I wasn’t going to post anything today, but someone sent me this video. Watch all four minutes, forty-six seconds of this important message, then pass it along.

Republican Presidential John McCain is behind Democrat Barack Obama in the polls.

Is anyone hearing this news for the first time?

Just do a quick search for “John McCain polls,” and you’ll get dozens of news stories with the same headlines. Do another search for “Republican grumbling,” and you’ll find stories about rumors that the GOP would rather John McCain stop worrying about that silly presidency thing and simply concentrate on trying to help other Republicans retain their offices in Congress.

But, here’s why we should love him: as far as I can tell, John McCain is not conceding anything. He has decided to keep fighting, just like he did in July of 2007, when his campaign’s budget disappeared and his staff was a mess. Though the polls are against him and his party is losing faith, McCain still believes he can come out on top.

In this time of uncertainty, how’s your faith? Are you starting to feel defeated about something in your business? Your life? Do you feel like giving up?

I’ve run something like 8 races this year, and 3 of them were crappy. The crappy ones had one thing in common… somewhere along the route, I gave up. I saw hills in front of me and felt defeated. I looked at the mile markers and lost my faith. And I finished weakly, disappointed with my time and my spirit.

To tell the truth, I’m feeling that way about my business right now. I’m sad, sad, sad about my family troubles; I’m worried about the economy, even though my business hasn’t actually suffered; I’m facing 40 and looking both back and ahead, uneasy about what my life goals are and whether I’m fulfilling them. I’m climbing a hill, out of breath, tired, facing negative thoughts. It’s so much easier to just give up.

But, seriously, I’m inspired by John McCain. I haven’t seen one sign that he’s tired of his uphill battle. I see that he truly believes he can win this race, and he’s going to keep trying to the end. And that makes me remember my other 5 races this year — the ones where I had hope and strength and positive thoughts about finishing strong. And each of those races was better than the previous, and I set personal records each time I got out there with the right attitude.

So, no matter your politics, think a few moments about John McCain or any other person you know who just keeps going. Perhaps that will help you persevere.

I’ve been Twittering my little heart out, linking up on LinkedIn and mass emailing, listserving and texting. I could spend (and sometimes I do spend), hours each day networking on these platforms and trying to stay dialed into the important social communities.

But I can’t keep up. This weekend I received a notice that my invitation to join Grouply (where I can consolidate my Google and Yahoo! Groups) was about to expire. And I just signed up for Goodreads because my blogging buddy Wendy sent an invitation. Goodreads shares book recommendations from my personal friends and tens of thousands of potential friends. On Twitter moments ago, people started revealing their locations using Brightkite, a location-based social networking tool.

Register now.

Sign up here.

Just enter your email to get started.

Argh!

Many of these social networks will scour your inboxes to help you send invitations to more friends to join your network, so you can send out hundreds, thousands of invitations….I feel bad when someone I know invites me to yet another network and I ignore the invitation. Each time I join something else, I have to share my email, remember a password, remember that I’m going to be findable somewhere else on the web, create my profile, upload my picture…. And, to make it a useful connection, I have to start interacting on that community as well.

Come on, people — can we really do it all? Can we live with all this social networking noise? How in the world can we get work done when we’re Tweeting, Linking, texting…? Remember when Jan from the Brady Bunch tried to join every extracurricular activity there was and ended up a multitasking mess? Do we really want to be a member of every single group?

I’ve heard that American workers are more and more productive, that companies can get more done with fewer employees these days. Is it because of these technology advancements, or in spite of them? Are we simply hiring more people who are better at multitasking?

What was it… 15 years ago? … when home computers first started having the ability to print personalized greeting cards? I embraced that technology before anyone else I knew, and all my friends ooohed over the custom color cards I printed on my ink-jet printer. And then everybody started printing their own cards (and then they started using e-cards instead), so I went back to hand-written cards sent through the old-fashioned postal service.

I’m feeling the same kind of stubbornness with all these social networks. I think I’ll embrace a handful and let the rest of the world pass me by. I think I’ll use this odd-shaped paperweight, otherwise known as a telephone, to reach out to people I know. I’m not going to sign up for Grouply, Brightkite or any more cool groups for a while. In fact, I think I’ll just use DarkCopy to convert my monitor to the black screen with the blinking green cursor that I had when I first saw a computer.

Or maybe I’ll buy a typewriter….

1. Create a fuzzmail, which is a little movie of you actually typing the email to show how you hesitated, rewrote, paused for dramatic effect… Here’s a(n offcolor) sample.
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2. Save an email for another day with hitmelater.com. Just forward it to 24@hitmelater.com, and you’ll get it back in 24 hours. You can replace the “24” with another number or a day of the week (4@hitmelater.com will send it back in four hours; Wednesday@hitmelater.com gets it back the upcoming Wednesday).
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3. Talk to your future self with EmailFuture, where you can set up an email that will be delivered when you specify. Dear Beth, By the time you read this, you’ll be 40. You’re old now…. really, really old…
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4. Need to register for something but don’t want to be on someone’s email list forever? Try 10 Minute Mail, which gives you a temporary email address.
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5. Need to know the origin of an email? Copy and paste the email header into Email Trace, and they will pinpoint the location of the sender’s IP address.
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6. Stop yourself before you send the electronic equivalent of a drunken phone call to your ex. Use Gmail’s Mail Goggles, which asks you to answer simple math questions before the email leaves your outbox.
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7. My favorite email silliness of all time… Monk-e-mail. Create a funny email with a talking chimp and send to a friend.