Got this short but powerful 3 minute video in my email last night and I thought I post in the morning for readers to get a boost in their day. I hope you have a powerful day!
Category Archives: Success
How the Innovators DNA works
in Innovation, Success
What are the personal characteristics of successful innovators?
Anyone can change his or her behavior to improve creative impact in a company, according to some new research by Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen which included a six-year study surveying 3,000 creative executives and conducting an additional 500 individual interviews they found five ‘discovery skills’ that distinguish them:…
Why failure is important
in Innovation, Success
Why are people afraid of failure? Failure’s not just part of life, it’s essential to life — and to success. Henry Ford put it most eloquently: “Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently”. You can’t learn if you don’t fail.
The fact is all people will fail more than a few times in our lives.
We tend to learn more from our mistakes than our successes. At our best, we turn them to our advantage. Thomas Edison once said, "I make more mistakes than anyone I know. And eventually I patent them."
Failure is an essential ingredient of innovation — if companies are risk averse, they’ll never develop breakthrough products or create new markets.
The value in failure is the fact that the more you fail — if you treat failure the right way — the more you succeed. The point is to turn failure into learning by not making the same mistake twice.
According to Dr. Carol Dweck, professor at Stanford University, coping with failure is a mindset problem:
If you believe that your talents are inborn or fixed, then you will try to avoid failure at all costs because failure is proof of your limitation. People with a fixed mindset like to solve the same problems over and over again. It reinforces their sense of competence.
Children with fixed mindsets would rather redo an easy jigsaw puzzle than try a harder one. Students with fixed mindsets would rather not learn new languages. CEOs with fixed mindsets will surround themselves with people who agree with them. They feel smart when they get it right.
But if you believe your talent grows with persistence and effort, then you seek failure as an opportunity to improve. People with a growth mindset feel smart when they’re learning, not when they’re flawless.
Michael Jordan, arguably the world’s best basketball player, has a growth mindset. Most successful people do. In high school he was cut from the basketball team but that obviously didn’t discourage him: "I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career, I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game wining shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
If you have a growth mindset, then you use your failures to improve. If you have a fixed mindset, you may never fail, but neither do you learn or grow.
If you don’t risk failure, you’re not trying hard enough.
Paying attention to the small details makes a HUGE difference
in Success
Like most people I get a haircut every 3 to 4 weeks before I start looking like a monkey. I’ve been cutting my hair with the same barber for the last 18 years so it was to my surprise this morning that I got a new added benefit
The Voyage That Shook the World trailer for getting a haircut…a massage!
Yup, that’s right a massage.
Using what looks like a motorized hand shaker attached to his hand with a soft pouch in the palm of his hand he rubs your arms, hands, neck, head, shoulders and back. If you are interested in alternative health therapies, you may want to learn more about the Domancic Method of Bioenergy Therapy. This is a therapy that is designed to help balance the energy system of the body. It is done in a non-invasive way and helps to promote healing. This therapy has already provided excellent results for more than a million people and is known to help treat a variety of health conditions. If you want a safe treatment option that is natural and without side effects, then this therapy may be the answer to your medical problems. You can visit BetterPT for further details.
Physical therapy is a branch of medicine that helps to treat people who have health problems, injuries, illnesses, or surgeries that limit their possibility of mobility and range of motion. The conditions which are treated by physical therapists include sports injuries, joint replacements, orthopedic surgery, burns, job-related conditions, and others. The physical therapist usually uses different treatment techniques that reduce pain, restore function, and prevent disability. Physical therapists work in such establishments as hospitals, outpatient facilities, and private offices. Physical therapists must be strong and able to move heavy equipment and lift patients. Those students who are interested in healthcare for sports or physical activities can obtain a career in physical therapy. Physical therapists have to be strong in academics, especially science and have perfect interpersonal skills with the ability to communicate with others. The responsibilities of physical therapists include improving the physical condition of the patients like the proper functioning of limbs after an injury, surgery or illness, improving mobility, and reducing pain. Consult with an injury and car accident attorney the best strategy to win your case.
List your service here for the patients who have different severe injuries or diseases like lower back pain, arthritis, cerebral palsy, to preserve physical disabilities from occurring or to restrain the effects of these disabilities. Those people who suffer from heart diseases or other related health problems are also recommended to use a physical therapist to treat joint pains and muscle problems. And if you need to undertake genomic analysis that is an excellent platform with which to do so.
Things like these make a whole of a lot of difference in the haircut experience. Getting a haircut is a relaxing experience, especially when the barber uses the shaving knife to slash the hair off the back of my neck…it just feels great. Now add a massage at the end and you get people leaving looking and feeling fresh!
The barbers got the idea after one of them built the strap-on-hand-shaker to give massages to himself and then one of the clients suggested he should give clients massages after their haircut.
