Reed's Law: "The Value of a Network Increases Dramatically When People Form Subgroups for Collaborations and Sharing"
Networks: why do networks matter? It is often said, and I believe it, that you are the average of those you know. If you want to get better, you need to upgrade those you know. You want to get better at sports, you donít play people worse than you at chess, you play those people that are better than you at the game. If you want to be a chess master, you play chess masters. Being and entrepreneur is all about taking opportunity when it comes, and the more opportunity you can get coming your way the better the odds one of them will work and you will succeed. Metcalfe noticed that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system. Two people with telephones can only make one connection. Five telephones can make 10 connections, and twelve telephones can make 66 connections. This is the network effect: The value of a network is proportional to n2, where n is the number of users. Your network is one of the most important assets you have, and like Reed's Law, the value of your network dramatically increases as you collaborate and share. Social networks matter. Social sells. Making money involves other people, and other people involved means that making money is social. There are three different types of networks: one-to-many (like TV and radio networks), one-to-one (transactional networks such as emails and instant messaging), and a group-forming network (many-to-many) Value your network. Expand it, and most importantly respect it and support and defend it. Use social media, use the phone, meet people on the street, meet people networking, Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, crawl, run, walk, and cold call, but meet people. You need people to make money, and you make money by solving their problems.To solve their problems you have to know their problems. To know their problems, you have to know them. Your network becomes more valuable the more connections it has. D I love this video, because you watch him literally making it up as he goes, and Gary Vaynerchuk shows what it takes to get business. A simple phone call.
D I picked up an ebook, Ikigai by Sebastian Marshall, on a recommendation from a podcast I listened to (lifestyle business podcast), and at first I wasn't too sure.
The author seems to wander, going occasionally off track, and I think the the book is a collection of older online posts, so it wanders a bit, but then it became of the spirit of the book. The author wants to be this century's strategist, and maybe, but but as I get deeper into into his way of thinking, I found that I liked it more and more. It is the perfect book to read on my phone, in small bits, it makes me think, and it makes me question. His web site is; http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/ I really like his way of looking at problems or goals; here he discusses how we pursue goals by working on the wrong things "Why do most of us, most of the time, choose to "pursue our goals" through routes that are far less effective than the routes we could find if we tried? My guess is that here, as with the calculus test, the main problem is that most courses of action are extremely ineffective, and that there has been no strong evolutionary or cultural force sufficient to focus us on the very narrow behavior patterns that would actually be effective. We do not automatically "but we should": (a) Ask ourselves what we're trying to achieve; (b) Ask ourselves how we could tell if we achieved it ("what does it look like to be a good comedian?") and how we can track progress; (c) Find ourselves strongly, intrinsically curious about information that would help us achieve our goal; (d) Gather that information (e.g., by asking as how folks commonly achieve our goal, or similar goals, or by tallying which strategies have and haven't worked for us in the past); (e) Systematically test many different conjectures for how to achieve the goals, including methods that aren't habitual for us, while tracking which ones do and don't work; (f) Focus most of the energy that *isn't* going into systematic exploration, on the methods that work best; (g) Make sure that our "goal" is really our goal, that we coherently want it and are not constrained by fears or by uncertainty as to whether it is worth the effort, and that we have thought through any questions and decisions in advance so they won't continually sap our energies; (h) Use environmental cues and social contexts to bolster our motivation, so we can keep working effectively in the face of intermittent frustrations, or temptations based in hyperbolic discounting; .... or carry out any number of other useful techniques. Instead, we mostly just do things. We act from habit; we act from impulse or convenience when primed by the activities in front of us; we remember our goal and choose an action that feels associated with our goal. We do any number of things. But we do not systematically choose the narrow sets of actions that would effectively optimize for our claimed goals, or for any other goals." Ikigai by Sebastian Marshall A huge body of research has shown that small wins have enormous power, an influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves. “Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage,” one Cornell professor wrote in 1984. “Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win.” Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.
“Small wins do not combine in a neat, linear, serial form, with each step being a demonstrable step closer to some predetermined goal,” wrote Karl Weick, a prominent organizational psychologist. “More common is the circumstance where small wins are scattered … like miniature experiments that test implicit theories about resistance and opportunity and uncover both resources and barriers that were invisible before the situation was stirred up.” The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg "Poverty, I realized, wasn’t only a lack of financial resources; it was isolation from the kind of people that could help you make more yourself.
