Saturday, March 29th, 2008
While there’s significant evidence (aside from the obviousness of experience) that communication quality online is significantly reduced from in-person communication, I continue to be reminded of the inherent power within the simplicity of communication that the Internet has to offer.
Three times in the past two days, I’ve made new connections with people (One through Twitter, another through this blog, and another through e-mail) who I would consider highly respectable, and would have likely never had contact with otherwise. Are they high quality interactions? Not necessarily, but they were simple and as powerful as they needed to be.
I think that perhaps the reason that more people don’t know more people is that they just don’t try. It’s easy to shoot off an email, to give a compliment to another through your blog, ping people through LinkedIn, etc. My amazement never ceases in regard to the openness of others to want to help, accept help, or just shoot the breeze about an interesting topic.
So, next time you’re curious, reach out.
Friday, March 28th, 2008
If you Click Here and watch this two minute Chevy Malibu video, Chevy will donate to Autism Speaks.
Go. Do it. Two minutes of your time.
Good.
Now, think about this: Some people came up with, and approved, a great idea for aligning their business with a great cause. Those same people said “This video is perfect. Let’s use it.”
I wanted to stab my eyes and ears out after I sat through that.
Compare it to this BMW video.
Does anyone actually wonder why Detroit is suffering? It’s not just their marketing, but I would imagine that their marketing is done with the same spirit as their operations. And, well, that may explain some things.
Friday, March 28th, 2008
Instead of the usual nutrition/fitness stuff, I figured I’d put together a list of some things that have caught my eye over the past week or so.
- PatrickRhone.com - One of my new favorite blogs. One of the best designs I’ve seen in a long time, great writing, and similar interests. I’m not quite there on the GTD stuff, but his interest in it seems to bring forth other great things like this 37 Signals article on Workplace Experiments. For those that have worked with me in the past, it’ll be quite clear why I like that post.
- Confident Goal Setting - I’m currently constructing an ontology for improvement, and this post references a great experiment that took a person of “average intelligence,” worked with them for 3-5 hours a week, and brought that person’s memory level (tested by memorizing random strings of numbers) to that of the best memories in the world…well, within the realm of random number. I’m waiting on the specific details of the experiment, but you can see how well this fits in with deliberate practice and expert performance.
- Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sleep - When it suddenly hit me that sleep was simply a series of chemical reactions in the body, I started researching further to see how it could be hacked for more optimal performance (ie: less sleep, more benefits). This article is mostly geared toward the chemical process of sleep, and is certain to help lead you to more specific research and questions.
- AnyWired.com - A new blog I found today about the cross between lifestyle design, entrepreneurship, and doing business online. Sounds comforting.
Thursday, March 27th, 2008
“The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” - Peter Drucker
“I skate to where the puck is going to be.” - Wayne Gretzky
“Getting fit is about nutrition and exercise.” - Everyone
People, and especially us Internet businesspeople, seem to forget fundamental concerns of the things they care about. They get so wrapped up in these complex ideas, and want to do these complex things, simply because they can.
The interesting thing is that when you look at what works and what succeeds, it’s when everything you do relates directly back to the fundamental concern of your objective.
I see this happening all over the place, and especially with social media marketing. The problem is that people get lost in the gliss (that’s not even a word, but it sounds like it should be and it sounds like the kind of word I’d like to use. So I’m keeping it) and forget why they’re on Twitter, Facebook, or even have the business that they have.
What fundamental concerns does your business address for your customers? Do you reach out to them in ways that resonate in those areas 100%, or are you farting around, exploring new opportunities without the fundamental concerns of your business at the top of your mind?
This applies to everything. For example, in rock climbing, everyone who has climbed more than once knows it’s about your finger strength and shoulder strength. Everyone who has climbed more than twice knows that climbing is all about your footwork and balance. But few people focus solely on these things. Ultimately, the ones that practice yoga to improve their footwork and balance, that exercise their grip to improve their finger strength, and practice pull-ups until their shoulders are burning, succeed much more quickly than others.
