20 Things I Wish I Knew at 20

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Written by: Julien Smith

1. The world is trying to keep you stupid. From bank fees to interest rates to miracle diets, people who are not educated are easier to get money from and easier to lead. Educate yourself as much as possible for wealth, independence, and happiness.

2. Do not have faith in institutions to educate you. By the time they build the curriculum, it’s likely that the system is outdated– sometimes utterly broken. You both learn and get respect from people worth getting it from by leading and doing, not by following.

3. Read as much as you can. Learn to speed read with high retention. Emerson Spartz taught me this while I was at a Summit Series event. If he reads 2-3 books a week, you can read one.

4. Connect with everyone, all the time. Be genuine about it. Learn to find something you like in each person, and then speak to that thing.

5. Don’t waste time being shy. Shyness is the belief that your emotions should be the arbitrators of your decision making process when the opposite is actually true.

6. If you feel weird about something during a relationship, that’s usually what you end up breaking up over.

7. Have as much contact as possible with older people. Personally, I met people at Podcamps. My friend Greg, at the age of 13, met his first future employer sitting next to him on a plane. The reason this is so valuable is because people your age don’t usually have the decision-making ability to help you very much. Also they know almost everything you will learn later, so ask them.

8. Find people that are cooler than you and hang out with them too. This and the corollary are both important: “don’t attempt to be average inside your group. Continuously attempt to be cooler than them (by doing cooler things, being more laid back, accepting, ambitious, etc.).”

9. You will become more conservative over time. This is just a fact. Those you surround yourself with create a kind of “bubble” that pushes you to support the status quo. For this reason, you need to do your craziest stuff NOW. Later on, you’ll become too afraid. Trust me.

10. Reduce all expenses as much as possible. I mean it. This creates a safety net that will allow you to do the crazier shit I mentioned above.

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FC's 100 Most Creative People in Business

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I love this idea.

Un-Learn These 5 School Lessons Now

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By Jeff Haden

You spent a lot of time getting an education. But if you want to make it as an entrepreneur, it's time to forget some of what you learned.

You spent a lot of years in school. You learned a lot.

Some of what you learned you need to un-learn as soon as possible. Here are five key attitudes you should adopt instead:

1. If you only do what you're told, you'll excel.

I know. School was hard.

But not that hard.

If you did what you were told--go to class, do the reading, turn in assignments on time, etc.--you could get As. Initiative was not required and, in fact, was often frowned on.

Now--whether you work for someone else or run your own business--doing what you're told makes you average. Not superior, not excellent... just average.

To be above average, or to achieve better than average results, you must do two things:

1. Do what others are willing to do, and do it better, and
2. Do what others aren't willing to do

Otherwise, you're just average.

2. Being micro-managed is to be expected.

Sure, you felt overly-controlled in school: Dates, timelines, rules... not to mention the seemingly arbitrary policies and nonsensical assignments. You saw graduation as the day you would finally have more freedom.

Nope.

In school you paid people to criticize, direct, and at times micro-manage you. Now you're the one getting paid... yet you somehow don't feel it's fair that investors, partners, or customers can dictate what you do, sometimes down to the smallest detail?

Don't expect someone to trust you to perform a task or service–and give you money to perform that service–until you've proven you can be trusted to perform that service.

Then, once you've proven your skills, if you still feel micro-managed it's your responsibility to change the situation. Communicate before you are communicated to. Answer questions before questions are asked. Demonstrate your value before you are asked to prove your value.

No one wants to micro-manage you. They have better things to do with their time.

If you're being micro-managed it's probably because you need to be.

3. Your time off is the highlight of the year.

You may have forgotten your mom's birthday, but I'll bet you knew the exact day every semester ended and the start and end of Spring Break. And you lived for snow days.

So it only makes sense to see weekends and vacations as the highlight of your working year, right?

Actually, no: If you feel you endure the workweek just to get to the payoff of the weekend, you're in the wrong business. Find work you enjoy; then you won't see time off as a chance to finally do something fun but as a chance to do something else fun.

While you'll never love everything you do in your professional life, you should enjoy the majority of it.

Otherwise you're not living–you're just working.

