Content marketing creates an emotional connection between your company and your customers.

<ul><li>Shift your mindset away from being an advertiser to building a media company delivering consistent, high-value content. </li><li>Your content platform and distribution channels become assets as powerful as products. </li><li>Rather than constantly pitching sales, provide ongoing education and value to build more durable mindshare. </li><li>Quality content that solves problems earns audience trust.</li></ul>

Becoming a Media Company, Not Just an Advertiser

Determine a specific target market vertical and buyer persona to create niche content tailored precisely to their preferences versus scattered content on various topics. Conduct research to deeply understand your core target customers' informational needs, problems, and interests. Customize content accordingly.

Identifying Your Target Market Vertical and Buyer Persona

<ul><li>Clearly define your central content mission – the informational needs, problems, and interests of your target audience that your content aims to address. </li><li>Let this mission guide ongoing creation of content formats, editorial themes, and messaging. </li><li>All content should tie back to serving the audience.</li></ul>

Developing a Content Mission Tied to Audience Needs

Create a diverse mix of content formats including blogs, podcasts, video, research reports, white papers, webinars, infographics, newsletters. Variety retains audience interest while also allowing you to build a more robust content platform. Expand reach.

Crafting a Diverse Mix of Content Formats

Map out the conversion pathways you want readers to follow from each content format to desired outcomes like sales, email subscribers, event sign-ups. Optimize these pathways through clear calls-to-action and seamless user experience across touchpoints.

Optimizing Conversion Pathways to Desired Outcomes

<ul><li>Monetize content through selected, unobtrusive avenues like sponsorships, premium memberships, virtual/live events and carefully vetted affiliate links. </li><li>Avoid over-commercialization that erodes audience trust. </li><li>Focus on serving audience needs through content.</li></ul>

Monetizing Content Strategically to Deliver Value 

<ul><li>Rigorously analyze performance metrics on how each content piece performs, including traffic, engagement, conversions. </li><li>Double down on what succeeds. </li><li>Improve or eliminate underperforming pieces. </li><li>Continuously refine content based on data.</li></ul>

Analyzing Performance Data to Refine Content

Recognize success requires a major long-term commitment to consistently producing high-quality, value-adding content. Budget significant focus, time and resources accordingly. Maintain consistency without burning out. Take the marathon mindset.

Sustaining Consistency Over the Long-Term

 In Content Inc., Joe Pulizzi makes the case for entrepreneurs to build media platforms and valuable content that attracts their ideal audience rather than pitching products alone. He provides strategies for using content to build a loyal following.

The NEW Rulebook for Entrepreneurial Success What’s the surest way to startup failure? Follow old, outdated rules. In Content Inc., one of today’s most sought-after content-marketing strategists reveals a new model for entrepreneurial success. Simply put, it’s about developing valuable content, building an audience around that content, and then creating a product for that audience. Notice a shift? Author Joe Pulizzi flips the traditional entrepreneurial approach of first creating a product and then trying to find customers. It’s a brilliant reverse-engineering of a model that rarely succeeds. The radical six-step business-building process revealed in this book is smart, simple, practical, and cost-effective. And best of all, it works. It’s a strategy Pulizzi used to build his own successful company, Content Marketing Institute, which has landed on Inc. magazine’s list of fastest growing private companies for three years straight. It’s also a strategy countless other entrepreneurs use to build their own multi-million dollar companies. Build an audience and you’ll be able to sell pretty much anything you want. Today’s markets are more dynamic and customers are more fickle than ever before. Why would you put all your eggs in one basket before securing a loyal customer base? Content Inc. shows you how to get customers first and develop products later. It’s the best way to build a solid, long-lasting business positioned for today’s content-driven world. This is the simple but profoundly successful entrepreneurial approach of one of today’s most creative business minds. A pioneer of content marketing, Pulizzi has cracked to code when it comes to the power of content in a world where marketers still hold fast to traditional models that no longer work. In Content Inc., he breaks down the business-startup process into six steps, making it simple for you to visualize, launch, and monetize your own business. These steps are: • The “Sweet Spot”: Identify the intersection of your unique competency and your personal passion • Content Tilting: Determine how you can “tilt” your sweet spot to find a place where little or no competition exists • Building the Base: Establish your number-one channel for disseminating content (blog, podcast, YouTube, etc.) • Harvesting Audience: Use social-media and SEO to convert one-time visitors into long-term subscribers • Diversification: Grow your business by expanding into multiple delivery channels • Monetization: Now that your expertise is established, you can begin charging money for your products or services This model has worked wonders for Pulizzi and countless other examples detailed in the book. Connect these six pieces like a puzzle, and before you know it, you’ll be running your own profitable, scalable business. Pulizzi walks you step by step through the process, based on his own success (and failures) and real-world multi-million dollar examples from multiple industries and countries. Whether you’re seeking to start a brand-new business or drive innovation in an existing one, Content Inc. provides everything you need to reverse-engineer the traditional entrepreneurial model for better, more sustainable success. Joe Pulizzi is an entrepreneur, professional speaker, and podcaster. He is the founder of several startups, including the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), recognized as the fastest growing business media company by Inc. magazine in 2014. CMI produces Content Marketing World, the world’s largest content marketing event, and publishes the leading content marketing magazine, Chief Content Officer. Pulizzi’s book Epic Content Marketing was named one of Fortune magazine’s Five Must Read Business Books of the Year.