If you’re trying to succeed at something that is seeming overwhelming, take a step back. Outline the fundamental concerns of the action (hint: it’s usually 3 things), decide which practices will most quickly develop your skill in those areas, and start practicing them more than anything else.
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
Sometimes, I find it useful set goals that are contingent upon other goals.
What I mean by that is that if I am unsure if I can develop the capacity to achieve a larger goal, I’ll set an interim one that will give me an idea of if I can develop the capacity to hit the larger one. There’s no use in having a goal of $10M in the bank, if you can’t get $10k in there.
In January, the morning of this (and before I found out about his death), I decided I wanted to do the same thing…ascend Everest, and two other difficult peaks in the world. The reality is that, other than rock climbing, I hadn’t intensely training for anything since playing hockey in high school…almost 10 years ago.
So, what I did is I set an aggressive goal, with an aggressive time frame, to ride my fixed-gear, brakeless bike a full 20 miles in an hour. I chose this because it would force me to exercise my legs in a similar way as mountaineering, and it would force me to develop my lungs - which I hadn’t taken care of with 8 years of heavy smoking (I quit last April).
Today, I hit that goal. More than three weeks ahead of schedule. (it sucked) (and I did it on 3 hours of sleep and after 3 hours of climbing/weight lifting last night…more on that later.)
The point is: If I had only focused on the larger goal, I probably wouldn’t have progressed nearly as quickly. Sometimes, making a larger goal contingent upon a smaller goal (rather than the smaller goal merely being an interim milestone) forces you to perform at a faster rate.
As a personal note, if you know anyone who has ascended Everest, K2, Kilamanjaro, or done any similar alpine mountaineering/climbing (ie: Patagonia, Africa, etc), if it would be possible to arrange some sort of meeting/communication that would be awesome. As much as informal education is a wonderful thing, there are some things that just can’t compare to the experience.
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
“We will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to be social,” says Charlene Li at Forrester Research, a consultancy. Future social networks, she thinks, “will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be.” - The Economist
As much as I’m a marketer and would love to believe this, I think it’s just flat inaccurate.
This prediction completely discounts the fact that part of what makes the Internet the Internet, is because of commerce. Commerce exists by the nature of creating significant value to others.
Because of this, there will always be newer networks with newer technologies. Newer networks with different demographics. Newer networks with varying costs (not just currency) to participate.
Whenever I see claims like this, I come back to other functions that exist due to the fundamentally social nature of humans: BBS systems and message boards. While certainly widespread, they are separate and distinct in their own markets. You do not see my message board posts on Yahoo!’s customizable home page.
Will there be aggregators, such as with RSS and e-mail? Absolutely. But they will be separate functions and networks of their own.
Is it archaic that we go to coffee shops to be social, when we can make coffee or hang out with others in our own homes? What about going to restaurants to eat food, when we can eat in our own homes?
The reality is that a portal exists because people want disparate information aggregated. A social network exists because people want to socialize online. Search engines exist because people want to find things more easily.
There’s a reason why Starbucks isn’t known for their dinner meals.
Monday, March 24th, 2008
So, I don’t really like sleep…other than the fact that it’s nice after significant physical exertion. But still, it kinda cramps my productivity. So I’m going to try and do less of it.
Those that know me, know that I’m fairly particular about sleep. I usually keep uncommon hours and often have no sleep schedule whatsoever other than “when I’m tired.”
This year, I’ve been trying to hack at the system of sleep a bit more precisely. I’ve done a fair amount of research and have discovered that, simply put, sleep is a series of chemical reactions in your body. I’ll explain more about what those are and what they do in a later post.
I’m definitely not up for polyphasic sleep in 20 minute cycles. It’s just not socially convenient in any way, shape, or form, and I can’t even imagine not getting into a longer flow-state.
However, 3 hours of sleep at night, with a 90 minute nap, like this guy, seems plausible. It would also fit in with my natural sleep habits.
So, my question to you all is this: What sleep experiments have you done? What research do you know about that I may benefit from?
