I don’t think winners beat the competition because they work harder. And it’s not even clear that they win because they have more creativity. The secret, I think, is in understanding what matters.

It’s not obvious, and it changes. It changes by culture, by buyer, by product and even by the day of the week. But those that manage to capture the imagination, make sales and grow are doing it by perfecting the things that matter and ignoring the rest.

Both parts are difficult, particularly when you are surrounded by people who insist on fretting about and working on the stuff that makes no difference at all.

“Clothes And Self-Perception” - great article in the New York Times about the psychology behind the clothes you wear everyday.

Cheers!

Tomorrow is my birthday — always an opportunity for reflection, but especially this time. For several weeks now, I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learned during the past six decades that really matters. Here’s a first pass:

1. The more we know about ourselves, the more power we have to behave better. Humility is underrated. We each have an infinite capacity for self-deception — countless unconscious ways we protect ourselves from pain, uncertainty, and responsibility — often at the expense of others and of ourselves. Endless introspection can turn into self-indulgence, but deepening self-awareness is essential to freeing ourselves from our reactive, habitual behaviors.

2. Notice the good. We each carry an evolutionary predisposition to dwell on what’s wrong in our lives. The antidote is to deliberately take time out each day to notice what’s going right, and to feel grateful for what you’ve got. It’s probably a lot.

3. Let go of certainty. The opposite isn’t uncertainty. It’s openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow.

4. Never seek your value at the expense of someone else’s. When we’re feeling devalued, our reactive instinct is to do anything to restore what we’ve lost. Devaluing the person who made you feel bad will only prompt more of the same in return.

5. Do the most important thing first in the morning and you’ll never have an unproductive day. Most of us have the highest energy early in the day, and the fewest distractions. By focusing for a designated period of time, without interruption, on the highest value task for no more than 90 minutes, it’s possible to get an extraordinary amount of work accomplished in a short time.

6. It’s possible to be excellent at anything, but nothing valuable comes easy and discomfort is part of growth. Getting better at something depends far less on inborn talent than it does the willingness to practice the activity over and over, and to seek out regular feedback, the more precise the better.

7. The more behaviors you intentionally make automatic in your life, the more you’ll get done. If you have to think about doing something each time you do it, you probably won’t do it for very long. The trick is to get more things done using less energy and conscious self-control. How often do you forget to brush your teeth?

8. Slow down. Speed is the enemy of nearly everything in life that really matters. It’s addictive and it undermines quality, compassion, depth, creativity, appreciation and real relationship.

9. The feeling of having enough is magical. It rarely depends on how much you’ve got. More is rarely better. Too much of anything eventually becomes toxic.

10. Do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, and don’t expect anything in return.Your values are one of the only possessions you have that no one can take away from you. Doing the right thing may not always get you what you think you want in the moment, but it will almost always leave you feeling better about yourself in the long run. When in doubt, default to calm and kind.

11. Add more value in the world than you’re using up. We spend down the earth’s resources every day. Life’s primary challenge is to put more back into the world than we take out.

12. Savor every moment — even the difficult ones. It all goes so fast.

Great video posted on www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog -

Eric Siu is the Vice President of SEO at Evergreen Search Marketing. He also writes about SEO topics such as the 10 Immutable Laws of SEO. Follow him @ericosiu

Disconnecting in the digital age seems like a virtue and a sin. The reality is, it’s hard to unplug. So much of daily life, particularly work, is tied to the web.

But temporarily disconnecting can actually help us be better on the job. And one of the best ways to do it is by hitting the gym. As it turns out, there are actual business perks to working up a sweat. Below are five that will get you pumped up.

1. Focus

We live in a world where every two days we generate as much information as we did up to 2003. With that constant influx of data, it’s easy to become distracted. One second you’re checking your e-mail. The next second, you’re texting someone back. Then you have instant messages to read. Oh, and what about getting in some Pinterest and Facebook before you go to lunch?

The bottom line is, in this age, we need to learn to focus better. Working out teaches us to focus on one main goal: completing a work out. Focusing at the gym will allow you to carry that behavior over to your work. You’ll realize how much more productive you can be when you truly lock in and do one thing at a time.