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

business

Business

creativity

Creativity

books

Books

Joe Pulizzi

Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses

Clutter is nothing more than postponed decisions.

<ul><li>A cluttered mind leads to increased stress, lack of focus, negative thinking, and feelings of being overwhelmed. </li><li>Understanding how cluttered thoughts originate from things like information overload, multitasking, lack of priorities, and habit loops is key to change. </li><li>Clutter hampers productivity, performance, and mental health.</li></ul>

Understand the Causes and Costs of a Cluttered Mind

<ul><li>Start by decluttering your physical space and keep it organized. Physical clutter leads to mental clutter. </li><li>Create open space by getting rid of things you don’t use.</li><li> Apply the “one thing at a time” principle to avoid being overwhelmed while decluttering. </li></ul>

Declutter Your Physical Environment

<ul><li>Mindfulness through meditation, deep breathing, and staying present brings calm and clarity. </li><li>It increases self-awareness, improves focus, and promotes positive thinking. </li><li>Making mindfulness a habit is key to maintaining an organized mind long-term.</li></ul>

Practice Mindfulness to Declutter Your Mind  

Avoid distractions from phone, email, social media, and interruptions. Multitasking reduces efficiency. Creating distraction-free time blocks to focus on important projects boosts productivity significantly. Turn off notifications and assign set times to check messages.

Limit Distractions to Improve Focus 



Clarity comes from identifying your most important goals and tasks, ranking them, and scheduling time to work on them. Use the 80/20 principle to prioritize. Schedule focus time for high priority projects first. Learn when you have peak energy to tackle tough tasks.

Prioritize and Schedule Your Most Important Tasks

Decluttering your mind space aids decision making by helping you focus on pertinent information. Avoid decision fatigue by reducing trivial choices. Streamline wardrobe and meals. Apply “good enough” principle to avoid perfectionism traps when choices are similar.

Improve Decision Making by Removing Clutter

<ul><li>Your mind replays negative experiences from your past which does not serve the present. </li><li>Practice self-forgiveness and actively release regrets using affirmations and mental imagery. </li><li>Replace bad memories with positive ones.</li></ul>

Let Go of Clutter from Your Past

Anxiety often arises from disorganized thoughts and emotions. Practice mental cleaning through journaling, listing worries, talking to someone or scheduling worry time. Organize your thoughts and plans in a list to gain clarity and calm.

Clean Up Mental Clutter to Reduce Anxiety

Declutter Your Mind by S.J. Scott and Barrie Davenport aims to help readers overcome information overload, negative thinking, distraction, and stress through mindfulness, focus, and mental decluttering strategies. It offers actionable advice to quiet the mind, increase focus, practice mindfulness, and achieve mental clarity.

How to Stop Worrying, Relieve Anxiety and Eliminate Negative Thinking  Feel overwhelmed by your thoughts? Struggling with anxiety about your daily tasks? Or do you want to stop worrying about life? The truth is, we all experience the occasional negative thought. But if you always feel overwhelmed, then you need to closely examine how these thoughts are negatively impacting your lifestyle. Declutter Your Mind details the habits, actions and mindsets you can use to clean up the mental clutter that might be holding you back from being more focussed and mindful. Authors show how to change a specific aspect of your life that might be causing you to feel stressed or overwhelmed. It is written for anyone who recognises how their untamed thoughts are interfering with their focus, productivity, happiness and peace of mind. This book is full of exercises that will have an immediate, positive impact on your mindset. Instead of just telling you to do something, this book provides practical, sciencebacked actions that can create real and lasting change if practiced regularly. In his books, S. J. SCOTT provides daily action plans for every area of your life: health, fitness, work and personal relationships. Unlike other personal development guides, his content focuses on talking action. So instead of reading overhyped strategies that rarely work in the realworld, you’ll get information that can be immediately implemented. BARRIE DAVENPORT is the founder of an awardwinning personal development site Live Bold and Bloom (liveboldandbloom.com). She is a certified personal coach and online course creator, helping people create happier, richer, more successful lives. She is also the author of a series of selfimprovement books on positive habits, life passion, confidence building, mindfulness and simplicity.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

