Secrets Of Elite Athletes - New York Times Health and Wellness Blog

The end of paper changes everything – The Domino Project

What Happens To Your Digital Life When You Die? – Daily Infographic

Editor’s note: Contributor Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo.  Follow him @ashkan.

Patience is one of the seven virtues, the lesser-known cousins of the seven sins.  And indeed, “patience is a virtue” – or so goes the saying.  But another saying states that “fortune favors the bold.” So which one is it?

Well, here’s the thing.  Yes, life is a marathon, but whether you define success by recognition, respect, money, power or fame – success issubjective, relative and fluid and boils down to Ambition, Vision, Determination, Execution, Luck and Timing.

In other words, success doesn’t fall in your lap; never has, never will. Besides, life’s too short, so don’t sit back.

 “I haven’t got a lot of patience”, Jeffrey Katzenberg

It’s not that patience isn’t valued; it’s that no one else is actually all that patient.  Whether you are growing a business or chasing a girl or trying to lose weight or auditioning on American Idol, no one will sit around and wait for results.

They will be impatient. This doesn’t mean you should be impatient, it just means that in the words ofGeorge Jackson: “Patience has its limits.  Take it too far, and it’s cowardice.”

Success is Most Definitely a Target, Albeit a Moving One

Regardless of what drives you and how you define it, people care about the outcome of your efforts and not the journey; frankly, the experience you gain throughout your journey is really only of value toyou.  But since we have limited needs but infinite wants, we tend to compete with everybody for the spoils.  As such, if you think that you will be rewarded for your patience, you’re a sucker, and will end up a loser.

This Ain’t The Super Bowl

It’s commonplace to use sports analogies in business, I do it all the time. But whereas in sports you compete with one or multiple individuals or teams, in business you ultimately compete against yourself: Apple really didn’t care that much about Research In Motion’s Blackberry.

Once you venture into a business, you need to put enough points on the board and then manage the clock (told you I liked sports analogies).  To do that you need to get ahead.

People who Preach Patience are Patronizing You

“We are telling the American people to have patience, courage, resolve and determination” Muammar Gaddafi.

Oftentimes those who urge you to remain patient are in fact patronizing you.  As football coach Steve Spurrier said: ”If people like you too much, it’s probably because they’re beating you”.

Be honest: how often has someone you looked up to told you that if you basically sat on your ambition and dreams they’d eventually open doors for you.

How often did they deliver?  Let me jog your memory: never.  If they did, it’s because you posed no threat to them.  You will be successful despite those people, not because of them.

Life is a Big Game of Musical Chairs

All of this Tony Robbins-esque talk is nice, but how does it help you:

If you’re working on a product, don’t wait for perfection.  “Perfection is the enemy of The Good”.  Even that messiah of perfection and attention to detail, Steve Jobs, reminded  everyone that “real artists ship”.  So did Mark Zuckerberg: Stay Focused, Keep Shipping.

If you see an opening for a job, don’t sit still.  No one will pull you aside and offer you the gig.  Go for it.  No one will think any lesser of you for going after the ball.  They’ll respect you, albeit reluctantly.

Don’t wait to close that round of funding before tackling the big opportunities you see; make it happen to the best of your abilities.

Now, A Word of Caution

1)      Balance is everything in life.  Too much impatience never helped anyone. I can list 100 quotes to that effect.

2)      Shortcuts get a bad rep, but they’re there for a reason. Those who fail to take advantage of them are in fact, ironically, lazy or unimaginative.

3)      Nothing replaces tact, dignity, respect and diplomacy.  It’s fine to press the pedal to the metal, but treat people the way you want to be treated.

4)      Wearing your ambition on your sleeve is a recipe to get cut off at the knees; hence the Russian quote “The tallest blade of grass is the first to be cut by the scythe”.

5)      If you’re perceived as too brazen and ballsy then you won’t even know whose butt you shouldkiss since no one will give you the time of day to start off with.

6)      Reduced patience only means heightened risk.  You can score by moving down the field 10-yards at a time or throwing a Hail Mary. Clearly, one comes with more danger.

7)      Nothing can replace preparation and practice.

The Paradox of Patience

Of course, patience is in itself not static.  For example,

• Once you have children, suddenly you become more patient, but ruthlessly, you have less time to spare for those who waste your time.
• As you become more successful in life, you become more comfortable to let the clock run out.

When it’s over and done: if you want to end up in a better position than where you started, then burn the playbook they give you and write you own.

Photo credit: Nicolò Paternoster

People judge us by the path they’ve seen us walk before. They can’t anticipate our future steps. We, ourselves, look to how things have been, what seems to be the lay of the land, without realizing that the maps are not the territory.