When you help others, they often help you. Reciprocity is the gussied-up word people use later in life to describe this ageless principle. Success in any field, but especially in business, is about working with people, not against them. No tabulation of dollars and cents can account for one immutable fact: Business is a human enterprise, driven and determined by people. Over time, I came to see reaching out to people as a way to make a difference in people’s lives as well as a way to explore and learn and enrich my own; it became the conscious construction of my life’s path. Once I saw my networking efforts in this light, I gave myself permission to practice it with abandon in every part of my professional and personal life. I didn’t think of it as cold and impersonal, the way I thought of “networking.” I was, instead, connecting—sharing my knowledge and resources, time and energy, friends and associates, and empathy and compassion in a continual effort to provide value to others, while coincidentally increasing my own. Like business itself, being a connector is not about managing transactions, but about managing relationships. Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi, Tahl Raz Business Experiment No. 1
Learning means nothing with out action, so here is the first goal for you; Make $1.00 by selling something to someone else. Take action. It could be anything, and it needs to be to anyone you don't currently know, but you need but make a deal. Sounds easy, but can you really do it, make that first dollar? That $1.00 can be the start of a business that can change your life. Do you have what it takes? Stop everything, stop reading this, and go do it. This will prove an important point to you, and it is what I think is the most important point that you can learn about business: That you can make money and you can do it now. No one else has do to it for you, you can make your future. The first dollar is the hardest, but once you get it, you understand that it can be done, that you don't have to work for someone if you don't want to, that businesses are created by people just like you. You make that dollar, you sell something, you have your first email for your customer list, your mailing list, and you meet someone new, which means you have widened your network. See on eBay, sell on flippa.com, sell at a garage sale, sell on the street, online, make a cold call, it doesn't matter. Sell. For me it was ebay, I started selling used books and some jewelry, and I quickly learned that I coiuld sell, and it started me learning all I can. Let me know how you do. I would like to know. Any questions let me know. D Principle 1: Base Prices on Benefits, Not Costs
In Chapter 2, we looked at benefits versus features. Remember that a feature is descriptive (“These clothes fit well and look nice”) and a benefit is the value someone receives from the item in question (“These clothes make you feel healthy and attractive”). We tend to default to talking about features, but since most purchases are emotional decisions, it’s much more persuasive to talk about benefits. Just as you should usually place more emphasis on the benefits of your offering than on the features, you should think about basing the price of your offer on the benefit—not the actual cost or the amount of time it takes to create, manufacture, or fulfill what you are selling. Principle 2: Offer a (Limited) Range of Prices Choosing an initial price for your service that is based on the benefit provided to customers is the most important principle to ensure profitability. But to create optimum profitability or at least to build more cushion into your business model, you’ll next want to present more than one price for your offer. The key to this strategy is to offer a limited range of prices: not so many as to create confusion but enough to provide buyers with a legitimate choice. Notice the important distinction that naturally happens when you offer a choice: Instead of asking them whether they’d like to buy your widget, you’re asking which widget they would like to buy. Principle 3: Get Paid More Than Once The final strategy for making sure your business gets off to a good start is to ensure that your payday doesn’t come along only once—you’d much rather have repeated paydays, from the same customers, over and over on a reliable basis. You may have heard of the terms continuity program, membership site, and subscriptions. They all mean roughly the same thing: getting paid over and over by the same customers, usually for ongoing access to a service or regular delivery of a product. (Note: Don’t get too hung up on the exact numbers here. The point is that in almost every case, a recurring billing model will produce much more income over time than will a single-sale model.) The key to this model is not market share. It’s share of the customer. And to gain more of each customer’s budget, you first have to zealously treat every customer as a “best” customer, no matter which ones actually end up becoming the proverbial “customer for life.” The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau Find your niche, know it - then drill down further.