mindfulness

Mindfulness

Feel overwhelmed by your thoughts? Struggling with anxiety about your daily tasks? Or do you want to stop worrying about life? The truth is...We all experience the occasional negative thought. But if you always feel overwhelmed, then you need to closely examine how these thoughts are negatively impacting your lifestyle. The solution is to practice specific mindfulness techniques that create more "space" in your mind to enjoy inner peace and happiness. With these habits, you'll have the clarity to prioritize what's most important in your life, what no longer serves your goals, and how you want to live on a daily basis. And that's what you'll learn in Declutter Your Mind. DOWNLOAD:: Declutter Your Mind -- How to Stop Worrying, Relieve Anxiety, and Eliminate Negative Thinking The goal of this book is simple: We will teach you the habits, actions, and mindsets to clean up the mental clutter that's holding you back from living a meaningful life. You will learn: ** 4 Causes of Mental Clutter ** How to Reframe ALL Your Negative Thoughts ** 4 Strategies to Improve (or Eliminate) Bad Relationships ** The Importance of Decluttering the Distractions That Cause Anxiety ** A Simple Strategy to Discover What's Important to YOU ** 400 Words That Help Identify YOUR Values ** The Benefit of Meditation and Focused Deep Breathing (and How to Do Both) ** How to Create Goals That Connect to Your Passions Declutter Your Mind is full of exercises that will have an immediate, positive impact on your mindset. Instead of just telling you to do something, we provide practical, science-backed actions that can create real and lasting change if practiced regularly. Would You Like To Know More? Download now to stop worrying, deal with anxiety, and clear your mind. Scroll to the top of the page and select the buy now button.

Barrie Davenport

S. J. Scott

Declutter Your Mind

We have vast untapped potential within us beyond who we currently are.Consciously deciding who you want to become in your ideal form and then aiming single-mindedly at that gives life meaning and forward momentum.Trade complacency and routine for a voluntary transformation through rediscovering exploring your latent talents and rebirth.

Becoming Who You Could Be 

<ul><li>Don't hide unwanted emotions, flaws, and unsavory motivations in a fog of willful blindness.</li><li>Have courage to look unflinchingly inside at your capacity for malevolence alongside good.</li><li>Integrate your full self through radical truth and self-understanding.</li><li>What you most wish to hide from yourself holds key truths.</li></ul>

Confronting the Shadow

The quintessential source of positive emotion is taking responsibility - defining goals and projects, then making progress.Turn and confront the difficulties of the future rather than hiding; reduce suffering.Stand up straight with your shoulders back and enjoy the journey.Where responsibility is abdicated, there is opportunity.

Taking Responsibility  

<ul><li>Notice where responsibility has been shirked and take it upon yourself to set things right instead of blaming others.</li><li>Step up to address problems rather than carping from the sidelines.</li><li>Approach issues needing leadership with the desire to make things better through your efforts.</li></ul>

Noticing Abdicated Responsibility 


If you feel contempt and inauthenticity doing something merely to maintain superficial order and expectations, pause and seriously reconsider.<ul><li>Minor moral transgressions snowball when left unaddressed. Listen to your conscience.</li><li>Refuse what you know to be wrong.</li><li>Speak truth.</li></ul>

Refusing What You Hate

Beware of resentful us-versus-them ideologies that distort truth. Maintain humility about your own flaws.The enemy is often biases within our own minds.Set your own house in perfect order before self-righteously criticizing others as the problem. Change begins from within.

Rejecting Ideology

Aiming intensely at a precise goal or vision fuels you with meaning and drive. If you aim at nothing, you'll be plagued by distractions and drift through life.Decide what you want, plan, and work diligently. Imperfect action beats perfect indecision. Value conscious effort.

Working with Diligence

Art expands vision, cultivates the soul, and connects us to the transcendent. Making something beautiful is intrinsically meaningful, not just a means to an end.Don't become so task-driven that you lose touch with beauty and degrade into soulless cynicism. What we aim at determines what we perceive.

Appreciating Beauty  

<ul><li>Unresolved, unprocessed painful memories from your past disrupt your present self.</li><li>Carefully deconstruct those memories to understand them, then integrate them into your story.</li><li>This frees you from lingering pain and anger.</li><li>Old ghosts must be confronted to move forward.</li></ul>

Integrating Painful Memories

<ul><li>Consciously plan enjoyable activities to nurture romance, fun, intimacy, and deep trust in a long-term relationship.</li><li>Dishonesty and poor communication erode foundations.</li><li>Protect your shared journey through openness. Invest when apart to sustain when together.</li></ul>

Maintaining Relationship Romance

<ul><li>Understand that good and evil exist within all people, including yourself.</li><li>Maintain hope in human potential while accepting flaws realistically, not cynically.</li><li>Bitter resentment and blind arrogance breed hatred.</li><li>Integrate your full humanity compassionately.</li></ul>

Avoiding Resentment and Arrogance


Suffering is inevitable in our imperfect world. But you can choose to be grateful anyway. Courageously give thanks even in the midst of life's catastrophes; do not become bitter.Suffering is in the mind. Find meaning through responsibility despite adversity.

Gratitude Despite Suffering


If you don't say what you think then you kill your unborn self.

When you have something to say, silence is a lie.

 In Beyond Order, Jordan Peterson provides philosophical insights on taking responsibility to find meaning, confront suffering, and live an ethical life. He offers principles to counter chaos and develop character.

