Saturday 31 August 2013
Friday 30 August 2013
Thursday 29 August 2013
Wednesday 28 August 2013
Tuesday 27 August 2013
Monday 26 August 2013
The Research Trap
Jack Zerby, entrepreneur and former designer at Pentagram on “The Research Trap:”
I’ve read over and over the importance of validating ideas, but it seems I was blurring the lines between market validation and personal validation. I wasn’t looking for them to say “yes I would definitely pay for that.” I was looking for “Jack you are awesome, please grace us with more of your infinite wisdom.”
In a sense I was looking for them to validate me, rather than my idea. I kept going because I was getting wonderful feedback about me and my idea, and who in the world would stop that ego gravy-train and actually go build something?
Read more about Zerby’s epiphany, fueled by his mother. Yes, really.
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/peB_6kum47I/the-research-trap
Friday 23 August 2013
Thursday 22 August 2013
Wednesday 21 August 2013
A Tour of TaskRabbit’s Offices
Whether it’s an open floor plan or more traditional set up, it’s always fascinating to see where creatives are getting work done. OPEN Forum has a peek inside of the offices of TaskRabbit, which is complete with “puzzle tables” and is full of “TaskRabbit green.”
To see the entire tour, check out the story on OPEN Forum, this month’s sponsor of Workbook.
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/tw-brqzpddw/a-tour-of-taskrabbits-offices
Tuesday 20 August 2013
What Is a Life Changing Realization That You Wish You Had Sooner?
At community Q&A site Ask Metafilter, one member asks “What is a life changing realization that you wish you’d had sooner?” The results are a compelling mix of not-so-obvious career and life advice. Some of our favorites:
- “A lot of epiphanies come at the end of an unpleasant process. That process is not only necessary to achieve the epiphany, but part of the epiphany itself. As such, distilling that process down to an axiom isn’t as valuable as going through the process itself, however grueling it might be.”
- “Put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others.”
- “HR works for management, not for you. Never go to them with a problem.”
- “Not making a decision is still a decision.”
- “The traditional road to education and success is a trap. But it is actually a road. So if you don’t take it, you’d better have some damn good alternate routes planned.”
- “It doesn’t matter if you’re right. It matters if people like you. I think this is one of the mistaken lessons a lot of kids pick up from school, that it’s all about having the right answer and if you’re the guy with the right answer, it doesn’t matter if all the kids hate you because you get As anyway. Sooooooo not the case in the working world.”
Have one to add? Let us know below.
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/_8VkHBR62uA/what-is-a-life-changing-realization-that-you-wish-you-had-sooner
Monday 19 August 2013
“I Approached Business the Way a 6-Year-Old Would.”
Fast Company has an outstanding piece on the revitalization of Detroit, and all of the do-ers that are making it happen, many with little or no experience. It’s a must read for anyone launching a project. Andy Didorosi is one of the people profiled, and he shared how he started a bus company to help fill in for Detroit’s gutted public transportation system:
I approached the business the way a 6-year-old would. What would people like on the buses? Well, people would like music. So we put good sound systems in. And the buses couldn’t stay yellow, so I paid Detroit artists to paint them. And I thought people would like to know where the buses were at any moment, so we found some free apps that allow you to see where the bus is. And finally we asked where would people like buses, and we thought, Woodward Avenue–we’ll drive buses up and down Woodward.
…
So I called the insurance company, and they’re like, ‘You want to do what?’ They said, ‘Okay, insurance is going to be $90,000 a bus.’ I was defeated. My buses cost $2,000. Why is the insurance that much?
“So I called them back. This time I tell them, ‘I want to create a private bus system that just goes from one bar to another bar. And they’re like, ‘Oh, no problem, we do that all the time.’ So then I had a bus company.
Read the entire story, you won’t read anything better today.
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/HaFJxI0Aej8/i-approached-business-the-way-a-6-year-old-would
Sunday 18 August 2013
Saturday 17 August 2013
Friday 16 August 2013
Thursday 15 August 2013
Wednesday 14 August 2013
Tuesday 13 August 2013
Monday 12 August 2013
Sunday 11 August 2013
Saturday 10 August 2013
Friday 9 August 2013
Size Does Matter: The Smaller Your Device, the Lower Your Confidence
The Harvard Business School released a study that points to the use of small gadgets as a reason that people are less likely to take initiative or willing go out of their comfort zones. The larger the gadgets used, the more assertive participants were.
When people use smaller devices, their posture contracts, increasing stress and decreasing testosterone levels, say researchers Maarten Bos and Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School. The inverse is true when people use large desktop computers, which force users to assume a more open posture. And the effect continues even after the device is put away or the user logs off.
