A beautiful speech by Sundar Pichai

The cockroach theory for self development
At a restaurant, a cockroach suddenly flew from somewhere and sat on a lady.

She started screaming out of fear.

With a panic stricken face and trembling voice, she started jumping, with both her hands desperately trying to get rid of the cockroach.

Her reaction was contagious, as everyone in her group also got panicky.

The lady finally managed to push the cockroach away but ...it landed on another lady in the group.

Now, it was the turn of the other lady in the group to continue the drama.

The waiter rushed forward to their rescue.

In the relay of throwing, the cockroach next fell upon the waiter.

The waiter stood firm, composed himself and observed the behavior of the cockroach on his shirt.

When he was confident enough, he grabbed it with his fingers and threw it out of the restaurant.

Sipping my coffee and watching the amusement, the antenna of my mind picked up a few thoughts and started wondering, was the cockroach responsible for their histrionic behavior?

If so, then why was the waiter not disturbed?

He handled it near to perfection, without any chaos.

It is not the cockroach, but the inability of those people to handle the disturbance caused by the cockroach, that disturbed the ladies.

I realized that, it is not the shouting of my father or my boss or my wife that disturbs me, but it's my inability to handle the disturbances caused by their shouting that disturbs me.

It's not the traffic jams on the road that disturbs me, but my inability to handle the disturbance caused by the traffic jam that disturbs me.

More than the problem, it's my reaction to the problem that creates chaos in my life.

Lessons learnt from the story:

I understood, I should not react in life.
I should always respond.

The women reacted, whereas the waiter responded.

Reactions are always instinctive whereas responses are always well thought of.

A beautiful way to understand............LIFE.

Person who is HAPPY is not because Everything is RIGHT in his Life..

He is HAPPY because his Attitude towards Everything in his Life is Right..!!

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Grappling with Digital Overload in a Hypermobile, Attention Deficient World

It is easy to stay connected these days--- thanks to Smartphones that allow us to communicate and access unprecedented amounts of information. We have become obsessed with staying connected at all times. We interrupt ourselves constantly to check our in-boxes, hoping for something more interesting, more fun, or more urgent than whatever we’re working on in the moment. However, checking e-mail interrupts continuity in our thought process and as a result our productivity plummets. E-mail is undoubtedly the world’s most convenient procrastination device.

Depending on how often you are forced to switch gears, it may cause you to lose a significant portion of work time a day. Being a chronic multitasking junkie, you may feel a constant urge to check your email, check what your friends are posting on Facebook, or connect with colleagues on LinkedIn. Constant interruptions are the Achilles' heel of the information economy. The average knowledge worker has a very limited attention span and sets asides whatever they are doing to start something else. It could be answering their cell phone, checking e-mail, sending a Snapchat message, clicking over to You Tube, or posting something amusing on Facebook.

Social media users receive an endless flow of information, often at a rate far higher than their cognitive abilities process the information. Social networking can absorb a lot of time, particularly if you don’t have a focus and are using multiple platforms. Social networking can provide a great way to collaborate with others to get fast answers, and create a social involvement no matter where you are. However, it can serve as a convenient temporary cyber mental escape.

The rapid-fire effect of texting and tweeting quickly becomes an unmanageable flood. Twitter is yet another technological tool to our lives, on top of e-mail and Facebook and everything else that competes for our scarce time. The 140-character update panders to our short attention spans and leads to communicating in a fractured form. If tweeting is our method of speaking with one another, it seems our social conversations have given up narrative and structure and lacking one of the most vital things---actual face to face interaction.

Today’s we are deluged by E-mails, text messages, instant messages, Webcast, corporate intranet, and smartphone notifications. When we are not using these social media tools, we may be checking our e-mail on our smartphones or reading random facts on Wikipedia. In recent years, the term "information overload" has evolved into phrases such as "information glut" and "data smog". Because of our communication technologies, we are all awash in mind-numbing tides of data and drowning in factoids. Information technology may be a primary reason for information overload due to its ability to produce more information more quickly and to disseminate this information to a wider audience than ever before.

The smartphone has become our pocket-sized master. However, if you jump on every e-mail or ping, you will have trouble pursuing your long-term goals. So, for all you smartphone addicts, smartwatch checkers, Google glass wearing-digital glasses everywhere, the next time one of the gadgets on your Batman-belt full of devices starts buzzing learn some restraint and techno-etiquette.

