You don’t want everyone. You want the right someone. Someone who cares about what you do. Someone who will make a contribution that matters. Someone who will spread the word. As soon as you start focusing on finding the right someone, things get better, fast. That’s because you can ignore everyone and settle in and focus on the people you actually want.
In a similar study in 2008, scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm found that when subjects slept four hours a night over five days, and then “recovered” with eight hours a night over the following week, they still showed slight residual cognitive impairments a week later, even though they reported no sleepiness. But in another study, also at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, scientists found that people recovered much more quickly from a week of poor sleep when it was preceded by a “banking” week that included nights with 10 hours of shuteye. In other words, if you know you have a week of little sleep ahead of you, try loading up on sleep beforehand, not simply afterward.
Here is my challenge: Write a mission statement with a goal that’s an action, not a sentiment; that is quantifiable, not nebulous. If you’re trying to sell a product, how and how many? If you’re trying to change lives, how and whose? Take your wonky mission statement and rip it to shreds. Then ponder your ambitions, and write and rewrite the thing until it reflects — in real, printable words and figures — the difference that you want to make.
— How to Write a Mission Statement That Isn’t Dumb | Fast Company
When you let customers tell you what they’re after, they will often reveal amazing details about what they find valuable as well what they’re willing to pay for. The surprise is generally positive as well as negative. They won’t like what you’ve built, but there will be other things they would like that would be trivially easy to implement. It’s not till you start the conversation by launching the wrong thing that they can express (or perhaps even realize) what they’re looking for.
— What Startups Are Really Like, Paul Graham
There’s the growing divide between kids who have access to technology and those who don’t; kids who participate in creating content with technology at home and school, and those who can’t; and the kids who know a lot about technology, and the parents who fear them.
— Will the Digital Divide Close by Itself? - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
Dunbar postulated that the typical human being can only have 150 friends. One hundred fifty people in the tribe. After that, we just aren’t cognitively organized to handle and track new people easily. That’s why, without external forces, human tribes tend to split in two after they reach this size.
— Seth’s Blog: Dunbar’s Number isn’t just a number, it’s the law
On the internet, the beautiful aspects of human nature manifest themselves, and we see individuals and companies maximizing their talents and resources for reasons of profit, pleasure, altruism, and mere progress in itself. Given that the government neither inhibits the activities of the internet nor props up or favors any particular actors or individuals, perhaps we are witnessing the closest thing to a free market that man has ever witnessed.
— Witness the Freest Economy: the Internet - Dan O’Connor - Mises Institute
We would not be able to grow the Disney brand … if we just created product in the US and exported it to the rest of the world,” said Mr Iger.
— ft.com
most people questioned in an online poll said they would not be offended if they received an electronic thank you, instead of a written note and 75 percent had no objections to anyone using laptops, netbooks and cell phones in the bathroom.
— Holster That iPhone in My Presence — But in the Bathroom, Anything Goes | Epicenter | Wired.com
Shoppers’ Shifting Priorities - NYTimes.com →
Against a baseline of spending levels in 2003, sales in computer stores have continued to rise. Restaurant and liquor-store sales are at much higher levels, and purchases at warehouse stores are up nearly 50 percent.
Still, in major retail divisions like home furnishings and clothing, sales faltered in 2007 and are now below their levels of 2003.
