“Everyone can rise above their circumstances and achieve success if they are dedicated to and passionate about what they do.”

“It always seems impossible, until it is done.”

“Lead from the back – and let others believe they are in front.”

"I have always believed exercise is a key not only to physical health but to peace of mind."

“I am fundamentally an optimist. Part of being optimistic is keeping one’s head pointed toward the sun, one’s feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lays defeat and death.”

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."

“Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”

“I like friends who have independent minds because they tend to make you see problems from all angles.”

“No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

18 July is Nelson Mandela Day, marking the late South African president's birth. Here are some of his most inspiring quotes - and how his legacy lives on.

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Here are 11 of Nelson Mandela’s most inspirational quotes

People will tell you to hire for intelligence, but intelligence is overrated. Other hiring criteria are equally or more important.  <ul><li>Drive. Self-motivation will cause people to push and push until they succeed. </li><li>Curiosity. Anyone who loves what they do will be intensely curious about it.</li><li>Ethics. Ethics are hard to test for, but if you see any whiff of less than stellar ethics, avoid the candidate.</li></ul>

Criteria for hiring great people

You can see drive in a candidate's eyes and background.<ul><li>Look for what someone has done, not just been involved in or been part of. For example, they started a business in high school. They started and ran a nonprofit in high school.</li><li>If you can't find anything - if the candidate has just followed the rules their whole lives without achieving something distinct and notable, they probably aren't driven. You're not going to change them.</li></ul>

Drive

Someone who loves what they do will read about it, study it, talk to other people about it, immerse themselves in it and work like anything to stay current. Anyone who isn't curious doesn't love what they do.  And you should hire people who love what they do.

Curiosity

Unethical people are unethical by nature, and the odds of conversion are quite low. Ministers and priests should give people another chance, not hiring managers at startups.<ul><li>One way to test for honesty is to see how they react when they don't know something.  They'll either say they don't know, or they'll talk nonsense and hope you won't notice. </li><li>If they're trying to deceive you during the hiring process, they'll deceive you once they're onboard.</li></ul>

Ethics

<ol><li>Have a written hiring process and ensure everyone has a paper copy of it. Many startups have a random hiring process and hire randomly.</li><li>Do basic skills tests. Ask them basic questions about how to do things in their domain. For a sales rep, have them sell you on your product all the way to a closed deal. For a marketing person, have them whiteboard out a launch for your new product. </li><li>Plan out and write down interview questions.</li><li>Pay attention to the little details during the interview process to show what the person will be like.</li><li>Pay attention to the small things during the reference calls.</li></ol>

How to run the hiring process

<ul><li>Know that while you're going to hate firing someone, you'll feel way better after the fact.</li><li>Realise that the great people on your team will be happy that you've done it as they knew the person wasn't working out. But watch how you fire people, as others will watch how you deal with people.</li><li>Realise that you're often doing the person a favour as you're releasing them from a role where they won't get promoted or valued.</li></ul>Be sure to value the people on your team as they are exceptional.

Fixing hiring mistakes

An archive of the best articles from Marc Andreessen’s now defunct blog

career

Career

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

startup

Startups

Marc Andreessen: How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with

The mobile home screen is the biggest time sink of today. I realized keeping my home screen minimal dramatically reduced my tendency to check apps with no prime purpose.p.s- I'm using a productivity launcher since the start of this year and it's amazing!

#1. De-clutter Your Mobile Home Screen

Remember that we are trying to fight the best behavioral scientists in the world whose job is to keep us hooked to our apps.Poor chance we will win.Install time blockers!

#2. Put Time Limits On All Apps Where You Tend To Waste Time

You will not be able to fight distraction if your mobile screen is constantly pinging with what's happening, or your screen shows you how many messages you've missed!Remove all of them. It should look like this, all the time.

#3. Remove All Notifications And Red Color Badges

One of the worst things we do to ourselves is to wake up just in time for our day.We feel rushed.It disorients us. For the entire day. The first thing I do is sip water for 15 mins.No phone. No book. No music. No person.Just me, water, and my thoughts.