I’ll be putting together the results of my research before next week - which is when I plan on starting the new sleep habit.
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
This year, I’ve taken significant steps to reduce distraction and allow for greater focus on certain things I’ve decided are important in my life.
Some examples are wearing the same clothes every day, getting rid of more than half of my possessions, eating the same nutritious meals six days a week (that’s a future post), eliminating alcohol, trimming my files from two huge cabinets to a 3″ folder, etc. I also got rid of my TV a year ago. I’ve never really been one for TV or movies anyway, but selling it was still a significant step.
The process has been great, and it has allowed me to more easily gain a mental clarity that I don’t know I’ve ever had. And despite the fact that I rarely recommend such “drastic” things, I think most people would do well to consider taking similar steps.
Yesterday, I watched a movie with a couple of friends. Blue Ray, flat screen awesomeness. When I left their place, it seemed like it took a few minutes for me to regain my mind. It was definitely palpable and awkward.
After noticing the juxtaposition of mental control, I realized that I had, in effect, stopped my mind for an hour and a half during this movie. I didn’t really think much…I let the moving picture box do the thinking for me.
I don’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing. But it was definitely a thing…
Mind-numbing, if you will.
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
Just because you can see the line, how do you know it’s there and what it’s like?
Sometimes you don’t when you think you do.
And when you cross that line, you’ll see that an experience offers an infinite number of points to take in rather than the limited perspective of speculation.
Friday, March 21st, 2008
Last week, I went over the elements of nutrition and macronutrients for a lean body composition. This week, it’s about fat loss.
Fat loss is fairly simple, but most people have incomplete or inaccurate ideas of what it takes to actually cut body fat from their body composition.
I’m going to talk about the three most effective ways for fat loss with exercise:
- Exercise to the extent that body fat, rather than food, is used as energy.
- Increasing your metabolism through cardio shortcuts.
- Increasing your metabolism through increasing muscle mass.
Exercise to the extent that body fat, rather than food, is used as energy.
The first option is pretty simple…basically, exercise long enough, and hard enough, to so that food energy is no longer sufficient to sustain performance. When food can’t be used for energy, fat is then turned into energy.
This is typically accomplished through a state called ketosis (remember, ketosis isn’t scary), where body fat is converted into energy. This is also accomplished through things like endurance cardio (bike training), strenuous sports like hockey, etc.
Increasing your metabolism through cardio shortcuts.
The second option is a shortcut with your cardio. Actually, two shortcuts.
High Intensity Interval Training, or HIIT, is the first shortcut and has been shown to increase your resting metabolic rate for a much greater period of time than much longer cardio sessions. In effect, you can often get more out of 20 minutes of HIIT training, than an hour on a bike.
The structure of a HIIT regimen is that you interval between intense aerobic activity, and moderate aerobic activity. This is done instead of a consistent ride on a bike or tradmill, for example. This study here, says it all:
After a 5 week conditioning period on a recumbant cycle, The High Intensithy Interval Training (HIIT) group perform sprints while the Endurance Training (ET) group performed a more traditional aerobic protocol, throughout the remaining 15 weeks. Both groups progressed in intensity. At the conclusion of the study, the HIIT group lost over 3 times as much subcutanious fat as the ET group despite expending less than half as many calories. For every calorie expended during HIIT, there was a nine fold loss of subcutanous body fat, as compared to the ET group.
Some ways that I’ve found to work best are alternating sprints with brisk walks, alternating jumping rope with crunches, or riding a bike on hilly terrain. As well, most of the newer exercise bikes have an interval training option.
The second shortcut is to exercise first thing in the morning, before breakfast. In essence, when you wake up, your body hasn’t had food (or food energy) since the last meal which may have been 8-12 hours prior. By this time, food has mostly been digested and any sort of intense activity would require energy. This energy comes from body fat.
So, doing HIIT first thing in the morning will work wonders. A couple/few pounds of fat loss a week, with a good diet, is not unreasonable.