The inspirational sequel to 12 RULES FOR LIFE, which has sold over 5 million copies around the world - now in paperback In 12 Rules for Life, acclaimed public thinker and clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson offered an antidote to the chaos in our lives: eternal truths applied to modern anxieties. His insights have helped millions of readers and resonated powerfully around the world. Now in this long-awaited sequel, Peterson goes further, showing that part of life's meaning comes from reaching out into the domain beyond what we know, and adapting to an ever-transforming world. While an excess of chaos threatens us with uncertainty, an excess of order leads to a lack of curiosity and creative vitality. Beyond Order therefore calls on us to balance the two fundamental principles of reality - order and chaos - and reveals the profound meaning that can be found on the path that divides them. In times of instability and suffering, Peterson reminds us that there are sources of strength on which we can all draw: insights borrowed from psychology, philosophy, and humanity's greatest myths and stories. Drawing on the hard-won truths of ancient wisdom, as well as deeply personal lessons from his own life and clinical practice, Peterson offers twelve new principles to guide readers towards a more courageous, truthful and meaningful life.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

The companion volume to 12 Rules for Life offers further guidance on the perilous path of modern life.    In 12 Rules for Life, clinical psychologist and celebrated professor at Harvard and the University of Toronto Dr. Jordan B. Peterson helped millions of readers impose order on the chaos of their lives. Now, in this bold sequel, Peterson delivers twelve more lifesaving principles for resisting the exhausting toll that our desire to order the world inevitably takes.   In a time when the human will increasingly imposes itself over every sphere of life—from our social structures to our emotional states—Peterson warns that too much security is dangerous. What’s more, he offers strategies for overcoming the cultural, scientific, and psychological forces causing us to tend toward tyranny, and teaches us how to rely instead on our instinct to find meaning and purpose, even—and especially—when we find ourselves powerless.   While chaos, in excess, threatens us with instability and anxiety, unchecked order can petrify us into submission. Beyond Order provides a call to balance these two fundamental principles of reality itself, and guides us along the straight and narrow path that divides them.

Jordan Bernt Peterson is a Canadian psychologist, author, and media commentator. He began to receive widespread attention in the late 2010s for his views on cultural and political issues, often described as conservative. Peterson has described himself as a classic British liberal and a traditionalist.

Jordan B. Peterson

Beyond Order

Drama results from miscommunications, misunderstandings, and misdirected efforts between coworkers.

Recognize that workplace drama stems from unclear expectations between coworkers, ineffective or avoided feedback, selective listening, assumed negative motives, and poor conflict management. Left unaddressed, drama breeds polarization, erodes trust over time, and drains energy from productive work. Be aware of these root causes.

Recognizing How Workplace Drama Originates

Proactively mitigate unnecessary drama by setting clear mutual expectations, providing regular positive and constructive feedback, questioning assumptions rather than jumping to conclusions, and communicating directly to prevent distortions. Maintain open, mature dialogue.

Proactively Mitigating Drama Through Clear Communication

<ul><li>Constructively deal with difficult coworkers and behaviors through compassionate candor, not avoidance or fueling negativity. </li><li>Lead with empathy, but also courage. </li><li>Understand the context and motivations driving behaviors, and find common ground.</li></ul>

Compassionately Addressing Difficult Behaviors 

Clearly set and enforce healthy boundaries around how team members engage with and treat each other, aligned with company values. Don't accept abusive, manipulative or intimidating conduct. Walk away if boundaries are violated. Enforce consistently, not punitively.

Setting Healthy Interpersonal Boundaries

<ul><li>Proactively encourage open sharing of dissenting opinions, disagreements, and honest concerns to prevent hidden resentments. </li><li>Make it psychologically safe to voice issues early before they silently escalate into drama. </li><li>Value transparency, diversity of thought, and addressing issues.</li></ul>

Fostering Open Sharing of Diverse Perspectives

<ul><li>Manage your own reactions first before addressing drama. </li><li>Diffuse situations proactively through self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, conflict wisdom and nonviolent communication. </li><li>Model desired change.</li></ul>

Leading with Emotional Intelligence

Workplace conflict consultant Anna Maravelas draws on her long experience to explain how to prevent and resolve workplace clashes.

"Maravelas is the best source on workplace irritability and tension." --Matt Villano, New York TimesThe human longing for respect and dignity is deep and pervasive. Yet, while resolving more than 300 workplace conflicts, author Anna Maravelas has met thousands of individuals struggling with tension and mistrust. Creating a Drama-Free Workplace contains strategies to avoid and reverse these troubling trends. Learn why trust and connectedness slip through our fingers despite our yearnings for workplaces that are grounded in collaboration and success. Stop common missteps before they walk out the door with your most valuable assets--trust, morale, and productivity. You can create the environments you desire and deserve with these proven skills grounded in neuroscience.In this book you will learn how to: <ul><li>Take the drama out of disagreement and enhance your ability to problem solve.</li><li>Eliminate the 5 root causes of workplace tension.</li><li>Be hard on the problem and soft on the people and create lasting alliances.</li><li>Preserve your integrity by talking to people rather than about them.</li><li>Replace bitterness about the past with a shared responsibility for the future.</ul></li>Knowing how to transform conflict into collaboration affects the outcome of every interaction, challenge, and opportunity.