#4. Wake up Slow

If our glucose levels go down, we feel drained out of energy.If they remain too high, we tend to overeat.

#5. Maintain Your Glucose Levels Sideways

We all have a zone where we are most productive.Guard that period ferociously. Schedule the toughest or most impactful things for that period. For me, it is my mornings. Reserved for the most important things with most of it thinking time

#6. Find your max energy period

A powerful way to keep your mind focused.A 30-min slot is 1 pomodoro25 mins of work5 mins of breakRepeatAfter 4 pomodoros, take a long 20-30 min break. Download a Pomodoro timer - there are plenty of good ones.

#7. Use Pomodoro Technique

Your mind should be used to think.Not to remember.Use the calendar, emails, and notes app to record everything.From to-do lists to reminders and beyond.

#8. Do Not Try To Remember Anything

We are living in a world of information abundance. And the more sources you have of information, the more you will constantly be consuming, as against doing real work.

#9. Restrict Information To Max 3 Sources

Even with 3 sources, you could spend your entire day consumed by them.Schedule time for them.

#10. Schedule time for these sources

We crave distraction because it is the forbidden fruit.Dopamine is addictive. You could fight it by setting up a scheduled time to "waste time"Our mind then anticipates it, instead of craving it.

#11. Setup distraction time

When we write we tell our brain that this is important.Which is one of the best ways to get our mind off that thing. So the next time you feel distracted, just write down that thought.

#12. Keep a  journal for distracting thoughts

Our mind is designed to focus on things that we haven't finished, as against things that we have. Do not add to your pile of unfinished things.

#13. If anything can be done in 2 mins and needs to be done, do it.

Nothing beats distraction than having a routine. The absence of which is you willingly giving away control of your day to external stimuli.

#14. Maintain a routine

This thread will help you in cutting the distraction off and doing more with our time!

productivity

Productivity

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

habits

Habits

14 Ways To Beat Distraction🚫

"The Art Spirit", by Robert Henri is about creativity through the lens of an art student.  The book starts, "Art, when really understood, is a province of every human being. It is simply a question of doing things - anything. Well, it is not an outside extra thing. When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature. He opens ways for better understanding." Startups are interesting to others. They don't have to be painters to be artists. They can work in any medium.

Startups are like artists

It's not just how important the end product is but the actual craft of doing the work, inventing within the work. Few have the courage and stamina to see it through. You have to make up your mind to be alone in many ways.

Learn how important the work is

The old masters did know how they compose their pictures. Do not fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them.  It's easy to fall in the footsteps of others, to do what they do because you think it's the right way. You may think if they've had success, you can copy that success. Yet, you have to find your own path to be successful.

Do what has not been done before

An art student must be a master from the start. He must be a master of his own tools. That mastership is not a destination. It is a process and constant practice. It is not enough to think of great things. What really matters is the work. To implement those ideas. Other's success seems like it happened in just a moment, but it takes years and years of patience.

Be a master of your own tools

If you don't have purpose that is shared between everyone, you will not do anything that is timeless. You must focus on building what you want to see in the world. When you have a passion for building for yourself, that' will draw other people to your cause and your team.

You cannot do anything without a shared sense of purpose 

Bill Walsh took a football team near the bottom and brought them to the top. He focused entirely on a new standard of performance. The most challenging transition for an entrepreneur is going from individual action to leading a team. First, start with an idea and a philosophy of purpose, then find people to help you implement it.

