“Christmas is the season for kindling the fire of hospitality.”

“I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.”

Gifts of time and love are surely the basic ingredients of a truly merry Christmas.”

“T’was the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”

“At Christmas, all roads lead home.”

“Christmas is not as much about opening our presents as opening our hearts.” – Janice Maeditere

“Christmas is doing a little something extra for someone.” – Charles M. Schulz

“Every time we love, every time we give, it’s Christmas.” – Dale Evans

“When we recall Christmas past, we usually find that the simplest things – not the great occasions – give off the greatest glow of happiness.” – Bob Hope

“Like snowflakes, my Christmas memories gather and dance – each beautiful, unique, and gone too soon.”

“We are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmastime.” – Laura Ingalls Wilder

“He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree.” – Roy L. Smith

“Unless we make Christmas an occasion to share our blessings, all the snow in Alaska won’t make it ‘white.’” – Bing Crosby

“All the Christmas presents in the world are worth nothing without the presence of Christ.”

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

education

Learning & Education

Christmas Quotes To Help You Celebrate The Season

Take a book with fairly standardized formatting, meaning mostly text with few bullet lists or graphs.<ol><li>Figure out roughly how many words are on a page.</li><li>Establish your baseline. Read for one minute at your normal speed. Then figure out how many words roughly you have read. That’s your words per minute rate (wpm). </li><li>Train yourself to focus on the middle third of the page while just dotting down the page.</li><li>Track with your finger. Trace underneath the line as you read to ensure your eye doesn’t bounce to previously read material.</li><li>For five minutes, read slightly faster than your comprehension allows.</li></ol>

Reading speed practice

We were taught to read word by word, so we start at the furthermost left word of a book and read to the furthermost right word. However, the problem with that is that the margins don’t have any words. <ul><li>Remedy this by drawing lines going down on either side of the page. But draw it one word in on both sides.</li><li>Instead of looking at the first word all the way to the left, start at the line you drew on the left and then end at the line at the right. You should not have trouble reading and still have full comprehension.</li><li>Do this for 5 - 10 pages, then indent by another word on either side. </li></ul>

How to look at a page

Tim Ferriss, author of "The 4-Hour Workweek" and host of the Tim Ferriss Show, teaches speed reading. | Take 10 seconds and sign up for my free "5-Bullet Friday" newsletter: https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-yt/​ Each Friday, you’ll get a short email from me with five things I've discovered that week, sending you off to your weekend with fun and useful things to ponder and try. 🙌 SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/1dSzTkW About Tim Ferriss: Tim Ferriss is one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” and an early-stage tech investor/advisor in Uber, Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and 50+ other companies. He is also the author of five #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers: The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors. The Observer and other media have named him “the Oprah of audio” due to the influence of his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, which has exceeded 200 million downloads and been selected for “Best of iTunes” three years running. Connect with Tim Ferriss: Visit the Tim Ferriss PODCAST: https://bit.ly/2rYjUBr Visit the Tim Ferriss BLOG: http://bit.ly/17jDHw3 Like Tim Ferriss on FACEBOOK: http://on.fb.me/1avYUxq Follow Tim Ferriss on TWITTER: http://bit.ly/17d94TE Follow Tim Ferriss on INSTAGRAM: http://bit.ly/2IfH37J Follow Tim Ferriss on INSTAGRAM: http://bit.ly/2IfH37J

writing

Reading & Writing

videos

Videos

Tim Ferriss, author of "The 4-Hour Workweek" and host of the Tim Ferriss Show, teaches speed reading. | Take 10 seconds and sign up for my free "5-Bullet Friday" newsletter: https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-yt/​ Each Friday, you’ll get a short email from me with five things I've discovered that week, sending you off to your weekend with fun and useful things to ponder and try. 🙌

SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/1dSzTkW
 
About Tim Ferriss:
Tim Ferriss is one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” and an early-stage tech investor/advisor in Uber, Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and 50+ other companies. He is also the author of five #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers: The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors. The Observer and other media have named him “the Oprah of audio” due to the influence of his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, which has exceeded 200 million downloads and been selected for “Best of iTunes” three years running.