For decades, the ability to switch rapidly from one activity to the next was thought to be the essence of managerial work. You talk on your cell phone, send emails, and jot down notes for an upcoming meeting all at the same time. Yet, multitasking may be counter-productive. The greatest casualty of our mobile, high-tech age is attention. By fragmenting and diffusing our powers of attention, we are undermining our capacity to thrive in a complex, ever changing world.

As social media technologies such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube open more lines of communication, more people might find themselves overwhelmed by all the information. When toggling between Facebook, Google+, Twitter and a handful of other online communities, it is difficult to keep up with the constant barrage of tweets, texts and instant messages.

Multitasking is quite simply seen as the ticket to productivity, even though it is actually quite inefficient. Multitasking is part of a wider value system that venerates speed, frenetic activity, hyper-mobility, as the paths to success. People are drowning in a deluge of data. Consumers don't have the bandwidth to process the fire hose of information coming at them all day.

Facebook’s New Mobile Test Framework: How users navigate on mobile

Facebook lost its ability to “move fast and break things” when it switched its apps from HTML5 to native. But it’s gotten its mojo back. Today it announced a big iOS 7-style app redesign featuring bottom-screen “tab bar” navigation built with an advanced native mobile testing framework. Facebook knew to ditch the pull-out navigation drawer by testing different interfaces in 10 million-user batches.

[If you don't see the new Facebook app in the App Store, give it an hour as the rollout seems to be a bit slow]

The new version of Facebook for iOS isn’t just for iOS 7. It’s rolling out to iOS 5 and 6 too, but with a black tab bar for navigation at the bottom of the screen that matches the old iOS style instead of the white tab bar for iOS 7. However, the tab bar won’t be coming to Facebook for iPad, as it sees the drawer as still a good fit for bigger screens.

For the little ones, the new tab bar delivers a super-charged “More” button. It appears on the far right next to one-tap buttons for News Feed, Requests, Messages, and Notifications.

More reveals your app bookmarks just like the old drawer did, but will save your place in whatever product you browse. Previously, if you opened your drawer and switched to look at Events or Photos, you’d lose your place in the News Feed or whatever else you were doing. The new More button essentially opens tabs over the top of the feed so your state and context are preserved. It even works between sessions so if you leave Events open in More, your parties will be waiting there at the ready any time you tap More.

As for aesthetics, Facebook has also made the top title bar translucent and redesigned many of its icons like the one for messages to match the line and arc style of Apple’s new mobile operating system. But Facebook didn’t flatten everything, leaving some texture and depth to the feed. You can see video of the redesigned app here.

The real story today isn’t the app, though, but how it was made.

HTML5 WAS SLOW, BUT BOY COULD IT TEST

Facebook has never been afraid to try new things and see what sticks. It invented the “Gatekeeper” system to let it simultaneously test thousands of variations of Facebook on the web with subsets of users. It would collect data about usage and performance to inform what to roll out to everyone.

On mobile, it hoped to do the same thing, so it built its iOS and Android apps using a Frankenstein combination of native architecture and HTML5. The latter let it ship code changes and tests to users on the fly without the need for a formal app update. “With HTML5 we’d ship code every single day and be able to switch it on server-side”, Facebook product manager Michael Sharon tells me. That meant it could push a News Feed redesign one day to 5% of users, then to everyone a week later, and then fix a bug a few days after that.

But beyond testing, HTML5 was a disaster. It made Facebook’s apps sluggish and unresponsive, which hampered engagement, ad views, and their app store ratings. Users hated Slowbook. Mark Zuckerberg would later say on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt that “Our biggest mistake as a company…was betting too much on HTML5″.

So Facebook ditched HTML5 and rebuilt the apps entirely on native infrastructure last Summer. They were twice as fast. Suddenly their app store ratings shot up, and people read twice as many News Feed stories on average. It was a huge win for Facebook.

Except that it had to sacrifice HTML5′s testing abilities.

“WE USE TESTING KIND OF RELIGIOUSLY”

Sharon explains “One thing we lost was the ability to do testing. We use testing kind of religiously in both the web and HTML5 apps, and this is something we wanted to get back to as much as possible.”

