Remember that line from Cory Doctorow’s book:
The days of companies with names like “General Electric” and “General Mills” and “General Motors” are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people. Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson In short, forget your job title and forget your job description (for the moment, at least).
Starting today, you’ve got to figure out what exceptional expertise you’re going to master that will provide real value to your network and your company. Here are ten tips on helping you on your way toward becoming an expert: 1. Get out in front and analyze the trends and opportunities on the cutting edge. Foresight gives you and your company the flexibility to adapt to change. Creativity allows you to take advantage of it. Identify the people in your industries who always seem to be out in front, and use all the relationship skills you’ve acquired to connect with them. 2. Ask seemingly stupid questions. If you ask questions that are like no other, you get results that are unlike any that the world has seen. How many people have the courage to ask those questions? The answer: all the people responsible for the greatest innovations. 3. Know yourself and your talents. I had no chance competing with the science geeks at ICI. In developing an expertise that highlighted my strengths, I was able to overcome my weaknesses. The trick is not to work obsessively on the skills and talents you lack, but to focus and cultivate your strengths so that your weaknesses matter less. I’d apply the 80/20 rule in that you should spend some time getting better at your weaknesses but really focus on building your strengths. 4. Always learn. You have to learn more to earn more. All content-creators are readers or at least deep questioners or conversationalists. They’re also sticklers when it comes to self-development. Your program of self-development should include reading books and magazines, listening to educational tapes, attending three to five conferences a year, taking a course or two, and developing relationships with the leaders in your field. 5. Stay healthy. Research has discovered that at midafternoon, due to sleep deprivation, the average corporate executive today has the alertness level of a seventy-year-old. You think that executive is being creative or connecting the dots? Not a chance. Sounds hokey, but you have to take care of yourself—your body, mind, and spirit—to be at your best. As hectic as my schedule can get, I never miss a workout (five times a week). I try to take a five-day vacation every other month (I do check e-mails and catch up on reading). 6. Expose yourself to unusual experiences. When management guru Peter Drucker was asked for one thing that would make a person better in business, he responded, “Learn to play the violin.” Different experiences give rise to different tools. Find out what your kids are interested in and why. Stimulate your creativity. Learn about things that are out of the mainstream. Travel to weird and exotic places. Knowing one’s own industry and one’s native markets is not enough to compete in the future. Take a deep and boundless curiosity about things outside your own profession and comfort zone. 7. Don’t get discouraged. My first e-mail to the CEO of ICI regarding TQM was never returned. To this day, I face rejection on a regular basis. If you’re going to be creative, cutting edge, out of the mainstream, you’d better get used to rockin’ the boat. And guess what—when you’re rockin’ the boat, there will always be people who will try and push you off. 8. Know the new technology. No industry moves quicker or places more emphasis on innovation. You don’t need to be a “techno geek,” but you do need to understand the impact of technology on your business and be able to leverage it to your benefit. Adopt a techno geek, or at least hire or sire one. 9. Develop a niche. Successful small businesses that gain renown establish themselves within a carefully selected market niche that they can realistically hope to dominate. Individuals can do the same thing. Think of several areas where your company underperforms and choose to focus on the one area that is least attended to. 10. Follow the money. Creativity is worthless if it can’t be applied. The bottom line for your content has to be: This will make us more money. The lifeblood of any company is sales and cash flow. All great ideas are meaningless in business until someone pays for it. Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi, Tahl Raz Making effective decisions—and learning effectively—requires massive elimination and the removal of options.
The easiest way to avoid being overwhelmed is to create positive constraints: put up walls that dramatically restrict whatever it is that you’re trying to do. In the world of work, a task will swell in complexity to fill the time you allot it, a phenomenon often referred to as Parkinson’s Law. How does so much get done just before you leave for holidays? All the items lingering on your to-do list for weeks or months? It’s the power of the clear and imminent deadline. Though vastly simplified, in the world of cooking, Le Chatelier’s Principle is invoked to remember that a gas will expand to fill the size of its container. The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss It is possible to vastly compress most learning. In a surprising number of cases, it is possible to do something in 1–10 months that is assumed to take 1–10 years.