communication

Communication

teamwork

Teamwork

“Maravelas is the best source on workplace irritability and tension.” —Matt Villano, New York TimesThe human longing for respect and dignity is deep and pervasive. Yet, while resolving more than 300 workplace conflicts, author Anna Maravelas has met thousands of individuals struggling with tension and mistrust. Creating a Drama-Free Workplace contains strategies to avoid and reverse these troubling trends. Learn why trust and connectedness slip through our fingers despite our yearnings for workplaces that are grounded in collaboration and success. Stop common missteps before they walk out the door with your most valuable assets—trust, morale, and productivity. You can create the environments you desire and deserve with these proven skills grounded in neuroscience.In this book you will learn how to: <ul><li>Take the drama out of disagreement and enhance your ability to problem solve.</li><li>Eliminate the 5 root causes of workplace tension.</li><li>Be hard on the problem and soft on the people and create lasting alliances.</li><li>Preserve your integrity by talking to people rather than about them.</li><li>Replace bitterness about the past with a shared responsibility for the future.</ul></li>Knowing how to transform conflict into collaboration affects the outcome of every interaction, challenge, and opportunity.

Anna Maravelas

Creating a Drama-Free Workplace

Creating a Drama-free Workplace

Research, test, and validate your software product idea before investing time and resources. Avoid falling into the quicksand of an untested idea and ensure you have a solid foundation to build upon.

Validate Your Idea Early On

Grab your customer's attention with a strong value proposition that showcases the benefits of your product. Your value proposition is the ultimate bait, hook, and sinker that can reel in your target audience and set you apart from your competitors.

Communicate the Value Proposition Clearly

Start Small, Stay Lean<ul><li>Bootstrap your startup and avoid premature funding that adds complexity. </li><li>Begin with a minimum viable product to validate assumptions before scaling up. </li><li>Keep operations lean, delaying hiring and overhead until revenue justifies it.</li></ul>Scratch Your Own Itch<ul><li>Build products that scratch your own itch - solve a problem you personally face. </li><li>This ensures a target audience exists and allows intuitive refinement based on your own user experience. </li></ul>

The Small Itch You Have

<ul><li>Continuously identify and focus on delivering the core value that customers truly want. </li><li>Say no to superfluous features or scope creep that don't address the core job to be done. </li><li>Refine strengths rather than chasing breadth.</li></ul>

Obsess Over Core Value 

Proactively engage with real and prospective customers to understand their needs and pain points. Solicit feedback early and often. Iteratively improve products based on user insights rather than assumptions.

Talk to Customers

Automate processes only after nailing down the essentials. Avoid prematurely over-automating before identifying core pain points. Outsource selectively - don't relinquish control of critical processes.

Judiciously Automate

Be extremely selective when hiring team members as early hires are crucial. But part ways quickly with wrong fits - the wrong people can sink a small business. Opt for skill fit over culture fit.

Hire Slow, Fire Fast

Obsess over your sales funnel by monitoring key metrics. Diagnose and improve lead generation, conversion rates, and customer retention through testing.

Mind the Sales Funnel

<ul><li>Manage cash flow aggressively, not just profitability. </li><li>Tight cash flow will cripple otherwise viable bootstrapped businesses. Maintain adequate reserves and runway.</li></ul>

Focus on Cash Flow 

<ul><li>Bootstrap to maintain control rather than giving up equity prematurely. </li><li>Take funding only when needed for pivotal growth. Retain leverage to make key decisions.</li><li>Have a target sales number in mind that allows an attractive exit. </li><li>When a serious acquirer offer meets that number, be psychologically ready to walk away on solid terms.</li></ul>

Maintain Control 

Zero to Sold: How to Start, Run, and Sell a Bootstrapped Business is a book written by Arvid Kahl in 2020. The book provides a step-by-step guide to starting, running, and selling a bootstrapped business. It covers topics such as developing an idea, creating a product, finding customers, hiring employees, raising capital, and exiting a business. It also provides advice on the key elements of an effective business, such as goal setting, customer service, financial planning, and marketing. The book also offers actionable advice on how to use technology to create a successful business. 

Zero to Sold is a comprehensive and actionable guide through the four stages of a bootstrapped business: Preparation, Survival, Stability, and Growth. From your first idea to successfully selling your business for life-changing amounts of money, this book will help you become a world-class entrepreneur. By focussing on your niche audience, finding their critical problem, and solving it with a product that your customers can't resist to pay for, you will learn how to create a recurring revenue engine that will make you financially independent. It's easy to build software products. The hard part is turning them into viable businesses that stand the test of time. If you want to build a business that survives, you have to know what challenges you will encounter. Zero to Sold tells the story of a sustainable, bootstrapped software business that grew to thousands of customers before it was acquired. Arvid Kahl is a software engineer turned entrepreneur who has accomplished just that. He co-founded and grew an online teacher productivity SaaS business called FeedbackPanda to $55,000 Monthly Recurring Revenue with his partner Danielle Simpson. They sold the business for a life-changing amount of money in 2019, just two years after founding the business. Arvid writes on The Bootstrapped Founder blog. In Zero to Sold, Arvid shares his experiences, learnings, and insights from building a Software-as-a-Service business from start to finish. He shows what worked and what didn't work. If you want to build your own bootstrapped business and stay sane while doing it, Zero to Sold will be your guide. You will learn how to: <ul><li>explore and validate your idea before you jump into building a prototype that no one needs.</li><li>find a well-defined audience, locate their critical problem, envision a solution that fits into their workflow, and build a product that makes them want to pay. Then, build a repeatable process of selling your product: a business.</li><li>grow your business sustainably and make it sellable, even if you want to keep it forever. Or sell it for a life-changing amount of money. Either way, you can prepare.</li><li> </li></ul>Zero to Sold is the ultimate business documentation: a memoir, a manual, a journal, and a guide. It will help you validate your ideas, build your products, and grow your businesses, whatever stage you might be at right now.

