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Founder of Microsoft Bill Gates gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

Here is an article in the Times on how caffeine can significantly improve one’s performance:

Exercise physiologists have studied caffeine’s effects in nearly every iteration: Does it help sprinters? Marathon runners? Cyclists? Rowers? Swimmers? Athletes whose sports involve stopping and starting like tennis players? The answers are yes and yes and yes and yes.

[…] “There is so much data on this that it’s unbelievable,” [a researcher] said. “It’s just unequivocal that caffeine improves performance. It’s been shown in well-respected labs in multiple places around the world.” […]

For many years, researchers thought the sole reason people could exercise harder and longer after using caffeine was that the compound helped muscles use fat as a fuel, sparing the glycogen stored in muscles and increasing endurance. But there were several hints that something else was going on. For example, caffeine improved performance even in short intense bursts of exercise when endurance is not an issue.

Now, Dr. Tarnopolsky and others report that caffeine increases the power output of muscles by releasing calcium that is stored in muscle. The effect can enable athletes to keep going longer or to go faster in the same length of time. Caffeine also affects the brain’s sensation of exhaustion, that feeling that it’s time to stop, you can’t go on any more. That may be one way it improves endurance, Dr. Tarnopolsky said.

The performance improvement in controlled laboratory settings can be 20 to 25 percent, Dr. Tarnopolsky said. But in the real world, including all comers, the improvement may average about 5 percent, still significant if you want to get your best time or even win a race.

Here is the former CFO of Crazy Eddie talking about how he was able to maintain a large-scale fraud for years.

Now a public speaker on fraud, his advice is “Don’t trust, and always verify.”

As criminals we learned that the most effective way to commit our crimes was with a smile. In the Godfather movie Michael Corleone said, “Keep your friend close, but your enemies closer.”

As a criminal I followed Michael Corleone’s philosophy all too well. We corrupted our auditor’s professional skepticism by giving them extraordinarily rich consulting work in addition to their audit engagements. Today, at least under Sarbanes-Oxley accounting firms cannot engage in consulting work for the clients they audit.

Our auditors felt too comfortable with us as “good, respectable human beings with high integrity.” We would socialize with our auditors by having so-called “three martini lunches” and we would invite them to attend Antar family functions. They believed we were pillars in our community as we gave large amounts of money to charity and were involved in a number of good community causes.

If anyone has ever seen the movie “The Devil’s Advocate” starring Al Pacino they would know that the devil’s favorite sin in vanity. The white collar criminal is equivalent to the devil. We took advantage of the vanity of our auditors.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a fascinating interview with Jim Cramer explaining “the mechanics of the market”, ie how the market is manipulated.

Essentially, he is talking about shorting a stock, spreading rumors so the stock goes down, then profit from the shorts and buy the stock to profit again when people realize the rumors were BS and the stock goes back up.

I have no idea what he was thinking talking about this publicly, but you now know how much you can trust the financial advice you see on TV and in the papers.

Full transcript is after the jump (click on the “read more of this entry” link).

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

You know, a lot of times when I was short at my hedge fund—when I was positioned short, meaning I needed [the stock to go] down—I would create a level of activity beforehand that could drive the futures. It doesn’t take much money. Similarly, if I were long, and I wanted to make things a little bit rosy, I would go in and take a bunch of stocks and make sure that they’re higher. Maybe commit $5 million in capital, and I could affect it. What you’re seeing now is - maybe it’s probably a bigger market. Maybe you need $10 million in capital to knock the stuff down.

But it’s a fun game, and it’s a lucrative game. You can move it up and then fade it—that often creates a very negative feel. So let’s say you take a longer term view intraday, and you say, “Listen, I’m going to boost the futures, and the when the real sellers come in—the real market comes in—they’re going to knock it down and that’s going to create a negative view.” That’s a strategy very worth doing when you’re valuing on a day-to-day basis. I would encourage anyone who’s in the hedge fund game to do it. Because it’s legal. And it is a very quick way to make money. And very satisfying.

By the way, no one else in the world would ever admit that. But I don’t care. And I’m not going to say it on TV.
Read the rest of this entry »

Two terrible articles about people losing their job in this depression:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/fashion/01generationb.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/us/01survival.html

Edward Kennedy has brain cancer, and it at his age it would be easy to just say goodbye to friends and family and wait for death. But he is doing the exact opposite. He is not giving up. He is giving interviews saying “I don’t really plan to go away anytime soon”.

