Mashable’s Pete Cashmore on Persistence

How he turned obstacles into an opportunity, why he’s so obsessed with the Internet and a winning habit he learned from his father.

‘Trep Talk is a column on personal insights from the people behind the big ideas.

Pete Cashmore carries a quiet sense of urgency wherever he goes, despite his easygoing demeanor. As founder of the influential technology blog Mashable, the 25-year-old has been labeled everything from a tech wunderkind to one of the U.K.’s “Britons of the Year” in 2010. But the accolades do not impress him. Cashmore sees success as an ever-moving target, which drives his compulsion to be “on top of everything all the time.”

Growing up in the rural village of Banchory, just outside of Aberdeen, Scotland, the self-described geek was a sickly child who befriended the Internet as a bedside companion. Missing too much high school to graduate with his peers, he earned his diploma two years later– an early example, he says, of his tendency to be “ridiculously persistent.”

Intrigued by the Web and its democratizing power, Cashmore opted out of college and launched Mashable at 19. He started the blog in an effort to decipher technology for a mainstream audience in 2005. Today the 44-employee company, with offices in New York and San Francisco, draws more than 12.5 million unique visitors to its site every month.

Read Full Article…

By Geil Browning

One afternoon in Oregon, apparently in 2006, artist Eric Singer contemplated a piece of orange Madrone wood from his neighbor’s yard and had an “Aha!” moment. Why not combine wood and sunglasses? He hand-carved his first pair of frames, added a couple of rusty hinges and some cheap lenses, and wore his odd new glasses everywhere, I’ve read. He received so many requests he started carving frames, from the back of his car. Today Shwood glasses are so popular the company just won Dell’s America’s Favorite Small Business contest. Singer continues to innovate—now using not only exotic woods to make the frames, but also wood laminated from broken skateboard decks.

This kind of ingenuity drives small businesses everywhere, and sometimes leads to big successes. Ted Turner and Richard Branson fit the stereotype of the individualist who has a wild idea, pursues it, and makes millions. But you don’t need an outsized personality to be a successful entrepreneur. You should create opportunities by recognizing other people’s needs that so far no one else has identified—and then finding a way to fulfill and market your solutions. Fortunately, your brain is built to be creative.

Truly innovative thinking happens differently for different people. For you, it may happen in a “Eureka!” moment (like Einstein’s theory of relativity), or it may take years of trial and error and painstaking research (Gregor Mendel discovering genetics).
•If you are a right-brained type who enjoys mental leaps, you may have had a great idea while you were making pancakes or washing your face.
•If you are a left-brained thinker who prefers research, you may have come to your most creative conclusions after studying your data.

Research reveals that for either type, the brain does a lot of preparatory thinking. In one study, volunteers were given word puzzles as their brains were scanned. The left-brained thinkers used methodical reasoning to reach their conclusions. Often right-brained thinkers had an “aha!” moment when they realized an answer, but they could not explain how they got it. It turns out during the “blank” period while the right brain wanders, it is actually performing complex problem-solving just under the surface of our awareness. One study was able to predict who would solve a problem with an “Aha!” insight by detecting neural activity in the right front cortex up to eight seconds before the answer actually dawned.

Read Full Article…

By Martin H.

Have you ever wondered what made people great and successful? What goes through the minds of these people? Was it luck? Were they born with a gift? Were these people blessed with such knowledge that only a few know about? Are they even humans? Really! or is it something else at work?

What I have come to understand is that any conscious person that can think and act have these same capabilities as any other. It takes persistence, existence and resistance. Back in 1937 Napoleon Hill published ‘Think and Grow Rich‘. What Hill spoke about was his techniques of developing a mindset of wealth and achieving success beyond your wildest dreams. This book as been out ever since and it is still widely known and people still buy and practice those techniques. Mentored by Andrew Carnegie himself told him that there is a power greater than poverty, greater than the lack of education, greater than all of your fears and superstitions combined, and that is the power to control your mind and direct it to one purpose to that of what you want. One of Hill’s his famous quotes that he says is this  ” What ever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve. “

These are the steps that he gives if you wish to utilize such power, that is your mind:

• 1. Write down a clear description of what you really want, make sure you create a definitive purpose of why you want that.
• 2. Say it everyday before you go to sleep and when you wake up and work towards that goal and believe in it.
• 3. Give thanks everyday for the wisdom that you have attained.