Connect with Tim Ferriss:
Visit the Tim Ferriss PODCAST: https://bit.ly/2rYjUBr
Visit the Tim Ferriss BLOG: http://bit.ly/17jDHw3
Like Tim Ferriss on FACEBOOK: http://on.fb.me/1avYUxq
Follow Tim Ferriss on TWITTER: http://bit.ly/17d94TE
Follow Tim Ferriss on INSTAGRAM: http://bit.ly/2IfH37J
Follow Tim Ferriss on INSTAGRAM: http://bit.ly/2IfH37J

Tim Ferriss has been listed as one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” and one of Fortune’s “40 under 40.” He is an early-stage technology investor/advisor (Uber, Facebook, Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and 50+ others) and the author of five #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers, including The 4-Hour Workweek and Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers. The Observer and other media have called Tim “the Oprah of audio” due to the influence of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, which is the first business/interview podcast to exceed 100 million downloads. It has now exceeded 800 million downloads. 

Listen to The Tim Ferriss Show podcast: https://tim.blog/podcast
Sign up for Tim's "5-Bullet Friday" free email newsletter with 1.5M+ subscribers: https://tim.blog/friday 


Tim Ferriss

How to Speed Read | Tim Ferriss

A day without third-party cookies is looming: By <a href="https://blog.google/products/chrome/updated-timeline-privacy-sandbox-milestones/">late 2023</a>, Google <a href="https://www.marketingdive.com/news/google-kill-3rd-party-cookies-marketers-forecast-doomy-scenario/570846/">plans to eliminate</a> the use of third-party cookies in Chrome—a browser used by an estimated <a href="https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share">3.04 billion people</a> worldwide, essentially disabling how most of our advertising and technologies work today.Third-party cookies have been the backbone of the marketing industry for the past decade. They allow ad platforms to trace individual users across the Web, understand users' habits and interests, and then serve ad content that is relevant to each user's browsing history.

The Mighty Third Party Cookie

So why is Google removing valuable third-party cookies and wreaking havoc on the marketing world? The answer comes down to concerns about data privacy. Google and other ad tech entities are under scrutiny for their data practices, and those practices began to be regulated with the passage of the GDPR by the European Union a few years ago.

The Reason For Third Party Cookie Removal

Privacy firms are concerned about personally identifiable information (PII)—including full names, bank account numbers, and Social Security numbers—that can be collected from third-party pixels. People question whether entities (such as ad tech companies) collect PII that could be used on a wider scale or without consent from users. The idea is that those privacy concerns will be mitigated with the removal of third-party cookies.

Identity Information In Galore

When Google announced its plans for the removal of third-party cookies in Chrome, it left the industry spinning about how ad tech would function in the future. To reach a solution, Google introduced a Privacy Sandbox where ad tech companies, marketers, and website engineers could submit proposals for potential alternatives to fill the void left by third-party cookies.Other companies, such as The Trade Desk and LiveRamp, began testing their own identity solutions: Unified ID 2.0 and Authenticated Traffic Solutions, respectively.

Replacing The Cookie

Many of the proposed solutions rely on a pixel placed on websites that collect users' data (such as email addresses) when they subscribe or login to an advertiser's or publisher's site.Although the changes are beneficial for protecting users' data privacy, they pose some challenges for advertisers and marketers, specifically in the following three areas.

Challenges of Third-Party Cookie Removal

Publishers and advertisers can use their own first-party data or rely on identity-mapping solutions to target prospects based on categories.Google also proposed its Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) solution, which would allow user consumption information to be gathered with consent, PII would be scrubbed, and the information would be placed in a bucket of users with similar attributes who could then be served relevant ads.

Challenge: Prospecting

A lack of confidence exists around whether new targeting solutions will foster adequate retargeting and frequency capabilities.If technology cannot target individual users, then how can ads truly be relevant to consumers and appear to them at the appropriate times in the consumer journey? If technology does not allow for third parties to follow users as they browse the Web, then how adequately will advertisers be able to track the frequency of ads shown to a single user?