2. New Ideas

Working out not only allows you to focus and think of different ways to solve current problems, but it also creates room to come up with new ideas. Take advantage of the clarity you can only get while you’re in the zone. Who knows? You might come up with your next big idea.

3. Confidence

You already know that working out helps people look great. The added benefit of looking great is confidence. And confidence will lead you to:

• Close more deals: When you’re confident, you get the feeling you can accomplish anything you want. It’s going to become tougher for you to accept no for an answer. In fact, each “no” might inspire you to push harder.
• Meet new people : Confidence will also help you realize that there isn’t a reason to be shy, and that it’s more beneficial to you to build as many quality relationships as you can.
• Speak more confidently: Talking confidently goes a long way in the business world. People want to talk to someone who’s sure of themselves.

4. Discipline

The first step to being successful is starting. The second step is discipline. If you’ve had trouble committing to any project for an extended period of time, try working out. Developing a habit of consistently working out will make it easier for you to apply the same dogged discipline to other aspects of your life, including business.

5. Stress Relief

Stress saps your energy and decreases your productivity. If you’re stressing, then your anxiety levels are probably high. There’s a good chance you’re brooding about things so you aren’t fun to be around either. A great way to blow off this steam is to channel those feelings into your work out. You’ll clear your mind, and you’ll feel better. That will make your work life a lot easier to address.

Image courtesy of ClipArtIllustration.com

Seth Godin is the founder of The Domino Project and has written twelve books that have been translated into more than thirty languages. Every one has been a bestseller. He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything.

…has nothing to do with the Justice Department or agency pricing.

No, the challenge the big book publishers are facing is that a perfect industry is being replaced by one filled with chaos and opportunity.

Perfect?

Limited shelf space plus limited competitors plus well-understood cost of creation and production meant that stability reigned. The industry was polished and understood.

For three hundred years or so, book publishing had nothing in common with technology businesses where the underlying economics of the business were questioned regularly. That meant that just about all of the creative energy in the business went into finding new content, not new business models.

Yesterday, I wrote about a short film online called Caine’s Arcade. It’s worth noting that more people have spent ten minutes watching this film in the last week than have read all but a handful of books over the same period of time. And even more profoundly, that this short film has raised almost $200,000 for the star’s college fund without really trying.

Conceptually, this is a book.

Of course there’s no paper and there’s no store and there’s no sale. Which is why people in the book industry won’t see it as a book. That’s because they grew up in an industry that never worried about technology changing what they do or how they do it.

[As I read this, I'm worried that some may think I meant that Caine's Arcade ought to be turned into a book, written down and printed. Yikes. No, I meant that the act of finding Caine, of investing in a short film, of bringing that idea to the public--it's stuff like that that publishers are actually quite good at--the format and the economics will change, but the risky act of bringing ideas to the public is what publishers do.]

Revolutions enable the impossible at the same time they destroy the perfect. There’s entirely too much handwringing about how the perfect book industry is no more. That’s true. It’s no longer perfect. What’s happening now, though, is the impossible.

If the companies (and the people who work for them) are going to be in this business just five years from now, they will only thrive if they understand that an entirely new business model will have to be built and understood. And it will have nothing whatsoever to do with paper. It will be about ideas.

Which is what book publishing was supposed to be about all along, right?

Editor’s note: Justin Kan is the founder of Exec, the fastest way to get your jobs or errands done in real-time. He previously co-founded Justin.tv / TwitchTV, which recently spun off Socialcam. You can follow him on Twitter @justinkan and check out his blog here.

When I was in college, I had a fixation on weight lifting. Like many other young men, I was obsessed with working out, with a disproportionate concentration on upper body muscle-building exercise. Despite what it may have appeared, my focus wasn’t on being fit (I rarely did cardio, had no flexibility), it was on appearing fit and having an adequately muscular build, especially when in comparison to my peers. Fit enough wasn’t “fit enough to my own standard,” but rather “looking more fit than everyone else.”

My mother always told me that if something was worth doing, it was worth doing your best. Unfortunately, the message got a little garbled in translation, and what I internalized was that if something was worth doing, you had to be the best. And ever since I’ve entered my adult life, I’ve always had a small knot in my chest every time I’ve done anything that can be compared; a small worrying reminder that I’m not the best at whatever it is.

