Eddie and Bill were sitting at an outdoor table at Scotty’s Landing having lunch last Friday. I had run over to the bayside shack right after my downtown lunch meeting to chat with a potential client and then needed to zip out to check on a video production in Coral Gables. But I had a couple of minutes before I had to be at the edit suite so I finished my meeting and walked over to say hi to my friends.

Bill was in shorts and sporting two days of stubble. Ed was in khakis and sneakers. Ed had a beer. Bill was drinking wine. Neither one was looking at their smartphones. And did I mention that it was 1:30 p.m. on a workday?

“Look at the two of you – happy as pigs in mangos, enjoying a beautiful day with nowhere to go, I said. “Man, I want to be you when I grow up.”

I told them about Starbucks envy.

You know about Starbucks envy. That’s when you go to Starbucks and see those people just sitting there in the sun. Usually they have a bike leaning against their table or they’re there with their dog. They’re reading something on their iPad or thumbing through The New York Times. Not a care in the world and clearly nowhere to rush off to — just enjoying being there.  They remind me of Satchel Paige’s old quote, “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.”

When I go to Starbucks, it’s usually to meet someone on the run — I’m meeting Marcos at the Starbucks in the Grove at 9 a.m. or Kim at the Starbucks on 69^th Street at two in the afternoon. We’ll grab a cup of coffee or tea, share pleasantries for a moment or two, and then get down to work — exchanging ideas and layouts, strategizing next steps — and then run off to our next meeting. Of course, while we’re meeting we’re fielding text messages and calls, mostly about where we’re going next, who we’re going to meet, and what time we’ll be getting together.

But just to sit there and take in the scene, with nothing pressing to run off to… wow. My desires might be simple but that kind of takes my breath away.

So anyway, I told Bill and Ed about my fantasy — my Starbucks envy. Ed laughed and told me a story:

“I was walking through Coconut Grove one night and there were a couple of guys playing music on the street corner. They had a guitar case out in front of them and a few people gathered around and they were having a great time. I thought, ‘I want to do that, too.’ So that weekend I went out and bought a guitar and have been taking weekly guitar lessons ever since. I’m not so good yet but I’m giving myself 10 years because I want to be just like Turkel.” ( -PAUSE- Hey wait a minute, that’s me.)

Here’s the funny part. Until Ed mentioned that it was me and my buddy he stumbled upon playing music on that street corner in the Grove, I was listening to his story thinking, “I want to do that, too.” It wasn’t until he mentioned who he saw playing that evening that it dawned on me that I already do that.

It’s more than the old paradigm to “be careful what you wish for because you might get it.” In this case, it’s about realizing what you’ve already got, what the perception is of what you’ve got, and what your perception is of what else is out there. The grass is always greener, indeed.

And it’s not just a good thing to think about when you’re evaluating your life. It’s also a good exercise to do when you’re thinking about your brand. After all, a brand is not what you think of your company, it’s what the employees and your customers — and your potential customers — think about it, and what they feel about it. And it’s very possible that those two viewpoints are not in sync.

Kodak thought it stood for the finest in photography until its customers cared only about digital photography and Kodak found itself in bankruptcy. It might not have happened quite that quickly, but it did happen.

Palm thought its brand stood for PDAs until it realized that RIM’s Blackberry and Apple’s iPhone had stolen its market share.

And Blackberry, who thought its brand was de rigueur for portable communication in the corporate boardroom, is quickly discovering that its customers no longer agree.

Even powerhouse Google, which preemptively purchased YouTube to maintain their superiority in search technology, is now concerned that Facebook and the voice-recognition company Nuance, will take their place in both search and ad sales.

So whether you’re dashing to a meeting, playing music on a street corner or piloting the marketing activities of some of the world’s most important companies, remember that when it comes to your brand, perception IS reality. Even at Starbucks.

A few weeks ago my mom recommended that my wife and I go to a restaurant she likes. She even gave us a voucher for the restaurant that she had purchased on Dealtificate, a couponing site similar in function to Groupon and others. She’d paid 20 dollars for $40 of food.

I arrived early and was seated before my wife showed up. Because we were celebrating a small victory, I decided to order a bottle of wine and have it poured so it would be ready when Gloria came in.

You should know that I am not an oenophile. Even though my business partner has a real passion for wine, knows an awful lot about it, and maintains an enviable wine cellar, I’m pretty much a ten buck a bottle kind of guy. So I was out of my depth picking through a wine list with selections starting in the low 40-dollar range and topping out at around $200.

But we were celebrating and I wanted the bottle served before my wife arrived. Plus, we did have a $40 coupon. So I made believe I was a sophisticated big spender and selected a $48 Italian red.

The waiter brought the wine, made the appropriate gestures to show me the label, and opened it with a flourish. He handed the cork to me and poured a quick splash for me to sample just in time for Gloria to walk in behind the maître d’. It was the perfect opportunity to gallantly offer her the glass of wine to taste.

Gloria liked the wine enough that I took out my iPhone to snap a picture of the label so we could buy some the next time we stocked up. Then I remembered I had downloaded the RedLaser app to my iPhone so I opened the program and used it to scan the wine bottle’s UPC code. RedLaser shows the product’s name, a picture of the product, and a list of retail outlets, online and off. It also shows the product’s price.

When I was a kid my parents were in the restaurant business and I’ve worked in a lot of restaurants as a server and bartender. I even know a little bit about restaurant management. One of the things I remember is that the rule of thumb for most restaurants is to sell a bottle of wine for three times the average retail price. I confirmed that with a quick trip to Wine Enthusiast Magazine’s site. “Industry-wide markups average two and a half to three times wholesale cost,” says Randy Caparoso, a restaurant wine consultant at Wine List Consulting Unlimited.”