Challenge: Retargeting And Frequency

Disabling third-party cookies will also leave a gap in marketers' abilities to follow a user to a brand's website and measure the effectiveness of their ad campaigns throughout the online consumer journey. Advertisers are eager to know how they will be able to track user activity down to their website KPIs without third-party cookies—especially for upper-funnel tactics.

Challenge: Attribution and Measurement

The multitude of privacy changes uncovered thus far leaves advertisers and marketers itching to know what actions they should take now to combat a world without third-party cookies. Because many of the solutions and their impacts are still unknown, it is difficult to give an exact prescription to remedy the loss of consumer tracking and targeting.

Embracing a Future Without Third-Party Cookies

Concerns about data privacy have led companies such as Google and Apple to announce new policies that affect digital marketers. Learn how to prepare.

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

Third-Party Cookies in Chrome Will Soon Be Gone. Are You Ready to Act?

Professional networking has many known benefits. Research suggests that higher status individuals have larger social networks, and seasoned professionals are most actively reaching out to their networks and pursuing new connections.
Yet many people shy away from it. A LinkedIn survey found that almost 80% of professionals consider networking essential to career success, although 40% admit it is challenging.

The benefits of professional networking

The prevailing wisdom about how social networks are built suggests that people's networks are formed mainly by forces outside of their control, such as the neighbourhood they grew up in, schools they attended, or others' interest in networking with them. While this is true, new research suggests that individuals actually do have agency in building their networks.

How social networks are built

<ul>
<li>Research shows that higher income was associated with larger social networks, but only among those who believed that people get ahead by their own talents and hard work.</li>
<li>For those who believed that luck or help was a main factor of success, wealth was not associated with network size.</li>
<li>Those who believed that social status is an indicator of someone's quality caused high-status people to network more than low-status people. This is because high-status people believe they offer more value and don't feel they're taking advantage.</li>
</ul>

The connection between beliefs and networking actions

Consider the value you bring to the relationship. The more value you bring, the more comfortable you feel about doing this type of work. Similarly, business leaders desiring to push mentoring and networking should encourage employees to understand their value. Even juniors are indispensable to the success of the project.

How to find networking more comfortable

The ability to network successfully lies in how people perceive their own success and professional value.

The key seems to be how people perceive their own success and professional value.

career

Career

communication

Communication

Why Are Some People More Reluctant to Network Than Others?

Observing and chatting with colleagues helps us gain valuable knowledge. Employers recognize how important it is to enable workers to learn from each other, on an ongoing, informal basis.Popular learning models have tended to suggest that 20% of our learning about a job comes from observing others, although newer research suggests that figure could be even higher. Of course, everyone needs formalized training when they join a team, on things like software or legal processes. But there are also the less obvious things to learn, like how do you fix that error message that pops up all the time? Who is the most helpful person in the IT team? Is it OK to wander over to the marketing team for a chat? Why do we work with this company but not that one?

The power of observation 

The truth is once you’re in a physical place, osmosis tends to happen because you’re sitting near someone. Organizations may need to work harder to ensure their employees do continue to learn from each other. <ul><li>One solution is to leave less learning to chance You can’t just expect everyone to be in the office and somehow osmosis happens. You've got to intentionally design space differently, you’ve got to intentionally design proximity differently and thirdly you’ve got to intentionally design encounters.</li><li>Ensure that people have the encounters critical to meaningful learning rather than leaving them to chance. When you're going to a board meeting, make sure you take a junior person along’. These are incredibly important ways of learning.</li></ul>

Why intentionality matters

As we emerge from the pandemic and begin to adjust to how workplaces have changed, whether by embracing different forms of hybrid or allowing far more staff to work remotely, we will of course depend more on technology to interact with our colleagues.Recent technological developments have revolutionized how well we can work and also socialize with our colleagues.

Osmosis learning in the post-pandemic workplace 

An office isn’t really a physical location, it’s a place of connectivity.

This means building a system that really thinks about what knowledge each worker needs for the job they’re doing, who they need to spend time with to gain it, and how that knowledge can be shared even more widely, so everyone benefits – wherever they are working.

