There is no way around the hard work. Embrace it.

A man who wins, is a man who thinks he can.

You have to believe in the long-term plan you have but you need the short-term goals to motivate and inspire you.

I fear no one, but respect everyone.

When you're good at something, make that everything.

The more I lose, the more they believe they can beat me. But believing is not enough, you still have to beat me.

Success is a nice thing because it always means you've taken a step forward and it gives you a sense of pride, which in turn gives you confidence and experience-a positive circle, so to speak.

The one thing you can do for sure is push the luck on your side.

What I think I've been able to do well over the years is play with pain, play with problems, play in all sorts of conditions.

I definitely need to use my chances when they come because definitely there wont be many.

I've always been aware that the image you patiently construct for an entire career can be ruined in a minute. It scares you a bit, but that's the way things are.

Discover Roger Federer famous and rare quotes. Share Roger Federer quotations about tennis, winning and sports. "There is no way around the hard work..."

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

sports

Sports

QUOTES BY ROGER FEDERER

A question that lingers in the minds of many working professionals, either experienced or freshers, is whether they should build their own startup or not.A study by Harvard has shown that there are three primary reasons people venture into startups:<ul><li>Many times, it's driven by a zest to really solve a problem that is faced by the future founder itself.</li><li>Sometimes, a major gap is discovered in an industry/sector that the future founder feels he can cover and make money.</li><li>The third reason is love for a particular industry/sector and motivation to grow aggressively..</li></ul>

Building One's Own Startup

Starting up due to Love for a particular industry is often the outcome of creative thinkers, who start their own firm, with the key investment being their creativity.Startup founders are divided into two buckets: Billionaires 1 & 2.

The Two Buckets Of Founders

These are the ones who experiment right from their college days. Most of the time, they connect to the third reason for building a startup- creativity. They love a specific industry and really want to make their mark on it. The biggest advantage college students have is that of low liabilities and tons of resources.A downside is that it's often the first time that they are building anything, and as such, they often make a lot of mistakes, which might hamper the growth or development of their service/product.

Billionaires 1

These are folks who have worked in a particular industry for at least 3-4 years and have identified a gap, which forms the genesis of their startup vision. The gap can be something small, like optimization of a particular sales/marketing/manufacturing process, or building an entirely different operating and business model for the same industry.These folks are quite well suited for a startup, having prior professional experience, knowledge of how things work, soft skills, team building, management, etc.

Billionaires 2

Across all the three reasons and two buckets, a thing that's common is the endpoint. The startup works or it doesn’t. In either case, the founder benefits a lot. For he is someone who has learned real-life lessons, has donned multiple hats, has built a team, a product, a business stream, managed the branding, marketing, etc. These are all the things the founding team is actually expected to do and with this experience, any founder becomes a valuable asset to the organization.

The Endpoint

The question, should you start up, is highly qualitative in nature. Is the problem statement you identified big enough? Do you have any liabilities? Would you be the one who can wear multiple hats for at least 1 year of the startup? Do you have co-founders who are with you on your vision? Do you have enough money in the bank that can sustain you for at least 6months? Do you have industry knowledge of the problem you are solving? A founder needs to be honest about the above questions and gauge independently the feasibility.

The Main Question

We have met folks who are in their 40s and 50s who regret not working on a startup in their 20s. There are folks in their 20s who think they should build a startup once their life is settled off, probably in their late 30s or 40s. And then there are 19-year-olds who think they should start up after some experience. There is no right or wrong age, it's just a moment and the scenarios that help in making the decision.

The Bottom Line

myPluto helps small teams, young entrepreneurs and ,aspiring product managers to navigate the development of their first product in a structured manner.

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

business

Business

startup

Startups

Why Should You Startup?

There’s a popular adage in the fitness community that you never regret a workout. And while that generally may be true, there are simply some days your mind doesn’t care and urges you to avoid it anyway.This is not only perfectly normal; it’s totally acceptable. The notion that you should force yourself into tough workouts creates an unsustainable and poor relationship with exercise.