So imagine my surprise to find out that the $48 bottle of Gran Sasso Montepulciano d’Abruzzo that we were enjoying doesn’t retail for $16 but slightly more than half – only $8.99. I’m guessing that the retail store price is probably twice wholesale but even marking up the retail price means that a restaurant price of $27 would have been fair, $30 – $35 would have been extravagant and $48 was abusive.

Knowing I had been ripped off didn’t ruin our evening – the food and service were good and my wife was beautiful and wonderful to be with – but even though I liked the wine, it left a bad taste in my mouth (no pun intended) that will keep me from going back to that restaurant again.

Ironically, it was the Internet that got me there in the first place because until my mom offered us the online voucher that restaurant wasn’t even in our consideration set. And now it’s the Internet that will keep me from returning because RedLaser showed me how the restaurant was taking advantage.

The takeaway is simple: Internet technology can be a great way to build your business. Democratized information means that you no longer have to buy expensive print or radio ads to get the word out about your firm. But companies planning on taking advantage of their customers need to remember that the digital revolution cuts two ways. Now customers have just as many digital shortcuts as business people do.

The Internet giveth and the Internet taketh away.

A couple of blog posts ago, I wrote about the opportunities of small ideas. How Internet technology (among other things) had made it easier and easier for entrepreneurially minded people to develop their concepts.

We talked about the iPhone Scrabble game Words With Friends (WWF), and Qat, the iPhone App for WWF players. When I posted the article, my thought was that you would be put off by the daunting task of actually creating software or taking your ideas to market. Instead, the comments most people made were more concerned with finding their new ideas in the first place. Unlike many established businesses that struggle with implementation, what I learned is that you’re not concerned about getting the job done, you’re thinking about what job to actually work on in the first place.

What great news. If you don’t mind me mixing my metaphors, you’re a damn the torpedoes crowd; just show you the hill and you’ll storm it! You’re ready, willing, and able to do the work, you just want to know what work to actually do.

Well, here’s the secret – figuring out where the opportunities are is the easy part. The answers are all around you; all you need to do is pay attention. Everywhere you look you’ll see unmet needs, consumers looking for something to buy, moments waiting to be seized. As my friend Owen Frager likes to say, the opportunities are “hidden in plain sight.”

The trick is to get use to looking at the world around you in a new way. Instead of seeing what’s there and nodding complacently, we need to learn to see what’s not there and wonder why the hell not.

For example, how many times in your life do you think you’ve seen a person using a walker? A hundred? A thousand? How many of those walkers had bright yellow tennis balls stabbed onto the bottoms of the back legs? Seems like all of them, doesn’t it?

Do you think older ladies and gentlemen have a particular penchant for tennis balls? Do you think that maybe they like the way the snappy fluorescent yellow hue brightens up their somber gray walkers? Or maybe they were just walking along, minding their own business, when they accidentally stabbed errant tennis balls with their walker’s legs, just as a street sweeper might lance a piece of litter on the end of his pointy stick?

Think about it for a minute. How many of these people just happen to have tennis balls lying around? And how do they puncture the balls so they’ll fit on their walkers anyway? Clearly these folks are making a real effort to install the balls.

So here’s the big question: If most walker users make the effort to put tennis balls on their walkers, why in the world haven’t the walker companies figured this out and installed ball-like devices on the walkers to begin with??!!

Shhhh. Be very, very quiet. Listen carefully or you might miss it. Do you hear it? It’s the sound of opportunity knocking. It’s right there on the bottom of every walker you pass – a patent waiting to be filed, a product waiting to be designed, a fortune waiting to be made. And if we find this one just staring us in the face from something we see every day, imagine how many more opportunities are out there just waiting to be pounced on.

Ideas are swirling all around us. All you have to do is pay attention, separate the need from the noise and start creating the solution.

But once you figure out what that solution is, you gotta strike while the iron’s hot. Because as my dad likes to remind me, “When opportunity knocks, you can’t say ‘come back later.’”

My to do list is about as long as my arm – people to call, people to call back, clients’ jobs to work on, appointments to schedule, blog posts to write, tweets to post, emails to return and books to read.

Hey, I’m reading just as fast as I can but the night table is still sagging under my growing pile of books.

Thanks to Things, the computerized to do list program, most everything I need to do is neatly cataloged and updated right on my screen. And because the list automatically syncs with my iPhone, the list is always in my pocket, silently screaming out how much there is to be done.

With so much to do, and everything so well organized, why is it that I’m never sure of what I should be doing next? Especially when my favorite business books tell me EXACTLY what to do:

• Jim Collins was adamant that to go from Good To Great I need to get the right people off the bus, the right people on the bus, and to make sure they’re all in the right seats. I better stop writing this post and go work on my HR plans.
• Eliyahu Goldratt made it real clear in The Goal that the number one thing a manager should do is avoid being a bottleneck. So that means I should put down my personnel files and go approve those pending ads to keep my agency humming along.
• In The E-Myth Revisited Michael Gerber says that the thing to do is “work on your business, not in your business.” So the heck with reviewing client work, I should be finding clients to work on.
• In Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte preaches that “content is king.” Maybe I should stop prospecting and start creating more content – like this blog post that I had stopped crafting in the first place.
• And in Younger Next Year, Chris Crowley and Harry Lodge say that if I don’t work out intensely at least six days a week I’m not going to be in any shape to run my business anyway so maybe I ought to turn my computer off and go for a run.

Or maybe I should stop reading so much. Not only will that give me more time to get my work done but imagine how much shorter my to do list will be without all those recommended book titles cluttering it up.