Putting an end to the “happenstance” of learning

Observing and chatting to colleagues helps us gain valuable knowledge. How do we make that happen in the post-pandemic workplace?

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

The problem with losing 'osmosis learning'

Nuxt.js makes it simple to create a universal application.A universal application is about preloading your application on a web server and sending rendered HTML as the response to the browser for every route in your app in order to improve SEO, make loading happen faster, along many other benefits.

How Nuxt.js helps you with SEO

Nuxt uses a library called vue-meta to handle the <code>&lt;head&gt;</code> element in each of your pages. A page is just Nuxt’s term for a route, and each one lives inside of a pages folder.Nuxt gives you three ways to set up the <code>&lt;head&gt;</code> element within your application’s pages:<ul><li>Setting up default meta tags for all pages.</li><li>Setting up meta tags for your pages individually.</li><li>Setting up meta tags for your dynamic pages.</li></ul>

How Nuxt.js handles the head for all your pages

One of the biggest selling points of Nuxt.js is that it can help your application with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and to rank better on Google. In this article, we’ll go over the best practices…

Best Practices for Nuxt.js SEO

Consumers in the digital world give away a large part of their personal data. For example, we enter our age and credit card numbers, allow companies to track our behaviour, and often display our geographical location.  However, customers are also becoming aware of the risks of their information being stolen, misused, or sold to third parties and are looking for privacy protections. A 2019 survey showed that 81 per cent of participants felt the risk of data collection outweighed the benefits.

Privacy data in the digital world

A user's decision to participate in an online platform activity depends partly on how many people are using it. This concept is known as "network effects." Negative network effects often drive privacy risk. The more users, the bigger the company's database, the more attractive it becomes to attack.

Network effects can cause privacy risk

Research showed that companies would gather more personal information than they need unless policymakers set requirements for data protection. However, if regulators restricted data collection but ignored data protection, companies did not guard customers' data enough. Data collection can be restricted:<ul><li>Regulators could impose fines on companies whose data were leaked.</li><li>Policymakers could tax data collection and discourage firms from gathering optional personal information.</li></ul>

Regulations to protect consumers

Firms that provide personalised services to users based on how other users behave puts users' personal information at risk, even if hackers don't directly gain access to the database. Hackers might get access to an algorithms' output for real users, then reverse-engineer the information to gain insight into a person's characteristics. One strategy to combat this is to add some noise to an algorithm's output.

Personalised services

Not all efforts are costly, and being known for strong protections could give firms a competitive advantage.

cybersecurity

Cybersecurity

artificialintelligence

Artificial Intelligence

How Companies Can Do Data Privacy Better

While we crave forward motion, it is the forward part, in the truest and fullest sense of the word, that we need most of all. The motion part, the part about speed and obsessing over it, and the part we tend to treat with undo reverence, is secondary and supporting.
Moving forward is a many-faceted desire. Progress, growth, evolution - it's all part of the same forward movement we as business owners crave, indeed need for both our survival and our psyche. But people often confuse advancement with acceleration.

Speed is your enemy; momentum is your friend

productivity

Productivity

problemsolving

Problem Solving

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

startup

Startups

Why Learning to Notice Better Will Help You Disrupt Your Industry

In marketing, goal funnels (or conversion funnels) are simply a sequence of action steps that your leads must go through in order to “convert” (e.g. buy one of your products).For example, for a typical B2B company, a website visitor may first discover a couple of blog posts by the company, then click on a product page link, fill out a contact form, schedule a call with a sales representative, and then become a customer.

Goal Funnel Visualization

You can only track Page-To-Page funnels (where each step is a web page) as of now, although Google Analytics does offer some event tracking, "event funnels" are not currently supported. Goal funnels are not as useful for tracking Multi-Session engagement. For example, it is not very good at tracking how Website engagement turns into conversion because your users may complete this action in multiple sessions. Funnels are only reliable in tracking Drop-Offs and completions in one session.

