Does Social Media Make You Dumb?

The “Mainstream Media” has had somewhat of an antagonistic relationship with “New Media”. Journalists have bemoaned blogging on several occasions, stating simply that “Journalism requires journalists”. Once again journalists are gracing us with another study linking the success of the social news sites to the downfall of society.The study, conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), compared the mainstream media’s headlines for one week against those of a host of user-news sites. Specifically:

“PEJ took a snapshot of coverage from the week of June 24 to June 29, 2007, on three sites that offer user-driven news agendas: Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit. In addition, the Project studied Yahoo News, an outlet that offers an editor-based news page and three different lists of user-ranked news: Most Recommended, Most Viewed, and Most Emailed. These sites were then compared with the news agenda found in the 48 mainstream news outlets contained in PEJ’s News Coverage Index.”

Read the full article in TechCrunch

Do You Have A Chindia Strategy?

There is no hotter topic in the high-tech industry than the impact of China and India on the industry and the world at large. If you are a strategist or a decision maker in almost any enterprise, anywhere in the world, you see the impact of India and China in new waves of technology products and services in events, decisions and strategies featured on corporate Web sites and in international news coverage.

Read the full article in Forbes.com

How To Hire An Ad Agency

Here’s a staggering statistic: In the month of June alone, accounts worth over $1.7 billion changed advertising agencies. And that’s only among the six largest advertising agency holding companies. It doesn’t include any of the brands that shifted their accounts to thousands of independent agencies across America.

Why so much turnover? One reason is the diminishing tenure of the chief marketing officers who hire agencies—an average of less than two years, according to one recent study. But even in companies where the marketing staff is stable, the temptation to shop for a new agency can be strong.

Advertising is an exciting, visible business, and when another brand’s agency is making news, it can make their grass appear greener. Plus, it’s a business based on experience, confidence and trust. When trust breaks down, relationships end.

Read the full article in BusinessWeek.com

Learning and Growing

Our rewards in life will always match our service. You will almost always get general agreement. People will nod their heads and say, Yes, that’s certainly true. They will then go their ways and never realize, for the most part, how close they came to a truth so great and all-enveloping that their every thought and action is affected by it.

Another good way to look at this law is on the basis of giving and receiving. Giving means let go of, completely abandon. Unfortunately, most people have been conditioned to trade rather than give and are not even aware of it. The individuals who truly give are richly rewarded.

It’s not the job, it’s the person, it’s not your present circumstances which count, but the circumstances you make up your mind to achieve that are important. The only limit on your income is you. And the income you decide upon can be achieved within the framework of your present work, industry or profession where you already have a start and a place.

All you need is the plan and the courage to press on to your destination, knowing in advance that there will be problems and setbacks, but knowing also that nothing on earth can stand in the way of a plan, backed by Persistence And Determination. Every person should know happiness in their work and home and prosperity.

It all gets back to the law that controls everything in the universe: Cause And Effect. The cause must preceed the effect, or the effect cannot occur. This is why people who try to get something for nothing are only fooling themselves and earning the disillusionment and frustration they must one day reap. You can have what you want. You need only make up your mind.

If you don’t like your income, you must devise ways and means of increasing your service. And this is an individual thing, no one can do it for you although you can get ideas from others. Your service must come out of you, your mind, your abilities and your energy. A strong person cannot make a weak person strong, but a weak person can become strong on their own by following a specific course of action for a sufficient length of time. And a person who’s already strong can become alot stronger.

It’s the same with this business of money. A person who refuses to do more than they’re being paid for will seldom be paid for more than they’re doing. You may have heard someone say, Why should I knock myself out for the money I’m getting??? Now it’s this attitude which, more than anything else, keeps a person at the bottom of the economic pile.

This person doesn’t understand that only as we grow in value as persons, we will receive the increased income we seek, if we try to stand still in our work. We’ll never know the rewards, nor the joy of accomplishment and the personal satisfaction and peace of mind. Which come only to the person of unusual achievement….

Learning is when….

We consciously entertain an idea

We emotionalize the idea.

