Category Archives: Business

Sometimes The Small Things In Life Matter

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No one is too small to make a difference, they just might be too small to do it by themselves. If you can get a few big dogs in to help you out that’s great, but the problem with them is that they can’t be everywhere and help you all the time, look for someone smaller. Turn to the rats to help you out, they are plentiful and will be eager to help you for next to nothing as long as you provide something that makes them happy.

That was the realization I had watching Wanted, when Wesley releases the rats into the mill. He provides them with peanut butter, albeit laced with gasoline, in order to have them help in his mission. Several dozen dogs couldn’t have presented him with the return that he received for the hundreds of rats that went out to return his favor. So maybe you should follow his lead and seek the little guys that want you to help them out, not the big guys that you want help from. How do you think they got big, they helped the little guy out, and he let his friends know about it.

Look at how the successful social-networks grew. They all start with a small focused market, Myspace with Musicians, Facebook with College Students, Twitter with texting and the Early Adopter. Each of these small markets had one huge thing in common, they were set in a location where they could expand to the general population, Myspace to fans, Facebook to older Alum and the general public, Twitter to marketers and people looking for an audience. Then they expanded to the mainstream audiences through word of mouth and the necessity for people to have friends on the network to interact with.

They did 3 things and they did them well.

  • They decided on a market.
  • They expanded their market into a natural evolution of the original Market.
  • The focused on the large groups, of small people, to help spread the message, not small groups, of big guys.

Far too many people have the wrong perspective. They seek to become a giant by standing on the shoulders of other giants, rather than building a self sufficient community that helps each other rise up to the sky. I’m going to show you a perspective variation of the King’s Chessboard, a parable in which a king offers a peasant a payment for his services, the peasant simply asks that the king give him double the amount of rice that he gave the day before, until he has covered each square on a chessboard, starting with one grain of rice. The king soon realizes that he can’t honor this payment as it’s too much for the kingdoms granary.

In my variation, I’ll have the king offering 2 different rewards to the peasant, he can receive 1 billion grains of rice each day until each square has been covered, or he can take the option from the original story of 1 grain of rice and have it doubled everyday for each square. Most people would be blinded by the large sum that they are told they will receive each day and wouldn’t quantify the fact they will actually lose a large sum by taking the larger initial choice. In fact, you will receive only ~.0000007% of the total had they chosen the doubling.

So remember, sometimes it’s better to go with the small people and to take time for the little things in life. They will pay off much more in the long term than always trying to do something that involves the major points in of focus. Take your time and if someone needs help don’t be greedy go and help them you never know the power to change your life they might have.

Strive To Create Wealth, Not Money

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We are all spending our days working for someone, whether it be ourselves or someone else, or something. How do you know what you’re doing is worth your time and effort? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself for several weeks, and I still haven’t figured it out, to be honest. I do have an idea of how we may be able to come up with an estimate, this requires honest introspection, no lying to yourself. Continue reading →

Success Isn’t In Your Genes, It’s In Your Heart

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The other day I watched Gattaca and was fascinated by it’s attitude. The film is supposed to be a sci-fi thriller looking into a dystopian future where if you weren’t genetically engineered you were of lower social rank. This however isn’t what I took away from the film, I took away something far brighter, a look into successful habits.  The protagonist is a genetically inferior child with a weak heart and huge dreams to reach the stars. Here’s a list of some of the habit’s I found.

Don’t Save Anything to Go Back

This is probably, the most noticeable in the film as this statement is only slightly paraphrased from the film. The reason not to save anything is because the risk going to prod you along, you will know in the back of your head it’s sink or swim. I don’t recommend going so far as that if you make a mistake you will fail completely, but just far enough to make it hard to accept failure.

Always Look Up

In the film, Vincent stares at the rocket that is his dream multiple times as it is taking off. He was positive that he would be able to find a way to get on it no matter how impossible it seemed. Positivity will lead you towards your dreams, you just have to know where to look, up.

Share Your Success

What’s better than one person being successful and reaching there goals. It’s multiple people assisting each other in achieving their goals. The movie provides a very close relationship between multiple characters as they each find success through assisting each other. Pull someone along for the ride and let them occasionally pull you up also when you slip.

Don’t Let Others Tell You What You Can or Can’t Do

Being born in a time of genetic engineering, Vincent’s parent’s new exactly what was wrong with him from the time he was born. As the movie progresses you can clearly see that he was triumphing over these ailments that were supposed to cripple his potential. He set his own bar and didn’t let what was supposed to happened keep him from going strong. Don’t let other’s inhibit you from doing what you set out to do.

Success Isn’t In Your Genes, It’s In Your Heart

Remember that, you achieve what you want to achieve, and only what you want to achieve. Your life isn’t predetermined by what’s pumping through your veins but what’s pumping through your mind. So what is it that you want from life and who are you taking for the ride?

3 Types Of People You Just Can’t Forget

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I got to reminiscing over the last 6 months at my job. I’ve seen several hundred customers come and go but only remember maybe 20 names. So I asked myself if I could group them into categories to figure out what made them so special, I came up with 3 groups that contain them.

Douchebags

These are the guys that do pretty much anything to make your job just a bit harder. They can be overly pushy when you tell them that you’re unable to assist them. They will do anything to get what they want and don’t give a damn whether it’s possible on your end, but their persistence though annoying sticks with you. You use them to benchmark  your other customers. These guys stick out because they ruffle your feathers and they just beckon to be remembered.

Nice Guys

This group you don’t want to forget because they are the few people who can brighten your day up. They can call you up on short notice and you don’t have anything for them that’s decent but they are happy to take what you have to offer and so glad that you could get them out of there bind. I had one guy, Mr. Bruce, that wouldn’t stop smiling it was just so remarkably odd, normally I see people who are upset because they got into an accident or their flight was canceled. These are the people you want to come back again and again just so they can cheer you up.