 

 
In 1950′s a motivational speaker Earl Nightingale and author of the ‘ Strangest Secret ‘. He Says ” Success is the  progressive realization of a worthy ideal, if the person is working towards their goal they are a success “. Nightingale mentions that the problem with people now a days is that people conform. The reason why people conform he mentions is because they believe their lives are shape by circumstance, by things that just happen to them. If anything things happen because you make a choice based on logic or emotions and on how you react to that situation. ” We become what we think about “. Successful people in the world have one thing in common and that is the strange thing because even though they have their own opinions about a lot of topics in this particular topic they all agree. For ex:
 

Marcus Uralious: a mans life is what his thoughts make of it

Ralph Waldo Emerson : A man is what he thinks about all day long

William James: Human beings can alter their minds by altering their attitude of  mind.

and more…
 

It is why I do believe that the principles towards success has to do with 80% mental and 20% physical. I can understand that to play such a sport is required to have a specific body type, but just because you do have it and may have the talent does not mean that you will automatically win or have success because some one else with the same specific body type that may not have the same experience as you but is mentally a winner and likes challenges, will be more certain that this person will be likely to work harder, be focused and will therefore win. Keep in mind that believing in a task is a big requirement.

It is a concept that has baffled people around the world, all I can say is those people with a conscious mind all have the same capability. So remember your emotions and thoughts will determine what it is that will happen. Whether you take this or leave it there are people that live by this certain believe and will continue to do so, so be happy and know what you want, if you don’t know then think and sooner or later it will come to you. So don’t force it, and once you do figure it out ACT on it.

In the grand tradition of Hollywood franchises, audiences have seen everything from battles in outer space, such as “Star Wars” or “Star Trek” to clever heists like the A-list “Ocean’s Eleven.”

With each unique franchise, a new actor has rises through the ranks to emerge as a top-earning Hollywood heavt hitter—but as the saying goes: behind every man, there is a great woman.

And there is a growing list of women who are leading high-earning film franchises.

With the upcoming release of “The Hunger Games” and the critical success of the “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” it looks like more and more women are coming to the forefront.

So here we toast the women who head their own movies and sequels. There are some extremely badass chicks, but there are some chick-flicks too.

Read Full Article…

The Fullerton company is following a recent trend in business models — for-profit firms that donate a major percentage of their revenue to charitable causes. In Sevenly’s case, it’s nearly 30%.

By Ricardo Lopez

At Sevenly, a business started by young entrepreneurs in Orange County, a key to the operation is the number seven.

Each line of T-shirts and hoodies designed by the company goes on sale for exactly seven days. No more, no less.

The Fullerton company donates to seven causes: anti-slavery, hunger relief, clean water, medical help, disaster relief, anti-poverty and miscellaneous aid.

And for every item sold, Sevenly donates — you guessed it — $7.

“It’s a great number,” said co-founder Dale Partridge, who holds the title of chief world changer. “We just happened to be able to break down the world’s greatest issues into seven causes, seven days in a week, etc.

“It had tons of parallel brand play.”

Partridge, in the hallowed tradition of entrepreneurs, is always looking for an edge and an opportunity. At 26, he already has created and sold a small fitness company, and he currently co-owns a chain of rock climbing gyms in the Inland Empire.

The hook at Sevenly, which he co-founded last year with Aaron Chavez, 19, goes beyond the number gimmick. The company is following a recent trend in business models — for-profit firms that donate a major percentage of their revenue to charitable causes.

In Sevenly’s case, it’s nearly 30%. That might seem like a huge cut of revenue, but it’s also a way to generate sales.

“Consumers want to do business with brands who do good,” said Loren Solomon, founder of Advertising for Good, an agency that creates marketing campaigns for nonprofits.

Since launching in June, Sevenly has sold more than 29,000 items and donated more than $200,000 to charities including Cure Childhood Cancer in Atlanta; the International Justice Mission, which fights sex trafficking abroad; and Hope International, which provides micro-financing for developing businesses in Africa.

Read Full Article…

By: Vadim Kotelnikov

Creativity Defined

Creativity is  an act of making something new. It is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts.