Fitness Freaks And Their Regimes

Recovery is vital in any fitness routine. Recovery might mean simply walking or cycling to keep the body moving, or taking a break altogether ― and that’s OK. It’s all about listening to your body and not pushing yourself to a point where you end up hating exercise.Just as when you wake up feeling rested from a good night’s sleep, a rest day will give your body that same opportunity to meet your next workout with energy and enthusiasm.

Sometimes, Just Don’t Work Out

<ul><li>What you may have been able to conquer yesterday may not be the same today.</li><li>You will always have to take care of your fitness, but the way you move your body will change.</li><li>Your mind is just as important as your body. Just having a 'sweat session' isn't all there is to fitness.</li></ul>

Your Fitness Levels Can Change

<ul><li>Your workout doesn't need to be long in order for you to reap the benefits</li><li>Finding an enjoyable way to move your body for a short period of time can be just as effective</li><li>It's not just about the workout. It's about your peace of mind and quality of life</li><li>Buy a  good workout set, because clothes make us feel good.</li></ul>

Commit to Doing Just a Few Minutes

<ul><li>Blast some good music before getting started</li><li>Keep it simple and relaxed. Don't pressure yourself to have your best performance.</li><li>Stretch or find a gentle way to move their body.</li><li>Prioritize stretching and foam rolling: use a foam roller to activate your glutes and other muscles to feel good each day.</li><li>Fitness feels easier when it's an activity you don't hate.</li><li>Find a fun way to move that feels more like play.</li></ul>

Keep It Moving, Keep It Fun

<ul><li>If you don't feel like going to the gym, don't pressure yourself to have the best workout, and instead encourage yourself to move for the sake of consistency, the next workout will be that much easier.</li><li>The act of restarting is most often more challenging than the workout itself.</li></ul>

The Bottom Line: Think About Your Future

If your head isn't into exercise or if you only have a few minutes to spare, this advice is for you.

health

Health

exerciseandfitness

Exercise & Fitness

What Fitness Pros Do When They Don't Feel Like Working Out

Space, time and gravity get weird when they are studied at a super subatomic scale, where the quantum nature of gravity starts to kick in. Albert Einstein taught us that space and time could warp and bend like a piece of fabric. We experience this warping of the space-time continuum as gravity. Einstein’s theory is mainly concerned with the largest scales of nature, the scale of stars, galaxies and the whole universe. It doesn’t look at space and time at the smallest scales.

The mystery of space, time and gravity

At the smallest level, nature is governed by quantum mechanics.  The quantum theory account for all the forces of nature but not gravity. When physicists try to apply quantum theory to gravity, space and time start to fluctuate wildly, almost as if falling apart. This is incompatible with the outcome of Einstein’s theory. Some physicists conclude that space and time may not be as fundamental as we thought. Instead, they seem more like byproducts of something deeper.

Nature at the smallest level

Both special relativity and general relativity are fundamentally classical theories. Classically, things have positions, and locations - positions and velocities. However, classical mechanics fail at small scales. This is where quantum mechanics becomes useful. Since the discovery of quantum mechanics, we have to take everything we know about nature and fit it into the quantum mechanical framework. Physicists can do that for almost everything they know about nature, except for gravity and curved space-time.

Classical vs quantum mechanics

Technical issuesWhen you’re learning quantum mechanics as a student, you’re taught the classical model for something, then given rules for quantising that classical theory. However, classical theories do not define quantum theories very well. When you straightforwardly apply that quantisation procedure to gravity, it gives infinite crazy answers.Conceptual issuesWith gravity, you’re trying to combine many different possible geometries of space-time, meaning you’re not sure what time is or where things are in space because you don’t know the geometry of space.

Why it’s hard to find a theory that merges quantum theory and gravity

Classically, for a particle, you have a clear idea of where a particle is and how fast it’s moving. And you can measure whatever you want. However, there is less agreement on what quantum mechanics is saying because you have to use words like "measurement" and "observation." You can observe things such as the position or velocity of a particle, but can't measure it. When you extend that to gravity, things like location in space don’t exist. They are some approximations that you get at the classical level in the right circumstances.

