Mouli's thoughts and musics over two decades
Presentation Zen my favorite presentation critique/info site has a great post today on places to get some good quotations from. Ofcourse topping the list is the Tom Peters site.
Go on, steal some quotes .. and make your presentation snazzy.
Gina Trapani, Queen of Lifehacker.com has a great post on laptop tips. Good set of must-do tips if one has a laptop.
Psychologytoday has an excellent (albeit pretty long) article on how to get good sleep. It gives some excellent detailed information on how and why insomnia happens. More interesting is some of the medical data given (which I did not know before) about how we get drowsy and feel sleepy (or other wise).
The following paragraph is amazing – most of us who have night-outs during college can relate to this. Looks like there is a medical reasoning behind this.
Circadian rhythm guides the body through cycles of sleep and alertness. Ironically, it issues its strongest alerting force in a burst lasting from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., perfect for dinner-party repartee (although you may not remember the bon mots — short-term memory is sharpest around 7 in the morning). After 8 p.m., alertness begins to fade, permitting us to doze off. This same system makes us sleepiest in the early morning, from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. Stay up all night studying for an exam and circadian forces will make you drowsy near dawn. Stick it out for two more hours, though, and you’ll start picking up steam again. “You don’t need sleep to actually get alert,” Spielman points out.
Also, about the way our brain functions with respect to day and night (light and dark).
The circadian system is tied, albeit imperfectly, to cycles of light and dark. We have dedicated sensors on the retina that deliver the daytime/nighttime message directly to the pineal gland tucked deep inside the brain. In response to darkness, this tiny nodule of brain tissue produces the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, broadcasting the sandman’s message to brain areas that govern everything from body temperature to protein synthesis to hormone production to alertness.
Wow, just the other day, I read in Keiths column (in todone.com ) that watching tv or working on the computer just before sleeping is a bad idea – because the bright light emanating from either of these can fool the brain into thinking that it is day time.Read the full article here. [link]
(thanks lifehack.org)
An excellent article in Lifehack.org which narrows down the 2 or 3 main causes of procrastination, and gives advise on how to tackle the root causes, so that procrastination does not occur at all in the first place.
Guy Kawasaki has a fantastic list of things that is a must if you want to do a really good speech. I have not heard him speak, but he is famed to be a very good speaker himself. He says that it took him 20 years to get to the point where he is. The post is titled “how to get a standing ovation” very aptly. All of us would want something like that.
Lifehacker, in its infinite wisdom, has a post giving us ideas on how to find the best free photos on flickr. Searching for a nice graphic for your ppt, or your desktop wallpaper, or maybe just the event that you had missed while you were out of town. Scroll down to the comments and check out the first link – the commenter searches for nature photos – and yes he does find some very good ones.
Ramit is at it again, with his second installment in his personal finance makeover for 2006. I have got to admit that he is good. Check out some of the stuff he says about how important saving at a young age is. Highly recommended read. And if you havnt read this first installment read that too.
first article [link]
second article [link]
Remember Tew, the young college guy who was making money the enterprising way – yeah the milliondollar webpage guy. This was a guy who was selling small pixels of his webpage for $100. ANd his target was a million dollars. And oh yes, he did it – until yesterday, hackers cripped the website and asked for a ransom ! I think the site is back up now. Tew promptly informed the FBI, the smart guy he is. Good luck dude. I think it was a great way to have earned your money – you deserve to keep it.
Fast Company has an amazing article titled “Thrown into the Deep end”. This is about an Internet company guy, decides to leave and join his competitor as CEO, when his older company had been acquired by Google and shelved. The article is not about what he was before and after. The article is about how he got sucked into the new job, how he felt like having been thrown into the deep end of an olympic sized swimming pool in the middle of winter ! Good read.
Check out a minute by minute commentary of the latest MacWorld talk by Steve Jobs. I have always been very impressed with this presentations. This one keeps up the standard.
Check it out here at your friendly engadget site.
Just read an article by Steve Pavlina titled “Rules are no obstacles for the Committed”. Very good read. I should say a little boastful, but inspiring none-the-less. I think he probably has every right to speak highly of his deeds. They are indeed things to be proud of.
A small snippet:
Steve: I’ve decided to do X.
Cowardly Lion: Bock bock bock. Cluck cluck cluck. I’m scared.
Steve: Step aside please. Coming through.
Cowardly Lion: Huh? What? Um, OK.
Cowardly Lion goes home and ponders what it might be like to live as something other than a cowardly lion for just one day. Cowardly Lion obeys previous conditioning by flipping on TV to help eliminate such socially disruptive thoughts and feelings. Cowardly Lion begins feeling “normal” again (ca. 1984) after noticing that friendly TV characters universally agree that people like Steve are broken, anti-social, and wicked and that Cowardly Lion is in fact perfectly normal, average, and socially acceptable.
Read the full article here.
Ramit Sethi in his blog I will teach you to be rich, writes an excellent piece on Sucess and the Shrug effect. He talks about how, when we compare ourselves with a famous person – lets say a CEO, we tend to put ourselves behind and compare, find excuses to prove why we are not there as the CEO and then shrug it off. Very well written.
Some snippets from the article:
CEOs don’t just magically flip a switch and start wearing a fancy suit one day, directing their staff to do this and that. Getting to the top isn’t about knowing how to execute a leveraged buyout, or negotiating anti-dilution provisions, or whatever. (This is true for both CEOs and other successful people in other domains!)It starts earlier. For that CEO, it probably started when he took a paper route in junior high, or started a Web site in high school, or designed an interesting product in college. It started by knowing how to get in touch with the right people and learning–through lots of experience and failure–that senior executives are just people. They’re regular people who started their path to being extraordinary by taking small steps.
He defines the shrug effect as :
Pointing at someone successful, attributing it to external factors, and shrugging because you don’t have identical qualities.
Read the full article here.
No, I am not talking about me. I write for the pleasure of it, and for archiving these nuggets that I find on the web. I am talking about Steve Pavlina and his personal development blog. He claims that it is not (at the moment) his primary source of income ; but maybe next year it will be. November alone brought about $4700 through earnings on his website. He says that it is a 33x increase than his January 2005 earnings. At this rate, extrapolating, he claims that ‘maybe’ his 2006 earnings through the website would be about $100,000.
Read about this and some more of his ideas (disclaimer: some of them wacky) at his blog post today.
Adrian in his Coyote Within blog has an excellent post titled ‘Coyote and the Grim Reaper’. Wow is all I can say. He writes a post about seeing the Grim reaper outside a corporate office. He talks about how ‘The One’ above invests in creativity. Investment planning is done in earnest. People are assessed about the investment returns – on how creative they have been. If they have not been productive, the investment is withdrawn. The best that I really liked was when Coyote asks about insects and dogs, and the Grim Reaper replies: “Sure,” said the Grim Reaper. “We put a lot of our investment into safe holdings like those. You don’t invest much in an ant, but there are billions and billions of them, so it all adds up. And the investment is totally safe. Insects and such do what they do and we always collect a tiny dividend when they die. The more advanced the creature, the more investment it takes and the higher the rewards. Of course, the risk goes up too. Humans demand a huge investment and they’re very, very high-risk. But when it works as it should, the rewards from just one human are immense. All that creativity and learning. Beautiful stuff! You know, I collected our investment from Socrates — and Albert Einstein. You could barely quantify the rate of return, it was so massive.”
Read the full post ‘coyote and the grim reaper’.