, so I can be objective. Finally, here’s last year’s entrants.

Stereohyped is basically a source of news for and about black people, but sometimes with a comical vent. There’s actually a team of people who write this blog, but I find it very entertaining.

WWE Characters may seem out of character to people who don’t know me well, but for those who do they know that I love professional wrestling, especially the WWE. This blog gives some information that’s actually available on the WWE website, but the writer of the blog also gives updates and opinions on all things wrestling, and I love that. I don’t always get to watch it, so I can easily catch up on all the happenings by checking this one out.

Along those same lines, we have J.R.’s Place, which hosts the words of the Hall of Fame wrestling announcer Jim Ross, as he talks not only about wrestling, but anything else that hits his fancy at the time.

This year’s leadership blog to highlight is Leader Business, written by Tom Magness. I just like the way he writes about leadership; relatively easy principles that most people forget about, couched in a story; who doesn’t like stories.

By now, my regular readers know I’m diabetic. This year, I found Diabetes Mine, written by Amy Tenderich. It’s a mixture of what’s happening to her in life as well as information about diabetes.

The final blog I’m going to mention here is one that seems more suited, on its face, to my other blog. But Barbara Ling’s blog is more than just a blog about blogging. This woman gives away information on almost anything, and lots of it. Her blog is so comprehensive that there’s almost no way one can take all of it in at one time. And if you only stick to the new entries you’re not doing yourself any favors. Check this one out, but make sure you have some time to take in a lot of it.

And there you go. I hope you enjoy some of these as much as I do. See you next year for more.