Observation and measurement

Consider gas in a box. A box full of some gaseous substance is made of atoms and molecules. When we look at the gas in the box with our eyes, or our thermometers, we don’t see each individual atom or molecule, its position and velocity. We see coarse-grained features of the system. We can invent a predictive theory of what the gas is going to do based on the coarse-grained macroscopic observables. We can model things without knowing what every atom is doing. That’s emergence. You have a set of properties that are approximate and coarse-grained.

The emergence of space-time

The Higgs boson is a real particle but it’s hard to detect because it has a very short lifetime and quickly decays into other particles. It can decay into two particles, an electron and a positron. When you consider quantum mechanics, you can predict roughly how long it will take the Higgs boson to decay, but when it spits out that electron and positron, you can’t predict the direction in which they will move. Entanglement is the fact that you cannot separately predict what the observational outcome will be for the electron and positron.

Entanglement

The particles and forces of the world come from fields that spread all throughout space and time and have a quantum mechanical nature. There’s a quantum mechanical field for the photon, the gluon, the Higgs boson, for gravity, etc. But the important thing to remember about field theory is that even in empty space, there are still fields. They are in their lowest-energy state or zero value.  When you take two different points of space-time at some distance between them there are still things there. The quantum state of the fields at these two points in space is always going to be entangled.

The world is run by what is called quantum field theory

The idea is that all the quantum mechanical information inside a black hole can in certain circumstances be considered as spread out on the boundary of the black hole.  If you think of the interior of the black hole as a three-dimensional region of space, and the boundary as a two-dimensional boundary, one can think of all the information of the black hole as being located on the boundary. That’s holography because there’s a two-dimensional boundary that is filling the three-dimensional inside.

The holographic principle

In theoretical physics, the AdS/CFT correspondence is called Maldacena duality or gauge/gravity duality. <ul><li>Juan Maldacena applied the holographic principle to black holes and anti-de Sitter space. Because there’s no gravity there, you can define quantum field theory on it and have no conceptual issues quantising it.</li><li>Mark Van Raamsdonk, Brian Swingle and others pointed out that if you fiddle with the amount of entanglement between different parts of the quantum field theory on the boundary without gravity, the geometry of the anti-de Sitter space inside changes in response to that.</li></ul>

Some try to derive gravity from quantum field theories that don’t have gravity in them

Strange things happen when you try to combine Einstein’s description of curved space-time with a universe made up of quantum wavefunctions.  This podcast shows how space and time are emergent properties of quantum reality but not fundamental parts of it.

Einstein’s description of curved space-time doesn’t easily mesh with a universe made up of quantum wavefunctions. Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll discusses the quest for quantum gravity with host Steven Strogatz.            The post Where Do Space, Time and Gravity Come From? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

space

Space

The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz interviews leading researchers about the great scientific and mathematical questions of our time.

The Joy of Why

Where Do Space, Time and Gravity Come From?

Runners may get caught up in the idea that in order to see gains, you have to do more. However, experts say that running is an individualised sport, and the volume and intensity to perform optimally depend on fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscle fibre predisposition.

Running is individualised

<ul><li>Fast-twitch fibres have a more powerful force but fatigue quickly. </li><li>Slow-twitch muscle fibers are less powerful but more fatigue-resistant. </li><li>Our muscles contain both types, but your personal ratio can vary.</li></ul> A 2020 study found that runners with more fast-twitch muscle fibres were more likely to suffer from short-term performance dips after periods of higher-volume training. It means that if you’re a fast-twitch athlete trying to push the same training as a slower-twitch athlete, it may actually make you get slower.

