When to Quit and When to Stick

One recurring principle in personal development is perseverance — the ability to persist in an undertaking in spite of counterinfluences, opposition, or discouragement.

This brings to mind Steve Job’s success story at Apple Inc:

At 30, Steve Jobs was fired from Apple in a very public falling out; he persevered and started two more companies, NeXT and Pixar. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now one of the world’s most successful animation studio. NeXT was bought by Apple, which saw Steve’s return to Apple, and the technology he developed at NeXT is now at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance.

As much as there are proponents of perseverance, there are as many which advocates “quit while you’re ahead.” One example would be Eugene O’Kelly, Ex-CEO of KPMG. Read the Rest of This Article »

Thinking Around Corners – A New Perspective On Creative Thought

In Japan, blind corners are everywhere. The roads are narrow and walls extend right out to meet the curb. It is inconvenient at best, deadly at worst. From the driver’s seat of a car there is just no way to see what is around the corner.

The only help is a mirror on the other side of the intersection. If you look into the mirror, it is like you are standing in a different position. It is like you cross the road, and now have a clear view straight around the corner. This is the only way to see around blind corners. Looking from this different position makes the way forward obvious. Read the Rest of This Article »

How to Achieve the Creative State of Flow

Have you ever been so engaged in an activity that you lost track of time or even your surroundings? A bomb could of gone off (figuratively) and you wouldn’t have noticed?

That’s called “flow” – a state of consciousness where we experience a task so deeply that it truly becomes enjoyable and satisfying. For me this usually happens while I’m reading, writing, or developing software. For you, it could happen during any number of tasks — golfing, cooking, hiking, etc. Read the Rest of This Article »

How to Write Fascinating Content That Readers Will Remember

Editor’s note: This post was submitted by Muhammad Saleem.

Before you can start writing easily retainable content, you need to understand the kinds of people that will be reading your content.

Active, Reflective, Visual, and Verbal Readers

There are four main kinds of readers that we will be optimizing for.

Active readers are those that will understand and retain your content most when they are actively engaged. These readers prefer the opportunity to see things in context, in action, and the ability to discuss the content with others. They make up most of your commenters.

Reflective readers, on the other hand, prefer to take their time with what they are reading and like to ponder it on their own before (if at all) participating in a discussion. Read the Rest of This Article »

10 Ways to Make Your Evenings Happier, Healthier, and More Productive

In my article 8 Simple Ways to Enjoy Life Every Day, I suggested that rethinking your evenings is a great way to get more from life. With this in mind, the following are 10 ways you can make your evenings happier, healthier, and more productive. Read the Rest of This Article »

A Free Guide to Building a Successful Online Business

The best way to attain the freedom to pursue your dreams is by reaching financial independence. Once money is no longer a problem, you’ll be free to travel the world, express yourself creatively, and do whatever it is that you love.

Financial independence can be reached many ways, but one that works for many people is building an online business. Creating this site has helped me to generate a significant amount of income that has made a major impact on my life and my plans for the future.

Online businesses are attractive because they require very little money to start and the rewards can be huge. The downside is that the internet is highly competitive.

In the age of a million free information sources, everyone is constantly battling for attention. If you write your own blog or website, I’m sure you’ve experienced the difficulty of attracting readers first hand.

The problems people face are largely the result of having the wrong mindset. Most people think like opportunity seekers, jumping from one hot idea to the next, instead of developing a longterm strategy.

I was plagued by this problem myself, and I know for a fact this site never would have reached it’s current level of popularity if I hadn’t learned the ideas contained in the Internet Business Manifesto by Rich Shefren.

The manifesto is completely free, and I highly recommend you give it a read, but even more importantly, Rich is on the verge of releasing his latest free report, The Attention Age Doctrine.

This completely free report contains specific tactics you can start using right after it’s released to blow past your competitors that don’t know what you know about the new Attention Age. If you’re serious about building a successful business you need to read this fast.

The free report hasn’t been released yet, but if you sign up now you’ll be notified as soon as it’s available. I’ve already signed up myself and plan on reading the entire Attention Age Doctrine as soon as it becomes available.

The people who are quickest to use this information with profit the most. I plan to be one of them, which is why I already reserved a copy, and I recommend you do the same.

Rich has provided great free information before and I expect even more this time. Unfortunately, Rich has decided to make this report available only to a limited number of readers, so if you miss your chance to get it now you could be waiting for a long time.

7 Lesser Known Ways to Increase Productivity

You’re a productive go-getter, so you’ve probably heard them all, right? Write out lists, eliminate the unimportant and nuke your procrastination. For the getting-things-finished junkies, I’d like to share some lesser known productivity tricks, to give you the edge when you’ve already mastered the basics.

Some of these you might have heard of, or even used, before. But hopefully I can put a new angle of some of these old ideas so they can make sense in the context of organizing, becoming accomplished and just staying sane. Read the Rest of This Article »

5 Survival Tips for Difficult Conversations

I suspect everybody on the planet has a tough talk “To Do” list – the list of difficult conversations we really should have, but keep putting off.