4. Getting criticized means you failed.

Here's another pay/paid dichotomy. In college you paid professors to critique your work.

So now that you are the one getting paid, why is it unfair for someone--like a customer, investor, or key partner–to critique your work?

It's not.

When you get negative feedback, see it as an opportunity. Think, "Wow, I didn't realize I wasn't doing that right. I didn't realize I wasn't doing that as well as I could."

Criticism is a chance to learn--and this time you're getting paid to learn.

Never complain when someone pays you to learn.

5. Success is based on toeing the line.

Say you disagreed with a professor's point of view on a particular point. You may even have been right... but the only way to get an A in the class was to parrot the professor's take on the subject. Except in rare cases, confirming and following the rules was everything.

In business, conforming only ensures that you will achieve the same results as other people.

If you want to achieve different results you'll have to think and act differently. Do your homework, think critically, and don't be afraid to create your own path.

But don't be different just for the sake of being different. Be different because it's who you are and what you believe... and because it will get you where you want to go, with your integrity and your sense of self intact.

via Inc.com

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From Ramit Sethi, Author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich

The Game Being Played Around You

From Ramit Sethi, Author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich

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Developing a Brand Voice Strategy

By John Doherty

A brand voice strategy is formed by the following:

• A brainstorm (idea doesn’t have to be perfect);
• Ship a strategy by planning out content for 3 months and delivering it;
• Iterate once you have seen what traffic is doing (are people engaging?)
• Ship (ship the adjustments, keep iterating)

Visualize it this way:

Every company needs a vision and a voice, but finding that vision is undeniably the hardest part. The great secret about branding, though, is that you don’t have to get it “right” from the beginning. The most important, and undeniably hardest, part is the start. You have to define it as well as you can and then go. After all, your culture, brand, and voice will probably look quite different when you are a 3 person team than when you grow to a 30 person team, but your brand voice will naturally change as culture changes anyway. A brand voice is never static, so all you need to do is start.

Developing a brand voice strategy is an exercise in wide-scale introspection and focus. The goal of the brand voice is not only to provide focus and direction for the company, but also to attract the right people to the company to help further that voice.

Plan out a schedule for producing content as early as possible. Create an editorial calendar that has you producing content regularly. Remember, your first few pieces will not usually do well, so you need to keep pushing through and establishing yourself in your space. Success is not usually a consideration of who is first to market, but rather who is able to maintain that momentum and turn it into future success as well. Ship it and keep shipping. And track it so you can adjust.

INC: Seducing Your Audience

Leading a meeting or brainstorming session and want to get your group to loosen up and forget their fear of embarrassment? Musician Bobby McFerrin has the answers.



In this video, Bobby McFerrin embodies the five simple tips you can use to lure your audiences into participating. She writes:

• Start slow. Have people do one small activity before an activity that is longer or more complicated.
• Make sure it's always safe. Don't ask people to do anything they are not comfortable doing, especially at the beginning.
• Humor is good for making people relax, but don't make fun of people as a form of humor, or the entire audience will start to feel unsafe.
• Research shows that synchronicity bonds people together—when people do something together, such as clap, laugh, raise their hand to a question, it bonds the group. A bonded group feels safe, so ask your audience to do something all together and the group will bond.
• Be confident. If you are the leader people will follow you.

via INC.com

The Business Model Generation

Meet the World's Best Chefs

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"Good eats come from good chefs, and since 1991, the James Beard Foundation has recognized the most creative culinary talents in the U.S. with an annual award that has become, as TIME
dubbed them at the time, the “Oscars of the food world.” Each year, the prestige of the Outstanding Chef title grows, and brings rock star status to the previously unsung heroes of the kitchen. As something to aspire to, the awards have also served as a gastronomic stimulus package, fueling innovation and unforgettable concoctions that have gone a long way toward upgrading the American palate (thanks, Wolfgang Puck, for forever changing airport pizza). On the James Beard Foundation’s 25th anniversary, we spoke to 23 Outstanding Chef honorees about what the award has meant to them, what they would request as their last meal, and even what they eat when nobody is looking. You might be surprised by some of their answers."