The difference between fast-twitch fibres and slow-twitch fibres

To find your specific muscle fibre ratio, plug a recent 5K time into a race equivalency calculator, then compare it to your marathon results. <ul><li>If a 5K time suggests you can run a 3:59 marathon, but your real marathon time is 4:10, you may be stronger at shorter races that need fast-twitch muscle fibres.</li><li>If your marathon time is 3:45, you may have more slow-twitch fibres.</li></ul>

Establish your specific muscle fibre ratio

Most people aren't suited for higher mileage. Professional athletes go home after their workouts; they're eating well, they're stretching and sleeping. The average person with a full-time job is likely not sleeping enough and knows it's unsustainable to put that much volume in their running. Furthermore, pushing higher may result in getting broken down and injuries.

Lifestyle factors play a role

Examples of lower mileage training plans:<ul><li>Athletes can do two harder but longer-distance sessions per week, with a shorter recovery run the next day.</li><li>Athletes can run four or five days per week with just one hard workout, such as 200-meter intervals. Long runs with varied intensity count as a quality session. </li></ul> Expert trainers advise you don't need to supplement your days off with another form of cardio to cross-train. Cross-training sessions depend on your schedule and motivations. Other experts believe it's better to let your body fully recover on days you're not running.

How to pack more quality into lower-mileage training plans

Regular strength workouts is a key component to strong performances. For example, a combination of weight-lifting and plyometric exercises, such as 5 sets each of barbell squats, weighted box jumps with dumbbells, and non-weighted box jumps, as well as separate 20-minute banded exercise sessions.

Strength workouts

<ul><li>You’re constantly dealing with soreness, fatigue, overuse injuries, or aiming for high numbers for their own sake.</li><li>If you get out for a run, are breathing normally, and running at a pace that should be easy, but you find that your legs just don’t want to move.</li><li>Watch out for an increase in your resting heart rate. You need to make serious adjustments if it is more than 10 percent for a couple of months.</li></ul>

Signs of overtraining

<ul><li>Listen to your body and write down notes that you’ll learn from.</li><li>Comparison can steal your joy for running. Social media only tells a fraction of the picture. We continually forget what works for us and then get scared or insecure based on what we see others doing.</li></ul>

Take personal notes and avoid comparison

For some runners, from recreational to sub-elite and even the pros, less truly is more when it comes to reaping gains.

In Defense of Running Lower Mileage (Just Hear Us Out)

Researchers, founders and executives insist that running can teach essential lessons in sticking with big goals and mental toughness. Olympic distance runner Alexi Pappas's advice from one of her running coaches is to use the rule of thirds: "Whenever you're chasing a big dream, you're supposed to feel good a third of the time, okay a third of the time and crappy or not great a third of the time." "If you feel too good all the time, you're not pushing yourself enough, and if you feel too fatigued, you might be burning out."

How hard you should push yourself when chasing big dreams

The rule of thirds is for looking back at your progress and seeing if you should push yourself more or less. Feeling lousy is not a sign that you're not good enough or doing something wrong. Instead, it means you're trying to do something ambitious. To maximize your progress towards challenging goals, <ul><li>you should be well outside your comfort zone (feeling lousy) a third of the time.</li><li>Feeling lousy much more is risky.</li><li>Feeling lousy less means you're not putting in enough effort.</li></ul>

Resilience in rule form

If you don't feel lousy a third of the time, you're probably not aiming high enough, says Alexi Pappas.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

education

Learning & Education

Use This Olympian's 'Rule of Thirds' to Chase Any Big Dream

<ul><li>All too often, the only time customers hear from a salesperson is when they clearly have an agenda</li><li>Give your buyers credit, and be a resource to them always, not just when there's something for you to gain from it.</li></ul>

Buyers only hear from you when you want something

<ul><li>If a customer or prospect makes a request of any kind, do your best to accommodate them. If you can't, acknowledge their request, let them know you've tried to fulfill it.</li><li>Use a content experience platform so you can organize, tag and access your content easily and quickly whenever a specific content request is made.</li></ul>

When customer requests are ignored

There are many shades of friction, but three, in particular, can sour your customer's experience fast.<ul><li>Trouble accessing the content you share. Maybe you send a link that leads to an error or a landing page that won't load. </li><li>Sending a great piece of content at the wrong time. Timing is crucial.</li><li>Unclear next steps. If your content is high quality and helps a buyer to see that they want to work with you, it should be immediately obvious how they can do so.</li></ul>

There's friction with your content experience

Many organizations are still failing to connect the dots between content and an elevated buyer experience. To help you avoid making the same mistakes, this article outlines three customer experience breakdowns that happen all the time.