We act on the idea.

And we observe a change in results.

The Truth…The Achievement

We have always known this phrase…” Honesty is the best policy ” Do we…??? I am not a perfect person myself…Gone through life just as everyone else…to seek what we all want in life….

We have been conditioned, genetically and enviromentally to live one way and taught to live another. You might be thinking this must cause tremendous conflict in our lives and of course, it does. And the sad truth is that there are a huge number of people who are so used to living with this conflict, they have accepted it as the norm. They don’t even realize it is the cause of almost all of their problems. They have come to believe that other people, conditions and circumstance are the cause of any problems they may be encounting.

We have our mind, our abilities, our unique and individual talents and time. These are our possessions, this is really an immense amount of wealth that belongs to each of us. And it’s the investment of our wealth which will determine our rate of return. Making the best use of what we have, in the time we are given to use it. Truth is always simple and uncomplicated.

Think of the number of times you have felt yourself being pulled in one direction while at the same time, your intellect was telling you the opposite direction was the true course of action to follow. This sort of mental conflict is not a modern phenomena brought about by our fast changing world. The truth has always had a way of shifting under pressure. It is often just as hard to tell the truth as it is to hide from it.

It’s realizing that a person who does not read is no better than one who cannot and that a person who does not continue to learn to grow as a person is no better than one who cannot. The greatest joy a human being can know is the joy of accomplishment.

Think of your life as a plot of ground to be seeded. If can only return to you what you first give to it. And you have time, the one thing which is completely beyond the control of man. Time, which cannot be saved, stopped, nor held back for even an instant. Make full use of these riches while you have them. Why wait to say…I wish I could do it all over again??? There is no second chance…..only yourself, the choices you seek…to where you want to be.

Attitudes

Attitude is defined as the position or bearing as indicating action, feeling, or mood. And it is our actions or feelings which determine the actions or feelings of others towards us and which control, our success or failure.

Without an image of the mind, your understanding of attitude will very likely be distorted. That does not mean you will not be successful in life. You could have a great attitude and become highly successful, yet, not understand exactly what attitude is and how it has affected your success in life. A person in this position is referred to as an unconscious competent. Since their success has its foundation in their attitude and they do not have a clear understanding of what attitude is, they would be unable to explain their cause of success to another person, possibly even a loved one, this are not uncommon.

Our attitude toward life which will determine life’s attitude towards us. Everything we say or do will cause some effect. Each of us shapes their own life, and the shape of it is determined by our attitude. What we receive from life, what we accomplish, or fail to accomplish, is due in large measure to our overall attitude. Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

Is easy saying this, human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. It is not easy, it can’t be, the answer is obvious, they don’t know how. A change in attitude will change your life, is all you require. The conscious mind is the part of you that thinks. You can accept or reject any idea. No person or circumstance can cause you to think about thoughts or ideas you do not choose. Because the thoughts you choose will eventually determine your results in life.

To develop a good attitude toward the world in general, each of us must first develop a good attitude toward ourselves. WE CAN’T GIVE TO OTHERS SOMETHING WE DON’T HAVE. So it’s the attitude we take toward ourselves which determines our attitude toward others. Which radiates to the world around us.

When you see someone with a poor attitude toward others, you can be sure they have a poor attitude toward themselves. They don’t like themselves, they’re unhappy about something. A happy person reflects their happiness in their attitudes. A person with a poor attitude most of the time is unhappy and frustrated most of the time, and they’re a human magnet for unpleasant experiences. When they come, as they must because of their attitude, they reinforce their poor attitude, thereby bringing more problems. But for the person with a good attitude, the same principle holds true in reverse. Expecting the best, that’s what they get most of the time.

Why would a person persist in a poor attitude, expecting the worst???? We are so familiar with ourselves that we tend to take ourselves for granted. We tend to minimize what we can accomplish the goals we can reach. We believe others can reach heights which we cannot. We tend to overlook the fact that there is enormous undeveloped potential within each of us, a great reserve of talent and ability which we habitually fail to see.