Increasing your metabolism through increasing muscle mass.
Finally, one of the relatively unknown facets of fat los, is that muscle mass increases your metabolism, thus burning more calories. A number that I’ve heard is that each extra pound of muscle mass that you have burns up to an additional 50 calories per day.
So, how do you increase muscle mass quickly? Resistance (weight) training, and lifting s.l.o.w.l.y.
Despite the fact that it’s weight training, women will get toned with this kind of lifting, not bulky. Men can get noticeably bigger, depending on the intensity of the training regimen.
How it works is that by lifting weights slowly, you tear all of the various levels of muscle fibers. The way that most people lift relies on inertia and actually doesn’t stimulate the entire muscle. Lifting slowly get all of these layers and is actually much safer for you as well.
To maximize the effects here, you need 20-30 minutes of weight training, twice per week. Rest periods are crucial with this in order to give your muscles the time they need to rebuild themselves, hence only two workouts per week. In those 20-30 minutes, lift and lower weights with a count of 5-10 seconds up and 5-10 seconds down. Use a series of 6-8 compound exercises to hit the most muscle groups at a time, and do each exercise with an amount of weight that brings your muscle to failure after 6-8 reps.
The most common books for this principle are The Power of 10, and Slow Burn exercising, and strict research can be found here.
Thursday, March 20th, 2008
I got tired of thinking about clothes.
When I got to calculating the real cost of wearing clothes, I was appalled about how expensive it is to try and keep up with fashion. That awesome shirt you bought for $80 and wore twice? Yeah, that cost you $40 to wear it. That’s stupid.
So I got rid of almost all of my clothes and did this:
I expect to save several hundred dollars this year on clothes by wearing only white shirts and jeans. Exceptions: Special occasions.
When is a white shirt unacceptable? Nice jeans? I’ve got khakis but haven’t had to wear them once this year. And I won’t need to for another 5 weeks.
I’ve been doing this since the new year (beta test from Thanksgiving to the new year), and the mental space this clears up is amazing.
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
Give away your customers.
Let your competitors have them.
…
A worrisome thought, isn’t it?
It just might be the best one you can have.
…
If you can figure out how to give away your customers, and still have them come back (or not have any desire to leave in the first place), then you know your offer is good.
And that’s what really matters.
Because that’s when you know you’re giving your customers what they really want.
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008
The idea of a catalyst for creativity has been a long-standing debate: Do boundaries, or the removal of boundaries, inspire creativity? In essence, is a boundary a limiter or the foundation?
Architects use materials, math, and purpose (the creation of dwellings) to define the starting points of their creativity. Painters choose restrictions of a specific medium of paint and a subject as their boundaries. Business professionals choose professions, industries, and roles that define their boundaries.
Online, we have such things with “severe limitations” (140 character messaging), such as Twitter, that inspire new creativity every day in the realm of communications. Google limited your options on their home page, thus focusing the user on the search box, resulting in new, billion-dollar markets.
In the evolution of art, it wasn’t until a few hundred years ago, despite the existence of painting for thousands of years, that some art began to go noticeably in the directions of the unreal, abstract, or expressionistic. Technology continues to allow for redefining music through the use of synthetic sound. Business, with growing use of the Internet, continues to be redefined in ways that never existed before. (Did you ever think you would be doing bank transactions on your “brick” of a cell phone?)
When you have the conversation regarding the source of creativity, and you’re asking whether boundaries inspire or hinder creativity, perhaps it’s the wrong question.
For one, it becomes clear that our question needs clarifying. We aren’t searching for creativity, we’re searching for exceptionally recognized creativity - through appreciation of that thing as creative, or through wide adoption of new practices/services/products, etc.
Maybe I’m a bit off my rocker this morning, but I’d like to propose that it’s the fact that a boundary exists is what inspires creativity.
It is when we either leverage or reject those boundaries that we begin to see a notable evolution, progression, and change in interpretation of the rules. The rules become publicly redefined, not through preemptive measures, but through reflection on what has just been done.