Having to wait until its monthly app update cycle came around to test new versions of its apps was torture for the typically nimble company. It wanted to push changes and get immediate feedback. To solve the problem on Android, Facebook launched a beta tester club in June 2013 that let it use Android’s more permissive stance towards developers to let power users sign up to play with potential new features and catch bugs.

But iOS refuses to sully its simplicity with such beta capabilities. So over the past year Facebook quietly built out a new native mobile app testing framework and sprung it into action in March to build the app update released today.

How it works is that when you download Facebook for iOS, the app actually contains multiple different versions of the interface. However, you’re grouped with a few hundred thousand other users and you all only see one version of the app. This way Facebook can try out tons of variations all at once, without multiple app updates or any confusion for users. We’ve all been Guinea pigs in the mobile testing framework since March, but none of us knew it.

Sharon was adamant that these different tests aren’t half-baked betas, saying “We’re not shipping a subpar version of our app. We’re shipping full production-ready versions that could become the main experience”. When added up, Facebook would test major changes with between five and ten million users at a time — more than many apps have in total.

“I wouldn’t say we’re ‘data-driven’. We’re ‘data-aware’ or ‘data-informed’,” Sharon says. That means that while Facebook collects a bunch of testing data that sways its decisions, it won’t chuck out its intuition or a design it believes in just because the data says so.

The first big mission of the new testing framework was rethinking how users navigate on mobile. It wondered if there was something better than the navigation drawer that slides out from the side of the app.

It used the new testing framework to experiment with dozens of different interface designs, and compared them on metrics including “engagement metrics, satisfaction metrics, revenue metrics, speed metrics, perception of speed metrics” until it found that when looked at holistically, the row of buttons at the bottom of the feed or main screen was the best design. This is what’s becoming available for iOS today.

And that’s how Facebook got its testing groove back.

Why is Facebook blue? According to The New Yorker,

Why is Facebook blue? According to The New Yorker, the reason is simple. It’s because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind. This means that blue is the color Mark can see the best. In his own words Zuck says:

“Blue is the richest color for me I can see all of blue.”

Not highly scientific right? Well, although in the case of Facebook, that isn’t the case, there are some amazing examples of how colors actually affect our purchasing decisions.

After all, the visual sense is the strongest developed one in most human beings. It’s only natural that 90% of an assessment for trying out a product is made by color alone.

So how do colors really affect us and what is the science of colors in marketing really? As we are also trying to make lots of improvements to our product at Buffer, this was a key part to learn more about. Let’s dig into some of the latest, most interesting research on it.




First: Can you recognize the online brands just based on color?
Before we dive into the research, here are some awesome experiments that show you how powerful color alone really is. Based on just the colors of the buttons, can you guess which company belongs to each of them:

Example 1 (easy):



Example 2 (easy):



Example 3 (medium):



Example 4 (hard):





These awesome examples from Youtube designer Marc Hemeon, I think show the real power of colors more than any study could.

How many were you able to guess? (All the answers are at the bottom of this post!)



Which colors trigger which feeling for us?
Being completely conscious about what color triggers us to think in which way isn’t always obvious. The Logo Company has come up with an amazing breakdown which colors are best for which companies and why. Here are 4 great examples:

Black:



Green:



Blue:



Especially if we also take a look at what the major brands out there are using, a lot of their color choices become a lot more obvious. Clearly, everyone of these companies is seeking to trigger a very specific emtion:





On top of that, especially when we want to buy something, the colors can play a major role. Analytics company KISSmetrics created an amazing infographic on the science of how colors affect our purchases.

Especially the role of “Green” stands out to me as the most relaxing color we can use to make buying easier. We didn’t intentionally choose this as the main color for Buffer actually, it seems to have worked very well so far though.

At second look, I also realized how frequently black is used for luxury products. It’s of course always obvious in hindsight. Here is the full infographic:





How to improve your marketing with better use of colors:
This all might be fairly entertaining, but what are some actual things we can apply today to our website or app? The answer comes yet again from some great research done by the good folks over at KISSmetrics.

If you are building an app that mainly targets Women, here is KISSmetrics best advice for you:

Women love: Blue, Purple and Green
Women hate: Orange, Brown and Gray


In case your app is strictly targeting men, the rules of the game are slightly different. Here it goes:

Men love: Blue, Green and Black
Men hate: Brown, Orange and Purple




In another amazing experiment Performable (now HubSpot) wanted to find out whether simply changing the color of a button would make a difference to conversion rates.