The more you compress things, the more physical limiters become a bottleneck. All learning is physically limited. The brain is dependent on finite quantities of neurotransmitters, memories require REM and non-REM (NREM) sleep for consolidation, etc. The learning graph is not unlike the stress-recovery-hyper-adaptation curves of weight training. The more extreme your ambition, just as in sports, the more you need performance enhancement via unusual schedules, diet, drugs, etc. Most important: due to the bipolar nature of the learning process, you can forecast setbacks. If you don’t, you increase the likelihood of losing morale and quitting before the inflection point. Based on all I’ve seen, it’s possible to roughly forecast your progress on the back of a napkin. The process, which is optional, is the following. Skip if you find it dense: 1. Pick your world-class (top 5%) objective, and set your timeline. For this example, we’ll use Spanish in one month (28 days). 2. Use deconstruction, 80/20, and everything in META-LEARNING to nail your materials, determine your sequence, and map out your calendar. 3. To forecast different milestones, work backward from your total allotted time of 28 days. First, we divide our total time units by eight, to reflect the monthly units (eight) needed on my graph to reach fluency. Our progress unit is therefore 3.5 (28 days divided by eight). Next, we look at the graph and multiply out, based on the location of milestones. We round up, so: • Sugar high @ 1 unit = sugar high @ 3.5 days (3.5 x 1), so rounding up, expect a sugar high @ day 4 of 28 days. • Followed by immediate drop and low point @ day 7 (3.5 x 2 units). • Rapid progress after the low point, followed by plateau @ day 10.5 (3.5 x 3), so day 11. • Inflection point @ day 21 (3.5 x 6). • Fluency @ day 28 (3.5 x 8). This forecast is subject to your nailing every other step in META-LEARNING, of course, and it’s a tool of estimation. That said, it can be surprisingly accurate, especially for attempts that last longer than two months. Google cofounder Larry Page once said, “Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail completely. That’s the thing that people don’t get.” THE VALUE OF 5–10-MINUTE BREAKS The serial position effect refers to improved recall observed at the beginnings and ends of lists. Separately, these are called the primacy effect and recency effect, respectively. Memorizing a hypothetical list of 20 words, your recall might look something like this: This mid-list dip can be observed in study sessions as well, so a 90-minute session might resemble the below graph: We can dramatically improve recall by splitting that single session into two sessions of 45 minutes with a 10-minute break in between. The Von Restorff effect, also called the novel popout effect,‡ correlates unique items in a list to better recall. For example, if the fifth item in a word list uses a unique color or a larger font size, it will be better remembered than others. This is perhaps obvious. What isn’t obvious is that planting odd material in the middle of a session can produce a macro–Von Restorff effect. Let’s assume we have a list of 100 plain-Jane, high-frequency words, split into 50 words per 45-minute session. The recall will look just as it did in the primacy and recency effect graph. Now we spike the punch in the middle of each 45-minute session, injecting 2–4 idiomatic phrases that are sexually related from minutes 20–25. There are two content changes: the sexual content and, almost as important, the word-to-phrase shift. In my experience, the memory curves can then morph into the above graph. Instead of averaging out at 60%–70% recall over a week, say, we can get well over 80%. Furthermore, it’s a more sustainable and pleasant learning approach. This is the approach I used with the Linkword method to achieve more than 85% retention of 350 Italian words 72 hours after cramming them into 12 hours. The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life There are three general stages to memory:
1. Registering the information. 2. Storing the information. 3. Retrieving the information. The types of memory are split into three major groups: 1. Sensory memory- a representative example of this type of memory is when glancing at a sheet of data and then glancing away; the first few milliseconds glancing away allows you to still see the data as if it was just in front of you, however this memory lasts for only a few hundred milliseconds and by the time you attempt to recall it the information is gone. 2. Short term memory- this is memory that can be recalled between a few seconds to a minute after first being encountered. Some research suggests that encoding of the information is mainly acoustic rather than visual. 