Limitations of Google Analytics Goal Funnels

All sorts of businesses can use goals and funnels to track Micro conversions. One of the most compelling reasons for tracking a goal funnel using Google Analytics is the ability to quickly identify “problem pages”.&nbsp;The problem may be technical(An error on one of the pages in the payment process) or Design-Related (Too many Pop-Ups with promotional offers), but either way,

The Use Of Goal Funnels

To set up a goal funnel, you must first set up a Google Analytics goal. In this example, let’s say we want to track how many Website visitors make it to the purchase confirmation page for our Ecommerce store. Since we want to measure the number of purchase Confirmations, we’ll call it “purchase confirmation.””

Set Up the Goal

Each step represents a web page that your Website visitors must pass through to reach your goal. If a potential customer must complete a certain step in the funnel to complete the goal, Toggle the “required” switch to “yes”. Click on “verify goals” to make sure your goals are tracking the correct data. To confirm each step of your funnel is working, you need to wait about a week for enough data to be collected to verify the data is working properly. Click on “verify goals” 

Enter the URLs of Each Step of the Funnel

Only about 43% of users made it past the cart Checkout to the Billing/Shipping step. You don’t have to worry about exits to “/Signin.Html” because it is simply the page asking the user to sign in to their Google account before they Checkout. If users are dropping off the funnel you set up in order to get to another page on your site, perhaps you should figure out why they are drawn to that page.

Using Your Funnel Visualization Report for Analysis and Insights

In last week’s article, we walked you through how to properly set up Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. In that tutorial, we briefly explained how to set up Google Analytics goals in order to…

How to Set Up Goal Funnel Visualization Reports on Google Analytics

Here are some factors that can impact user behavior that you may want to analyze with a Cohort Analysis:&nbsp;<ul><li>Target audience&nbsp;</li><li>Ad content&nbsp;</li><li>Channels&nbsp;</li><li>Campaigns/experiments&nbsp;</li><li>Website redesigns&nbsp;</li><li>New product lines and service offerings&nbsp;</li><li>Sales, discounts, promotion campaigns&nbsp;</li></ul>As a business analytics technique, a Cohort Analysis allows you to compare variables and changes between your digital marketing campaigns.

What Cohort Analysis is Good For

<ul><li>First of all, cohorts in general can technically be grouped by any shared characteristic. However, the cohort analysis report in Google Analytics (which has been in beta for a while) can currently only define cohorts based on acquisition date (i.e. the first time a user visits your website).</li><li>Secondly, tracking retention and returning users on your website (which is what cohort analysis is often used for) is currently an imprecise exercise for Google Analytics.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Limitations of Cohort Analysis in Google Analytics

At the top of the cohort analysis report, you can adjust settings for cohort type, cohort size, metric, and date range. <ul><li>Cohort type: currently, the only option is acquisition date </li><li>You can define cohorts by day, week, or month. Each Cohort represents the users acquired in a particular month.</li><li>Date range : the window of time that you want to examine </li><li>Metric: the data you’ll see in report. The default metric is user retention, which measures the percent of users that return. </li></ul>

A Beginner’s Primer to the Cohort Analysis Report in Google Analytics

<ul><li>Use Annotations: Start using Google Analytics Annotations or a marketing calendar to track your marketing activities and campaigns. This will help you see the impact of your marketing initiatives.</li><li>Test Your Marketing Activities: Start running experiments to test audiences, channels, and website design by week or by month.</li><li>Drill Down on Unusual Cohorts: If you see significant increases or decreases in metrics like user retention for a certain cohort, check your marketing calendar to identify what changes could be driving these movements in your metrics.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Beginner’s Guide to Cohort Analysis

Earlier this year, we at Humanlytics interviewed more than 100 small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to learn about their biggest digital marketing pain points. What we found was that two…

Christmas Quotes To Help You Celebrate The Season

How to Speed Read | Tim Ferriss

Third-Party Cookies in Chrome Will Soon Be Gone. Are You Ready to Act?

Why Are Some People More Reluctant to Network Than Others?

The problem with losing 'osmosis learning'

Suzanne Freeman