Human beings living narrow, darkened, frustrated lives, living defensively, simply because they take a defensive, doubtful attitude toward themselves and as a result, toward life in general. Attitude is the reflection of a person.

No matter what a person does, whenever you find a person doing an outstanding job and getting outstanding results, you’ll find a person with a good attitude. These people take the attitude toward themselves that they can accomplish what they set out to accomplish, that achievement is the natural order of things that there’s no good reason on earth why they can’t be competent and successful. They have a healthy attitude toward themselves and as a result, toward life and the things they want to accomplish.

Because of this, they achieve things and come to be called successful and outstanding. They are no more brilliant or talented than the majority of the people by whom they’re surrounded, but they have the right attitude.

The world we’ve created around ourselves, is really a mirror of our attitudes. If we don’t like our enviroment, we can change it by changing our attitudes. The world plays no favorites, it’s impersonal, it doesn’t care who succeeds and who fails, nor does it care whether we change or not. Our attitude toward life doesn’t affect the world and the people in it nearly as much as it affects us.

The jobs which are held though hated, the marriages which are tolerated but unhappy, the relationships of two people who fail to understand one another, all because of people who are waiting for the world and others to change toward them, before they’ll change.

I remain.

Overcoming Obstacles

To overcome obstacles that seem insurmountable and achieve the success one seek. People have goals, they fix their mind a point they have to reach, something that’s more important than the effort and time that have to be expended in its achievement, a dream, seen only in the mind and felt in the heart, that’s too big to be denied, a dream which rises before their eyes when they awaken in the morning and is the last thing think about as they sleep at night.

This dream, invisible to all except to the person who holds it.  What the mind of man can conceive, and believe, it can achieve. The best definition of success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal. It means that any person engaged in achieving something which they consider worthy of them, is successful.

Any person with a dream in their mind and heart pursuing a worthy goal, is successful. The uniformed always seem to equate success with lots of money. While money often accompanies success, it has nothing to do with success necessarily, unless it happens to be a part of the goal. It’s left to each of us to decide for ourselves what our goal is.

Paradigms can have a tremendous influence over our thinking and will cause an individual to think of all the valid reasons. Why they are not able to have what they want in life. The conscious mind is often referred to as the intellectual mind. As information flows into your conscious mind you deal with it intellectually.

It is very common to find individuals who are intellectually brilliant and yet accomplish little with their lives, their day to day actions produce mediocre results. You must understand that it is not the intellect of the individual that is the cause of their behavior, it is their paradigm which is in control of their behavior. Until the paradigm is changed, the results will remain the same.

Every person knows how to do much better than they’re presently doing in almost every aspect of their life. There’s an enormous difference between knowing how to do something and doing it. The knowing has to do with the conscious mind, the doing has to do with the sub-conscious mind. Knowing that without a goal we are unsuccessful, but that with a goal we will have direction and purpose and that our goal will be reached.

Most of the confusion and indecision suffered by the majority of people is caused by their half-heartedly wanting so many things that they can’t decide which to go after first. As a result, they run in circles and often accomplish little or nothing at all.

There are two things we have to know to achieve……

1. Am I able??? Am I able to receive in my material world, anything that I seriously want.

2. Am I willing??? Am I willing to pay the price that must be paid, realizing that there is no such thing as something for nothing.

Decide on your goal, insist upon it. Force your goal into your sub-conscious mind. See yourself as having attained it.

We Seek What We Believe In

If we will only have the wisdom and patience to intelligently and effectively explore the work in which we’re now engaged. We’ll usually find that it contains the riches we seek. Whether they be financial or intangible, or both.

Before we go running off to what we think are greener pastures. Let’s make sure that our own is not just as green or perhaps even greener. You see, while we’re looking at other pastures, other people are looking at ours. There’s nothing more pitiful, to my mind, than the person who wastes their life running from one thing to another, forever looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and never staying with one thing long enough to find it.