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

3 Customer Experience Breakdowns That Buyers Hate

While many IC-level developer tools offer free trials that let developers take the product for a test drive themselves, enterprise POCs and trial periods address a different kind of buyer pain point: exploring a potential (and likely significant) in a new solution.A paid pilot sets expectations for what the period is about: evaluating your product as a long-term investment. Asking your customers to pay a token fee is an important qualifier for long-term successful deals

Frame your POC as a “Paid Pilot.”

POCs or paid pilots should be framed in the context of a full-year contract, with the ability to terminate at will. Setting the pilot period up this way means you’ve already jumped through the <a href="https://www.heavybit.com/library/blog/customer-security-questionnaires-the-vra-two-step/">legal and security hoops</a> you’ll inevitably face. When the customer decides to convert from the pilot to the full-term contract, you won’t need to slow down to negotiate details. You’ll be able to keep up your momentum and build on the results you’ve shown during the pilot.

Start with a Contract

Many POCs are set for a 90-day period. But a full quarter feels like a long time, and the task of implementing and evaluating your product can easily get lost among the team’s other priorities for the quarter. Instead, aim for a 30-day paid pilot. A one-month pilot pushes your product to the top of the to-do list and drives urgency for stakeholders.You can always leave the option open to extend the POC for another 30 days if needed

Stick to a Short Time Frame

Pick a single KPI that will have a measurable business impact (e.g. engineering time saved, increased revenue) and frame the pilot in terms of that goal. Only pick one KPI; the point is to share the sharpest, most focused vision of success you can, and the more goals you have, the less clear your impact will be. It’s okay if you pick aggressive KPIs.You just have to show that you can move the needle.

Define Clear Goals for the Pilot

One of the most common mistakes that companies make during their POCs is doing all the heavy lifting for the customer. Enterprise SaaS POCs are about showing business value, and they require an investment of resources from your customer. In order for a POC to be successful, there has to work on both sides.Set the expectation that your POC is a partnership between your team and your customer’s team to ensure that they’re ready to commit the time and resources needed to get it off the ground.

Set Expectations for Shared Responsibility

A well-run paid pilot, or trial period can be the key to capturing and converting prospects, especially as you move upmarket. But POCs can be challenging to execute well.

Heavybit is the leading fund for developer and enterprise startups. From pre-Seed to Series A companies, we help teams achieve breakout commercial success. 

How to Execute SaaS POCs that Convert | Heavybit

Elon Musk is revered as one of history's greatest innovators. But what makes him so brilliant is that his genius is rooted not in an abstract complexity, but in straightforward simplicity. 
He doesn't pursue every idea or innovation that comes to mind. Rather, he fields them using his simple "innovation equation" to determine if they are indeed worth pursuing. It's a crucial step many entrepreneurs overlook, leading them into a blind pursuit of something that might be great, but not great for them.

The Innovation Equation

According to Musk, "What matters is the pace of innovation, access to resources, and raw materials." So, entrepreneurs can quickly and easily gauge whether they have what it takes to turn their wild idea into reality using this simple equation.
It breaks down into three basic questions:
<ul>
<li>How long will it take you to build?</li>
<li>Do you have access to the right resources?</li>
<li>Can you obtain the required raw materials?</li>
</ul>
For any entrepreneur, this is a critical step in the pursuit of a startup. Not only can it save you a great deal of time, money, and energy.