The Score Takes Care of Itself, by Bill Walsh

<ol><li>Start with a comprehensive recognition of reverence for identifying the specific actions and attitudes relevant to your team's performance.</li><li>Be clear on your expectations of effort and execution of your standard.</li><li>Let all know that you expect them to possess the highest level of expertise in their area.</li><li>Teach your beliefs, values and your philosophy.</li><li>Teach connection and extension. You don't want independent contractors, you want people who feel connected that can expand the organization.</li><li>Make the expectations and metrics of competence.</li></ol>

Establish a standard of performance

<ol><li>Be yourself</li><li>Be committed to excellence</li><li>Be positive</li><li>Be prepared to recognize fortunate situations and act on them immediately. Good luck is a product of good planning.</li><li>Act professional. Push in your chairs, tuck in your shirts. If you build an organization that does that, you build an organization that cares about itself.</li><li>Be organized.</li><li>Be accountable</li><li>Be near-sighted and far-sighted.</li><li>Be firm</li><li>Be flexible</li><li>Believe in yourself</li><li>Be a leader. Ensure to show and not tell.</li></ol>

Habits of a leader

<ol><li>Exbihit paralyzing patience.</li><li>Engage in massive delegating. </li><li>Act in a tedious, overly cautious manner.</li><li>Become best buddies with certain employees or play favouritism.</li><li>Spend excessive time socializing with superiors or subordinates</li><li>Fail to continue performance evaluations of long-time or tenured staff members.</li><li>Fail to actively participate in efforts to praise and acquire new hires.</li><li>Trust others to carry out your fundamental duties.</li><li>Find ways to get out from under the responsibilities of your position.</li><li>Promote a laid-back organisational environment.</li></ol>

What not to do

<ol><li>Praise is more valuable than blame.</li><li>Set expectations. Use every means before and after comment to tell troops what they're going to do and what they have done.</li><li>Discipline is based on pride in the profession of arms, meticulous attention to detail, and mutual respect and confidence.</li><li>Officers must assert themselves by example.</li><li>General officers must be seen in the front line during action.</li><li>There's a tendency for the chain of command to overload junior officers with excessive requirements in the way of training.</li></ol>

How General Patton ran his army during World War One

<ol><li>Formally celebrate and observe the momentous achievement and ensure everyone feels ownership of it.</li><li>Allow pats on the back for a limited time.</li><li>Be apprehensive about applause.</li><li>Develop a plan for your staff that gets them back into the mode of operation that produced success.</li><li>Address specific situations that need shoring up. </li><li>Be demanding. Do not relax.</li><li>Don't fall prey to overconfidence. Make change for the sake of change.</li><li>Make hard decisions immediately after success.</li><li>Never fall prey to the belief that getting to the top makes everything easy. It doesn't.</li><li>Mastery is a process, not a destination.</li></ol>

How to protect against the success disease

Keep a list of everything that you want to do every day and a list of things that you don't want to do. This will help to establish patterns for yourself. Every day for a week, wake up to this note. Check it throughout the day and before you fall asleep.For example:Do's<ul><li>Stay present.</li><li>Be vulnerable. Show people your mistakes and fears.</li><li>Drink only lemon water and red wine.</li><li>Exercise.</li></ul> Don't's<ul><li>Don't avoid eye contact.</li><li>Don't be late.</li><li>Don't set expectations for someone and not meet them.</li><li>Don't eat sugar.</li><li>Dont drink hard liquor or beer on weekdays.</li></ul>

Keep daily notes

How to Start a Business: A Startup Guide for Entrepreneurs

business

Business

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

The Startup Masterclass

Jack Dorsey at Startup School 2013. Startup School is YC's free online program for founders. Sign up to access the full curriculum and over $100k in deals! https://www.startupschool.org/

videos

Videos

Videos to help you build a successful startup. Subscribe for startup advice, founder stories, and a look inside Y Combinator.

What is Y Combinator?
We invest $500,000 in every startup and work intensively with the founders for three months. For the life of their company, founders have access to the most powerful community in the world, essential advice, later-stage funding and programs, recruiting resources, and exclusive deals. 

Visit https://ycombinator.com/why to learn more.