What the internet has shown us all, is that no matter what we like, what odd quirky thing we find interesting, we now know there are similar people with similar interests out there online. The more we understand that, the better the business. That is our niche, and now we go for the long tail market. The Long Tail is a interesting term and it has gained popularity recently as a way to describe a retailing strategy where you try to carry and sell a large number of unique items with no or little carrying costs and sell relatively small quantities sold of each – usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities. The concept was popularized by author Chris Andersen in his book by the same name, The Long Tail. The distribution and inventory costs of successfully applying this strategy allow a business to get to solid profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The total sales of this large number of "non-hit items" is called the Long Tail. Less competition, more margin D The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg Part 1
Great book, this coupled with the other book I just read called Willpower has seriously made look at my habits and actions and reevaluate how I do what I do. Researchers began examining images of Lisa’s brain, they saw something remarkable: One set of neurological patterns—her old habits—had been overridden by new patterns. They could still see the neural activity of her old behaviors, but those impulses were crowded out by new urges. As Lisa’s habits changed, so had her brain. By focusing on one pattern—what is known as a “keystone habit”—Lisa had taught herself how to reprogram the other routines in her life, as well. “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,” William James The choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits. And though each habit means relatively little on its own, over time, the meals we order, what we say to our kids each night, whether we save or spend, how often we exercise, and the way we organize our thoughts and work routines have enormous impacts on our health, productivity, financial security, and happiness. One paper published by a Duke University researcher in 2006 found that more than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren’t actual decisions, but habits. In some sense, he said, a community was a giant collection of habits occurring among thousands of people that, depending on how they’re influenced, could result in violence or peace. In addition to removing the food vendors, he had launched dozens of different experiments in Kufa to influence residents’ habits. There hadn’t been a riot since he arrived. (The military changed community habits by removing food stands, and the violence stopped.) Why does my brain decide that one memory is more important than another?” (This is a very interesting statement) As each rat learned how to navigate the maze, its mental activity decreased. As the route became more and more automatic, each rat started thinking less and less. The basal ganglia, in other words, stored habits even while the rest of the brain went to sleep. This process—in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine—is known as “chunking,” and it’s at the root of how habits form.1.18 There are dozens—if not hundreds—of behavioral chunks that we rely on every day. Some are simple: You automatically put toothpaste on your toothbrush before sticking it in your mouth. (Think driving to work via the same route, your brain turns off once it becomes habit.) Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any routine into a habit, because habits allow our minds to ramp down more often. This process within our brains is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future: Habits aren’t destiny, habits can be ignored, changed, or replaced. But the reason the discovery of the habit loop is so important is that it reveals a basic truth: When a habit emerges, the brain stops fully participating in decision making. It stops working so hard, or diverts focus to other tasks. So unless you deliberately fight a habit—unless you find new routines—the pattern will unfold automatically. Habits never really disappear. They’re encoded into the structures of our brain, and that’s a huge advantage for us, because it would be awful if we had to relearn how to drive after every vacation. The problem is that your brain can’t tell the difference between bad and good habits, and so if you have a bad one, it’s always lurking there, waiting for the right cues and rewards.” (old habits are dormant but there.) Without habit loops, our brains would shut down, overwhelmed by the minutiae of daily life. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness, or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission, but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense. Claude Hopkins - My Life in Advertising . He created a craving. And that craving, it turns out, is what makes cues and rewards work. That craving is what powers the habit loop. Throughout his career, one of Claude Hopkins’s signature tactics was to find simple triggers to convince consumers to use his products every day. The brilliance of these appeals was that they relied upon a cue—tooth film—that was universal and impossible to ignore. Telling someone to run their tongue across their teeth, it turned out, was likely to cause them to run their tongue across their teeth. And when they did, they were likely to feel a film. Hopkins had found a cue that was simple, had existed for ages, and was so easy to trigger that an advertisement could cause people to comply automatically. First, find a simple and obvious cue. Second, clearly define the rewards. Even today, Hopkins’s rules are a staple of marketing textbooks and the foundation of millions of ad campaigns. However, it turns out that Hopkins’s two rules aren’t enough. There’s also a third rule that must be satisfied to create a habit—a rule so subtle that Hopkins himself relied on it without knowing it existed. However, once a monkey had developed a habit—once its brain anticipated the reward—the distractions held no allure. The animal would sit there, watching the monitor and pressing the lever, over and over again, regardless of the offer of food or the opportunity to go outside. The anticipation and sense of craving was so overwhelming that the monkeys stayed glued to their screens, the same way a gambler will play slots long after he’s lost his winnings. This explains why habits are so powerful: They create neurological cravings. “There is nothing programmed into our brains that makes us see a box of doughnuts and automatically want a sugary treat,” Schultz told me. “But once our brain learns that a doughnut box contains yummy sugar and other