Huge Personal Benefits

Creativity is your key to a brighter future. Creativity gives you an incredible source of adventure, achievement, self-discovery, connection, spirituality, awakening, normalcy, self-worth, identity, healing, happiness, energy and power.

Huge Business Benefits

All progress and innovation is the result of finding new – often radically new – better, cheaper, easier, or different ways to do things and solving customer’s problems, and this requires the continual honing of your creative thinking arts and skills. The benefits of functioning more creatively can be enormous. You can win customers and retain them by producing more or of better quality or cheaper or faster or differently – and this requires doing things in new ways, differently, using creativity.

You Are Creative!

Creativity is not about inventing something totally new, it is about making synergistic – connections. You don’t have to be a special kind of person to be creative – everyone can do it. It’s not about who you are, it’s about what you do. You just need to start looking for multiple solutions rather than settling for just one, and give yourself permission to be playful and inquisitive, flexible and versatile.

Psychologists call the activities associated with idea generation “loose associative thinking” processes. Associative thinking is not linear or sequential. It is jumpy. To invent new connections, the maintenance of uncertainty is important for a time. “Closure is a killer; it strangles associative thinking, in favor of arriving at “an answer”. Early in the process, leveraging uncertainty, riding it, and valuing it are critical to developing robust ideas.”

An Important Pre-Condition

Although creative people come from varied backgrounds, they all seem to have one thing in common – they love what they are doing.

Practice Every Day

How often should you practice if you wish to win the World Tennis Cup: once a month? once a week? every day?

How often should you exercise your right brain’s creative muscles if you wish to master your creative skills: once a month? once a week? every day?

Take a Different View

It was by taking a different view of a traditional business that major innovations were achieved.To find a better creative solution to thecurrent practice, force yourself to reframe the problem, to break down its components and assemble them in a different way.

Ask Searching Questions

Creativity requires an inquisitive mind. Unless you ask lots of “Why?” and “What If”? questions, you won’t generate creative insights. “To avoid this most common of creative errors, be sure to peek under all carpets, including your own.

Meditation as a Source of Your Creative Power

Meditation has been scientifically proven to improve creativity, intelligence, memory, alertness, and to integrate left and right brain functioning. It has been shown to improve physical, mental, and emotional health. In a word, meditation is an invaluable tool to ensure that you are at your very best every day.

INTEL SOURCE LINK : 1000ventures.com

Entrepreneurship is first and foremost a mindset. It is the art of finding creative profitable solutions to problems.

Every successful entrepreneur, every successful businessperson has been someone who’s been able to identify a problem and come up with a solution to it before somebody else did.

Who Is the Entrepreneur?

Entrepreneur is a person who habitually creates and innovates to build something of recognized value around perceived opportunities.¹

In this definition, all words are key words:

• ‘Entrepreneur’ – can be an individual entrepreneur, but also an entrepreneurial team or even entrepreneurial organization

• ‘A person’ – emphasizes a personality rather than a system

• ‘Habitually’ – just cannot stop being an entrepreneur

• ‘creates‘ – starts from scratch and brings into being something that was not there before

• ‘innovates‘ – able to overcome obstacles that would stop most people; turns problems and risks into opportunities; delivers – sees ideas through to final application

• ‘Builds something’ – describes the output of the creation and innovation process

• ‘Of recognized value‘ – encompasses economic, commercial, social, or aesthetic value

• ‘Perceived opportunities’ – spotting the opportunity to exploit an idea that may or may not be original to the entrepreneur; seeing something other miss or only see in retrospect¹

What Entrepreneurs Are Like?

