Survival strategies

How to Be Happier at Work – Start Something!

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Start something. More specifically, start something outside of work.

via How to Be Happier at Work – Leonard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer, and Paul B. Brown – Harvard Business Review.

Before you get mad at me take note of where this article comes from.  Harvard Business Review Blog Network is the source of this article.  This article reminds me of what I did several years ago.  I started something.

When I started something I had no clue what it was I started.  What I thought I started was not what I am doing today.  In other words, my original plan failed but ultimately my little business succeeded.

Take a risk.  Start something!

  What are you avoiding doing that you know needs to be done?”  We seem to have a talent for burying the truth, covering it up, distracting ourselves from it… When was the last time you took a risk in the direction of your dance?

Laurie Beth Jones

 

Teleworking Triples Over the Last Decade

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In its report, “The Incredible Disappearing Office: Making Telework Work,” The Conference Board finds that the advancements in home networking over the last decade have been accompanied by teleworking gains among a number of these technology-reliant professions, including insurance underwriters 4.5 percent, up 275 percent since 2001-2003 and computer software developers 6.1 percent, up 127 percent.

via Teleworking Triples Over the Last Decade – Insurance Networking News.

You Are Not A Computer – HBR

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The Internet, and all it has come to include, is the most powerful interruption technology ever invented. It slices and dices our focus, fractures and distracts it, gives us less and less of more and more. It prompts us to skim, scan, and skip rather than immerse ourselves in any one thing.

Technology has no business setting our agenda, but it has turned into our dominatrix. Masochistically — but all too willingly — we submit to it. Emailing, texting and tweeting, searching Google, checking Facebook, and surfing websites not only consumes our time and energy, it also diminishes our capacity to pay attention to anything for very long — or to resist the next digital temptation.

via You Are Not A Computer (Try As You May) – Tony Schwartz – Harvard Business Review.

Intelligence Is Overrated: What You Really Need To Succeed – Forbes

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Research carried out by the Carnegie Institute of Technology shows that 85 percent of your financial success is due to skills in “human engineering,” your personality and ability to communicate, negotiate, and lead. Shockingly, only 15 percent is due to technical knowledge. Additionally, Nobel Prize winning Israeli-American psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, found that people would rather do business with a person they like and trust rather than someone they don’t, even if the likeable person is offering a lower quality product or service at a higher price.

via Intelligence Is Overrated: What You Really Need To Succeed – Forbes.

Opportunities EVERYWHERE

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Exchange of Services and Adding New Business Lines: I have a good friend who is a young MD type doctor. He was loaded down with student loans and he operates his own office in Encino, CA, a fairly wealthy area. It costs him $225 per hour to keep his office doors open. He had to do hospital rounds at night to survive. Radio time is now going begging. So, I worked a deal for him with a local radio station. He gets advertising air time and even has his own medical “show” on that station. He is also now the personal doctor for the station owner and the few employees. This was an exchange of services. I did not charge for putting this deal together but it lead to a new business line for him that I proposed and share in that revenue. He is located in a wealthy area. There are a lot of wealthy older people in the area who do not like going to see the doctor but from time to time, need medical help and attention. So we set up a medical concierge service that also gets advertised on that radio station. We make house calls and the fee is not cheap. We now have eight doctors on call and business is brisk.

via Opportunities EVERYWHERE Market Sniper – Slope Of Hope with Tim Knight.

The example above is one of the real life money making opportunities highlighted in the article.  Go read the rest.  This is tremendous food for thought.

I started to think about my own business after reading the article.  A while ago I recognized my opportunities were similar to the ones described by Knight.  I began to understand that I had started working at the intersection of disciplines.  Underwriting and law.  Auditing and underwriting.  Technology and underwriting.

Can you take your expertise to the intersections of disciplines to meet unmet needs?

HT – Michael Panzner at Financial Armageddon

Life Underwriting Expert Witness Search Results on Google Alternatives

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We get so focused on Google that it’s easy to forget there are alternatives to Google search. Granted, the alternatives are not nearly as popular. At 66% market share and 11.7 billion searches during the month of February 2012 alone, Google clearly is the leader. But other search engines are worth understanding — both from the perspective of when you are a searcher for information, and from the perspective of a site owner knowing that visitors may come from those other search engines.

via Google Alternatives.

I came across this article while catching up on news one Saturday morning.  For fun I ran the search string “life underwriting expert witness” without quotation marks on all of the search engines listed in the article.  I must admit that I was surprised at the search findings on all of the engines.

Let’s just say I’m a happy guy this morning.

Pink Slime – You Want Fries With That?

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Similar to a previous dissection they had performed on hot dogs, the researchers discovered waste and by-products including connective tissue, nerve tissue, cartilage, bone, and in a quarter of the samples, Sarcocystis parasites. But surely these “fillers” were the minority, right? Unfortunately not. After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that the amount of actual meat (muscle flesh) in the burgers ranged from 2.1 percent to 14.8 percent.

via Michael Greger, M.D.: Pink Slime: All About the Green.