The barber says that they’ve just recently started giving massages and says that so far clients have liked it (who wouldn’t!) and leave with big smiles in their faces.
As a business owner, you want your clients to have big smiles on their faces all the time.
Key takeaway.
Look at where you can add extra value, small things make a big difference If I Didn’t Care rip
…it got me talking and even wrote this post about a simple haircut!
If you are truly innovative, you will fail. If you don’t fail, you are playing it safe
in Success
“I often say that I’ve learned but one thing in 40 years, since I began my management career. … And that is … “try stuff” … faster than the next guy.”
— Tom Peters
At it’s core innovation is a numbers game. You have to ensure that your innovation pipeline has a large number of ideas coming in at the front end in order to yield an adequate number of successes at the back end.
You have to accept that for every 100 ideas 10 will merit a small scale experiment, and of those, only 1 or 2 will turn out to be successes.
The truth is experiments fuel creativity and change. Experimenting means you are intentionally going off the map and pushing beyond the status quo.
Examples of experimental innovators abound, here are a few examples that we can learn from:
Play the odds with volume and frequency
Kevin Nalty is a YouTube celebrity and created an entry on Google Knol on how to get popular on YouTube. Here’s his take on how to make videos that don’t suck:
This chapter sounds arrogant, and its somewhat hypocritical. Because I make so many videos, many of them suck. If anyone should have the ?magic recipe? for a decent online video, it should be me. But I’m still learning each day, and that’s part of what makes it so fun to create videos. People often ask me why I don’t focus on creating fewer quality videos instead of posting routinely. There are two reasons for that. First, if I stop creating for more than a few days, I generally don’t feel like posting anymore. Second, I have no Earthly idea which of my video ideas will resonate and which will become popular. There are a lot of factors involved, so I play the odds with volume and frequency.
Testing beats guessing
Ebay, one of the most popular websites on the web, gets huge amounts of people coming the site everyday looking to buy and sell stuff. Knowing what all these users want is important, converting most of the users is Ebay’s most critical activity. A recent article from Harvard on how to design smart business experiments (registration needed) explains how Ebay built it’s own application called the Ebay Experimentation Platform to lead testers through the process of testing pages in the website and to keep track of what’s being tested at what times on what pages.
Alien³ movie Thousands of small experiments
Consider Chris Rock, the popular comedian, who uses small experiments as part of his process:
First, he picks small venues where he can do rapid, low-risk experiments with new material. In gearing up for his latest global tour, he made between 40 and 50 appearances at a small venue called the Stress Factory in New Brunswick, New Jersey, not far from where he lives. Rock told the Orange Country Register, “It’s like boxing training camp. I always pick a comedy club to work out in.”
In front of audiences of say 30 to 40 people, Rock will bring a yellow legal note pad with lots of joke ideas scribbled on it, according to fellow comedian Matt Ruby. In sets that run say 45 minutes, many of the jokes will fall flat, but according to Ruby, “There were 5-10 lines during the night that were just ridiculously good. Like lightning bolts. My sense is that he starts with these bolts and then writes around them.”
Fail fast, fail cheap, and move on to the real winners
A recent example of a company investing incrementally in a new market is Dell’s agreement to sell PCs in Wal-Mart stores.
Rather than sell the entire line of Dell PCs in stores, it conducted a test, offering only a select few models in many stores, providing Dell valuable information about its mass appeal.
There’s simply no way around it, your chance of finding the next big opportunity is largely a function of how many seeds you sow and how many new things you try.
The great thing about the web is how easy it is to try something new. Experiments can be frequent and small and the best can be built into something big.
10,000 Hours to success
in Success
Talent is overrated argues Malcolm Gladwell in his new book Outliers: The Story of Success Heartbreakers release . Although I have yet to read the book I’m fascinated by the idea behind the 10,000 hours needed to master a skill. Gladwell argues that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice.
“In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, “this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years… No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”
The real path to great performance and therefore success is a matter of choice. Practice makes perfect indeed. Just make sure you practice on the things you’re passionate about.
Gladwell’s new book is generating a lot of buzz with countless interviews picking his brain:
- Slate Magazine 4 part discussion of Outliers
- Fortune Magazine Secrets of Success
- Gladwell’s Outliers website interview
- NY Mag Why we have little control over our success
For a real treat check out Fortune Magazine’s Why Talent is Overrated article from last month. It’s not about Malcolm Gladwell’s book but about the principle of deliberate practice. Uptown Girls movies District 9 psp The essence of deliberate practice is to stretch an individual beyond his or her current abilities. With examples of Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer, Chris Rock, Giants Quarterback Eli Manning to name a few you’ll find this a good read.