Y Combinator

Jack Dorsey at Startup School 2013

Jack Dorsey at Startup School

Growing from concept to millions requires adaptability, in mindset & skillset.Especially from the founder, who needs to shift his/her daily responsibilities with growth.See below the roadmap for bootstrappers created by Casey Clark from Cultivate Advisors. <a href="https://emojipedia.org/backhand-index-pointing-down/">👇👇👇</a>

Founders must be ready to evolve

In the early days, with no money or network, founders need to do everything.Flush with passion, the challenge at this stage is knowing how to channel energy into results.To graduate from the hustle phase, spend 70% of your time on sales.

1. Hustler

Reading too many (or the wrong) business books encourages founders to focus on the wrong things.<ul><li>You don't need systems to scale or perfect OKRs (yet) -- you need sales. </li><li>Become a master of selling & set the foundation for growth.</li></ul>

You need sales

There is no timetable for success, and hustlers understand this. They are willing to work hard, from morning to night, until they reach their goal.

You've proven that this idea has legs. Now how can you optimize your offering and your processes?
<ul>
<li>A/B test your offer</li>
<li>Add employees & vendors to fulfill tasks not in line with your strengths</li>
<li>Find ways to lower customer acquisition costs before scaling</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
Begin building processes to produce repeatable results. Establish KPIs/ OKRs so that a quick snapshot can give insights into the health of your business.
</blockquote>

2. Experimenter

Ready for scale, founders need to delegate. Probably delegating is the hardest phase because it requires putting your ego aside and empowering others to perform, but, most often, the person appointed to a task ends up being more effective.Many bootstrappers get stuck in this phase because it's uncomfortable relinquishing control.It's difficult to shake the desire to "protect" what we've built.It usually unfolds like this...

3. Visionary

With a fully functioning team, you need to add management to replace yourself.It's challenging because it's expensive, risky & will remove you from the day to day.But it's essential to pave the way toward giving the company what it needs:<ul><li>This phase includes letting others control budgets, make hiring decisions, and design processes (without your input).</li><li>On the other side of systemizing is the opportunity to scale for years to come.</li></ul>

4. Systemizer

You've built a product with demand, attracted talent & built systems.<ul><li>Amplify everything by becoming a respected voice in your industry.</li><li>Use social media to build a following. The earned authority and trust will attract customers and talent.</li><li>Position yourself to be a keynote speaker at industry events. Being an influencer gives you the inside track on acquisitions & opportunities for growth that others will miss out on.</li></ul>The power of influence can't be overstated.

5. Influencer

Put your heart, mind, intellect and soul even to your smallest acts. This is the secret of success.

What’s your best tip to become an effective delegator? 

Master these 5 roles to scale your startup

Price is the most delicate element of the marketing mix, and much thought goes into setting prices to nudge us towards spending more.There’s one particularly cunning style of pricing strategy that marketers use to urge you to change your choice from one choice to a costlier or more profitable one.It is called the “Decoy Effect.”

The decoy effect: how you are influenced to choose without really knowing it

Imagine you are in a movie house and now are searching for a cola drink. You have got two options. The cheapest is at Rs 200/-for 200 ml.The pricier at Rs 400 for 450 ml.Which one you select will rely upon some assessment of their relative value for money.It is not immediately apparent, though, that the costlier option is the best value. It does have over twice the amount, but what are they worth?Now consider the above choice in light of the 3rd option of Rs 300 for 300 ml.

Relative value for money.

The decoy effect is defined as the phenomenon whereby consumers change their preferences between two options when presented with a third option — the “decoy.”

Decoy Effect

When consumers have many alternatives, they often experience “choice overload.” In an endeavour to cut back on this anxiety, consumers tend to simplify the method by selecting only a pair of criteria (say price and quantity) to see the simplest value for money.Through manipulating these key choice attributes, the decoy steers you in a very particular direction while supplying you with the sensation that you are making a rational, informed choice.

How do decoys work?

The decoy effect can cause us to spend and consume more than we’d like. When a decoy option is present, we tend to make decisions based less on which option will suit our purposes and more on what seems like the most advantageous choice.

Individual effects

Decoys are a commonly used tool by businesses and corporations to “nudge” us into buying more quickly than we’d like.