3. Long term memory- through repetition (or the techniques presented in this chapter) information can be stored in long term memory- which refers to periods of years up to a lifetime. Research suggests that Long term memory is primarily encoded semantically. The hippocampus is a part of the brain believed to be essential in the transferral of memories from short term to long term storage. Sleep is considered a crucial component in this process of consolidating information. Without using any techniques, it is sensible to realise that lifestyle choices have a strong effect on cognitive functioning- crucial factors are regular and adequate amount of sleep, balanced diet, physical activity and limiting stress. Assuming no stress factors, forgetting is still a natural process that the brain follows, the main factors are: 1. Cue-dependent forgetting- failure to remember the information due to the lack of stimuli that was present when it was first encoded. 2. Trace Decay- it is believed that new information causes a set of neurons to create a neurological memory trace in the brain- this trace naturally fades with time. However, with repetition the synapses experience a structural change after which the memory moves from being short term to long term. There are several competing theories for the existence of trace decay: a. Interference theory- competition/conflict between old and new information. b. Decay theory- disintegration of the neurochemical trace overtime- it is believed that this happens in order to ensure that only the most important traces are kept so that brain works most efficiently for processes that are critical for survival or deemed significant. c. Organic- physiological damage or disease. Key concepts In order to remember something we need to first pay attention to it, but we tend to only pay attention to topics or events that are of interest to us or are of survival significance. The idea behind most memory system is to ‘trick’ the mind into believing that the concept being memorised is out of the ordinary (thus interesting) or so shockingly unusual that it triggers primal emotions (survival significance). It is simple to notice then that any memory system would need to take the information and add spice or emotion to it before it can be committed to memory. We therefore introduce the ‘tools’ that would allow us to implement a system: Images- Images are the crux of the memory techniques presented here. Use objects that the words represent or convert abstract concepts into images- then apply the techniques. Link method- this is the method used to take two pieces of information at a time and connect them together, replicating the natural way in which new information is incorporated by the brain. For example say you wanted to memorise a list of items, one way to do so is to link each item to the next: Shoes, sofa, hose, coffee, iPad, orange, kettle In essence we would need to link shoes to sofa to hose to coffee to iPad to orange to kettle. The idea is to link each item we do not know to an item we already know. There are several ways to do this: Logic- if a logical connection exists between the items and the list does not allow the possibility for confusion- logic can be used to remember it. Unfortunately, the list above does not have an obvious logical representation and the list is not short so a different tool needs to be employed: Creative linking - this is the ‘glue’ of memory systems: using this technique, one can link any items in any order without the need for a logical connection between them. The idea behind this method is to employ the 2 basic principles behind the imprint of any memory: a. The need to pay attention- we do so by creating exaggerated pictures that are unusual, full of colour, have nonsensical action, are novel and interesting- most importantly they need to be absurd. b. The need to make the picture of primal significance (through emotions) - in connection with the above, the picture that we create needs to evoke emotions (e.g. hilarious, scary, disgusting, confusion, lust etc). The Manual- A guide to the Ultimate Study Method (USM); covering Speed Reading, Super Memory, Laser Concentration, Rapid Mental Arithmetic and the Ultimate Study Method (USM) by Rod Bremer This means that one-person enterprises can get things made in a factory the way only big companies could before. Two trends are driving this. First, there’s the maturation and increasing Web-centrism of business practices in China. Now that the Web generation is entering management, Chinese factories increasingly take orders online, communicate with customers by e-mail, and accept payment by credit card or PayPal, a consumer-friendly alternative to traditional bank transfers, letters of credit, and purchase orders. Second, the current economic crisis has driven companies to seek higher-margin custom orders to mitigate the deflationary spiral of commodity goods.