Having What It Takes To Turn Ideas Into Reality

Time matters, though it's not necessarily that you need to be able to build something the fastest. But you do need to be able to innovate in a timely manner.
Especially when those looking to innovate are typically those looking to innovate quickly and stay ahead of the competition. In many instances, it can be something of a race, and with immense competition across just about every field, being at the head of the pack can help you be successful.

Factor 1: Pace of innovation

With the right pace, you also need access to the right resources. This is because resources indicate your ability to innovate. Without them, an idea is simply just an idea, and pursuing something without the necessary resources will cause you to spend more time pursuing resources than innovating.
Ask yourself if you have the resources at hand (or within reach), from the right network to the right people, to be able to innovate the way you plan to.

Factor 2: Access To Resources

You need to have the physical resources, or raw materials, available to be able to innovate. Raw materials are often something that holds startups back in terms of speed.
But trouble sourcing raw materials can also be to the detriment of a startup that depends on them.

Factor 3: Raw Materials

Dig into this collection about Elon Musk to see how his brain works, the future he envisions for the world, and a lot more.

books

Books

problemsolving

Problem Solving

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Inside The Mind of Elon Musk

This simple three-part lesson can save you a great deal of time, money, and energy.

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

creativity

Creativity

Elon Musk Reveals His Innovation Equation. It's an Easy Way to Gauge If a Business Idea Is Viable

We’re in the best period in history to be a freelancer or solopreneur. There’ve never been more opportunities and there’s never been lesser of a barrier to entry.Portfolios of work, pitches, and resumes might still have some relevance — but they’re no longer nonnegotiable pre-requisites to attracting clients.

The Freelance World Has Changed

The best way to attract clients in 2022 is to build your own brand online.When people see your build an engaged following, when they see you write so well for yourself, they want you to do the same for them.This is just how the human brain works today. We’re conditioned by conglomerates to compare and contrast our lives with what we see online. We’re hard-wired for comparison, we see something appealing online, and we want it too.Leverage this inherent human tendency to attract clients without even trying.

Building Your Online Brand

The reason proof of work is overrated in the online world today is that your online presence — if you’re good enough, is the proof of “work”.You see, as creators — we build our following online for fun because we genuinely like the process. We sometimes forget how much “work” that process actually is. Only when we get offers to be paid for it do we actually realise how much “work” we’ve put in.Clients trust you when they see that you’ve already written a whole library of great content for free.

Proof Of Your Work Is There For All To See

<ol><li>Try out different things until you find something you love doing.</li><li> Once you find what you love doing, prioritize it.</li><li>Go a few months at the very least without getting any money or attention in return.</li><li>That’s why you have to really love what you’re doing — in order to keep going without any validation and reward in the beginning.</li><li>Practice in public and get good at it.</li><li>Focus on getting better and don’t think too much about the returns. </li><li>If you’ve stuck to it for long enough and gotten good, opportunities will finally start coming to you without you having to go looking for them.</li></ol>

A Blueprint To Follow

Pitching, scouring freelance platforms for gigs, and trying hard might work — but they’re extremely boring and demotivating. Rejections hurt.Building your personal brand online takes boredom and rejections out of the equation.You won’t get bored because you’ll be doing what you love. You won’t get rejected because they’ll be coming to you.

Branding Yourself

<ul><li>Everyone likes talking about themselves, that’s all you really have to do when it comes to building a brand online.</li><li>‘Building a content brand’ is just a fancy way of saying — speak about yourself in a way that will help your audience.</li><li>If you do this with patience and persistence, you’ll get all the rewards you can possibly imagine.</li></ul>

We’re in the best period in history to be a freelancer or solopreneur. There’ve never been more opportunities and there’s never been lesser of a barrier to entry. Portfolios of work, pitches, and…

QUOTES BY ROGER FEDERER

Why Should You Startup?

What Fitness Pros Do When They Don't Feel Like Working Out

Where Do Space, Time and Gravity Come From?

In Defense of Running Lower Mileage (Just Hear Us Out)

Jessica Delgado