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The Met Gala 2012 - NYC

"New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was once again home to this year’s “fashion Oscars”, the Met Gala, as the museum celebrated the opening of 2012 fashion exhibit at the Costume Institute. Vogue was on-hand for the star-studded event, capturing the likes of Gisele Bundchen, Tom Brady, Rihanna, Carey Mulligan, Bruno Mars, Lana Del Rey, Rooney Mara, Cameron Diaz, Pharrell, M.I.A., Beyonce, Justin Timberlake, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Kanye West and more as the actors, actresses, athletes and musicians made head-turning appearances alongside some of fashion’s most popular iconic names."

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Incredible, Inspiring - A Story for Tomorrow

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Creators: gnarls bay productions


This beautifully crafted colorful montage of images, video and narration has inspired me like no other. I hope you find it do the same. The couple wrote and produced this video while traveling through Chile & Patagonia over a five week span.

what are you waiting for? get out there!

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Time is Running Out!

Are You Trading Now for Then?
By Ben Michaelis, Ph.D.

Time is running out. Seriously. I'm not just being an alarmist. I mean it. Right now -- even as you read these words, you are losing time. Stop reading this and get started. Okay, fine if you insist that this article is just too gripping, you can finish reading this article but that's it. Then it's time to get doing (that's not a typo).

As a clinical psychologist with experience working with people who are feeling stuck in their creative lives, I can tell you that even if it is dressed up in nuance or different disguises, almost all of the problems that people have with doing/making/creating/expressing themselves come down to one thing. It is not a lack of talent, ability, resources, or intention. Instead, it is about one deceptively-simple exchange that people make every single day.

The problem is trading now for then.

When you put things off for later, "when you have time," what you are doing is making a trade. You are exchanging the now for the then. When you do that, now becomes then and there is never a now, there is only then. Make this trade enough times and is always, "then," and never, "now." Soon there won't be enough "now" left for you to do what you were meant to do.

If you want to write that novel/compose that opera/build that building/make that (fill in the blank) you can do it, but only if you do it now. You do not need more time in school developing techniques; you do not need more research at the library to ensure that your protagonist's moustache style was appropriate to the era, what you need to do is to do. You need to try, make mistakes, learn from them, and move forward. Regardless of what your passion is, the song remains the same and can be summed up in four simple words:

Do Now. Details Later.

The anxiety of indecision and indecision of anxiety is far more cumbersome to your spirit than the process of revising, reworking, and rebuilding. Doing something, doing anything, reminds you of the most important asset you have: you -- and your capacity to do, make, and create.

So, now that you are nearly done reading this (and maybe you have even passed it along to a friend or two who can use the inspiration) put it down and don't pick it up again until "then."

Go to it!

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The Kobe System with Richard Branson

"You can do better, I know you can. Good luck to you."

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I am fascinated by Christopher Nolan's work ethic and genius.

12 Lessons from the CEO of the Energy Project

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President and CEO of The Energy Project, Tony Schwartz shares the twelve most important lessons he's learned so far:

"Tomorrow is my birthday — always an opportunity for reflection, but especially this time. For several weeks now, I've been thinking about what I've learned during the past six decades that really matters. Here's a first pass:"

1. The more we know about ourselves, the more power we have to behave better. Humility is underrated. We each have an infinite capacity for self-deception — countless unconscious ways we protect ourselves from pain, uncertainty, and responsibility — often at the expense of others and of ourselves. Endless introspection can turn into self-indulgence, but deepening self-awareness is essential to freeing ourselves from our reactive, habitual behaviors.

2. Notice the good. We each carry an evolutionary predisposition to dwell on what's wrong in our lives. The antidote is to deliberately take time out each day to notice what's going right, and to feel grateful for what you've got. It's probably a lot.

3. Let go of certainty. The opposite isn't uncertainty. It's openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow.

4. Never seek your value at the expense of someone else's. When we're feeling devalued, our reactive instinct is to do anything to restore what we've lost. Devaluing the person who made you feel bad will only prompt more of the same in return.

5. Do the most important thing first in the morning and you'll never have an unproductive day. Most of us have the highest energy early in the day, and the fewest distractions. By focusing for a designated period of time, without interruption, on the highest value task for no more than 90 minutes, it's possible to get an extraordinary amount of work accomplished in a short time.