I’ve Heard Great Things About You – A nondouchey guide to personal branding and self promotion. The Game is Afoot. My biases are obvious. I am a programmer (or rather, a developer). I believe the best ISVs are the ones which are started and managed by someone who knows how to use a compiler, not by someone who was trained to run a business. But I do admit that a big problem happens when a geek becomes the founder of a software product company.
Suddenly the geek must do a whole bunch of stuff they were never trained to do. Somebody has to keep track of the finances, make the coffee and devise clever ways for management to mistreat the employees. Luckily, a lot of this "non computer science stuff" is fairly intuitive. We can understand deep abstractions and object oriented programming. To some extent, this deficiency arises from the tendency for computer programmers to think of things in "black and white" terms. But my convictions remain unchanged, so I am always looking for ways to explain this topic in terms that geeks will find intuitive. #include <You_Need_Competition.h> You think you can. Ping Pong. (4) Jason Silva. How to write an email that generates a useful response.
Most people who are on top of their game respond to most emails within 48 hours. However some emails are so terribly written that it's actually impossible to send an answer. Other emails are so terribly written that the amount of time it would take to figure out what to answer is simply not worth it. In order to get the response you're looking for, you need to ask a very good question. Here are five ways to do that: 1. 2. 3. For example, the question, Should I quit my job? 4. Last week someone I barely know asked me what she should get her boyfriend for a gift. 5. Networking. 10 Things Entrepreneurs Don’t Learn in College. Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur.
He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book is I Was Blind But Now I See. You can follow him@jaltucher. I’ve written before on 10 reasons Parents Should Not Send Their Kids to College and here is also Eight Alternatives to College but it’s occurred to me that the place where college has really hurt me the most was when it came to the real world, real life, how to make money, how to build a business, and then even how to survive when trying to build my business, sell it, and be happy afterwards. 1. In other words, life was going to be great. Only one problem: when I arrived at the job, after 8 years of learning how to program in an academic environment—I couldn’t program. So they sent me to two months of remedial programming courses at AT&T in New Jersey. So, everything I dedicated my academic career to was flushed down the toilet. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
Productivity tip: Face-to-face contact energizes your brain. The need to have regular human moments at work is similar to the need to stand up and stretch on an airplane: Your well-being depends on it. On top of that, a workday with regular face-to-face contact is more energizing than a day full of contacts exclusively via computer and phone. So get out from behind your computer and have a “human moment” — a term coined by Harvard lecturer Edward M. Hallowell. He defines the human moment as “an authentic psychological encounter that can happen only when two people share the same physical space.”
The human moment is a quality of interaction you don’t get from computers, or even the phone. “In order to really converse with someone, you have to keep reading them– when they look at you, when they smile, when they turn away,” says Jayme Lewin Rich, an occupational therapist who specializes in treating sensory integration dysfunction. So when you’re feeling tired at work, try creating a human moment for an energy boost.