They started out with the simple hypothesis of choosing between 2 colors (green and red) and trying guess what would happen.

For green, their intuition was this:

“Green connotes ideas like “natural” and “environment,” and given its wide use in traffic lights, suggests the idea of “Go” or forward movement.”

For red, their thinking went like this:

“The color red, on the other hand, is often thought to communicate excitement, passion, blood, and warning. It is also used as the color for stopping at traffic lights. Red is also known to be eye-catching.”

So, clearly an A/B test between green and red would result in green, the more friendly color to win. At least that was their guess. Here is how their experiment looked like:



So how did that experiment turn out? The answer was more surprising than I had expected:

The red button outperformed the green button by 21%

What’s most important to consider is that nothing else was changed at all:

21% more people clicked on the red button than on the green button. Everything else on the pages was the same, so it was only the button color that made this difference.

This definitely made me wonder. If we were to read all the research before this experiment and ask every researcher which version they would guess would perform better, I’m sure green would be the answer in nearly all cases. Not so much.

At my company Buffer, we’ve also conducted dozens of experiments to improve our conversion rates through changes of colors. Whilst the results weren’t as clear, we still saw a huge change. One hypothesis is that for a social media sharing tool, there is less of a barrier to signup, which makes the differences less significant.

Despite all the studies, generalizations are extremely hard to make. Whatever change you make, treat it first as a hypothesis, and see an the actual experiment what works for you. Personally, I’m always very prone to go with opinion based on what I read or research I’ve come across. Yet, data always beats opinion, no matter what.

Quick last fact: Why are hyperlinks blue?
This is something that always interested me and is actually a fun story. It’s to give the best contrast between blue and the original grey of websites:



Here is the full explanation:

“Tim Berners-Lee, the main inventor of the web, is believed to be the man who first made hyperlinks blue. Mosaic, a very early web browser, displayed webpages with a (ugly) gray background and black text. The darkest color available at the time that was not the same as the black text was that blue color. Therefore, to make links stand apart from plain text, but still be readable, the color blue was selected.”

I think it is extremely fascinating that simply changing something as small as the color, can completely chance the outcome of something. What have been your findings in terms of colors and marketing? I’d love your ideas on this.

10 Screw ups you can Avoid in your Advertising Career

I have a friend who’d been working in China for a long time. He said that after a week of being there you feel like you can write a book about China. After a year, you could manage an essay.

After ten years of living in China, you would probably end up with a postcard.

Advertising is a bit like China in that way. After almost 20 years of doing it, I feel I can barely squeeze out a few core themes that would fit on the back of a postcard. Maybe after another 10, I could write one on the back of a business card.

I got into advertising because it was my Plan B. When I was in high school, I read a novel which was set in an ad agency. I knew the author had actually worked in advertising before, so I presumed that some of it was based on real experience. In the story, I got the feeling, that advertising would be a place where you could earn a decent living, without any formal qualifications.

You’d only need your ability to think creatively.

From that point on, I parked a career as an advertising copywriter as an escape hatch - an industry to go to if my plan A bombed out.

Plan A did in fact flame-out in spectacular fashion. Towards the end of my 19th year in this world, I found myself trying to sell the most awful copy test (a set of lateral thinking problems agencies used to test a person’s ability to approach advertising briefs) to Johannesburg’s advertising industry. Of course I thought I was a genius and I couldn’t understand why nobody was clambering to hire me. That’s when I learned my first lesson:

1: You’re not as good as you sometimes think you are.

Imagine that. I was learning, and I hadn’t even got in yet.

A very kind headhunter took pity on me and tried to find me a gig. I held on to a belief deep inside me, that I did have what it takes, but I just needed the right environment to prove myself. Of course, I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was right. Talent is nothing without the right environment - the right coaching and the right inspiration. Because you know -

2: Success never happens in a vacuum.

Lesson 2, done and dusted and I haven’t even earned a single dime yet. I told the headhunter I would work in an agency - FREE! As long as I could get exposure to the right people and opportunities. Of course, I was too young and inexperienced to understand that I was asking for a full-time internship but when he called me to say that Saatchi & Saatchi would take me on - that is what I was offered.