And one of the ways he uses to keep moving is to continue having a full agenda, and set concrete goals for the future:

“What has been essential to his recovery and motivation has been setting goals,” said Dr. Lawrence C. Horowitz, a former Kennedy staff member who has been overseeing his care.

The first goal the senator set after cancer surgery in June was to speak at the Democratic National Convention (he did, despite kidney stones); then he resolved to attend Mr. Obama’s inauguration (he did, though he had a seizure afterward).

“Now, his goal is to play a central role in health care reform,” Dr. Horowitz said. “That’s what keeps him going.”

That a fighter’s way of facing adversity.

It’s always fascinating to read old pieces written about folks who have gone on to be wildly successful.

Here is an old article on the movie The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, written in 1968.

Context: at the time Clint Eastwood was a TV actor - he had gone to work for TV after failing to find work in cinema. He was hired by Sergio Leone to feature in 2 of his movies, but those were spaghetti westerns and that sub-genre was despised by most critics at the time. It was NOT considered “serious” or “art”.

Three years ago, Clint Eastwood—an unshaven, slit-eyed refugee from television’s Rawhide—was glad to get an invitation from Italian Director Sergio Leone to star in a hokey little quickie to be shot in Spain.

It was called A Fistful of Dollars, and the title proved prophetic: the picture was a smash. (…) Now they are back with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—a title that might serve as the film’s own capsule review. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is an excellent talk on creativity, very enjoyable and full of little nuggets of gold.

The speaker is a widely successful author, Elizabeth Gilbert. She talks about how most creators have creeping self-doubts, moments of intense enthusiasm followed by intense guilt and fear, and how most of the great creative minds verged on mental imbalance - in many cases ending up committing suicide.

She goes on to explain that in past civilizations, a person could not BE a genius…he could only HAVE a genius. An artist was perceived as a channel from greater beings, his art a mere expression of a universal spirit bigger than himself. Using this as a frame of reference can help calm down doubts and fears and lead to better, easier ways to be inspired. One of them is simply to “show up” in front of your notepad/screen/drawing board and gently ASK the greater forces around you (or God or Buddha or whatever you want to call it) to please help and send you the ideas you need.

I also LOVED how she points out the automatic fear-based reactions you can get from most people. She experienced them:

Before success:

…with everyone saying that writing was a crazy idea, she would spend a lifetime honing her craft and fail miserably and die broke and alone…

After success:

…with everyone saying her best work was behind her and she must feel terrible knowing nothing she will ever write could possibly top it…

Gotta love it!

The market for Iphone applications is hot right now. Here is a success story: a coder raking in 600,000 in one month.

Here are a few success principles I read between the lines:

1. Taking quick action

This Iphone application marketplace is barely a few months old. You needed to jump right into the action to make money.

2. Let the competition inspire you, not discourage you

At the same time, the coder wasn’t among the first guys to do it. In fact, he waited long enough (a few months) that there were already 20,000 apps competing for customers’ attention. Some would have thought themselves out of it - “I’m too late in the game”, “it’s too crowded”, etc. He just did it.

He was inspired by another app coder who made 250K in 30 days a few month ago, and instead of being envious, he set out to do the same thing. Not only did he succeed but he made about twice that amount.

3. Working hard, no excuses

It wasn’t easy for Nicholas, either. After getting off his shift as an engineer at Sun Microsystems, he worked on iShoot eight hours a day, cradling his 1-year-old son in one hand and coding with the other.

4. Don’t let anything stop you - just do it

He didn’t have the money to buy books to learn how to write an iPhone app, so he taught himself by reading websites.

5. Originality is overrated

He didn’t try to re-invent the wheel - his app is a basic shooting game like many others already out there. That didn’t stop it from being successful.

6. “Moving the free line” - giving something away for free to get customers’ attention

When iShoot launched in October, business was slow for a while. And then Nicholas found some spare time to code a free version of the app — iShoot Lite, which he released January. Here’s how that helped: Inside iShoot Lite he advertised the $3, full version of iShoot. Users downloaded the free version 2.4 million times. And that led 320,000 satisfied iShoot Lite players to pay for iShoot.

