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This is an interesting video from Seth Godin. He takes a while to get started and I think his balloon metaphors are pretty weak, but he makes good points nevertheless.

His main point is:

“What you do for a living is not be creative. Everyone is creative. What you do for a living is SHIP.”

He then explains how your “lizard brain” will sabotage you right before the finish line, because it is scared of criticism and being judged. You need to quiet that part of your brain and SHIP it anyway.

I like that Godin has the honesty to say most of what he tried to do in his own life (from writing books to starting companies) has failed – but he is still successful because he kept shipping.

Of course, this isn’t new to Developage’s readers – it goes right along Tom Selleck explaining that you can’t be successful without failing a lot, or Bloomberg saying:

“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. What do you do? Keep doing them.”

Godin also mentions the concept of Resistance, which comes from Steven Pressfield, whose book The War of Art was already on my radar. I’ll definitely get on that one soon. I’ve just ordered the audiobook.

I liked this piece in Psychology Today:

Some of the most interesting solutions [to get more out of your time] ]involve figuring out how to do two things at once. [...]

For instance, I met a woman named Audrey Carlson several years ago who was struggling to figure out how to spend time with her friends and take care of her growing family. She started a group called “Chop and Chat.” Every Sunday six friends got together to cook at a member’s home. Each member brought the ingredients to make a different recipe that was then split into six portions. Members took home six different main courses for the week. Chop and Chat was an inventive way for the women to cook together, socialize, and prepare meals for their families.

Another example is venture capitalist Fern Mandelbaum. You would assume that meetings with Fern take place in her office… and you’d be wrong. Fern is an avid athlete and her meetings take place on hiking paths. Everyone who knows Fern knows to wear walking shoes and carry a bottle of water to their meetings in anticipation of a strenuous hike. Fern finds that this strategy is a great way to get to know each entrepreneur while also getting exercise.

Doing two things at once is something I practice with a passion. For example, if I’m not eating with someone, I’m always reading or listening to something interesting. When commuting or cooking or even brushing my teeth, I am usually listening to an audiobook on my mp3 player. It’s astonishing how much more you get done when you use this trick.

Shocking figures in Sports Illustrated, that shows what happens when you don’t care of your finances:

By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce.

Within five years of retirement, an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke.

The reason: ignorance, poor planning, relying on friends instead of professionals, hiring dishonest professionals (no due diligence), going for tangible assets (real estate, newly invented products) instead of intangibles (stocks), and of course, reckless spending.

Good article in TIME on diet vs exercise.

Key points:

1. Over-eating to “gain muscle” is counter-productive

Gaining muscle doesn’t mean you should eat THAT much to sustain it. Muscles doesn’t need that much energy. 10 labs of extra muscle only burns 40 calories a day. So if you think you can eat like crazy because you are more muscular than before, think again. That’s actually how/why people who exercise get FATTER.

This was a trap in which I fell into myself. After exercising for a year or two I was actually fatter because I was eating too much in order to “gain muscle”. This is a common misconception. See the truth about bulking for more.

2. The ‘post-exercise reward’ factor

The average person can only have so much self-control. So when that person has had the self-control to exercise that day, later his self-control “muscle” is weaker. Then he will rationalize that he can allow himself a double muffin since he just exercised anyway. AND he will post-rationalize that he needs extra calories for bulking and sustain his new muscles anyway – see the point above.

3. Spread exercise around your day

It’s unrealistic to get fit by exercising for 30 or 60 minutes a day but sitting on your ass the rest of the time. You may be better off distributing your exercise in short bursts thorough the day – walking, running a flight of stairs, do some push-ups, etc. This is what we used to do back a few centuries ago – small physical activities all day long.

4. Focus on food

To lose weight and keep it off, focus more on food than on exercise; it’s what and how much you eat that matters most.

Check out this other article for more details on exercise, the truths and the myths.

From David Rowan’s blog:

How did eBay make a boring tech firm look sexy? By inventing its own ‘creation myth’. David Rowan reports

It was the warm, smalltown story of a corporate giant’s humble beginnings that enticed Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, even the fact-obsessed New Yorker. When Pam Wesley wanted to boost her collection of Pez sweet dispensers, her fiance, Pierre Omidyar, built a website for her to trade them. That website grew to be the huge online auction house eBay, one of the internet gold rush’s few success stories – even though, in the words of the company’s PR chief, Mary Lou Song, it began simply “as kind of a love token”.

It was a touching tale, recounted in endless profiles on both sides of the Atlantic, with only one flaw: it was a lie. As Song admits in a new book by Adam Cohen, The Perfect Store: Inside eBay, she invented the story five years ago to generate publicity for an otherwise dull tech company. “No one wants to hear about a 30-year-old genius who wanted to create a perfect market,” Song confesses. So she constructed what corporate PRs call a “creation myth”, and hoodwinked some of the world’s most respected reporters.

[...] “Reporters didn’t show much interest in marketplaces, or battered keyboards or Star Wars artefacts for sale,” he says – until they heard the Pez story. “Inevitably, the finished story would mention the Pez angle but leave out virtually all the other factors.”

Tech companies, often those hardest to sell to journalists as “sexy”, are those most commonly linked with creation myths. Apple Computers and Hewlett-Packard even ran commercials celebrating their garage origins. When three management consultants launched an online betting site, Flutter.com, three years ago, it was widely reported that it stemmed from their own betting competitions during a Super Bowl party. “That wasn’t the case,” says a source close to the team, “but it didn’t stop them winning the column inches.”

From a piece on Ford’s CEO:

Mulally instituted color coding for reports: green for good, yellow for caution, red for problems.

Managers coded their operations green at the first couple of meetings to show how well they were doing, but Mulally called them on it. “You guys, you know we lost a few billion dollars last year,” he told the group. “Is there anything that’s not going well?”

After that the process loosened up. Americas boss Mark Fields went first. He admitted that the Ford Edge, due to arrive at dealers, had some technical problems with the rear lift gate and wasn’t ready for the start of production.

“The whole place was deathly silent,” says Mulally. “Then I clapped, and I said, ‘Mark, I really appreciate that clear visibility.’ And the next week the entire set of charts were all rainbows.”

“If something is off-track, we are much better at identifying it and resolving it,” says CFO Booth. “Not everything turns to green. If it doesn’t, we have to modify the plan.”

Compare that to the prevalent culture in other companies, where bad news or even (God forbid!) talking about the competition is strongly frowned upon.

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 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.