startup

Startups

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Arvid Kahl

Zero to Sold

<ul><li>This is all the shared knowledge in a conversation. It’s a key part of having crucial conversations. The pool of shared meaning is a measure of a group’s shared IQ. The more information in the pool, the better their decisions.</li><li>But it’s important to remember that it’s the overall amount of information in the pool that’s important. One dominant person shouldn’t control it. Other people’s contributions are just as valuable. </li><li>People are also more likely to follow through on a conversation they’ve contributed to. They feel that they’re working towards a common goal. </li></ul>

The Pool of Shared Meaning

How did people communicate when you were growing up? Was there debating or shouting or silent treatment? How do you respond to conflict? Do you shut down or lash out?<ul><li>The styles of communication you were exposed to as a child affect how you communicate now.</li><li>Despite sometimes feeling helpless, we’re rarely powerless to influence our circumstances. We don’t like to admit it, but we often contribute to our issues, even when we don’t realize we’re doing it.</li><li>It’s not about being to blame. It’s about learning to take control of your life and conversations.</li></ul>

Crucial Conversations Start With Examining Yourself

When you’re in a crucial conversation, it’s easy for high stakes to get the better of you and for things to blow up. You lose focus.A great way to avoid this is by setting yourself a clear goal for the conversation.Another way to focus your mind is to ask yourself:<ul><li>What do they want for/from me?</li><li>What do I want for them?</li><li>What don’t I want from this?</li><li>How do I avoid that?</li></ul>These simple questions will help you empathize with the other person, pre-solve any challenges and have better, more constructive conversations.

Stay Focused

Crucial conversations can be frightening. When we get scared, we typically turn to one of two “Styles Under Stress”: Silence or Violence.Silence behaviors include:<ul><li>Masking: Hiding your true opinion through sarcasm or sugarcoating;</li><li>Avoiding: Steering away from the conversation topic; and</li><li>Withdrawing: Pulling out of the conversation by changing the topic or leaving.</li></ul>Violence behaviors include:<ul><li>Attacking: Belittling or threatening;</li><li>Controlling: Coercing others into your way of thinking, cutting people off, exaggerating your facts, or speaking in absolutes; and</li><li>Labeling: Dismissing something by associati<warningtag>ng it with a stereotype.</warningtag></li></ul>

Style Under Stress

These questions might help you better understand your behavior:<ul><li>When do you have outbreaks of your Style Under Stress?</li><li>What situations do you find stressful? and</li><li>What subjects do you find stressful?</li></ul>Once you’ve learned to look at yourself you can start looking at other people.Understanding their proclivity for violence or silence will help you to plan your approach.

Pay Attention To How You Respond, and Why

You can do this through mutual respect and mutual purpose.<ul><li>To ensure mutual respect, ask: Do they believe you respect them?</li><li>Apologize when appropriate.</li></ul>To ensure mutual purpose, ask:<ul><li>Do you both trust each other’s motives in this conversation? </li><li>Do they believe that you care about what they have to say?</li></ul>

Make Sure Everyone Feels Safe To Take Part

The most common stories are:<ul><li>Victim Stories: they ignore your responsibility for causing the problem;</li><li>Villain Stories: they make the problem someone else’s fault; and</li><li>Helpless Stories: they make us feel powerless to fix the situation.</li></ul>These stories assume the worst about ourselves and the people around us. These stories lead to silence or violence.

The Stories We Tell

We need to develop five distinct skills.We need to STATE:<ul><li>Share your facts – Start with your least controversial points. Ease them into the conversation.</li><li>Tell your story – Explain your perspective. Where do you think the conversation is going?</li><li>Ask for others’ paths – Allow others to share what they think and want from the conversation.</li><li>Talk tentatively – Don’t treat your perspective as fact. Remember it’s your story. It might not be anyone else’s</li><li>Encourage testing – Let others challenge your points. Their opinions have value and could help you find the truth.</li></ul>

STATE My Path

To encourage other people to share, try AMPP:<ul><li>Ask questions – Get things moving with questions. They show you’re interested and help others contribute.</li><li>Mirror feelings – Let others know you recognize what they’re feeling e.g. “I can hear that you’re upset about that” or “It sounds like you want to make a change.”</li><li>Paraphrase to show understanding – Show you understand by putting what they’ve said in your own words e.g. “To make sure I’ve got this right; you want to…”</li><li>Prime when you’re unsure – Make an educated guess when they give you nothing e.g.”I would feel sad about that. What about you?”</li></ul>One more <warningtag>acronym to help with others’ paths is ABC:</warningtag><ul><li><warningtag>Agree </warningtag><warningtag>– Tell them what you do agree with.</warningtag></li><li><warningtag>Build </warningtag><warningtag>– Build on what they’ve said.</warningtag></li><li><warningtag>Compare </warningtag><warningtag>– Compare and contrast when you completely disagree.</warningtag></li></ul>

