Your access to knowledge and people is limited by your status. If you are not careful, you will accept this status and become defined by it, particularly if you come from a disadvantaged background. Instead, like Hurston, you must struggle against any limitations and continually work to expand your horizons. (In each learning situation you will submit to reality, but that reality does not mean you must stay in one place.) Reading books and materials that go beyond what is required is always a good starting point.
The people in your field, in your immediate circle, are like worlds unto themselves—their stories and viewpoints will naturally expand your horizons and build up your social skills. Mingle with as many different types of people as possible. Those circles will slowly widen. Any kind of outside schooling will add to the dynamic. Be relentless in your pursuit for expansion. Whenever you feel like you are settling into some circle, force yourself to shake things up and look for new challenges, as Hurston did when she left Howard for Harlem. With your mind expanding, you will redefine the limits of your apparent world. Soon, ideas and opportunities will come to you and your apprenticeship will naturally complete itself. Mastery by Robert Greene
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I like the idea that all ideas need to have actions and facts tied to them. Without that, they are just wishes. No idea, action, business concept should ignore scientific knowledge.
D ‘Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here,’ said Plato to his students, referring to his school, the Academy; and thereafter no philosophy has ever seriously proposed to ignore scientific knowledge. If philosophy, like religion, has its deepest roots in human ‘finiteness’ – the fact that for us mortals time is limited, and that we are the only beings in this world to be fully aware of this fact – it goes without saying that the question of what to do with our time cannot be avoided. As distinct from trees, oysters and rabbits, we think constantly about our relationship to time: about how we are going to spend the next hour or this evening, or the coming year. And sooner or later we are confronted – sometimes due to a sudden event that breaks our daily routine – with the question of what we are doing, what we should be doing, and what we must be doing with our lives – our time – as a whole. This thought process has three distinct stages: a theoretical stage, a moral or ethical stage, and a crowning conclusion as to salvation or wisdom and this leads to two fundamental questions... These two questions – the nature of the world, and the instruments for understanding it at our disposal as humans –"these" constitute the essentials of the theoretical aspect of philosophy. To be a sage, by definition, is neither to aspire to wisdom or seek the condition of being a sage, but simply to live wisely, contentedly and as freely as possible, having finally overcome the fears sparked in us by our own finiteness. To find one’s place in the world, to learn how to live and act, we must first obtain knowledge of the world in which we find ourselves. This is the first task of a philosophical ‘theory’ A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living by Luc Ferry You must value learning above everything else. This will lead you to all of the right choices.2/25/2013
You must value learning above everything else. This will lead you to all of the right choices.
You will opt for the situation that will give you the most opportunities to learn, particularly with hands-on work. You will choose a place that has people and mentors who can inspire and teach you. A job with mediocre pay has the added benefit of training you to get by with less—a valuable life skill. If your apprenticeship is to be mostly on your own time, you will choose a place that pays the bills—perhaps one that keeps your mind sharp, but that also leaves you the time and mental space to do valuable work on your own. You must never disdain an apprenticeship with no pay. In fact, it is often the height of wisdom to find the perfect mentor and offer your services as an assistant for free. Happy to exploit your cheap and eager spirit, such mentors will often divulge more than the usual trade secrets. In the end, by valuing learning above all else, you will set the stage for your creative expansion, and the money will soon come to you. Mastery by Robert Greene If you are deliberately trying to create a future that feels safe, you will willfully ignore the future that is likely. - Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable A man who goes to a hardware store to buy a power drill doesn’t really need a drill—he needs holes.2/23/2013 A simple analogy: If you’re fishing and have one pole with one line in the water, you will be able to catch only a limited number of fish. But if you use ten poles and put ten lines with ten different baits in the water at the same time, your fish-catching potential will significantly increase. Many of the best prospects are accessed from multiple impact points that move them from curiosity to interest, and all the way to action. If you’re attacking your market from multiple positions and your competition isn’t, you have all the advantage and it will show up in your increased success and income.
You must understand and appreciate exactly what your clients need when they do business with you—even if they are unable to articulate that exact result themselves. Once you know what final outcome they need, you lead them to that outcome—you become a trusted adviser who protects them. And they have reason to remain your client for a lifetime. For instance, a man who goes to a hardware store to buy a power drill doesn’t really need a drill—he needs holes. You have also become a trusted adviser and a friend. And you should think of your clients as dear, valued friends. The concept of viewing clients as valued friends will appear frequently in this book and for good reason—it is the essence of the Strategy of Preeminence and the lifeblood of a long-lasting, rewarding, and profitable relationship for both you and your clients. And you will learn that the value you provide to your clients and everyone you deal with can be deeper, more meaningful, and more rewarding than you ever realized. Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition by Jay Abraham I have a client whose income curve was stagnant. It doesn’t matter what they sold. Pretend it’s your product or service. This company had a compensation program that paid the salespeople 10 percent of the profit. So, if the company made a $1,000 profit on a sale, the salesperson would get $100 and the company would get $900. I had them calculate:
• What the average new client is worth to them in dollars each time they buy • How many times that client will buy from them each year • How many years the average client will be with them It turned out the first sale, on average, resulted in about a $200 profit for the company. Of that, $20 went to the salesman or saleswoman, $180 to the company. On average, the client bought five times a year for three years. So basically, each time that company got a new client, they were receiving $3,000 in cumulative profits. My solution: Instead of giving the salespeople 10 percent of the profit on a sale to a new, first-time client, give them 100 percent of the profit on the first sale. The company management’s response: “You’re insane!” I smiled pleasantly and went on to explain that as long as their salespeople maintain sales from existing clients at past levels or above, give them 100 percent of the profit on the first sale for every new client they bring in. They’ll be ten times more motivated to sell new clients. And every time they bring in a new client, the salesperson makes an additional $200, but the company makes an additional $2,800. The company implemented the plan and sales tripled in nine months. Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition by Jay Abraham Value learning over money
What is important when you are young, she (Martha Graham) decided, is to train yourself to get by with little money and make the most of your youthful energy. For the next few years she would work as a dance teacher, keeping her hours to the minimum for survival. The rest of the time she would train herself in the new style of dancing she wanted to create. Knowing the alternative was slavery to some commercial job, she made the most of every free minute, creating in these few years the groundwork for the most radical revolution in modern dance. Mastery by Robert Greene So, good news/bad news: good news that I’m progressing; bad news that life is short and art is long.2/20/2013
...I find myself feeling like I’m in a bit of a race to get down on paper the way I really feel about life—or the way it has presented to me. And because it has presented to me very beautifully, this is hard. It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations.
