Franklin Taggart's Unconventional Life Blog

  I recently had a wonderful conversation with my friends, Meridith Grundei and Joseph Bennett on their Are You Waiting for Permission podcast. We covered a lot of territory in our short time together, but there were some lovely nuggets to be found. Some of our topics: ** The important distinction between gifts and talents. ** Your gifts define your purpose. ** There are people here who are waiting to find you because they need your gifts. ** The creativity we imagine doesn't usually include the messy parts. ** A part of becoming masterful at something is the willingness to suck. ** Very often our struggle to master something becomes most difficult right before the breakthrough happens. Thanks, Meridith and Joseph for the fun conversation! You two are lights in my world! Listen here now: Be sure to subscribe and review! You can find Meridith: Meridith Grundei Coaching You can find Joseph: Joseph Bennett the artist/coach extraordinaire

** Disclaimer: This isn't my normal blog fare. If you're interested at all in email marketing, this article might be of interest, but otherwise it's long and potentially boring. I'm also not offering it as a prescription for how anyone should do email marketing, or email in general. It's just some observations of my own. A couple of weeks ago I was presenting a workshop in which I was talking about my recent experiences with email. The gist of the story is that a few months ago, after getting tired of the vitriol in many online exchanges, I wanted to bring a more uplifting message to people. I started a weekly email message, now called Inbox Encouragement. I was telling the group about how I was seeing open and click through rates that were the highest I'd ever seen. Open rates as high as 80% and click through rates ranging from 25-45%. At one point in the discussion I was asked if I had any idea of any of the clicks were converting. In sales language that

Yesterday I drove up to Laramie for a music party honoring the life of Mark Booth. I only met Mark a few times, all memorable, but this story is more about his son, Michael. I can't easily forget the day I met Michael Booth; mostly because it's a fairly typical experience for people who grew up in Wyoming. Wyoming is more like a huge small town than it is a state. Sports teams travel as much as four or five hours to play rival teams. With a population of around 500,000, depending on the boom/bust cycles of the oil and mineral industries, there aren't many people per square foot, so everyone knows everyone, or at least they know the name. When I lived in the DC area I worked at the world famous House of Musical Traditions . They were kind enough to give me a job to get started with my life in a new area having just arrived from Nashville. One fall day I happened to randomly choose to wear my University of Wyoming sweatshirt to work. That same day happened to be the