Interesting

Rework your business

The guys from 37signals just released their new book REWORK. I'm hoping to get my hands on one soon. It's a compilation of essays that give you great new insights on how you should run your business. A must read for every entrepreneur out there.

In the real world, you can't have over a dozen employees spread out across eight different cities over two continents. In the real world, you can't attract millions of customers without any salespeople or advertising. In the real world, you can't reveal your formula for success to the rest of the world. But we've done all those things and prospered. The real world isn't a place, it's an excuse. It's a justification for not trying. It has nothing to do with you. - Excerpt from REWORK

If you would like to know more about the book. check out the REWORK manifesto on Changethis.

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Too many ideas, too little time

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If you have too many ideas and you don't have enough time to execute them, you should check out this article by Scott Belsky on how to overcome the idea-to-idea syndrome. By now, I hope you understand the real value of an idea is in its execution. But there's another problem that arise while you are executing your idea. You might get bored and lose your initial momentum and creativity. And being addicted to ideas, you come up with a new one to keep yourself interested and abandon the old one.

Scott proposed some tips on how to stop yourself from going from idea to idea. First we need to restrain ourselves from coming up with too many ideas. Execution of the idea is still the main goal. Stop being addicted to inspiration and start the perspiration.

We also need to run our idea through the others, the ones that live in the real world. Their input is invaluable if you want your idea to go mainstream. Scott calls them the sober monitors.

Try skipping meetings and appointments that doesn't align with your goals. Because when idea-lovers get together, all they can do is just generate more ideas and prevent you from actually bringing yours to live.

I suggest you keep an eye on the next article of the series to get more tips on how to turn your ideas into reality.

Tagging in the real world

​In Flickr, you can tag your photos to categorize them. On Facebook, you can tag the faces in your photos to link them to the actual person. (or spam others) Now, stickybits gives you a way to tag objects in the real world with digital content like photos, videos or messages. Tagging is done by scanning the bar-code on the item using their application that is available on iPhone and Android. If you are the first to scan the bar-code, the content that you tag onto it will appear first. There is also a history log to track if there's new content being attached to the item or when it changed location.

Currently the business model is selling packs of vinyl bar-code stickers so you can tag any items you want by simply stamping the stickers on them. There's nothing stopping stickybits from charging for exclusive rights to add content to items first and maybe even show related items when you scan something. Google Adsense for the real world anyone?

Now this is a brilliant idea that is well executed.

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Truth about happiness

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Daniel Kahneman, pioneer of behavioral economics, talked about the 2 ways we perceive happiness and the conflict between them. There are these notions of experiencing self and remembering self. As you probably have guessed, experiencing self is the one that live in the moment and experience our life, while the remembering self is the one that recalls the memories of our life and experience. They are the reason why being happy in your life isn't the same as being happy with your life.

When I ask you, how you are feeling now, your experiencing self will be the one responding to the question. If I ask you how was your day yesterday, your remembering self will replay your memories of the day before and answer the question. Differentiating these 2 entities is crucial to understanding what happiness is.

No one can explain this better than the man himself so I've embedded the video below. Happy watching.

Emailing the right way

If it seems like you don't have enough time to reply all the emails you get, maybe you should check out this tip.

The Problem

E-mail takes too long to respond to, resulting in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it.

The Solution

Treat all email responses like SMS text messages, using a set number of letters per response. Since it’s too hard to count letters, we count sentences instead.

There are 2, 3, 4 and 5 sentences policies. This should help improve your productivity by spending more time away from emailing.

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Evolution of spam

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What happens when you can broadcast to thousands and thousands of people at virtually zero cost? Some use it to organize flash mob, while some decide to spam us indiscriminately to sell us products we don't need. The most familiar form of spam would be the email-spam. However, the recent rise of social networking sites gave spammers a whole new playground to harvest contact information and a new way to grab our attention.

Facebook (largest social networking site on the planet) has a really convenient feature that allows you to tag faces in your photos. If you have a hard time remembering faces like me, this is god-send. Surprisingly, some really creative people found it to be the easiest and most effective way to start a conversation on a photo.

Because you can tag anyone on any photo, you can if you are motivated enough, tag every single one of your friends on a picture of a tree. Your friends will then be notified while the photo shows up on their news-feed. This is great for greeting cards, group photos and of course, spam.

Luckily, there's a bunch of ways to block your spammer friends and Facebook being a closed platform helps reduce the amount of tag-spam. Anyway, I now have a valid excuse to be anti-social as less friends means less spam.