As business owners, managers, etc, we begin to produce change to gain essential competitive advantage. Instead of looking at boundaries as restrictions, look at how you can leverage or reject them to create new markets.
Monday, March 17th, 2008
Tonight, I spent about 20 minutes putting together a script to automate a task that I’ve spent 3 hours on in the past two days. Now, I’ll get 5 times as much done…in my sleep tonight.
When I first started working at KeywordRanking/WebSourced/MarketSmart Interactive, I watched 20+ salespeople run Keyword/Search Engine Ranking Reports reports for 2-3 hours before making cold calls…Every…Single…Day. They would get a lead in from the website, enter in the URL and keywords, and send it to the prospect before making the call, waiting while it ran, etc.
It was completely stupid.
Once I realized what was happening, I spent my free time one week, and a few hours over the weekend, putting together an automated script that integrated a few programs and completely eliminated all of this work.
On Monday, I came in and ran the script.
Immediately, it started churning through the weekend’s leads one-by-one, pulling information out of Outlook, putting it into the ranking report software, copy the report into an e-mail, and send it to the VP of Sales.
Overnight, the entire sales team had just gained 25%+ more productivity. At 20 salespeople, this was like hiring 5 new people. And it didn’t cost a dime.
Due to the 1,200+ clients we had at the peak of the KeywordRanking/WebSourced heyday, we put together a lot of automation practices and infrastructure that was pretty rad.
Today, I still use automation practices as much as possible. It’s smart, it’s efficient, it’s effective, and it saves boatloads of cash…If you know what you’re doing and how to do it.
The problem is that most people don’t even know what’s possible to automate. The answer is: Everything.
Maximizing these three things below can turn your operations from a headache to the easiest part of your business to manage. Plus, seeing all of this work get done while you’re focusing on maximizing your knowledge and strategies? It’s just smart business.
1: AutoMate. This is the piece of Windows software that can make every other piece of software talk to each other. You can make it send keystrokes, run programs, open new windows, copy/paste, whatever you need it to do. I “know a guy” who even uses it to automate parts of his marketing. Online data mining with specialized software a pain? Not once you get the hang of AutoMate.
2: Outsourced Assistants. Tim Ferriss brought this idea to light for me. I’d say the learning curve here is a bit steeper, and a bit more costly, but once you get through that, you can have all of your weekly reporting, analysis, bills, whatever, all taken care of while you sleep. And you don’t have the responsibility of an employee…just an hourly bill.
3: Automation tools with your current services. Google AdWords reports. Automated bill-pay. RSS aggregators. Outsourced transcription services. (Writing a book? Ramble for a while and get someone else to type it for $30/hr…that’s a lot of words.) So many people don’t maximize the value of these tools, and it’s simply a matter of sitting down with them and tinkering around to see what they can do. And heck, that’s fun. Make the stuff you already pay for do even more work.
Aside from these three things, you also have things like Excel macros and learning the basics of PHP/MySQL to create and run tasks from your own computer. There’s nothing like having your own customized tools for those secret data mining and analysis projects you work on.
Go work less.
Sunday, March 16th, 2008
For several reasons, I love this article on Jeff Bezos, published by Wired in 1999. The tech boom was gaining notoriety, and the young Amazon.com was a hopeful leader still trying to find its way like everyone else.
One of the things I like is the idea that Bezos lives by called a Regret-Minimization Framework, exemplified here:
“When I’m 80,” he asked himself, “am I going to regret leaving Wall Street? No. Will I regret missing a chance to be there at the beginning of the Internet? Yes.”
Steve Jobs holds a similar posture in his legendary morning routine that he shared in his 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech…
“I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”
They both can be tough postures to hold, but are very powerful in answering decisions about how to live life…Or grow your business…Or manage your employees…Or make that decision that can have potential negative consequences for the community.
If you never have, consider giving the idea some practice in your day-to-day. Maybe you’ll find yourself throwing raves, setting otherwise-unreasonable goals, or quitting your job and moving across the country.
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