I started working my first job in advertising in March of 1995. It wasn’t a perfect agency - by no means. But it did contain some amazing people. People of the kind I have never met before. And it contained amazing opportunities. Lucky for me, one of those opportunities did arrive on my desk and lucky for me I solved a problem that had been lingering in that agency for a long time. The client loved it, and so the agency felt compelled to put me on the payroll.

At the time, the agency had a horrible but rather profitable project - to advertise the 1995 local government elections. But two wonderful opportunities were hidden inside the darkness. Firstly, between me an one of the senior writers we produced close to 300 radio commercials. For a young copywriter with mere months of experience under the belt, to get this exposure to the production process, was incredible. It gave me a grounding in radio that stays with me today. And secondly, I wrote an ad for that project that gave me an in into the best agency in South Africa.

And so, I learned Lesson 3.

3: Never say no to an awful brief.

Part of my duties were to write the Afrikaans communication for the campaign. Because very few people on the project understood (or cared for) the language, I was able to be a little experimental. I had a lot of fun with some of the ads. There was one press ad I was particularly proud of, but of course you had to understand the language and its history to appreciate it. Lucky for me, one person in particular saw it and loved it.

Harry Kalmer, the playwright, novelist and famed Afrikaans copywriter at TBWA Hunt Lascaris saw it in the paper and when he decided that it was time for him to pursue his own interests, he suggested to John Hunt that they should hire me.

So, after two years in the business, I got hired into one of the best advertising agencies in the world - with a not great portfolio, but on the strength of one newspaper ad.

Being the Afrikaans copywriter wasn’t the perfect job, but - it was a job in the right agency. Hunt Lascaris was in full ascendence and it has created an amazing environment that allowed for charming, memorable and award-winning work to flourish. And I was fully exposed to it. To the people, the culture and the work.

I realised I could apply my mind to any brief there - not just the ones I had been assigned to. And I did. At some point, the agency realised I had useful ideas and they had paired me up with one of their most up and coming art directors. We stayed a team for a few months and then I was placed in a new team and did the best work of my life.

4: Your career is like a highway. Choose your on-ramps and lane changes carefully.

This is a very good analogy for a career in advertising. Probably also for a career in anything. If I didn’t get into the lane that got me into Hunt Lascaris I would never have come as far as I did.

Remember lesson 1: the environment is incredibly important. Great talent will wilt and suffer in the wrong environment. Don’t compromise on who you choose to shape your talent.

I made some bad lane changes after I left there, but lucky for me the momentum of my stay there helped me to get back in the fast lane. In fact, after two years I found myself back at Hunt Lascaris.

I noticed a shift in the culture of the agency. At that time, John Hunt, one of the the founders and the eventual world-wide creative director of TBWA, asked me if I had noticed a difference. I said: Sure. Two years ago, creative teams always had their doors open. People would drift in and out and look at your work and they would always comment, and help you make your work better.

In the new culture the doors were always closed. Teams worked in isolation. People protected their ideas.

John just nodded and I left to go home.

The next morning, when I arrived at work - every single door in the creative department had been removed overnight. Firstly, that was the type of decisive action that is the hallmark of a great leader, but secondly, it was opening up the agency again to the power of collaborative learning.

John understood that ideas are almost never a single individual’s “work”. They are the result of days, months, even years of influence. Half-formed thoughts bouncing around in the ether until one day, when the conditions are perfect, they snap together in a beautiful, full formed idea.

He even alluded to this with an analogy that I only fully grokked years later. He said, as creative people, we carry a bag of Lego with us. And every experience we have is a block of Lego that goes into the bag. And as we tread this earth, and as we live, the Lego pieces bounce around our bags and sometimes snaps together in new and wonderful combinations. The trick, if you follow his analogy, was to fill your bag with as many Lego pieces as you can to maximise the opportunity for as many new ideas to form in your head as possible. This brings us to the next lesson:

5: Live your creative job outside the agency.

Open yourself up to lots of different and new experiences. When people start out in advertising, there is a huge temptation to try and fit in with the other creatives. With the rest of the culture. But if you do that, your work will look and feel like everyone else’s. You know that joke about teenagers - “I want to be different - just like my friends”? Well, ad people are like that too. It is the truly innovative people in our business that manage to speak with their own voice. They don’t care about trends. They listen to that vibration deep inside their own hearts. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American poet and essayist had something to say about this in his great essay “Self-Reliance”:

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

What Emerson was trying to say to us is this: that weird way of looking at a problem, if you don’t act upon it, you will see that on next year’s Cannes reel. And you will hate yourself because somebody else will pick up your accolade.