Article on fraud and theft in Iraq by Army officers and contractors:

“I believe the real looting of Iraq after the invasion was by US officials and contractors, and not by people from the slums of Baghdad,” said one US businessman active in Iraq since 2003.

In one case, auditors working for SIGIR discovered that $57.8m was sent in “pallet upon pallet of hundred-dollar bills” to the US comptroller for south-central Iraq, Robert J Stein Jr, who had himself photographed standing with the mound of money. He is among the few US officials who were in Iraq to be convicted of fraud and money-laundering.

Despite the vast sums expended on rebuilding by the US since 2003, there have been no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline (…) One of the few visible signs of government work on Baghdad’s infrastructure is a tireless attention to planting palm trees and flowers in the centre strip between main roads. Those are then dug up and replanted a few months later. (…)

In 2004-05, the entire Iraq military procurement budget of $1.3bn was siphoned off from the Iraqi Defence Ministry in return for 28-year-old Soviet helicopters too obsolete to fly and armoured cars easily penetrated by rifle bullets. (…)

the evidence of a small-time US businessman called Dale C Stoffel who was murdered after leaving the US base at Taiji north of Baghdad in 2004 is being re-examined. Before he was killed, Mr Stoffel, an arms dealer and contractor, was granted limited immunity from prosecution after he had provided information that a network of bribery – linking companies and US officials awarding contracts – existed within the US-run Green Zone in Baghdad. He said bribes of tens of thousands of dollars were regularly delivered in pizza boxes sent to US contracting officers.

Here is an article about a one-man fraud scheme at Fry’s, an American consumer electronics chain. Even though Fry’s is a small operation (less than 40 stores), the executive was able to grab tens of millions of dollar in kickbacks. He did this for years, without raising any eyebrows. His huge gambling debts ended up doing him in.

The allegations came as a shock to the owners of Fry’s, who had thought so highly of their longtime employee that they had given him one of their top jobs — and lent him $10.1 million.

“He has a strong ability to persuade,” said spokesman Manuel Valerio, who worked in the Fry’s corporate offices with Siddiqui. “He carried himself as a confident individual, a businessperson with acumen.”

It is unclear when Mr. Siddiqui, Fry’s vice president of merchandising and operations, allegedly began receiving kickbacks. The IRS says he persuaded Fry’s to let him bypass the independent brokers who usually supply products, then demanded that vendors pay him commissions as high as 31% through a “fraudulent company” he set up in 1998. The sole purpose of PC International was to receive kickbacks (…).

Siddiqui deposited at least $167.8 million in PC International’s bank account between 2005 and 2008. The IRS alleges that $65.6 million came from just five vendors. It is still investigating where he got the rest.

Read the rest of this entry »

Quick interview of Tom Selleck by the Holywood.tv people (who always manage to ask the weirdest questions, see later in the interview).

The journalist asks “What’s the secret to your success?”

Tom Selleck: “Mostly just taking risks and being willing to fail…taking new risk every time out and…don’t protect yourself…and fail a lot…and dream big dreams.”

Not surprisingly, the interviewer doesn’t get it at all and proceeds to ask: “But… you are very successful!?”

Tom Selleck: “Yeah, but I failed a lot too…or you can’t be.”

Bob Parsons, Godaddy’s CEO, has a few more interesting rules (besides those we’ve already covered) in one of his video blogs.

Three of them strike me as important, and quite original too:

• “Train yourself to be positive”

I have already talked at length about the scientifically validated results of positivity, but Bob talks about training yourself to be positive. You often hear that you “should feel more positive” or “try to be more positive” or “just be more positive”, but seeing it as something you can train yourself to be can make all the difference.

Thinking about it as a training removes a lot of blocking thoughts and limiting beliefs. For starters, you acknowledge that you are actually making a deliberate effort into training yourself, with takes away any hesitation, guilt or awkwardness you might feel if you just told yourself “I should try to be more positive”.

Seeing it as a training process helps you to plow through. The important thing is to try to steer your thoughts towards positivity - it doesn’t have to always work, as long as you are trying, as long as you keep training.

Given the documented benefits of positivity, that’s obviously a glorious idea.