Explore Others’ Paths

<ul><li>Command – If you know what you want, give clear instructions. The best way to do this is to phrase a request. It also helps to give reasons.</li><li>Consult – Decisions are better when everyone inputs. Only use this if you need outside input; don’t pretend. When you make a decision, report it to everyone you’ve asked.</li><li>Vote – Votes should never replace healthy dialogue and analysis. But they can be great for either/or decisions. </li><li>Consensus – This is where everyone comes to the same decision. Don’t force it. These need to happen naturally to be sure everyone agrees.</li></ul>

There Are Four Ways of Making Decisions As A Group

Give feedback that’s frequent, effective, and will help you get you the outcome you need

career

Career

Giving Effective Feedback

Keep your cool and get the results you want when faced with crucial conversations. This New York Times bestseller and business classic has been fully updated for a world where skilled communication is more important than ever. The book that revolutionized business communications has been updated for today’s workplace. Crucial Conversations provides powerful skills to ensure every conversation—especially difficult ones—leads to the results you want. Written in an engaging and witty style, the book teaches readers how to be persuasive rather than abrasive, how to get back to productive dialogue when others blow up or clam up, and it offers powerful skills for mastering high-stakes conversations, regardless of the topic or person. This new edition addresses issues that have arisen in recent years. You’ll learn how to: Respond when someone initiates a crucial conversation with you Identify and address the lag time between identifying a problem and discussing it Communicate more effectively across digital mediums When stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong, you have three choices: Avoid a crucial conversation and suffer the consequences; handle the conversation poorly and suffer the consequences; or apply the lessons and strategies of Crucial Conversations and improve relationships and results. Whether they take place at work or at home, with your coworkers or your spouse, crucial conversations have a profound impact on your career, your happiness, and your future. With the skills you learn in this book, you'll never have to worry about the outcome of a crucial conversation again.

Keep your cool and get the results you want when faced with crucial conversations. This New York Times bestseller and business classic has been fully updated for a world where skilled communication is more important than ever. The book that revolutionized business communications has been updated for today’s workplace. Crucial Conversations provides powerful skills to ensure every conversation—especially difficult ones—leads to the results you want. Written in an engaging and witty style, the book teaches readers how to be persuasive rather than abrasive, how to get back to productive dialogue when others blow up or clam up, and it offers powerful skills for mastering high-stakes conversations, regardless of the topic or person. This new edition addresses issues that have arisen in recent years. You’ll learn how to: <ul><li>Respond when someone initiates a crucial conversation with you</li> <li>Identify and address the lag time between identifying a problem and discussing it</li> <li>Communicate more effectively across digital mediums</li> </ul> When stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong, you have three choices: Avoid a crucial conversation and suffer the consequences; handle the conversation poorly and suffer the consequences; or apply the lessons and strategies of Crucial Conversations and improve relationships and results. Whether they take place at work or at home, with your coworkers or your spouse, crucial conversations have a profound impact on your career, your happiness, and your future. With the skills you learn in this book, you'll never have to worry about the outcome of a crucial conversation again.

Joseph Grenny

Kerry Patterson

Ron McMillan

Al Switzler

Emily Gregory

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, Third Edition

Being smart in a typical American secondary school makes life difficult as teenagers would rather focus on being popular. Nerds are smart but not socially adept. They avoid social interaction and instead focus their energy on becoming smarter, not adopting fashionable norms. This causes nerds not to be very popular at school. Yet, nerds seem to do just fine after high school and in the real world, as being trendy doesn’t matter so much.

Why nerds are unpopular

Hackers are makers, like painters or writers. Hackers need to understand the theory of computation, similar to painters who need to understand paint chemistry. Hacking and Sketching are similar: good software is put out there and gradually searched, refined, and sometimes beaten into shape over continuous iterations. You learn to hack by hacking. You also learn from examples. Great software requires devotion to beauty, even the parts you don’t expect anyone ever to see. Software should be well-written, readable, and well documented.

Hackers and Painters

Successful computer programming does not require rigid adherence to rules and conventions. More often, becoming a hacker involves breaking some rules. To learn how to hack, you must look at others’ work, even if the work is protected by intellectual property rights. The only way to become innovative is to question the established ideas and seek ways to improve them.

Hackers must break rules to be good at what they do

Regardless of how hard you work in a large corporation, your wages won’t increase substantially. Instead, start a company as it is the fastest way to make money. The rich aren’t hoarding wealth because wealth isn’t limited. Chances are that the richest individuals have worked harder and more productively than most people. If you want to make a million dollars, you must endure a million dollars worth of pain.

How to make wealth

As painters must please an audience, hackers must please their users. Keep the end user in mind when you start designing your product. To collect feedback from real users, first, create and launch a prototype. Even a very stripped-down prototype early on gets you valuable feedback so you can correct mistakes and improve the product. The more users you have, the more successful your company will be. When someone considers buying your company, the value will be based on the number of users you have.