Want to succeed at work? Then don’t try to do your job. Instead, work towards something larger, more meaningful, and something that blends your convictions internally with your best ability to help others externally.

Want to create something new? Then throw away the old, or maybe join two disparate old things together into something new. The newest creations often come from two old maps stuck together.

Want to feel confident? Then forgive yourself every footstep you’ve ever taken until the one still attached to the bottom of your foot and start now. Today. Day one. Focus on your next steps, not the ones you missed.

Bravery and courage don’t come from following some guide. Be where you are, truly where you are at this moment, and see the real territory around you and take stock. And with that reality, even if it’s a painful one, throw away your maps and walk your own path.

So it’s Saturday night and you’re out with friend. Are they the inconsiderate jerk who can’t stop checking their smartphone? Or is that you?

Either way, here’s one way to make dinner a little more interesting.

I’ve seen/heard this described as both “The Phone Stacking Game” and “Don’t Be a Dick During Meals”. It’s been mentioned on a couple of blogs, but a quick  straw poll of my friends suggests that it hasn’t become widespread yet, at least on the West Coast. Which is a shame, because it’s perfect for folks in tech.

Here’s how it works: At the beginning of the meal, everyone puts their phone face down at the center of the table. As time goes on, you’ll hear various calls, texts, and emails, but you can’t pick up your phone. If you’re the first one to give in to temptation, you’re buying dinner for everyone else. If no one picks up, then everyone pays for themselves.

You can explain the game in a few different ways. Most obviously, it could be a protest against the incessant, unthinking use of cell phones during social gatherings. Or maybe it’s a game that acknowledges the new reality and tests your willpower accordingly. Personally, I like to think of it as a free market exercise. After all, people love to say, “Sorry, but I have to take this.” Do you have toanswer it? Really? Is it that important to you? Great, then you can pay.

The most interesting and intriguing section of the S1 filing that I came across today when browsing through it was this little section written by Mark Zuckerberg titled “The Hacker Way”. Zuckerberg isn’t afraid to admit that a big part of his plan in going public is to reward his employees and investors for believing in him and his company for what he always envisioned as the future of FaceBook. Mark’s letter that he wrote in the S1 describes the culture of the company and reveals alot about the types of people who work for his company.

“The Hacker Way”

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.
The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.
The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.
Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.
Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”
Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.
To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.
To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

—–

Bottom Line: Not everything has to be perfect. Doing the work is always more important than talking about what you are going to do. If it doesn’t work, make it better. “The Hacker Way” can be applied to pretty every single business out there – take note.

Dorothy Parker said, “I hate writing. I like having written.” I know many people who are like that about their business, their trade. I know many more people who love to fantasize about what life will be like when they make it, but they like to skip over the part with the hard work, or they give it a sentence or two.

Here’s a hint: the work part is what brings the money part.

How to Get Very Lucky In Life

A few days ago, I came a lot closer to being able to cross something huge off my bucket list. I can’t talk about it just yet, but essentially, I was able to shoot video and talk with a legend of mine. That didn’t happen because someone was looking around to find the right kind of person to do this interview. I asked for it. And I asked for it after having done that person a decent job turning around some work in short order, on top of the work I’d already handed in.

In essence, I was able to check something off of my bucket list because I worked hard enough to earn the shot at doing it.

I’m lucky like that all the time. I spent 12 years (and counting) learning how to create compelling information and nurture relationships with the people who interact with that information. After twelve hard years (many of them without making a cent or receiving much recognition), I get lucky. Luck just comes pouring in all around me. I just sit back and let it all just happen.

Yeah, right.

Luck, Like Love, is a Verb

Both luck and love are verbs that run on work. In 2012, one of my three words is “practice.” I’ve said it repeatedly like this: “the practice is the reward.” When I practice, and when I do the work, I attain luck. Your relationships work like that, don’t they? Your business relationships require nurturing. Your personal relationships require nurturing. Everything you do to add value requires work. Playing a musical instrument, singing, painting, sinking the three point shot in basketball, dealing without flipping over the cards ( Hi, Dad!), are all skills that come from a lot of work.

Make the Work Sexy

I’m on day 9 of 12 in 12 and it’s hard to stick with something every single day in a row. But by making this commitment, I’m already seeing the fertile soil where the seeds of my effort will eventually yield results. When I tackle this work every day, I start with a smile. I force a HUGE smile onto my face. WHY? Because it gets me closer to feeling like the work is sexy. When I write the 2000 words I have due every day on my book, I celebrate each finish with a private cheer and I make sure that I celebrate that work. Why? Because the practice is the reward.