This means you have to be brave. And you have to understand this about advertising. It is a business of opinions. There is no real right and wrong. What is true is this: the one with the best ability to convey her opinion wins. So. Learn to make your case. If you’re shy, and an introvert, it doesn’t matter. Just learn to make your ideas hear and learn to present them with the passion and theatre. Be true to yourself, believe in your ideas and respect them and give them a big opportunity to win. It is hard to boil down what I have just said in one lesson, but let me try:

6: Give your ideas maximum respect.

Use massive pieces of paper to let illustrate your thought. Be confident. Have balls. Present in a way that you are comfortable with, but by all means, present with passion.

In that time, when I was at Hunt Lascaris, I got given an assignment that was my first real creative leadership role. A perfect opportunity to give a young player a run on the park when the match result is a foregone conclusion. The project was sure to fail for many reasons, but it was a brilliant opportunity for them to try things out.

The opportunity was this: BMW was about to launch the newly redesigned MINI car. They asked us to pitch, because we were the agency of record for the BMW brand, but all signs pointed to the fact that they wanted a new agency to handle this launch.

But we had three months and I did nothing except work on this. Plus, I got to collaborate with amazing people.

What I learned from this was that if you can make everyone in your team believe that you can achieve the impossible - you will. Also, if you have an idea that really excites people. That really touches them, then you will win.

And we had such an idea. It was so simple. John Hunt kept saying to us during reviews: “This car is such a legend, it defies description. So … our idea was this: for the indescribable car, we invent its own language.

Minish - was a language we made up and presented as the launch idea. We developed about 200 words that described how you feel about your MINI, from the way your bum feels when the seats warm them, to the sound it made when you wire the battery terminals the wrong way round.

It was the kind of idea that lit a fire in people ran. Our activation guys came up with an amazing dealer strategy. They made CDs that people listened to on test-drives - that would be an instruction course on how to speak Minish.

We won that business. But in the end, they launched the car with an international campaign.

But, lesson learned:

7: Truly inspirational ideas can make the impossible happen.

This project lead to me being offered a job as Hunt Lascaris’ creative director in Cape Town.

I arrived at an agency that had the same name as the one I knew in Johannesburg, but that had a very different culture. I tried everything to do things the way I was thought but was too inexperienced to change the fundamentals that made the bigger sister agency tick. I also pushed work on clients who weren’t interested in that style of work. It was then that I learned that:

8: You can only do the work for your clients that they want you to do.

If you come up with awesome stuff for a client who does not think it is awesome it will fail in the long run. Spend time understanding a client’s business. Listen to them. Agency people like to believe their clients are idiots, but in most cases they know their brands. Work with them, not against them. Of course they want work that will make them famous, exactly what you want, but you have to tick their boxes. That is just the way advertising is. You can’t work around it. And you can’t blame the system. This is what you signed up for. So suck it up, love it, and make it work.

In the last few years, I have been lucky to have regional and global jobs in Asia and Europe. And I found this:

9: Before you change agencies, change yourself.

I am not saying don’t move if you’re unhappy. But I am saying give every job your best shot. Sometimes we are not honest with ourselves. We come up with reasons to leave - but actually those are just hiding our own insecurities. Give every position your best shot, and unless something really intolerable is going down, give it your best shot for at least 2 or 3 years.

Finally, I’d like to say a thing or two about your brain.

10: Your brain is your tool. Look after it.

You have chosen a job that 100% relies on the proper functioning of the matter between your ears. This means, if you take your job seriously, you should take proper care of your brain.

So:

No drugs. I am being serious. I have seen amazingly talented people lose their careers and their lives because their addiction to drugs took control of their lives. So, yeah, like your mom I am saying - say no to drugs. She says it cause she loves you, I am saying so cause I want you to make an awesome contribution to our industry.

Respect the computer. Computers are amazing tools. They have automated many functions you kids take for granted. When I was your age, we walked 16 miles in the snow - barefoot - to the agency. And we used letraset. And typewriters. Well, almost. But the point is this: computers can make your brain lazy. Use them when you execute, but always do all your thinking in your brain.

