Wilson's Landing

Sep
9th

Fri

Your attention please

Jason from 37signals writes that he thinks time was his most limited resource but highlighted the difference between giving your time vs your attention.

How many of us give(sell) our time to our employer? Are we giving our attention that whole time?

How does this change when you work for yourself or if your compensation is tied directly to your performance (which we assume requires your attention)?

My favorite part is:

The greatest things you make and do are the ones that get your full attention. It’s helpful to take an inventory of what you’re doing and then ask yourself where you’re spending your best attention. You can fill your time, but you have to spend your attention. How you spend it is probably a better measure of priority than anything else.

Sep
7th

Wed

Do Happier People Work Harder? Yes!

“Working adults spend more of their waking hours at work than anywhere else. Work should ennoble, not kill, the human spirit. Promoting workers’ well-being isn’t just ethical; it makes economic sense. Fostering positive inner lives sometimes requires leaders to better articulate meaning in the work for everyone across the organization. Sometimes, all that’s required is that managers address daily hassles and help with technical problems. If those who lead organizations — from C.E.O.’s to small-team leaders — believe their mission is, in part, to support workers’ everyday progress, we could end the disengagement crisis and, in the process, lift our work force’s well-being and our economy’s productivity.”

Jul
12th

Tue

The VersaPay Team and I in the news!

VersaPay Team

An interview about how VersaPay can improve cashflow & sustainability while reducing cheque fraud.

May
27th

Fri

Why the groupon copycat business models don’t make sense

In the late 1500s, tulips were introduced to Holland. The flower was considered so rare that wealthy aristocrats and merchants tripped over themselves to buy them.

Speculation ensued and the flower became wildly overvalued.

In 1637 the tulip trade crashed.

People who thought of themselves as extremely rich were reduced to poverty overnight. Trends are temporary.

Don’t just do something because everyone else is doing it – do something because it makes sense

Thanks Credit-http://37signals.com/28

May
18th

Wed

Is a Well-Lived Life Worth Anything?

“The economy we have today will let you chow down on a supersize McBurger, check derivative prices on your latest smartphone, and drive your giant SUV down the block to buy a McMansion on hypercredit”

an outcomes gap: a yawning chasm the size of the Grand Canyon between what our economy produces and what you might call a meaningfully well-lived life, what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia.

hedonic opulence vs
eudaimonic prosperity

doing, achieving, fulfilling, becoming, inspiring, transcending, creating, accomplishing or

are you just (yawn) a pawn in the tired, predictable game called ‘the pursuit of diminishing returns to hyperconsumption’: the game that’s rigged by hedge-fund bots against you?

http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/05/is_a_well_lived_live_worth_anything.html

May
10th

Tue

When Steve comes into his office and his garbage can is full, he stays late and asks the janitor why. The janitor replies “the reason I didn’t empty your garbage is my keys don’t work on the lock”.

“When you’re the janitor,” Jobs has repeatedly told incoming VPs, “reasons matter.” He continues: “Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering.”

May
4th

Wed

You know how you can tell when you’ve made a good decision? If you feel like you waited too long to make it, then it’s a good decision.

—

Jason Fried is co-founder of 37signals, a Chicago-based software firm, and co-author of the book Rework, which was published last March.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110501/jason-fried-how-to-hire-an-assistant.html

Mar
30th

Wed

3 questions Coudal asks before deciding to take on a project:

Can we make money from it? We’re a going business. We have mortgages to pay. We have tuitions to pay for our kids. We’re not ashamed of making money.

Are we gonna be proud of it when we’re done? There’s nothing that will break your heart faster than working three months on a project and then, when it’s all done, you’ve sold your soul and compromised and you don’t even want anybody to see it.

Have we learned something new? That allows us to continue to grow in the skills that we have. It allows us to be better filmmakers and writers and coders and art directors. And it keeps things interesting.

— Coudal Partners

They are not new lessons. Never owe any money you can’t pay tomorrow morning. Never let the markets dictate your actions. Always be in a position to play your own game. Never take on more risks than you can handle…Good businesses, good management, plenty of liquidity, always having a loaded gun; if you play by those principles you will do fine no matter what happens. And you don’t ever know what’s going to happen…

I mean, when times are good, it is kind of like Cinderella at the ball. She knew at midnight that everything was going to turn into pumpkins and mice, but it was just so much damn fun, dancing there, the guys looked better and the drinks got more frequent and there were no clocks on the wall.

And that’s what happened with capitalism. We have a lot of fun as the bubble blows up, and we all think we are going to get out five minutes before midnight, but there are no clocks on the wall.

— Warren Buffett’s answer to “What are the key lessons you took from the financial crisis?”

Feb
22nd

Tue

Ultimately, the best test of any product is to go to your target market and pretend like it’s a real business. You’ll find out soon enough if it is or not. You have to take some risks. You can sit and analyze these different markets forever and ever and ever, and you’d get all these wonderful answers, and they still may be wrong. The problem with the businessman type is they spend a lot of time with all their great wisdom and all their spreadsheets and all their Harvard Business Review people, and they’d either become convinced that there’s no market at all or that they have the market nailed.

— One of the entrepreneurs profiled by Saras Sarasvathy in “How Great Entrepreneurs Think.” Among Inc. 500 CEOs, 60 percent had not written business plans before launching their companies and just 12 percent had done market research, according to the article.