But I can look back at the way I thought and felt even as a little kid and there was a lot of wonder there, and openness to the many sides of life—the way that beauty and ugliness co-present, for example, or the way that tragedy might be enshrouded in something really funny, or vice versa—and I feel like I’ve only barely scratched the surface so far in what I’ve been able to write. And I have finally realized that, you know, it’s not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations. It could be that it would take me 12 more books at six years each to get it—which means I would have to live to be 126. Which I fully intend to do, of course. But it seems to me that there are certain thoughts and vignettes and attitudes that I have always had the desire to represent—but that I’m only now picking up the chops and/or confidence to pull off. So, good news/bad news: good news that I’m progressing; bad news that life is short and art is long. George Saunders Realize this hard fact:
The people above you (bosses, management, and organization leaders) want one thing most of all—they want solutions to problems. Solutions that make them look good and help them achieve their goals. They want the people who report to them to be problem solvers. These strategies will give you those solutions and turn you into a problem solver. Employers will kill for problem solvers. Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition by Jay Abraham Did you ever wonder how many ways there are to increase your business? One hundred ways? Two hundred ways? Five hundred ways? It can be intimidating to merely figure out where to start.
I have good news—there are only three ways to increase your business: 1. Increase the number of clients. 2. Increase the average size of the sale per client. 3. Increase the number of times clients return and buy again. Let’s take a simple example. • Calculate your number of clients. • Figure the average amount they spend on each transaction or sale. • Determine how often they make a purchase in a year. Let’s say you have one thousand clients. They average $100 per transaction or sale. And they make two purchases in a year. But look what happens if you increase these three numbers by just 10 percent. A mere 10 percent increase across the board expands your income by 33.1 percent. A 25 percent increase in these categories nearly doubles your income to $390,625. Very simple. But the results can be overwhelming. Focusing on this simple formula is just one small way people easily do increase their incomes or grow their businesses by 100 percent, 200 percent, or more. But my simple geometric growth formula works just as well on nonfinancial goals. My good friend, a famous peak performance coach, used a version of it to propel the Los Angeles Kings hockey team to a stunning 9–1 victory over their competitors. How’d he do it? He got the Kings players to break down each key element of the game into an identifiable process. They then rated on a scale of 1–10 based on how they performed each successive period. At the break the coach would target two or three different processes like power plays and challenge the player to improve his rating performance that next quarter. On the chalkboard he demonstrated to them how much-improved their performance efficiency among two or three existing points in enough different categories produced exponential compounded overall impact. Once the Kings realized how to use the power of geometry to maximum competitive advantage, they went wild with it and trounced the competition. Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition by Jay Abraham When I first moved into senior management roles at Netscape, I found my day-to-day tasks fell into three distinct areas: People, Process, and Product.
I do not believe inspiring products happen by accident. In every case, behind every successful, inspiring product, I find that there are certain truths. Here are ten such truths that I try to keep in mind on every product effort: The job of the product manager is to discover a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible. Product discovery is a collaboration between the product manager, interaction designer, and software architect. Engineering is important and difficult, but user experience design is even more important, and usually more difficult. Engineers are typically very poor at user experience design—engineers think in terms of implementation models, but users think in terms of conceptual models. User experience design means both interaction design and visual design (and for hardware-based devices, industrial design). Functionality (product requirements) and user experience design are inherently intertwined. Product ideas must be tested—early and often—on actual target users in order to come up with a product that is valuable and usable. We need a high-fidelity prototype so we can quickly, easily, and frequently test our ideas on real users using a realistic user experience. The job of the product manager is to identify the minimal possible product that meets the objectives—valuable, usable and feasible—minimizing time to market and user complexity. Once this minimal successful product has been discovered and validated, it is not something that can be piecemealed and expect the same results. People refers to the product organization, and the roles and responsibilities of the members of the team as they define and develop the product. Process refers to the processes, activities and best practices used to repeatedly discover and build inspiring and successful products. Product refers to the defining characteristics of these inspiring products. All three of these areas are essential to discovering and creating inspiring products. Everything starts with the people, but the process is what enables these people to consistently produce inspiring and successful products. Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan |
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