So the next time you’ve got a presentation to give or networking to do, it might be better to leave the smartphone at home.
Read the rest of the study’s findings at the Wall Street Journal.
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/iIQBLkXE_qk/size-does-matter-the-smaller-your-device-the-lower-your-confidence
Thursday 8 August 2013
Take an “Administrative Day” So You Can Focus the Rest of the Week
Unfortunately, even though we have a new artistic challenge or a project that requires more dedication, the rest of life doesn’t stop for us. Errands don’t stop. Friends and social lives don’t stop. Physical fitness and health don’t stop.
We do have a choice, though. We don’t have to let these tasks take our awareness away from our creative output. Author and professor Cal Newport shares a trick to handle all these administrative tasks, while improving focus on work:
Choose one day a week to do nothing but accomplish small tasks. Your goal should be to finish every obligation for the week that can be accomplished in less than 20 minutes and/or does not require any serious thought. For a college student, these include:
- Laundry
- Phone calls
- Cleaning
- Getting your car washed
- Filling out applications
- Sending long or important e-mails
- Paying bills
- Writing blog posts
- Catching up on your online reading
- Handling any administrative work or planning for extracurricular clubs and related obligations
While spending an entire day on administrative tasks may seem like a waste, it ensures our ability to perform at our peaks the other six days of the week. Taking one small step back on that day means being able to use the six to make a giant leap forward.
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/2mtPYg-ua-c/use-an-administrative-day-to-focus-the-rest-of-the-week
Wednesday 7 August 2013
Interview Hires Like Google: Ditch the Pop Quizzes
Google recently decided to spur interview questions like brain teasers or the classic cliches (“What’s your greatest weakness?”) when a study they did of their own interviewing process yielded surprising results.
On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.
Instead, what works are structured “behavioral interviews,” where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people.
More from the story:
Behavioral interviewing also works — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable “meta” information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.
Continue reading the interview over at The New York Times .
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/SyKAKQuXazs/interview-like-google-ditch-the-pop-quizzes
Tuesday 6 August 2013
Monday 5 August 2013
Video: Embrace Ambiguity In The Design Process
IDEO’s New York office with a look inside their design process, as demonstrated using a slew of homemade “special effects.”
The takeaway? Let your limitations empower you and realize that “sometimes the best way through the fog, is through the fog.”
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/yefsk3zYz4k/video-embrace-ambiguity-in-the-design-process
Sunday 4 August 2013
Friday 2 August 2013
It’s Not About “Productivity.” It’s About Living Purposefully.
Reading quickly will take about 50 bits per second, leaving the rest for sounds, sights, and smells of the environment around you. Everything we perceive as human beings takes up some allotment of our brain’s processing power. Having a deep conversation with a loved one, watching TV, doing mindless work, and sitting quietly and watching the world around you, all draw from the same pool of attentional resources.
If we assume your brain can process 100 bits of information a second, we can extrapolate how much information your brain can process in your entire lifetime (assuming you live to be about 80 and you sleep for eight hours a night). That number comes out to be roughly 150 billion bits of information.
That sounds like a huge number, right? However, we’re talking about the entirety of your experiences as a human being being encapsulated in one simple number. Every emotion, thought, sensation, and conversation you’ll ever have is included in that number and the way you’ve allocated those 150 billion bits of attention over the course of your life will make up the entirety of who you were and what you accomplished.
Suddenly, 150 billion doesn’t seem so big.
For some, productivity is about fiddling with new tools or shaving seconds off an ultimately meaningless task. It can be fun to read about others’ productivity hacks and try them in our own workflows. But really, thinking about productivity means coming back to those 150 billion bits that make up who you are and who you will be.
It becomes less about tips and tricks and more about making sure you’re allocating the most scarce resource in the universe, your attention, in ways that most closely align with who you are and what impact you want to have on the world. It’s about eliminating the unnecessary tasks and demands that are eating away at your 150 billion bits so you can focus on something that helps another person or creates a little more beauty in the world or solves an important problem or makes you feel like you’re on this planet to do something worthwhile.
“Being productive” isn’t about getting more work done. It’s about making sure those 150 billion bits are spent as wisely as possible.
Watching TV and having a conversation with a loved one will take about the same number of bits of information for your brain to process. Mindlessly flipping through the channels after work and brainstorming a new creative endeavor take about the same number of bits to perform. Which is more meaningful to you? Which will you be glad you did more of when bit number 1,499,999,999 rolls over?
A thank you must be given to my professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi for first sharing this perspective regarding attention and it’s impact on who we are and ultimately, who we end up being.
via 99U http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/The99Percent/~3/ZzkkCii0JVI/its-not-about-productivity-its-about-living-purposefully