Of course that is true. With over six billion human beings on the planet, there’s always someone better than you at everything you’ll ever do. Someone who will achieve more, younger. Someone who has made more money, earned more accolades. Better at music, luckier in love.

Silicon Valley has an unhealthy obsession with the being at the top. We’ve canonized Steve Jobs and idolize Mark Zuckerberg. TechCrunch headlines are almost entirely about companies being successful, acquisitions and funding rounds and “best thing ever” product launches; how many articles are about companies headed to the deadpool? I’ve had friends whose startups have grown much larger and more successful than mine, made orders of magnitude more money, and I’ve felt envy at times. I’ve seen other friends obsessed with keeping up with the startup Joneses, abandoning long-term thinking to try to find success, money and status as quickly. There is even competition for who is having the best time; at events I always hear not-so-subtly masked bragging about who is experiencing the most growth, having the most fun with their startup. I know I’ve contributed to it myself. It is insanity.

I bought into the race completely. I used to think: if we just grow to another order of magnitude of traffic, everything will be feel great. If we reach the next revenue milestone, light will shine down from the heavens and I’ll finally be successful. But we always hit our goals, and mentally nothing changed.

One of the most simultaneously depressing and enlightening moments for me was when I learned that human beings don’t get any happier day-to-day once they’ve reached a certain level of comfort. In America, that’s around $75,000 of salary a year, something which pretty much anyone reading this blog can achieve. Making more money or having more titles beyond that doesn’t do anything for you: you might feel great for five minutes, but afterwards that just fades and you have a new, higher standard of living to maintain.

It was extremely difficult to accept this; after all, I’d always lived to get to the next milestone. Go to a good university, launch a company, get funding, hit a product, hit a growth goal, raise the next round. Each time expecting that the next time would change the game. To accept that no matter what happened, I’d never feel any better than I do now, well, that was earth shattering, even though I’d experienced the same brief, fleeting high and return to earth every time. To be perfectly honest, while I theoretically accept it I am still working on internalizing it.

I have to remind myself from time to time that I want to be happy doing what I’m doing now, not after some next step, accolade, or achievement beyond my peers. The truth is that it isn’t a bad thing if I can’t get any happier: I was quite happy to begin with. For the most part I enjoy immensely my day-to-day of working on products and creating something new, something that no one has seen before. Still, I try to regularly re-evaluate that I’m doing the things I’m doing because I want to be, not for some next level of achievement.

Being successful doesn’t have to mean having the most employees or making the most money. Yes, it can mean that you do create a huge company that has massive impact and you reshape the world in your own image. But it can also simply mean that you enjoy your day-to-day and the people you work with. Have fun with what you’re doing. Do it because it gives you opportunities to grow and learn new things, and because some days are great, even if there are just as many days that are awful. No life is perfect, and that is an ok thing.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do a startup and strive to grow something big, amazing and self-sustaining. If it sounds like a challenge, then go for it, even though it will be hard and probably make you very unhappy at times. Don’t do it because you expect that there is something magical waiting for you at the other end, some state of nirvana for the rich and successful; there is always something next to attain. The journey is its own reward; if it isn’t, you’re on the wrong path.

[photo of Banksy graffiti via flickr/Duncan Hull]

After weeks of speculation and rumors, Google has officially pulled back the curtain on what they have come to call Project Glass — a pair of augmented reality glasses that seek to provide users real-time information right in front of their eyes.

These glasses feel like something straight out of the TV Show “The Jetsons”…

Check out this video showing the potential of these augmented reality glasses being used in a person’s normal day-to-day life

Here is a little preview:

“If you’re a white-collar worker, hacking your body isn’t limited to the gym. In fact, what you do outside of the gym might be more important that what you do inside the gym.

Recent research suggests that those who sit from 9-5 (more than 6 hours daily) and exercise regularly are more likely to have heart disease than those who sit less than 3 hours per day and don’t “exercise” at all. ff Venture Capital, a New York early-stage technology venture capital fund, recently moved into a new NYC location, and they’ve documented their experiments and findings in rethinking the office for physical optimization.”