There is a theory that writers write better on typewriters because you can’t just backspace backspace backspace backspace. They spend more time composing in their heads so when they commit to paper, the words are better. The same is true for film cameras. Because film is expensive, you think more about the composition of a shot. If you’re just going to shoot 2000 images and choose one, where is the fun in that?

Computers are incredible tools. But like any powerful tool, it can cause you to lose a thumb. Or a brain. So get to know how to use them.

Successful People are Able to Pick Themselves Up ?

Success comes in all shapes and colours. You can be successful in your job and career but you can equally be successful in your marriage, at sports or a hobby. Whatever success you are after there is one thing all radically successful people have in common: Their ferocious drive and hunger for success makes them never give up.

Successful people (or the people talking or writing about them) often paint a picture of the perfect ascent to success. In fact, some of the most successful people in business, entertainment and sport have failed. Many have failed numerous times but they have never given up. Successful people are able to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and carry on trying.

I have collected some examples that should be an inspiration to anyone who aspires to be successful. They show that if you want to succeed you should expect failure along the way. I actually believe that failure can spur you on and make you try even harder. You could argue that every experience of failure increases the hunger for success. The truly successful won't be beaten, they take responsibility for failure, learn from it and start all over from a stronger position.

Let's look at some examples, including some of my fellow LinkedIn influencers:

Henry Ford - the pioneer of modern business entrepreneurs and the founder of the Ford Motor Company failed a number of times on his route to success. His first venture to build a motor car got dissolved a year and a half after it was started because the stockholders lost confidence in Henry Ford. Ford was able to gather enough capital to start again but a year later pressure from the financiers forced him out of the company again. Despite the fact that the entire motor industry had lost faith in him he managed to find another investor to start the Ford Motor Company - and the rest is history.

Walt Disney - one of the greatest business leaders who created the global Disney empire of film studios, theme parks and consumer products didn't start off successful. Before the great success came a number of failures. Believe it or not, Walt was fired from an early job at the Kansas City Star Newspaper because he was not creative enough! In 1922 he started his first company called Laugh-O-Gram. The Kansas based business would produce cartoons and short advertising films. In 1923, the business went bankrupt. Walt didn't give up, he packed up, went to Hollywood and started The Walt Disney Company.

Richard Branson - He is undoubtedly a successful entrepreneur with many successful ventures to his name including Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Music and Virgin Active. However, when he was 16 he dropped out of school to start a student magazine that didn't do as well as he hoped. He then set up a mail-order record business which did so well that he opened his own record shop called Virgin. Along the way to success came many other failed ventures including Virgin Cola, Virgin Vodka, Virgin Clothes, Virgin Vie, Virgin cards, etc.

Oprah Winfrey - who ranks No 1 in the Forbes celebrity list and is recognised as the queen of entertainment based on an amazing career as iconic talk show host, media proprietor, actress and producer. In her earlier career she had numerous set-backs, which included getting fired from her job as a reporter because she was 'unfit for television', getting fired as co-anchor for the 6 O'clock weekday news on WJZ-TV and being demoted to morning TV.

J.K. Rowling - who wrote the Harry Potter books selling over 400 million copies and making it one of the most successful and lucrative book and film series ever. However, like so many writers she received endless rejections from publishers. Many rejected her manuscript outright for reasons like 'it was far too long for a children's book' or because 'children books never make any money'. J.K. Rowling's story is even more inspiring because when she started she was a divorced single mum on welfare.

Bill Gates -co-founder and chairman of Microsoft dropped out of Harvard and set up a business called Traf-O-Data. The partnership between him, Paul Allen and Paul Gilbert was based on a good idea (to read data from roadway traffic counters and create automated reports on traffic flows) but a flawed business model that left the company with few customers. The company ran up losses between 1974 and 1980 before it was closed. However, Bill Gates and Paul Allen took what they learned and avoided those mistakes whey they created the Microsoft empire.

History is littered with many more similar examples:

Milton Hershey failed in his first two attempts to set up a confectionary business.
H.J. Heinz set up a company that produced horseradish, which went bankrupt shortly after.
Steve Jobs got fired from Apple, the company he founded. Only to return a few years later to turn it into one of the most successful companies ever.
So, the one thing successful people never do is: Give up! I hope that this is inspiration and motivation for everyone who aspires to be successful in whatever way they chose. Do you agree or disagree with me? Are there other things you would add to the list of things successful people never do? Please share your thoughts...