” What lies before you and what lies behind you are tiny matters compared to what lies within you. ” by Emerson. It helped me to understand that all of our opportunities as well as our problems are in our perception of situations and our perception is controlled by our paradigms. To ignore the power of paradigms to influence your judgement is to put yourself at risk when exploring the future. Paradigms definitely influence our thinking and have the ability. If left unchecked, to control our entire life.

We should avoid such self-restriction and realize there’s virtually no limit to our growth and development on the land upon which we now find ourselves, with our roots deep in the soil of a working philosophy of life and our minds and bodies in climate of freedom.

People who become outstanding in their work are those who see their work as an opportunity for growth and development and who prepare themselves for the opportunities which surround them everyday.

To do this, start at the beginning. What industry or profession does your job fall??? Do you know all you can know about your industry?? How did it begin?? Why did it begin?? Who started it and when?? What is your industry’s annual dollar volume?? How fast has it grown during the past twenty years??? What’s it’s projected growth during the next ten years??

Did you know that many industries will double in size during the next eight years?? This takes only about a ten percent gain per year. In short, start now to become a student of your industry. You’ll be amazed at the results. If you can see no limit to the growth of your industry, doesn’t it makes sense to realize that there’s no limit as to how far you can progress within its framework?? On the other hand, those who are not preparing and growing are not just standing still, in relation to their industry, their going backwards. So ask yourself. Do I know as much about my job and my industry as a good doctor knows about their job, their profession??

In order to become a professional in a world of amateurs, we need to study three important subjects.

1. Our company and the industry in which it operates.

2. Our job and perhaps the next step upward in our career.

3. We need to study people, since successfully serving and getting with people will

    determine our success or failure.

How can I increase my service today?? Think of ways and means by which you can increase your contribution to your company, your industry and those whom you serve.

You’re creating, rather than competing. You’ll affecting life, rather than just being affected by it. You are becoming a creator and a giver to life, instead of just a receiver.

Money As In Value

Money cannot be sought directly, money, like happiness, is an effect. It’s the result of a cause and the cause is valuable service. Keep money in its proper place, it’s a servant nothing more. It’s a tool with which we can live better, see more of the world. It’s the means to a happy, carefree retirement in later years. Too much emphasis on money reverses the whole picture, you then become the servant, and the money becomes the master…..

Be realistic about your financial goals. For as you reach them, you can then set higher goals. Trying to jump too far too soon can often result in confusion, tenseness and worry. Take your growth in sensible, logical steps, remembering that the big thing is that you know what you want and that you realize your rewards will match your service. That is, that you must devise ways and means of actually becoming the person who is worth the amount of money you have established for yourself. A person may be worth more than they’re getting, for a while, but the two will match up. They have to. In fact, unless a person is worth more than they’re now receiving, they cannot move ahead. They’re receiving all they’re worth.

THE IMAGES YOU HOLD IN YOUR MIND MOST OFTEN MATERIALIZE IN RESULTS IN YOUR LIFE.

When To Trust Your Gut

The intuitive insight that would save Chrysler in the 1990s came to Bob Lutz, then the company’s president, during a weekend drive. On a warm day in 1988, Lutz took his Cobra roadster for a spin. As he raced along the roads in southeastern Michigan, he tried to relax, pushing aside what critics had been saying about Chrysler—that the company was brain-dead, technologically dated, and uninspired and that it lagged dangerously behind not only the Japanese auto-makers but also General Motors and Ford.

Read the full article in Harvard Business Online

Strategies For Growth

A company can’t outperform its rivals if it competes the same way they do. Reconceive your business’s profit drivers, and you can change from copycat to king of the jungle.

Read the full article in Harvard Business Online

How To Play To Your Strengths

Most feedback accentuates the negative. During formal employee evaluations, discussions invariably focus on “opportunities for improvement,” even if the overall evaluation is laudatory. Informally, the sting of criticism lasts longer than the balm of praise. Multiple studies have shown that people pay keen attention to negative information. For example, when asked to recall important emotional events, people remember four negative memories for every positive one. No wonder most executives give and receive performance reviews with all the enthusiasm of a child on the way to the dentist.

