Shared Sundays are the best
08 August 2010About once a month, I get the opportunity to come down to south Chandler and hang with some of my best friends. This is the time I get to let lose and play games with the people who I love the most. It brings me back to my center and makes me more creative as the month goes along. I enjoy this so I hope you each get a time to sit with those people who make you creative this fine Sunday.
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Social Media TiVo please
07 August 2010It's pretty amazing the number of "real-time" online tools there are now. Twitter, Facebook Updates, Foursquare, Gowalla, Ustream and hundreds more are all tools to help us communicate with one another right now. It's getting pretty loud and a lot of folks have started to posit that the next wave of online tools will be those to help us filter all this information. This to me looks shockingly like cable television in 1997. Back then there were hundreds of channels all happening in real time and all fighting for an audience. There was no easy way to break out of the "right now" consumption of the content. Then a game changing product was released: TiVo. All of a sudden it was easy and intuitive to record your shows and watch them at your convenience. You could still go out with friends and not be stressed about missing this week's "Survivor" episode. This changed the way most Americans are consumed television. DVR adoption rates are good and only look to be getting even more ubiquitous with television cable and satellite companies. What I'm looking for is the next revolutionary web technology that will have the same kind of effect that TiVo did for ...
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Surround yourself with the right people
05 August 2010There's been a recurring message in my conversations in the last two days: surround yourself with those people who you want to be like. It's come from people both much more experienced than me in business and also a young guy who's just finishing college. They're all successful and are heading in the direction that shows their ability to create real businesses that make profits even in these economic times. These are the people who I want to be about. One trait that they all have is being extremely positive in their mindset. There isn't anything that they can't do. If they set their mind to accomplish a goal they will achieve it and most likely with a little panache. My mindset wavers from being insanely driven and focused when I'm angry or inspired to needing all kinds of proof when I have doubt regarding a situation. It's becoming clear to me that these folks have the same doubts I have but decide to try anyway. It's the equivalent of making the ask. (I always enjoy it when my own bits of wisdom can be used against me.) Another consistent thread is that these successful people all have networks of other ...
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- blog, Introspective
People are the people that are going to help you
04 August 2010The title of this post actually is a quote from Gary Vaynerchuk's Web 2.0 Expo video and it falls perfectly in line with a knowledge bomb of a blog post that Olivier Blanchard put up today titled "You want results? Time to start re-investing in people" I can't begin to stress how important investing in people is so crucial to your long term success in life, let alone business. People are the difference in great teams and doing the things that at face value seem impossible. While I've been known to say on several podcasts that you should always work to network up, the real difference that most people miss is that you really have to care about everyone you want to maintain a relationship with regardless of whether they're in the position you aspire to achieve or not. It is the people you choose to surround yourself with both physically and digitally who will make your life richer and give you the safety net that you may need to do the things that really scare you. Choose those folks wisely but don't try to keep that network small. Keep it the perfect size so you care enough about each ...
From 0 to podcast in 2 days
03 August 201072 hours ago I was a normal guy with a ton of audio and video equipment in my apartment. Several friends and even a few family members made fun of me for the obnoxious set up I had. Over the course of the last 3 days I blurted out an idea I had for a podcast and got such a supportive reaction from the community that I think that they would be upset if I didn't produce the podcast. Now I have 21 interviews lined up for the month of August and I've started the conversations with potential sponsors. There's something about great, simple ideas that people gravitate to. My recommendation for folks is to take their original idea, even if it's a different version of a currently respected and known idea, and boil it down for a while until it becomes so simple that anyone can understand it in under a tweet. 140 characters is all you need to get a concise and complete idea across. As my friend and role model Gary Vaynerchuk communicated in his 2008 speech circuit, if you think you have a feel and you know you have the knowledge you have to take a shot now ...
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