When I was a PC person thinking about moving to a Mac, I got some good advice: "Don't try to do things the Windows way.  Learn the Mac way."

Easier said than done, but that was right on the mark.  And it holds regardless of how long you've been in the PC world (I'd used a PC from Windows 3.1 all the way to XP).

You have to shift your thinking, and you'll feel a backwards pull for a while, especially when you don't see how to do something.  But once you get there, you won't ever look back, and surprisingly you can then go back and forth, working on both platforms with little problem.

My biggest hang-up was installing and uninstalling apps – it was so much simpler on the Mac that I kept thinking it couldn't really be doing everything.  You may or may not experience something similar, and if you do, it will pass.

I believe you can get a handle on the basics in just an hour with these links.  I've put them in the order that I think will be most useful to you.  Watch the videos first for a good overview then use the documents for practice.

Video

• (5:45) - Mac OS X: PC to Mac – The Basics

• (1:55) – Mac OS X: Finder Basics

Text

• Switch 101: Migrate to Mac
• Switch 101: On Windows, I used to… (Side by Side Comparison)
• Mac 101: Get Started with the Mac
• Why you’ll love a Mac: Frequently Asked Questions
• Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts
• Hack Attack: A Guide to Switching to a Mac (Slightly dated, but good stuff)

A friend of Keith's is trying to find a job. Keith spent an hour advising him on how to fix his (really poor) resume to get more opportunities. Unfortunately, he declined to do any of it, saying "that's just basic stuff".

He's right that it was mostly "basic stuff", but he's still not doing it. It's "basic stuff" for a reason: while it seems really simple and obvious, he still needs to do it to be successful.

I was reminded of the Biblical story of Naaman the leper. When told what he needed to do to cure his awful disease, at first he refused because it sounded too simple for a great man like himself. (It's a great story, btw).

Look, success is rarely easy. But sometimes we make it harder than it needs to be by overlooking the "obvious" things. Sometimes we're trying to install a complicated triangle offense in a pickup basketball game with 2nd-graders. They don't know how to dribble the ball, much less run the triple post.

You have to start with the basics, and keep working on just those things until you've got them down. Then worry about the complicated stuff. Details, details, details.

The great thing is that most people seem to make this same mistake. They try to fly before they can crawl. So if you get the fundamentals down, you'll easily beat out other people — some of whom may even be more qualified than you — who are running around trying to launch some grand, complicated plan without "wasting time" on that piddly basic stuff. Without a foundation, they have very little chance of succeeding, no matter how talented they are.

Don't get ahead of yourself. Don't worry about what the other guy claims he's going to do. Don't worry about how good the competition could be if they just did the "basic stuff".

You just make sure you're doing all the basics right, and worry about the rest when there are no more "basic" things to master.

I recently asked several contractors I use for research and writing projects to send me future deliveries in Open Office's OpenDocument format. Open Office is completely free and in my experience has 90%+ of the functionality of Microsoft Office for 0% of the price. See here for a quick overview of why you should use it.

We've used it at Conditioned Air since we've been in business (March 2004) and have had very few interoperability problems with Microsoft Office. It is an amazing tool set that looks and works as well on the Mac (among other platforms) as it does on the PC. Few of our current customers or vendors use it but (and this is a big part of my point here) that's not been a problem for us – Open Office easily reads and writes Microsoft's .doc/.xls/.docx/.xlsx files.

So why do I care what my vendors use? Three reasons:

1. I hate to see people spend money they don't have to. Conditioned Air has proven, with 5.5 years of real world use on thousands of documents and spreadsheets (and much interaction with our Word/Excel using customers), that most people simply don't need Microsoft Office. Why spend the money, worry about licensing issues, and just deal with the hassle if you don't need to? Maybe this strategy isn't for everyone, but for many small businesses it is just the thing!
2. As Ryan and I do more writing (such as our upcoming ebook on how to do collections in a small business) and sometimes have contractors help us, we find that we want to keep larger projects in one format instead of translating back and forth (in this case, from .docx to .odt and vice versa).
3. When I hire a contractor, the purpose is to make my life easier. I'm paying them to do something that I either can't do, can't do well enough, or simply don't want to do. Receiving projects in OpenDocument format is just one more little thing that helps me.

So why not download it and try it out? It isn't a free trial or anything like that – it is FREE, period. You have nothing to lose and $ to gain!