Productive Flourishing. Editor’s Note: This is a continuation of our core conversation series, “Extraordinary Women Change the World.” Yesterday, Emilie Wapnick shares what it feels like to be the only girl in the room. Today, Carmen Sognonvi shares the dangers of the prestige to your meaningful work. When Charlie and Angela invited me to be a part of this core conversation on women’s empowerment, I had just discovered Y Combinator founder Paul Graham’s 2006 article “How to Do What You Love.” I was especially struck by what he wrote about the dangers of prestige: Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world… Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy.
Graham’s words really hit home for me because there have been several points in my career in which I’ve taken a left turn, and everyone around me kind of scratched their head and wondered what the heck I was doing with my life. So how does this relate to empowerment? I went to a good school. In this video, we talk about: 800 CEO READ. Daniel Pink. Sally Hogshead. Are you a visual person? If so, you like to learn ideas in a graphic way. When I spoke to 500 trainers recently, a graphic facilitator captured my Fascinate keynote in real time, drawing while I was giving the presentation. Presenting concepts visually helps people “see” the ideas. This outline describes how to reach your personality’s highest value, and communicate in 9 seconds or less. Cool! (Check out the little “hogshead” drawn on the board next to me.)
The moment I walked on stage for a recent speech, my microphone died. How can you over-deliver for your client if audience can’t hear the speech you flew 5,000 miles to deliver? Always have Plan B ready, to keep them engaged, so you don’t get flustered and they don’t get bored. “Don’t worry, I’ve been trained in MIME… and I’ll be delivering the entire speech in interpretive dance.” By the time the laughter died down, my new mic was ready to go, and the speech went on to a standing ovation! Lifework. Heirloom Apparent Fifty years after it was purchased, an Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman begins its third chapter with a new generation of the... Read More Live from New York A major market for our furniture, and the headquarters of some of our most important designers, Manhattan has long been...
Read More Getting to Comfortable In creating a more casual design for today’s work environments, Jehs + Laub sought a technical solution to balance structure... Read More Myth Maker Celebrated as a photographer of iconic mid-century architecture, Balthazar Korab accumulated lesser-known portfolios that... Read More Social Furniture For Austria’s entry in the Venice Architecture Biennale, Vienna-based EOOS offers a problem-solving design to help Europe’s... The Great Debate: Not Even A Question Decades after the first open office launched a thousand workplace conversations, Herman Miller dives into the... :zenhabits. Ben Casnocha. Over the past year, Felix Salmon of Reuters wrote a masterful five-part series on the economics of content online. Worth reading for anyone interested in the topic.
I link to each part below and excerpt my favorite paragraphs (all Salmon’s words, but emphases are my own). Part 1: Advertising Do advertising dollars ultimately end up where people spend their time, he asked, echoing Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker says, or, pace Bernstein Research’s Todd Juenger, is that a “fallacy”? I’m with Juenger on this one. Moreover, if you’re running a news site, you’ll be even more sobered to learn that just 2.7% of the time that people spend on the internet is spent on news sites. According to Meeker, some 67% of all ad dollars are spent either on TV or in print. When people like Meeker look at ad spend, they’re looking mainly at brand advertising.
So if the internet is not going to displace TV as a medium for mass-market brand advertising, might it at least be good at direct marketing? Part 3: Costs. The Happiness Project. TED.com.