Systemic effects

ven though we believe that we make all of our decisions consciously and deliberately, in reality, we are often unaware of things that have influenced our choices or how they need to affect us.Decoys justify our choice.When people make decisions, their goal isn’t to select the right option. Instead, the goal is to justify the result of a choice they’ve already made.Decoys serve to de-stress the decision-making process in additional ways than simply providing a nice-sounding explanation — they also settle the anxiety of having too many options to decide on.

Decoys work subconsciously.

The decoy effect is simplest when there are only three options in play: target, competitor, and decoy. Whether you’re out shopping, or you’re evaluating political candidates, try and notice when things take place in groups of three — there could also be a decoy within the mix.

Beware of sets of three.

Your thinking style plays a role in how likely you’re to be laid low by the decoy effect. One study, which involved over 600 participants, found that the people most affected by a decoy were those who relied on intuitive reasoning.

Don’t trust your gut.

Apple unveiled its new iPod priced16GB for $229. 32GB for $299. and 64GB for $399.In other words, double the storage for a further $70; you also get more features.However, if you choose to double the capacity (32GB to 64GB), you pay a further $100, but you don’t get extra features. Therefore, you may conclude that the 32GB version offers the most effective value for money.So, only some would buy the 16GB version and even fewer would choose the 64GB version.But, the very fact is, the 16GB and the 64GB versions are the decoys to make the 32GB version more appealing and also the best choice.

How Apple uses the decoy effect

Talks about the one of the most Important Marketing Weapon of the industry.

There’s one particularly cunning style of pricing strategy that marketers use to urge you to change your choice from one choice to a costlier or more profitable one. Imagine you are in a movie house…

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

Innovation is the systematic practice of developing and marketing new products, services, processes, and business models for customers. Successful innovation increases value and drives growth. However, getting innovation right can be challenging.  Over 80 percent of executives surveyed say that innovation is one of their top three priorities, yet less than 10 percent are satisfied with their innovation performance.

Innovation in a business context

Companies that use the essentials of innovation see a substantial performance edge. Mastering innovation can generate economic profit 2.4 times higher than other players.

The importance of innovation in business

Research shows eight critical elements organisations should master for superior innovation performance. <ol><li>Aspire: Viewing innovation-led growth as critical.</li><li>Choose: Investing in a coherent, time- and risk-balanced portfolio of initiatives.</li><li>Discover: Creating actionable business, market, and technology R&D efforts.</li><li>Evolve: Developing business models that deliver defensible and scalable profit sources.</li><li>Accelerate: Developing and launching innovations quickly.</li><li>Scale: Launching innovations at the right scale in the relevant markets.</li><li>Extend: Creating and capitalizing on external networks.</li><li>Mobilize</li></ol>

Becoming better innovators

<ul><li>Mercedes-Benz Group invested extensively in digitizing its product development system, shortening its innovation cycles, improving its ability to personalise cars and increasing assembly efficiency by 25 percent.</li><li>The information services organization RELX Group ran ten to 15 experiments in each customer segment in its pipeline yearly, then selected one or two of the best ideas.</li><li>International insurance company Discovery Group mobilised the organisation around innovation by creating incentives using semiannual divisional scorecards.</li></ul>

Examples of successful innovators

Steps to help aspiring innovators get started:<ul><li>Hold collision sessions. Teams consider unmet customer needs, technology trends, and business models and bring creativity and specificity to idea generation. Then a panel evaluates the ideas and prioritises what to do.</li><li>Challenge orthodoxies. Participants describe common beliefs that prevent the organisation from innovating.</li><li>Make analogies to other industries. A team creates a list of companies with unique value propositions and then systematically applies these propositions.</li><li>Apply constraints, such as serving only one type of customer.</li></ul>

Improving the volume and quality of new ideas

The way to get to good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.

