health, lifestyle, design, business, music, psychology, wisdom
I recently discovered a corporate strategist and neuroscientist Dr Robert Cooper, who’s devoted his career to researching and improving human performance via what he calls “hacking human nature”. I thought it would be valuable to summarize and share some of the key nuggets from his main keynote presentation (you can watch some [...]
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The study of “happiness” (happiology?) is one of my main areas of interest. I’ve read multiple specialized books on the matter by people who’ve dedicated their lives to its study, such as: The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom [...]
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An idea I picked up recently from Larry Page and Google X via the Singularity Crew is the concept of “10x thinking”. Mostly, when people are trying to improve something, they aim for a 10% improvement. Setting your target at 10% will get a 2% to 5% improvement, if you’re lucky. The culture that Larry Page has tried to [...]
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A nice idea I recently picked up from a guru I follow called Dan Kennedy is the concept of resources versus resourcefulness. It is echoed by some of Peter Diamandis’s laws. Among the most common complaints / self-limiting beliefs you will find around and inside you are the following: “I don’t have the money .. “I don’t [...]
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Here is a quick mindmap I made of the book “The Design Sprint” by Jake Knapp from Google Ventures. It explains a 5 day model for developing and launching / validating ideas. Your browser is not able to display frames. Please visit Design Sprint on MindMeister.
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People often ask me how they should launch their app or web venture, so I thought I’d share my answers here. There are two main books I recommend, the first is The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, the second is The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki, which he has recently re-issued as The Art of the Start 2.0. First: Videos Lean Startup 2 [...]
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From the superb book by Daniel Kahneman “Thinking Fast and Slow”. This should take 30 mins or so, a small investment that will yield a significant difference in the quality of the people you hire. Step 1: Select approximately 6 traits that are prerequisites for success in the position (e.g. technical proficiency, engaging [...]
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A bit of a technical post for search engine optimizers looking to vary their anchor text post Penguin, here is a list of random words that should be used along with a high proportion of URL links (e.g. www.domain.com becomes the anchor text). My current feeling on the ration is 25% targeted anchors, from the remaining 50% words such as [...]
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No matter what you do in life (unless maybe you’re a buddhist monk) by systematically using checklists you can eliminate errors and oversights, and improve your results. This is the main premise of the book The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. He uses fascinating examples from medicine, aviation and even VC investing to [...]
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In this post I’m going to explain a nice way of jumpstarting your adwords campaigns using the Adwords Preview Tool. This process will allow you to take advantage of optimizations established advertisers have made over years of running their search marketing campaigns. While this technique can be augmented even further by using paid [...]
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