carbohydrates, it will start anticipating the sugar high. Our brains will push us toward the box. Then, if we don’t eat the doughnut, we’ll feel disappointed.” This is how new habits are created: by putting together a cue, a routine, and a reward, and then cultivating a craving that drives the loop. However, these cravings don’t have complete authority over us. As the next chapter explains, there are mechanisms that can help us ignore the temptations. But to overpower the habit, we must recognize which craving is driving the behavior. Anyone can use this basic formula to create habits of her or his own. Want to exercise more? Choose a cue, such as going to the gym as soon as you wake up, and a reward, such as a smoothie after each workout. Then think about that smoothie, or about the endorphin rush you’ll feel. Allow yourself to anticipate the reward. Eventually, that craving will make it easier to push through the gym doors every day. Want to craft a new eating habit? When researchers affiliated with the National Weight Control Registry—a project involving more than six thousand people who have lost more than thirty pounds—looked at the habits of successful dieters, they found that 78 percent of them ate breakfast every morning, a meal cued by a time of day. But most of the successful dieters also envisioned a specific reward for sticking with their diet—a bikini they wanted to wear or the sense of pride they felt when they stepped on the scale each day—something they chose carefully and really wanted. They focused on the craving for that reward when temptations arose, cultivated the craving into a mild obsession. And their cravings for that reward, researchers found, crowded out the temptation to drop the diet. The craving drove the habit loop. “Champions don’t do extraordinary things,” Dungy would explain. “They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.” So rather than creating new habits, Dungy was going to change players’ old ones. And the secret to changing old habits was using what was already inside players’ heads. Habits are a three-step loop—the cue, the routine, and the reward—but Dungy only wanted to attack the middle step, the routine. He knew from experience that it was easier to convince someone to adopt a new behavior if there was something familiar at the beginning and end. His coaching strategy embodied an axiom, a Golden Rule of habit change that study after study has shown is among the most powerful tools for creating change. Dungy recognized that you can never truly extinguish bad habits. Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine. That’s the rule: If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same. The Golden Rule has influenced treatments for alcoholism, obesity, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and hundreds of other destructive behaviors, and understanding it can help anyone change their own habits. Today, habit reversal therapy is used to treat verbal and physical tics, depression, smoking, gambling problems, anxiety, bedwetting, procrastination, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and other behavioral problems. And its techniques lay bare one of the fundamental principles of habits: Often, we don’t really understand the cravings driving our behaviors until we look for them. How do habits change? There is, unfortunately, no specific set of steps guaranteed to work for every person. We know that a habit cannot be eradicated—it must, instead, be replaced. And we know that habits are most malleable when the Golden Rule of habit change is applied: If we keep the same cue and the same reward, a new routine can be inserted. The evidence is clear: If you want to change a habit, you must find an alternative routine, and your odds of success go up dramatically when you commit to changing as part of a group. Belief is essential, and it grows out of a communal experience, even if that community is only as large as two people. These are “keystone habits,” and they can influence how people work, eat, play, live, spend, and communicate. Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything. Keystone habits say that success doesn’t depend on getting every single thing right, but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers. The habits that matter most are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business Your world is a place of constant interconnecting streams of transactions. A infinite amount of possibility and opportunity surrounds you.
Your business can be anything you create, if you work at it, and you think and experiment, because of this work, the business and you grow. Look at all the things you own, your computer, your book, your TV, your clothes, and know that is is all connected and all the result of transactions. Some yours, some other peoples. All of it is connected. Everywhere and everyone and everything is connected. This is a very important concept, because if you can see the transactions around you thrn it means that you can also see the opportunity. I am sitting on a plane when I write this on my phone, looking at all the connections around me. My phone is full of apps that I bought, full of music that I listen to (Cat Power - Sun) and while I listen, I watch people drink sodas put on board as a incentive to buy them again off the plane and each is a promotional roll out by the soft drink manufacturers. We eat peanuts that given for the same reason. Thank you California Growers. I am flying Southwest and I have read books about the company, and their structure. I have taken some of their ideas and made them my own. Their web site linked me to the rental car place, each side benefiting from the connection. At the car place (Avis) I learned all about bad customer service and what not to do. I am reading the $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau on my Kindle. the book written as Chris traveled the world, probably edited in Portland. The Kindle, thank you China. Drill down further. I used to manage a plant that made the cleaners for the seats and surfaces of aircraft. I helped produce the materials to see cracks in plane parts under black lights. I have made inks that are made to print the newspapers next to me. Everything is treated, created, and made. Each of those steps is a transaction. These are opportunities. The clothes we wearing are from around the globe, different countries, different carriers or freight companies, different retailers with unique styles or brands. Some imported, some exported. The supply chains built by companies today are amazing and they exist for every imaginable product. Every single thing around uou is the result of a transaction. Start looking a little closer. D |
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