Tell No One

Read this post by Derek Sivers. He’s pointing out something important that I first learned from Jacqueline: telling someone about your goals and talking about your goals out loud can have the opposite effect that you’re intending. It can signal the body that you’ve already accomplished the goal, and then a bunch of interesting reactions happen that keep you from actually doing the work you just got done telling everyone you were planning to do. I had that conversation last night with Rob Hatch as well. Evidently, talking about work is far less sexy.

But Chris: YOU Tell People Your Goals

I do, because I’m trying to model what goals can do for you. But believe me, that does make it harder. I’m writing this on day 9 of my #12in12. I don’t really want to jump down and do an hour of yoga. It’s not the work that’s hard. It’s that “hour.” But when I go back to the 25 minute program, that’s not all that useful to me. So, I’ve made it harder on myself.

But secretly, and don’t tell anyone this, I like it even more because it means that I have to work even harder to achieve these goals, because if I’ve done all the bragging, and all those chemicals supposedly tell me I’m done, then I have to work with even more effort, and something about the challenge of that is fun to me.

Being The Boss Is Sexy

I’m the boss of my own company now, and some people think that’s sexy. Of course, those of you who own your own company know exactly how nonsexy it can be (often), but let’s let the mystique linger a bit, shall we? Besides, I have a hunch.

I was an owner long before I was the boss. I owned my desk at my telephone company job, and that got me better opportunities, because I owned everything I could and make it my responsibility to do even more than the role required on paper. When I moved to my wireless telecom roles, I owned every one of them. I worked harder on projects that weren’t my assigned work while completing the job they paid me for as well. So I was an owner before I became the boss.

And now, as a boss? I never call Rob my employee. I call him my partner. He technically works for me, but Rob works with me. When I ran New Marketing Labs, we called our clients partners, too. Because business is about belonging.

So if you’re not the boss yet, become an owner. Either way, it gets you closer to doing the sexy work.

There Is Work in All Things

Watch a gorgeous red-tailed hawk find a heat pocket and glide on it a while and you’ll see all the grace and beauty of flight. But that hawk flaps more often than he glides, and his entire life is boiled down to trying to hunt for food in a dwindling habitat (which is why we can observe more and more red-tailed hawks). A duck sliding like glass across a pond is paddling furiously under the water to stay in motion.

Do the work. Make it sexy. The practice is the reward.

A fool always loses his temper, but a wise man holds it back. - Proverbs 29:11

Knock, Knock It’s The Future via The Domino Project

 The Most Luxurious Ranches And Gentleman’s Farms For Sale via Forbes.com

Do You Suffer From “Text-Neck” via Mashable.com

Tim Tebow Motivational Speechs via JustifiedLions.com

Here are some excerpts from articles to give you a jist of the SOPA bill.

“In other words: if your status update links to The Pirate Bay, Facebook would be legally obligated to remove it. Ditto tweets, YouTube videos, Tumblr or WordPress posts, or sites indexed by Google. And if Google, Twitter, WordPress, Facebook, etc. let it stand? They face a government “enjoinment.” They could and would be shut down.

The resources it would take to self-police are monumental for established companies, and unattainable for start-ups. SOPA would censor every online social outlet you have, and prevent new ones from emerging.” – via Gizmodo.com

“SOPA is, objectively, an unfeasible trainwreck of a bill, one that willfully misunderstands the nature of the internet and portends huge financial and cultural losses. The White House has come out strongly against it. As have hundreds of venture capitalists and dozens of the men and women who helped build the internet in the first place. In spite of all this, it remains popular in the House of Representatives.”

“Yet the language in SOPA is so irrational that I can only assume that the authors and backers wanted nothing more than to fundamentally change the rules of the web: To shut down the open post fields, kill reposting (goodbye, Tumblr), end shared videos (sorry, YouTube), expand the definition of what it means to infringe (sorry, Twitter, no sharing links that aren’t yours).” – via Mashable.com

Click here to visit a popular blog site and how it would appear if these bills were to pass - http://theoatmeal.com/

Wikipedia is shut down today in protest of this bill – can you imagine if Wikipedia disappeared forever?? 

CLICK HERE TO SIGN THE PETITION TO STOP THIS NON-SENSE BILL

 Articles:

“Smart Cities Will Change How We Live in 2012″ via FastCoExist.com

“31 smart ways to have an absolutely amazing 2012“

 ”Are Smart People Ugly?”

“10 Lessons From America’s Great Military Leaders” via Entrepreneur