How to make great things

There are many languages programmers can code in, like C++, Python, and Java, as certain things are more easily expressed in one language than another. For example, the language List allows you to tell the computer to add variables Y and X with only two lines of code. Python does not recognise variables, so you will have problems if you try to add Y to X. A workaround could be six lines of code. New languages are still developed, and existing ones are constantly evolving. These days, any developer can adapt and develop current programming languages or even create their own.

Programming languages explained

As hackers develop as programmers, they will recognise the value of good taste in the programming languages they use. A language that is too complex or limiting will simply be avoided by hackers. A language that meets hackers' needs will become popular, which means hackers will develop it further to improve it. For example, open-source languages such as Perl and Python.

Programming languages should be designed according to the needs of hackers

Companies find it easier to hire programmers who code in popular languages. It means there will always be more hackers using popular languages than obscure ones. But if programmers as forced to use one language for everything, you won’t get the best performance out of your product. You are most likely facing the same issue as your competitors and could gain a significant advantage by switching to a more optimized language.

 The downside to using popular languages

Timeless essays from Paul Graham on the internet, building wealth, startups, and more.

"The computer world is like an intellectual Wild West, in which you can shoot anyone you wish with your ideas, if you're willing to risk the consequences. " --from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham We are living in the computer age, in a world increasingly designed and engineered by computer programmers and software designers, by people who call themselves hackers. Who are these people, what motivates them, and why should you care? Consider these facts: Everything around us is turning into computers. Your typewriter is gone, replaced by a computer. Your phone has turned into a computer. So has your camera. Soon your TV will. Your car was not only designed on computers, but has more processing power in it than a room-sized mainframe did in 1970. Letters, encyclopedias, newspapers, and even your local store are being replaced by the Internet. Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham, explains this world and the motivations of the people who occupy it. In clear, thoughtful prose that draws on illuminating historical examples, Graham takes readers on an unflinching exploration into what he calls "an intellectual Wild West." The ideas discussed in this book will have a powerful and lasting impact on how we think, how we work, how we develop technology, and how we live. Topics include the importance of beauty in software design, how to make wealth, heresy and free speech, the programming language renaissance, the open-source movement, digital design, internet startups, and more.

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

"The computer world is like an intellectual Wild West, in which you can shoot anyone you wish with your ideas, if you're willing to risk the consequences. " --from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul GrahamWe are living in the computer age, in a world increasingly designed and engineered by computer programmers and software designers, by people who call themselves hackers. Who are these people, what motivates them, and why should you care?Consider these facts: Everything around us is turning into computers. Your typewriter is gone, replaced by a computer. Your phone has turned into a computer. So has your camera. Soon your TV will. Your car was not only designed on computers, but has more processing power in it than a room-sized mainframe did in 1970. Letters, encyclopedias, newspapers, and even your local store are being replaced by the Internet.Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham, explains this world and the motivations of the people who occupy it. In clear, thoughtful prose that draws on illuminating historical examples, Graham takes readers on an unflinching exploration into what he calls "an intellectual Wild West."The ideas discussed in this book will have a powerful and lasting impact on how we think, how we work, how we develop technology, and how we live. Topics include the importance of beauty in software design, how to make wealth, heresy and free speech, the programming language renaissance, the open-source movement, digital design, internet startups, and more.

Paul Graham

Hackers & Painters

<ul><li>One of the first stages toward making your dreams a reality is to be able to visualize them.</li><li>Davis learned to jump after rebounding back from traumatic situations, and he’s never looked back.</li><li>Find creative methods to think about your goals to overcome procrastination.</li><li>Face your worries head-on by working through them, taking action, and being focused.</li><li>Make a plan and discover your purpose to attain your objectives.</li><li>It’s time to take a risk once you’ve invested in your connections.</li></ul>

Key Concepts From The Book

This book is an empathetic handbook in realizing your dreams. It shares intimate, affecting anecdotes and sets out a step-by-step guide to overcoming your fears and achieving success.

Free yourself from self-limiting beliefs and fears that keep you stuck. This book lays out a blueprint for how to take control of your life and begin living your dreams. We all dream. We all imagine. And we all want to live our best life. But why is it that 90 percent of people admit that if they got to live their life over, they would live it differently? What keeps us comfortable with the status quo and unable to get beyond “What if”? In part 1 of this book, Dr. Shirley Davis addresses these and other questions by guiding the reader through a personal journey of self-discovery, a search for significance, and an examination of the self-imposed limitations that can hijack our purpose, power, and possibilities. In part 2, she details the readers' journies toward realizing their dreams by reimagining their lives, identifying their “why,” and developing a life plan to stay focused and accountable. She describes the right questions to ask, the right mindset to adopt, and the right relationships to build that will enable everyone to live the life he or she has always imagined. Dr. Davis reveals the necessary steps for releasing the limits we place on ourselves as a result of life's tests, wrong thinking, and bad decisions. She helps readers overcome paralyzing fears that keep dreams on pause and inspires the confidence to jump first and grow wings on the way down.

Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses

Declutter Your Mind

Beyond Order

Creating a Drama-free Workplace

Zero to Sold

Linda Thompson