An innovation portfolio is a thoughtfully curated collection of potential initiatives, with clear aspirations and resources defined for each. The portfolio will help to find new opportunities and determine the appropriate number of initiatives, including:<ul><li>Confirming the total value of the portfolio needed.</li><li>Evaluating existing innovation projects.</li><li>Getting comfortable saying “no” to stop projects that are dilutive.</li><li>Reallocating resources to new initiatives.</li><li>Identifying portfolio gaps and defining new initiatives.</li></ul>

Innovation portfolio

<ul><li>Look at innovation-driven net new growth, called the "green box." The green box looks at growth from innovation alone. It defines the value that a company creates from innovation, on a defined timeline, with quantifiable metrics. Once defined, the growth aspiration can be cascaded into a set of objectives and metrics.</li><li>R&D-to-product conversion: This metric is calculated from the ratio of R&D spending to sales from new products.</li><li>New-products-to-margin conversion: This metric view the ratio of gross margin percentage to sales from new products.</li></ul>

How to measure innovation

Innovation is a team sport and consists of ten traits that fall into four main categories:<ol><li>Vision - the ability to spot opportunities and inspire others to go after them.</li><li>Collaboration focuses on fostering effective teamwork and change management.</li><li>Learning or absorbing new ideas.</li><li>Execution, with traits that enable quick decision-making even during uncertainty.</li></ol>

How to create a high-performing innovation team

A recent poll showed that 85 percent of executives say fear is holding their organisation back from innovative efforts.<ul><li>Create a culture that accounts for the human side of innovation. For example, people who worry about failure, criticism, or career impact of a wrong move can prevent people from embracing innovation.</li><li>Create a safe environment for innovation.</li><li>The majority of important breakthroughs failed many times before they succeeded.</li><li>If someone knowledgeable thinks you have a bad idea, ensure to put them on your board and make them an advisor to prevent blind spots.</li></ul>

Broad innovation advice for business leaders

creativity

Creativity

What is innovation?

Problems aren’t personal.They are systemic.<ul><li>Your mind is a system containing systems.</li><li>Your body is a system containing systems.</li><li>The universe is a system containing systems.</li><li>Purpose is the divine force by which you conduct your life.</li><li>Purpose is the intrinsic energy that makes positive choices seamless.</li><li>Purpose is the compass that guides you inward — unmoved by external circumstances.</li></ul>

Finding Purpose By Solving Your Own Problems

By solving systemic problems, allowing nature to flow as it was meant to.Bring these questions to the top of your mind:What is the big problem you want to solve in the world?What is the big problem you want to solve in your life?With experience, you will realize that the answer to these questions is one and the same.At this very moment, what is it? What is your inward pull?

Finding Purpose

Chances are that the inward pull — where you will find your purpose — is painted over with layers of societal opinions, beliefs, and other projections that have been hard wired in your brain over years of unconscious living.<ul><li>That inward pull, for those that may not understand, can go by many names.</li><li>Some call it your higher voice. Some call it your calling. Some call it the universe.</li><li>For now, we will call in The Pull.</li></ul>

The Inward Pull

You increase the strength of The Pull by peeling back the layers that are suppressing it.That means working from external to internal.From superficial to profound.Surface level to the core.Tip of the iceberg to the bottom of the ocean.Don’t let the depths scare you off, there’s a reason it isn’t crowded.What problems are begging to be solved in your life right now?Do you have self-esteem issues? Hit the gym.Do you have money problems? Get a better job or start a low-risk business.By working your way up Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs, you reveal the way inward toward your deepest purpose.

The Layers That Suppress Us

It is the most foundational human drive that modern distractions have hijacked.You have the Library Of Alexandria staring you straight in the face.It will take some digging, of course. You will not find all of the answers after a few days of research.Your problems will get better.You will see the futility in surface level external pursuits.You will have a (good) desire to explore the depths of your being.You will adopt and shed macro and micro purposes for a lifetime until you uncover your life’s purpose.