Raise Your Salary; Improve your value to your employer

The only way you can command a higher salary is to make your employer more money than anyone else who could do your job.

You make money for your employer by producing profitable goods that will be bought by his customers (who are also his employers).

This is why your employer is not your employer, but your employer’s employers.

Who’s Your Employer?

As the saying goes in B2B (“business-to-business”) industries: “Your customer is not your customer but your customer’s customer.” To be successful in selling your products or services to your customer, you need to make your customer successful in selling his products or services to his customer.

As the manager of “ME, Incorporated,” you are in the B2B space. Your customer is your employer. If he doesn’t buy your services, you are out of a job. Your employer’s employers are his customers. If they don’t buy his products, he is out of business... And so are you.

Value Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

You buy a product if and only if you prefer it to any other use to which you could put your money. The seller sells her product if and only if she prefers the money to any other use to which she could put her product.

For example, if you buy a computer for $1,000, then you must believe that you will derive a higher benefit from the computer than from the $1,000. Similarly, if I sell you a computer for $1,000, I must believe that I will derive a higher benefit from the $1,000 than from the computer.

One of the greatest revolutions in economics was the discovery that “value” is not an attribute of things per se but, rather, an assessment made by the person for whom the thing appears to be valuable. Beginning with Aristotle, economists believed that “value” was an objective quality such as size, weight, or material composition. This thinking culminated with Karl Marx, who argued that “the labor incorporated in the good” was what made it valuable[CC1] .

They were all wrong.

A computer might be valuable to you because you don’t have one, but worthless to me because I have two. Neither of us is “wrong,” because the computer does not have an intrinsic value; it only has value for a particular person at a particular time under particular conditions. No matter how much effort the producer of the computer put into it, it’s still worthless to me.

The next time someone pleads with you, “But I worked so hard on this!” remember that the labor theory of value is hogwash. If his product doesn’t help you achieve your goals, all his effort has been for naught.

By the same logic, remember that your effort means nothing to your employer unless it helps him achieve his goals.

What Makes You Valuable?

You are selling your labor to your employer. (By “labor” I don’t just mean physical activity, but also everything else you do to contribute to your employer’s goals.)

Your employer buys your labor if and only if he prefers it to anything else he could do with his money—and that includes the labor of any other potential employee.

Your value to your employer depends solely on his ability to derive extra gains from your labor. (By “extra gains” I don’t just mean monetary profits but also everything else that matters to him and his organization.)

Of course, he combines your labor with other factors of production, such as the labor of others, capital equipment, and natural resources, so it is not a simple matter to calculate your contribution to the mix. But even if it is only an approximation, your employer will be willing to pay you only up to the monetary value that your contribution has for him.

A rational employer, one that wants to stay in business rather than overpay you and be undercut by more rational competitors who will bear lower costs, will never pay you more than this; and he will prefer to pay you less.

How much less? Well, how much would you like to pay for a computer? I wouldn’t mind getting it for free; would you? Well, neither would your employer mind getting your labor for free. The less cost, the more profit!

What Makes You Payable?

The upshot of all of this is that being “valuable” does not mean you are “payable.” As I said in my last post, your ability to negotiate your compensation is not limited only by the value of your labor in terms of extra gains for your employer. It is also limited by your employer’s best alternative to a negotiated agreement with you (his BATNA).

Your employer’s alternative is to hire the next most valuable person, where “value” is the difference between the extra gains he could make by hiring her minus her compensation.

So for your employer to hire you and keep you employed, your compensation must be in line with that of anyone else who could do as good a job for him as you can.

This is why the only way you can command a better salary is for you to be more valuable to your employer than anyone else who could do your job. And therefore, the only way to raise your salary is to make a higher contribution to your employer than you are making now.

This means helping him serve his customers more profitably than he currently does.

"In the market society the proprietors of [businesses, but also of labor] can enjoy their property only by employing it to the satisfaction of other people’s wants. They must serve the consumers in order to have any advantage […] Ownership is an asset only for those who know how to employ it in the best possible way for the benefit of the consumers.” —Ludwig Von Mises

Readers: What have you done at different stages of your career to improve your value to your employer, thereby raising your compensation? Leave a comment below and perhaps you will help thousands of professionals that would like to increase their value and command a higher salary.