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How to Be Happier at Work – Start Something!
Start something. More specifically, start something outside of work.
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
You Are Not A Computer – HBR
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.
Pizza Delicious Bought An Ad On Facebook. How’d They Do? : Planet Money : NPR
Those ads went viral. They got twice the usual number of click-thrus, on average. The ad showed up more than 700,000 times. Basically, everyone in New Orleans on Facebook saw it. Twice. Pizza Delicious got close to twenty times the number of Facebook fans they usually get in two days. The guys were stoked.
via Pizza Delicious Bought An Ad On Facebook. How’d They Do? : Planet Money : NPR.
I’ll cut to the chase so you don’t have to read or listen to the entire article. It didn’t work.
After a long night of asking every single customer where they found out about Pizza Delicious, not one said it was through Facebook.
Maybe at some point, the new Pizza Delicious fans will show up and buy some pizza. But social advertising is so new that nobody knows for sure. It’s still unproven, untested and largely unstudied.
Update –
I read the article first, then listened to the podcast. Listen to the podcast, it’s funnier than hell.
Intelligence Is Overrated: What You Really Need To Succeed – Forbes
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.
American Family Information Services – 87 Layoffs – Insurance Networking News
The company has reduced its total workforce by 730 positions, or almost 10 percent, over the past four years, mainly by attrition.
via American Family Information Services Department Incurs 87 Layoffs – Insurance Networking News.
Short articles like this make me wonder what’s really happening. We don’t know the total number of staff in the company’s IT department so we cannot know what percentage of the entire staff was affected. So I went online and found the following:
The cut positions included 85 people based at the company headquarters at 6000 American Parkway and its other Madison location, off Milwaukee Street, plus two people outside Madison. There are 850 people remaining in the company’s information services division, making the job reductions equal to about a 10 percent cut there.
Opportunities EVERYWHERE
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
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.
For Freelancers, Landing A Workspace Gets Harder : NPR
For Freelancers, Landing A Workspace Gets Harder : NPR.
More than 30 percent of the nation’s workers now work on their own, and the research firm IDC projects the number of nontraditional office workers — telecommuters, freelancers and contractors — will reach 1.3 billion worldwide by 2015.
The Case Against Passion – naked capitalism
But the real question is who this vogue for romantic attachment to one’s work really serves. Faking passion in job interviews seems to be as necessary as faking orgasms is in some relationships. On the surface, this long-lived fas appeals to the narcissistic tendencies that are ever more common in American society, that we all have some special talent or destiny and we are supposed to go forth and, to use that horrible New Age turn of phrase, manifest it.
But being emotionally invested in career success as the proof of one’s worth makes people exploitable. That’s the secret of elite firms like Goldman and McKinsey, which hire people who were not simply bright, but have a record of achievements that shows that they care deeply about external validation. When an organizational guru came in to give a look over McKinsey in the 1980s, he was famously told by the head of the firm, “Don’t mess with the insecurity.”
via The Case Against Passion « naked capitalism.
Passion is overrated. Love is perhaps too strong a term. I prefer extreme liking. Are you passionate about your work? Do you love what you do? Or do you simply like what you do?
Do or not do. There is no try.
Yoda
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