Read the full article in Harvard Business Online

Stop Making Plans Start Making Decisions

In most companies, strategic planning isn’t about making decisions. It’s about documenting choices that have already been made, often haphazardly. Leading firms are rethinking their approach to strategy development so they can make more, better, and faster decisions.

Read the full article in Harvard Business Online

The Evils of Ego

Hayward says a big head can lead to big problems for entrepreneurs…

View the full video on Forbes.com

Managing The Entrepreneurial Psyche

If this magazine decided to choose a patron saint, I’d nominate the economist Joseph A. Schumpeter. Born near Prague in 1883, Schumpeter (pronounced SHOOM-pay-ter) was one of the most astute business thinkers who ever lived, and–luckily for me as his biographer–an electrifying personality besides. He liked to say that he aspired to be the greatest economist, lover, and horseman in the world. Then he’d pause for a second before delivering his punch line: Things weren’t going well with the horses.

Read the full article on Inc.com

 http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070801/guest-speaker-mapping-the-entrepreneurial-psyche.html

Business Development – Networking

Business development and business networking are naturally complementary to each other. This includes networking that is done on the Internet. Here’s a look at how you can maximize your business development by networking online.

Read the full article on FastCompany.com

 http://www.fastcompany.com/resources/networking/\tetenallen/business-development-online/070207.html

The Art of Work

These words, written by American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Mee-high CHICK-sent-me-high-ee), describe the state of “flow.” It’s a condition of heightened focus, productivity, and happiness that we all intuitively understand and hunger for.

Csikszentmihalyi’s groundbreaking book on the subject, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row Publishers Inc., 1990), has been lauded by such heavyweights as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Jimmy Johnson, who credited it with helping him coach the Dallas Cowboys to a Super Bowl win in 1993. Yet although the quest for flow immediately resonated with the sporting and leisure worlds, the concept never got much traction in business, possibly because ecstasy and the workplace go together about as well as tomatoes and chocolate.

In the past few years, however, many major companies, including Microsoft, Ericsson, Patagonia, and Toyota have realized that being able to control and harness this feeling is the holy grail for any manager — or even any individual — seeking a more productive and satisfying work experience.

Read the rest of this article on FastCompany:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/97/art-of-work.html

What Is The New Economics?

Yale economist Robert J. Shiller wrote the defining book on the Internet bubble. Now he’s busy rewriting the laws of economics, where emotion and psychology dominate data and numbers. (And in his spare time, he’s busy worrying about his own dotcom.)

Read the full article on FastCompany.com:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/50/shiller.html 

Change or Die!

What if you were given that choice? For real. What if it weren’t just the hyperbolic rhetoric that conflates corporate performance with life or death? Not the overblown exhortations of a rabid boss, or a maniacal coach, or a slick motivational speaker, or a self-dramatizing chief executive officer or political leader. We’re talking actual life and death now. Your own life and death. What if a well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult and enduring changes in the way you think, feel, and act? If you didn’t, your time would end soon–a lot sooner than it had to. Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most?

Read the rest of this article on FastCompany.com:

 http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2007/01/change-or-die.html

Myspace & Online Social Networking

Participating In The World Of Myspace 

Join this online cultured community of gen x & y and you will see the world of people networking with other people. When in the past the only interaction we had with websites was to the computer only. 

www.myspace.com

We Love Tom!

With an estimate of over 72 million MySpace members, this is one wild party. Well not exactly but it is a highly creative mix of marketers, entrepreneurs, artists, musicians and cool people looking to socialize and get there profile up. You can add a friend, hook up your page, link up to others, send out bulletins, conduct business, add slideshows, music, downloads, share albums and more.

One of the peak observations on this website is how it has revolutionized the music industry. How musicians can connect one on one with there fans and business can compete through online advertising and marketing to there desired myspace audience. It’s quite entertaining. Peruse the website and you will find famous artists like Gwen Stafani, Black Eyed Peas, Gabriel and Dresden, Tiesto and more.

Jen Lyn