• “Practice being happy for 30 mins a day – refuse to feel any other way”

Again, you often hear “don’t worry, be happy”, etc etc. But how do you get there? There is no roadmap, and most people just think “that’s true, I should worry less and try to be happier” - then they go back to their daily grind and never apply it.

Read the rest of this entry »

As related by the Times in this article on positivity:

[There was an ] “Obama effect” on the test performance of African-Americans. Adult subjects in a study (still unpublished) answered comprehension questions from the verbal sections of the Graduate Record Examinations before and just after the presidential election. The black participants who were tested before the vote performed worse than whites; those tested immediately afterward scored almost as well as whites.

Here is an illustration of the “Fail faster” or “You can’t win all the time, but not trying surely leads to failure” mindset , coming from billionaire and New York mayor Mr. Bloomberg (article in International Herald Tribune).

[After losing on his bid to host the Olympics in New York, Bloomberg] noted that some people view losing as bad. “In the world I come from [ie business],” he remarked, “it’s another deal. You go on.”

That sort of against-the-odds confidence has been Bloomberg’s greatest strength - and greatest weakness. It has led him down treacherous paths that have landed him in political trouble since he moved into City Hall on Jan. 1, 2002. It has led others - among them his opponents in this year’s mayoral race - to question his judgment.

But it also led him, in 1981, to start Bloomberg LP, the global financial news empire that made him a billionaire. And 20 years later it led him to run for mayor on a Republican ticket with no political experience whatsoever. And win.

[…]

“You can’t have the good stuff unless you’re willing to try the big things, and if you try, sometimes you’re going to lose,” he said. “What do you do? Keep doing them.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Here are 16 rules from Bob Parsons, GoDaddy’s CEO.

Parsons sold the first company he ever started, a personal-finance software maker, for $64 million. He has built Go Daddy into far and away the market leader when it comes to managing Web domain names, leaving all competitors in the dust.

Bob is quite a character, and true to form, at the same time as he educates you with great quotes, he also sets it up to make a buck or two - you can buy his 16 rules poster here.

I really liked this list - in red are my highlights.

1. Get and stay out of your comfort zone.
I believe that not much happens of any significance when we’re in our comfort zone. I hear people say, “But I’m concerned about security.” My response to that is simple: “Security is for cadavers.”

2. Never give up.
Almost nothing works the first time it’s attempted. Just because what you’re doing does not seem to be working, doesn’t mean it won’t work. It just means that it might not work the way you’re doing it. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and you wouldn’t have an opportunity.

3. When you’re ready to quit, you’re closer than you think.
There’s an old Chinese saying that I just love, and I believe it is so true. It goes like this: “The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed.”

4. With regard to whatever worries you, not only accept the worst thing that could happen, but make it a point to quantify what the worst thing could be.
Very seldom will the worst consequence be anywhere near as bad as a cloud of “undefined consequences.” My father would tell me early on, when I was struggling and losing my shirt trying to get Parsons Technology going, “Well, Robert, if it doesn’t work, they can’t eat you.” Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote about Seinfeld before - I love the guy and often find him really profound in his interviews. Here is a productivity tip from him, as published on lifehacker:

[Seinfeld] said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. But his advice was better than that. He had a gem of a leverage technique he used on himself and you can use it to motivate yourself—even when you don’t feel like it.

He revealed a unique calendar system he uses to pressure himself to write. Here’s how it works.

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

“Don’t break the chain,” he said again for emphasis.

Over the years I’ve used his technique in many different areas. I’ve used it for exercise, to learn programming, to learn network administration, to build successful websites and build successful businesses.

It works because it isn’t the one-shot pushes that get us where we want to go, it is the consistent daily action that builds extraordinary outcomes. You may have heard “inch by inch anything’s a cinch.” Inch by inch does work if you can move an inch every day.

Daily action builds habits. It gives you practice and will make you an expert in a short time. If you don’t break the chain, you’ll start to spot opportunities you otherwise wouldn’t. Small improvements accumulate into large improvements rapidly because daily action provides “compounding interest.”

Skipping one day makes it easier to skip the next.

Interesting bit in this 1981 (!) NYT article I just stumbled upon:

”Our society conditions people to be power worshipers,” said Dr. Robert E. Gould, professor of psychiatry and associate director of the Family Life Division of New York Medical College. ”So many of us take jobs that are not suited to us - all because they make us look good to others. It’s a tragedy because it’s a misunderstanding of what power is.