Frequenters

These people come in maybe once every month or two and setup there reservations before they ever leave. You get to know exactly what they want when they show up. You really don’t want to forget frequenters because they are probably 20-30% of your business in my small town. You can’t offend them because they will go to your competitors and are unlikely to come back.

These are the 3 groups that I just can’t forget, I know them all by name and see someone from one of these groups atleast once per week. One thing about these groups though is that they aren’t self contained, I’ve got frequent nice guys and frequent douchebags. I’ve also managed to get a nice douchebag, I assume it’s just because I’m not used to the abrasiveness of people from NYC, they don’t come to small town West Virginia that often.  I bet if you wanted you could even make your self unforgetable by mixing them with your own style.

Technology Is Killing Our Time Of Marvel

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What’s the most interesting thing that you’ve marveled over in the last month? last week? last day? I’d bet most of you picked different things for each one. Just think about how fast information is flowing through your media streams; you have less and less time to marvel over something.

As technology makes more and more information available to you at an ever greater speed, your time to marvel over the latest design or innovative idea shrinks. Look at just about any area that your interested in. Now, think back to last year and what you were amazed by in that area and what your amazed by this year, last year’s seems pretty bland in comparison, right? How many times were you amazed by the changes that took place throughout the year in that area? Depending on your source for information it would probably change once a month, once a week, once a day.

Now let’s go back and look at what would have been a marvel to people throughout the 20th century,  a lot of what I’m basing this paragraph on is the image from Visualizing Economics.   The most marvelous things at the turn of the century had very little competition, due to less information for the masses. It took cars 15 years to reach 20% usage and during the same period electricity reached only 30% of the nation. These would have been marvelous utilities to have could you afford them.

As time goes on the different media streams come along that hasten the usage and acceptance I figure a ~20% usage rate as the reduction to marvel. The radio comes along and reaches 20% in just 5 years but allows other forms of media, such as television, computers, the internet, to develop more quickly than had been possible before.  B/W and Color televisions both took ~5 years to reach the threshold, computers took about 20 years and the internet roughly 10.

If you look at how fast we find new marvels today it takes between 1-5 years for nearly anything to reach the  20% threshold. Also, with each new advance in media we find that it loses it’s marvel much quicker than before because there are many more things to marvel at, which reduces the threshold to about 10% currently. As more and more new things come around we have less and less time to spend marveling over it.

This ever increasing pace that removes our abilities to attach to something for a long period of time is going to make it harder and harder for businesses to become a Goliath. This has already started to show in weak returns for advertising and purchasing of slower media types, such as newspapers and magazines. In the very near future you will have to come out with something that will blow everyone away as quick as possible  you don’t have the time to wait and become a Microsoft or Google.

Would love to hear your opinions in the comments about what you think of this idea.

Owning Your Brand

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Had a discussion on Twitter over how much you would pay for your brand and the reasons why you would want to own it. Today, with the internet everyone can own his/her brand, but with the brand comes the brand identity across the board which you might not be able to capitalize on if someone else already has it. Now it’s important to possess your name across the major urls and also across the major social media spectrum. There are 4 major reasons that you would want to own your brand across the board.

1. Easy to Find: Sharing an unanimous identity across the spectrum means that people only need to know that one aspect to find you on their favorite service. This makes it easier for you to not ostracize your followers by not being where they feel comfortable.

2. Reputation Proceeds You: If someone knows you from another service it will make it easier for you to gain following as you enter a new service. You also will have a beacon set up for when followers from another service come looking for you.

3. Protection From Miscreants: This is probably one of the big ones in this day and age. If someone shares the name with you and they do something that could only be viewed in a negative light; they are going to hurt your brand.

4. Multiple Connection Points: You can connect with people on multiple fronts in a multitude of ways. This provides heightened connectivity with those around you. Allows you to create deeper relationships that connecting on only one front.

5 Life Lessons You Can Learn From Poker

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I used to play a lot of poker, but I quit while I was trying to bring my grades back up and also had a long streak of losses. Recently, I began playing about 2-3 games a week just for fun and realized that a lot of what I’ve learned about business, entrepreneurship, and finance are key to the game. You don’t have to play poker to understand these principles that make it easier to be a winner in life and on the felt.

  1. Bankroll Management:This is definitely one of the largest keys to the game of poker, making sure you can still be in the game when your opportunity arises. The concept is that your allowing yourself to achieve the maximum value at the lowest risk possible. If your good at managing your stack you can take a small stack and still come out on top, do the same with your skills, talents, and money and you will can build a great life. This is the foundation that you build off of.
  2. Aggressively Take Chances: The more you risk in the early stages the easier it will be to recoup losses or exploit your massive advantage in mid- and late-game. This becomes especially true if you are good at managing your bankroll.
  3. Know When to Back Down: The corollary to number 2, being aggressive can put your in a winning position in most situations, but if you get cocky you might end up losing everything. You may scare away the source of your income. It’s up to you to toss a few hands, either due to the fact that your hand sucks or just to provide an incorrect position to your competition.
  4. Opportunities are not Rare: Yes, this may not be 100 percent true in life; it is in poker though.  Every hand your dealt is an opportunity to advance, in life you have probably on average one opportunity every day. The problem is that most people don’t have the skills to see opportunities in their peripheral, only the obvious ones that stand out right in front of them.
  5. Luck is a Factor: Every person is dealt a different starting hand, sometimes you will be beat before you ever see your hand. The only thing that you can do is try to take advantage of what you’ve been giving.