Learning Power

Adopt a writing habit.Why?The foundation of media is an impactful message.An impactful message starts with an idea.If that idea is not fleshed out for the sake of understanding through the written word; it will remain just that, an idea. Thrown in the trash with the millions of other “million dollar ideas” that have been piling up throughout your life.By not writing, you are preventing yourself from discovering new mental pathways to go down.One written word can change the direction of your life.

The Vessel For Purpose, Growth, and Impact: Writing

Writing is how you execute ideas as fast as possible so they don’t get lost in the depths of your mind.The greatest skill one can develop is decreasing the time between idea and execution.If you want to take part in any form of online business, media is your foundation.<ul><li>Educational content</li><li>Newsletters and articles</li><li>YouTube video scripts</li><li>Sales and product pages</li><li>Social media</li></ul>The list goes on. Media is the front end of the internet and if you don’t plan to learn to code… better get started writing.Creative, persuasive, and individual media houses (personal brands) cannot be phased out.

The Power Of Writing

Big corporations can be automated, but society is losing trust in them.We are transitioning into an age of authenticity.People are losing trust in:<ul><li>– The media</li><li>– Big corporations</li><li>– Flashy sales gimmicks</li></ul>People are gaining trust in:<ul><li>– Independent sources</li><li>– Value-driven communities</li><li>– Clarity and human connection</li></ul> Only the curious will survive.

Losing Trust In Big Media Corps

Authenticity stems from living through the energy generated from your purpose.Finding purpose stems from solving your own problems.Writing is the vessel for pursuing your curiosity, understanding yourself, and creating solutions for your problems.Media is how you document the process, teach others what you learned, and get paid for doing so.

The Future Belongs To The Authentic

<ul><li>Full control over who you work with, what you work on, and when you work.</li><li>The ability to live by the laws of nature, work 2-4 hours a day, and dedicate time to other important areas of your life (like rest!)</li><li>Getting paid for doing what you love, even when people say it is impossible.</li><li>Self-reliance, sovereignty, and personal freedom that comes with a lack of money problems.</li><li>Most if not all of this is impossible through employment.</li><li>Employment is still a great option for increasing your income.</li><li>At the same time, employment comes with a cap and distorts others’ perceptions of money.</li></ul>

The Experience Model For The "One Person Business"

Once you are locked into what was sold to you as “the good life” 40-80 hour work weeksA finite and predictable salary45 years of work before you rest It becomes 10x more difficult to get out.Build while you still have little to no responsibility.

That’s what business is… problem solving. That’s all it is. Money is the result of value exchange. Offer to solve someone’s problems for money in the areas you know best.The limits that come along with employment cease to exist when you start taking the internet seriously.Most of us “online business folk” refrain from talking about making a lot of money because that’s what most people’s lives revolve around.

Business Is Just Problem Solving

More people need to talk about money. Normalize it. Condition people into believing that they can earn as much as they want doing what they want. As cheesy as it sounds, self-belief is the first step in almost anything.A thought comes before action.

Believe You Can Earn More

<ul><li>Forget about finding a niche. </li><li>Choose 2-3 curiosities to pursue that have the potential to solve your own problems.</li><li>Immerse yourself in an informational and social environment conducive to solving those problems.</li><li>Read books, follow people online, and eliminate everything else that has the potential to distract you.</li><li>Treat your Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn account as a place for sharing your discoveries.</li></ul>That is your niche. YOU are your niche. YOU, at this very moment, are interested in a select few things that intersect. That intersection is where your audience is built.

The Experience Model

People are interested in more than one thing.Those that are interested in health can also express interest in spirituality or learning to code. That’s where the fun comes in — it’s on you to craft a persuasive argument for the interests that will help others solve their problems.As you evolve, your content and brand will evolve.That means you will move on from what you are currently talking about and selling.You will desaturate the market beneath you.The creator economy is impossible to saturate, otherwise, it’s not the creator economy (one-person businesses).

The Connections Between Things

How To Profit From Solving Your Own Problems - Dan Koe

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The decoy effect: how you are influenced to choose without really knowing it

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