”Of course, the power motif is very different for men and women,” he said. ”But to many public figures, power means being cloaked with a particular label, and to the extent that they derive power from that label, then they are bereft when they lose it.”

Powerful people who feel they have become nobodies are not complete persons in themselves, said Dr. Gould. ”Real power cannot be taken away. The job can come or go, but the person remains. Real power is self-knowledge, and a feeling of self-worth and self-esteem. If you have that, what you do and how you behave is a reflection of your true inner self, and not an attempt to achieve applause from others. Such a person isn’t devastated if the Presidential Seal - or any other external - is taken away. Real power is the thing that men and women have that comes from within.”

Interesting article on how living in a dense urban environment can adversely affect you.

In a nutshell, living in a big city, away from nature, leads to increased stress and agressivity and decreases attention levels.

“I think cities reveal how fragile some of our ‘higher’ mental functions actually are,” Kuo says. “We take these talents for granted, but they really need to be protected.”

The key, then, is to find ways to mitigate the psychological damage of the metropolis while still preserving its unique benefits. Kuo, for instance, describes herself as “not a nature person,” but has learned to seek out more natural settings: The woods have become a kind of medicine. As a result, she’s better able to cope with the stresses of city life, while still enjoying its many pleasures and benefits.

So walking around in nature is proven to make you feel better, more focused, calm and refreshed.

Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil.

This totally jibe with my experience. I have just spent a month in my hometown, walking around in the wilderness, and adjusting to my return in the wild urban jungle has been tough.

I now understand a bit better why,  and realize I should go out of my way to be in natural settings more often while I’m here.

I suggest you do the same.

Interesting story of a Kiwi entrepreneur who copy-pasted the eBay business model in his home country, and ended up selling it for 700 millions 7 years later.

Sam seems slightly miffed that we are all so aghast at the enormous amount of money Fairfax was willing to pay for his company.

“There have always been sceptics and this week has been no different from the last seven years,” he says.

“All of a sudden, people get it and they think ‘far out, maybe it’s something of value and something good’.

“That’s something I’ve dealt with since day one. People have looked at me and wondered what I have done with my time. The other day I overheard people in a cafe wondering how we made any money at all.”

He laughs. “People think I just run it from my bedroom or something. The main thing that’s shocked New Zealand is the fact that we are a successful business. Fundamentally, this is a very, very strong company and that’s what Fairfax has bought.”

“Some people are better decision-makers than others,” he says.

“Some people spend a lot of time sitting around talking about things they’re going to do and others get out and do them. I think there are plenty of people like that.”

So that’s the trick? To do rather than think?

“Yeah, I think so. Everyone says a lot of people will no doubt think, ‘oh, I wish I had that idea’ but what they should think about is ‘what ideas do I have?’ And get off your bum and go and do it.”

That’s something the famously forthright Gareth Morgan has been telling us for years. Sam, he says, pulled Trade Me off because he was confident and never afraid to take risks. But he qualifies that by saying the risks were excruciatingly well researched.

Instead of leaping head first into a business that he fancied the idea of, 22-year-old Sam sat back and asked himself what were the biggest internet businesses. They were auctions and dating, says Gareth. So that’s what he decided to set up.

“He always had the ability to drill down into what is the business case. If one doesn’t exist, then he doesn’t waste his time on it.”

[…]

You don’t try out all your ideas […]. Eliminate through careful analysis and look internationally. Especially for online businesses.

“That’s where the corporates here are completely falling on their faces,” says Gareth. “Like Telecom putting millions into [online second-hand company] Ferret, or Whitcoulls putting millions into Flying Pig and ending up being one. They weren’t looking internationally at how thing were being done.”

Sam, however, worked out that only one online auction site like eBay thrived in any given market and the trick was to be the first one to start up somewhere.

The trick, Gareth says, is to figure out your competition and ask exactly how they make their dollars.

“Ask what is it the market values. Get to the essence of their business.”

[…]

“He had not only built the site and it was going and people loved it. But he also had the business case for the precedent for it offshore. He had his shit together, basically. It’s amazing. And incredibly inspiring for young people.