Going Solo: Win Your Prize

Going Solo. It’s not for everybody

Your boss didn’t give you a pile of papers.

The coffee you spilled on your shirt will definitely not get noticed.

That project you just finished is not going to impress your cat.

And when you wake up in the morning, you’re the only one that will see that it’s 7:30 am instead of 5:45 am. Your late.

Nobody will notice.

It’s just You.

When you venture out on your own and leave the community of your “job”, motivation becomes your responsibility more that ever before in your life. Your boss, co-workers and peers will not be there to bounce ideas off and tell you what comes next. You’re in charge or the assignments, the grading and the feedback.  Even tasks you took for granted while having co-workers, like growing your network and showing up on time, become entirely your responsibility to get done.

5 Days of Discovery

5 Days to discovery. No two people will experience the same 5 days, and they shouldn’t! This week is about defining where you are now, where you want to go and what you need to do to move you towards that goal.

 

Itch That Painful Niche: Part 2

How do you “itch that niche”?(Part 2 of 2)

Finding your niche should be slightly painful. Saying “no” is difficult to accept, but it is the key to successfully saying yes to the right target audience. Through this process, you should find where you fit and feel confident that you can master it.

See part 1 Here

Here’s a summary of how to find your niche

Itch that Painful Niche: Part 1

“Find your niche”

A mantra repeated by nearly every business consultant, marketing expert, and start up guru, but how to do just that is nearly impossible to figure out for a start-up. Fear bubbles to the surface as you look at prospective customers and you are forced to say “no, we can’t help you”. It feels as though you’re letting income walk away.  Passing up the opportunity for money is frightening for someone just setting out on a business venture. When you’re just beginning, how are you supposed to highlight your niche if you haven’t proven it to yourself yet!

You’re not my favorite: Twitter experiments with infiltrating your feed

Have you noticed some changes on your twitter feed? This read will open your eyes to a few opinions on these “updates”.

Margarita Noriega

Twitter is the headquarters of the control freak. It’s a social network for those who want everlasting control over what they see and from whom they see it. It’s the social network for those who want to bless people by following their digital auras, depending on if they prefer ethos (power Twitter), pathos (animal pictures / rage Twitter), or logos (wonk Twitter).

“Social sharing is a popular but controversial way to measure the value of information itself.” – Me, explaining why people share on Twitter, These Tiny Gutenbergs, Part Two

Twitter is experimenting with a new feed function to rip this god-like control out of your pure, innocent, OCD-hands, in favor of showing you content only tangentially related to who you follow.

Encouraging rogue tweets to infiltrate your feed is a great thing because Twitter has a huge problem we should all care about: community silos which are based on groupthink or industry, and…

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A Day on “Start Up Hill”

Exhilarating. That word doesn’t even begin to describe how you feel as you glide to a stop at the bottom of the giant sledding hill. You laugh, check for survivors that fell off along the way and then take a moment to relax. Sure,you got knocked around and banged up a bit, but it was worth it.

Preparing to climb again, you get up and brush yourself off as you identify your goal and find the path that will take you there. Now you start climbing. Slowly at first. Trudging over the depths of uncertain ground. Suddenly the snow sinks out from under you making you work harder only to move slower. Other spots you float along the surface encountering almost no resistance.

There are people lagging behind you.

Doubt

You have a great idea. It grows to take on a life of it’s own. Your motivation is seemingly endless. Even the first people you share your idea with are excited about it. Then that voice starts telling you things. Unhelpful things.

“It won’t work, nobody will pay money for that, how could you be so stupid?”

“You don’t know how to do that?! What are you thinking?!”

That is doubt. Doubt in yourself and your idea. 

Change and Your Brain

The perception our minds create of being comfortable causes us to seek the familiar. Comfort indicates safety.

From the earliest days of human existence we have been programmed to either be safe (read comfortable) or die. Those are no longer the 2 choices we are left with in our world today. There are not predators lurking behind bushes and trees, forcing us to stay on the well-beaten path. Despite the lack of “real” danger our hardwired need for comfort controls our decisions as we resist anything that looks like change.

Leverage the Mind and Get Noticed

We are on a battlefield every day.

Consumers are exposed to a marketing onslaught. In fact, the number of marketing messages an average consumer sees daily ranges from ” 3,000 to 20,000. Those higher numbers include every time you pass by a label in a grocery store, all the ads in your mailbox whether you see them or not, the label on everything you wear, etc” Those figures are according to FluidDrive Media.

What causes your brain to notice a subset of these messages? Filters.

How do you see the world?

Why The Death Of The Office Can’t Come Too Soon

That nagging suspicion that you might not be actually “working” while at work is probably true. For instance, using a meeting cost calculator, similar to this one from Meeting King,  will open your eyes to the actual price of the meetings you are calling for strategic planning, weekly updates etc. If you’ve ever put a price on it, maybe the meetings are worth it, or maybe they aren’t. There are usually more efficient ways to complete projects.

Paul Taylor

“We literally followed people around all day and timed every event [that happened in the office], to the second.

That meant telephone calls, working on documents, typing e-mails, or interacting with someone.

What we found is that the average amount of time that people spent on any single event before being interrupted

was about three minutes.” – Gloria Mark, Professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California

If you are working in an office today you will be interrupted – or you will interrupt yourself – every 3 minutes.

And what’s worse is it will take many of you up to 23 minutes to recover from that distraction.

If your boss lets you – go home. It’s the most productive decision you’ll make this year.

Here are four reasons why the office should have died by now:

1. UK workers spend a year of their lives in meetings…

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