Institute for the Future’s model for “lightweight innovation.” 1. Network your organizations: “The bike vendors in Chongqing hang out in tea houses and shanzhai vendors in Shenzhen have a vast network centered in the large electronics malls.” 2. Reward solution seekers: “Penny-a-unit profits force the shanzhai collaborations to be totally solutions-driven. They don’t make money if they don’t deliver. ‘Not invented here’ is never a problem.” 3. Err on the side of openness: “The wild west of shanzhai is all about openness. Trade secrets of big companies are flowing freely. Everything is ‘open sourced’ by default. If we take the [intellectual property rights] issue aside, it’s really the ultimate openness we in the open-source world are looking for.” 4. Engage actively: “The shanzhai vendors used to produce knockoffs after original vendors had the products on the market. But in the past year I have seen a lot of them act on the latest Web rumor, especially those related to Apple. It was kind of funny that there were several large-size iPhones (seven-inch and ten-inch) being produced by the shanzhai simply on the rumor that the iPad would look like a large iPhone.” The rise of shanzhai business practices “suggests a new approach to economic recovery as well, one based on small companies well networked with each other,” observes Tom Igoe, a core developer of the open-source Arduino computing platform. “What happens when that approach hits the manufacturing world? We’re about to find out.” Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson To pull people into my dinner parties that would otherwise not come, I developed a helpful little concept I call the “anchor tenant.” Every individual within a particular peer set has a bridge to someone outside his or her own group of friends. We all have, to some degree or another, developed relationships with older, wiser, more experienced people; they may be our mentors, our parents’ friends, our teachers, our rabbis and reverends, our bosses.
I call them anchor tenants; their value comes from the simple fact that they are, in relation to one’s core group of friends, different. Frankly, anyone who can add a little electricity to your dinner party is an anchor tenant. Journalists, I’ve found, are terrific anchor guests. They aren’t particularly well paid (which makes them a sucker for a free meal), their profession has a good deal of intrigue, they are always on the lookout for good material and see such dinners as a potential venue for new ideas, they’re generally good conversationalists, and many folks enjoy an opportunity to get their ideas heard by someone who might publicize them to a larger audience. Artists and actors, famous or not, fall into the same category. On those occasions when you can’t land as big a fish as you might have liked, you can try to pull in a person with proximity to power: a political consultant to an interesting politician, the COO of an interesting company under an interesting CEO, and so on. In these cases, it’s about brand association. You see, there’s only one real rule to these get-togethers: Have fun. All right, there are a few other rules that might help you along the way. Among them: 1. Create a theme. There is no reason that a small dinner party should not have a theme. One simple idea can help you pull the food and atmosphere together. 2. Use invitations. While I’m all for slapdash impromptu parties, the dinner parties that will be most successful will be those you’ve devoted some time and energy to. Whether by phone, e-mail, or handwritten note, be sure to get your invites out early—at least a month in advance—so people can have a chance to plan accordingly—and so you’ll know who is and who is not coming. 3. Don’t be a kitchen slave. There’s no sense in a party being all work. If you can’t hire a caterer, either cook all the food ahead of time or just use takeout. If the food is good and the presentation snazzy, your guests will be impressed. 4. Create atmosphere. Make sure to spend an hour or two gussying up your place. Nothing expensive or out of the ordinary, mind you. Candles, flowers, dim lighting, and music set a good mood. 5. Forget being formal. Most dinner parties don’t call for anything fancy. Follow the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Silly). Good food. Good people. Lots of wine. Good conversation. That’s a successful dinner party. I always underdress just so no one else feels they did. Jeans and a jacket are my standard fare, but you judge for yourself. 6. Don’t seat couples together. The essence of a good dinner party lies in seating everyone properly. If you seat couples together, things can get boring. Mix and match, putting people together who don’t know each other but perhaps share an interest of some kind. I like to set placeholders where I want people to sit. Each placeholder is a simple card with the guest’s name on it. If I have the time, I love to put an interesting question or joke on the back of the card that guests can use to break the ice with one another. Or you can go out and buy funny greeting cards just to make things interesting. 7. Relax. Guests take their cues from the host—if you’re having fun, odds are that they will, too. The night of the party, your job is to enjoy all the fruits of your labor. Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi, Tahl Raz I am reading six books right now, which is normal for me, because I like to read various books, each one offsetting the other. I think we stay focused for about 20 minutes on a subject so I like to jump whemn my mind wanders.One fiction, one business book, one book that makes me think, etc.