Talking with your significant other about their parents, asking your best friend about the money they owe you, telling your co-worker to quit making loud personal calls. Oh, and explaining the birds and the bees to your…. now 10-year-old. Well, that one he may have figured out without you.

We put these difficult conversations off because we dread the reaction, we don’t want to start a fight, or don’t want to handle it badly or sound petty. Interestingly, the way we bring things up (or respond to their attacks) actually makes it more likely that we’ll do damage.

Here are 5 insights to help you sidestep typical traps, and have a real conversation:

1. Don’t Ease In or Be Indirect. Anxious about a confrontation, we instead come at the topic sideways, and this is bound to leave them feeling ambushed. Making indirect suggestions or using leading questions will only make it worse. You’re implicitly communicating: “what I want to say to you is SO BAD… I can’t even say it directly.”

Stating the issue more directly actually makes it less of a big deal: “Hey, do you think you could keep it down? I’ve just got to focus to get this out the door…..” or “By the way, if I remember right, you still owe me some money. Any idea when you might be able to pay it back?”

2. Stop Their “Hit & Run” with Humor. Sometimes you’re skipping along happily through your life, and someone else lobs a sarcastic remark in passing and “bam!” you are left feeling ambushed and abandoned. Perhaps you are at your parents’ house for Thanksgiving and your aunt, ever critical of your “insistence on working” rather than staying home with the kids full-time, watches your boys bop each other on the head and comments, “Yes, well, I’m sure they just don’t get enough attention.”

You can fume. Or you can speak up. I’d speak up, and with a bit of humor, “You know, if I thought that staying home would mean they wouldn’t fight… boy that might actually change my mind!”

But don’t leave it at that, because you risk simply returning sarcastic quip for hurtful quip. Actually say: “But I should ask, do you think they would behave differently if I were home? Because that’s interesting…”

3. Realize the Issue Isn’t the Real Issue. Whatever the argument is about – where you’ll spend the holidays, who forgot to call the plumber, what you’re having for dinner – chances are this isn’t the real issue driving the dispute. If the conversation becomes difficult, what you are really fighting about is how you’re each feeling treated by the other. Do you care about my feelings? Can I rely on you? Do you appreciate all I do for you?

Not every fight has to be about these larger issues, but humans are hard-wired to see patterns and to seek emotional safety, so whatever the themes are in your relationship, they will play out over and over under the cover of everyday squabbles.

4. The Real Issues Need to Be Managed….Not Resolved. Ready for this? Marriage researcher John Gottman of the University of Washington says that 64 percent of the fights married couples have are the SAME fights they are having five years later.

This is either really depressing, or really liberating. In other words, most of the things we fight about aren’t actually resolvable. It’s a process of managing differences in preferences, habits and personalities – differences that aren’t going to go away, so we might as well quit getting worked up about “how they are” and instead focus on working out ways to get around those issues.

5. Talk Backwards as Well as Forwards. Since so much of what we fight about are really surface reflections of deeper differences, put your energy into understanding those differences. If you argue about money, talk about where your attitudes, fears and habits around money came from. How did your parents handle money? What are your worst fears?

This is helpful even when the topic seems more mundane. For the first five years of our marriage, my husband and I could not pick out a Christmas tree without having an enormous fight. We fought about when to go. We fought about where to go. We fought about which tree. We fought about why he was being so difficult and ruining such a joyous expedition (which it decidedly was not).

This is actually one of the fights we’re not having anymore. It’s because we finally sat down to talk about our early family experiences and resulting emotional associations with getting and decorating the Christmas tree. Needless to say, we had opposite experiences and traditions, and I was replicating exactly the obligatory, pressured early experience he had always dreaded. Simply understanding what he was reacting to, and his understanding that this wasn’t my experience or intention, actually changed things. We decided to create our own tradition around the tree, which he is in charge of.

We’ll go get the tree any day now… right?

Sheila Heen is the co-author of “Difficult Conversations.” She also lent her expertise and communication know-how to www.HaveTheTalkAmerica.com. Today is Have The Talk Day so visit the site to learn more about how you can be a better communicator.

Happy Thanksgiving 2007: Top 10 Things to Feel Grateful For

If you reflect on the thoughts that motivate you, you’ll likely find that the majority are focused on wants and needs.

You want to advance your career, so you decide to work harder. You want to attract a desirable mate, so you push yourself to exercise. You want to have more money, so you search for ways to cut costs and earn more through investments.

This is perfectly natural, but it isn’t conducive to happiness. When you constantly focus on what you don’t have, life can seem hopeless. No matter what you accomplish you will always want more, more, more.

That’s why Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It’s a day dedicated entirely to the gratefulness that we blatantly neglect for most of the year. That and the food.

Here are my top 10 things to feel grateful for this Thanksgiving, in no particular order: Read the Rest of This Article »

How to Improve Reading Comprehension

Reading is all about information. It’s not about the number of words you read, but the amount of value you extract from them. The key to improved reading comprehension isn’t moving your eyes across a page more quickly. It’s about creating a mental framework that helps you process words and ideas.

With a bit of practice, anyone can read faster and more productively. The steps outlined below will help you to extract the maximum amount of information in the least amount of time. Read the Rest of This Article »

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