I just realized I also have them broken out by four devices and five formats , and each format seems to fit the type of book it is and I am reading and I find that interesting. Each book type reads better on a certain format. Here is what I am reading right now, and on what. 1. On my cell phone I am reading Makers by Chris Anderson - a great book on the futre of manufacturing, really a great read, and makes me think and re-evaluate my business thinking. Reads great in small chunks on the go. Makers: The New Industrial Revolution 2. IKIGAI by Sebastian Marshall is a collection of his blog posts on strategy and business and I read this on my ipod around the house during quiet moments. I really like his blog, and this book gives a nice overview. Ikigai 3. On my Kindle I am reading a book of fiction, Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, an author whose work I love. Wonder Boys: A Novel 4. On my computer I am reading the Boron Letters by Gary Halbart, which is a great small treatise on direct marketing and copy writing. http://www.thegaryhalbertletter.com/Boron/BoronLetterCh1.htm 5. On my kindle, I am also reading Eat to Live, by Joel Fuhrman, which is totally changing how I eat. I first got hooked on smoothies, and that lead to this book. Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss, Revised Edition 6. Finally, I am reading an actual book, the 4 hour Chef by Tim Ferriss. I originally bought it for $5 for the kindle, but saw it in a supermarket, and picked it up, and it is a beautiful book with photos and color layouts, and I just had to buy it. I am improving my cooking, learning to learn, and reading a great adventure book. The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life I have tried reading each of them on in other formats, but these each seem to have fallen into a format that fits its style the best. D You can’t make radical changes in the pattern of your life until you begin to see yourself exactly as you are now.
As soon as you do that, changes will flow naturally. You don’t have to force anything, struggle, or obey rules dictated to you by some authority. It is automatic; you just change. But arriving at that initial insight is quite a task. You have to see who you are and how you are without illusion, judgment, or resistance of any kind. You have to see your place in society and your function as a social being. You have to see your duties and obligations to your fellow human beings, and above all, your responsibility to yourself as an individual living with other individuals. And finally, you have to see all of that clearly as a single unit, an irreducible whole of interrelationship. It sounds complex, but it can occur in a single instant. Mental cultivation through meditation is without rival in helping you achieve this sort of understanding and serene happiness. “What you are now is the result of what you were. What you will be tomorrow will be the result of what you are now.." Mindfulness in Plain English: 20th Anniversary Edition by Bhante Gunaratana WILLPOWER EXPERIMENT: A FIVE-MINUTE BRAIN-TRAINING Breath focus is a simple but powerful meditation technique for training your brain and increasing willpower. Here’s how to get started: 1. Sit still and stay put . Sit in a chair with your feet flat on the ground, or sit cross-legged on a cushion. Sit up straight and rest your hands in your lap. It’s important not to fidget when you meditate—that’s the physical foundation of self-control. If you notice the instinct to scratch an itch, adjust your arms, or cross and uncross your legs, see if you can feel the urge but not follow it. 2. Turn your attention to the breath. Close your eyes or, if you are worried about falling asleep, focus your gaze at a single spot (like a blank wall, not the Home Shopping Network). Begin to notice your breathing. Silently say in your mind “inhale” as you breathe in and “exhale” as you breathe out. When you notice your mind wandering (and it will), just bring it back to the breath. 3. Notice how it feels to breathe, and notice how the mind wanders. After a few minutes, drop the labels “inhale/exhale.” Try focusing on just the feeling of breathing. You might notice the sensations of the breath flowing in and out of your nose and mouth. Start with five minutes a day. When this becomes a habit, try ten to fifteen minutes a day. If that starts to feel like a burden, bring it back down to five. A short practice that you do every day is better than a long practice you keep putting off to tomorrow. It may help you to pick a specific time that you will meditate every day, like right before your morning shower. If this is impossible, staying flexible will help you fit it in when you can. Even when he was focused on his breath, other thoughts sneaked in. He was ready to give up on the practice because he wasn’t getting better at it as quickly as he hoped, and figured he was wasting his time if he wasn’t able to focus perfectly on the breath. Most new meditators make this mistake, but the truth is that being “bad” at meditation is exactly what makes the practice effective. Science is discovering that self-control is a matter of physiology, not just psychology. It’s a temporary state of both mind and body that gives you the strength and calm to override your impulses. The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It. Join our mailing list and we will send you one to two emails a week for 12 weeks teaching you the basic body weight exercises, nutrition guidelines, and mindset tools you need to be Indestructible. |
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