Source: Entrepreneurs, Bill Bolton and John Thompson

1. Personality factors

   • born/made ratio – 50/50, a synergy of genetic and environmental influence

   • motivation and emotion – independence, competitive spirit, challenge, wealth

   • behavioral characteristics – perseverance, determination, orientation to clear goals, need to achieve, opportunity orientation, creativity, persistent problem-solving, risk-taking, integrity, honesty, internal locus on control

   • personality attributes – preferred styles: extrovert/introvert; sensor/intuit; thinker/feeler; and judger/perceiver

2. Environmental factors

   • family background – entrepreneurial heritage

   • age and education – begin entrepreneurial activity early; are not over-educated

   • work experience – most entrepreneurs first gain some work experience in the line of business they later start up

3. Action factors

   • make the difference – initiate change and enjoy it

   • Create and innovate – a continuous activity, seeing creative idea through to the end, and then start climbing another mountain

   • exploit opportunities – able to see or craft opportunities that other people miss

   • find resources and competencies – experts at exploiting contacts and sources

   • network – expertise oriented; know when they need experts and how to use them effectively

   • face adversity – resolve problems under pressure; turn problems into opportunities

   • manage risk – not adventurers, but manageable risk takers; their success lies in caution, learning, flexibility and change during implementation

   • control the business – pay attention to details and essential ratios; exercise strategic control over their business

   • put the customer first – listen to the customer and respond to the customers’ feedback

   • creates capital – financial, social, and aesthetic

INTEL SOURCE LINK:  1000ventures.com

Interestingly enough people

been sucked in being employed by someone, why can’t you just go out there and develop skills on your own that you will be able to use, the web is a huge help to learn new skills  and create different ideas. If you know what you want from life and want to get there then go and get it. You do not need crowd validation, you don’t need people telling you what to do. You have and posses all the skills that are needed for you to make that happen. It’s amazing how our education system is teaching kids how to be employees, starting off from 8am to 3pm on a daily basis Mon thru Friday which is what they are there for, the problem is that it is teaching them to be employees and not entrepreneurs. America is all about entrepreneurship. It’s ok if the kid chooses not to be then that’s their choice but that doesn’t mean that all the others have to be bombarded with the fact that you have to be someone special, or you have to know a certain amount of people, or you had to be born with such a talent, all that is a bunch of BS because it’s not where you are at, it’s what you are doing that makes the difference. Yes, it does take huge amounts of energy and a lot thinking and work involved but if you love what you do then it is no longer viewed as work because it’s fun and you love to do it. Do yourself a favor and listen to your own conscious because everyone can do it, get out of your comfort zone and find your purpose and figure out what you want, sooner or later it will come to you.

“For those who are building the next web, I challenge you to do the same. Dig in and be more than the sum of your parts. For those in the teaching systems, I beg you to stop teaching our kids to be employees. Teach them to be entrepreneurs. If you don’t feel qualified to do that, take up the reigns and drive your own path toward greatness so that you can teach others. It’s more than just the fate of some ridiculous trade show that relies on us pulling together for these goals.”

says – Brad McCarty from thenextweb.com

by Ed Pilkington

A couple of years ago, Amanda Hocking needed to raise a few hundred dollars so, in desperation, made her unpublished novel available on the Kindle. She has since sold over 1.5m books and, in the process, changed publishing forever

Amanda Hocking: ‘I didn’t have a lot of hope invested in ebooks’. Photograph: Carlos Gonzalez/Polaris

When historians come to write about the digital transformation currently engulfing the book-publishing world, they will almost certainly refer to Amanda Hocking, writer of paranormal fiction who in the past 18 months has emerged from obscurity to bestselling status entirely under her own self-published steam. What the historians may omit to mention is the crucial role played in her rise by those furry  wide-mouthed friends, the Muppets.

To understand the vital Muppet connection we have to go back to April 2010. We find Hocking sitting in her tiny, sparsely furnished apartment in Austin, Minnesota. She is penniless and frustrated, having spent years fruitlessly trying to interest traditional publishers in her work. To make  matters worse, she has just heard that an exhibition about Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, is coming to Chicago later that year and she can’t  afford to make the trip. As a huge  Muppets fan, she is more than willing to drive eight hours but has no money for petrol, let alone a hotel for the night. What is she to do?

Then it comes to her. She can take one of the many novels she has written over the previous nine years, all of which have been rejected by umpteen book agents and publishing houses, and slap them up on Amazon and other digital ebook sites. Surely, she can sell a few copies to her family and friends? All she needs for the journey to  Chicago is $300 (£195), and with six months to go before the Muppets exhibition opens, she’s bound to make it.

“I’m going to sell books on Amazon,” she announces to her housemate, Eric.

To which Eric replies: “Yeah. OK. I’ll believe that when it happens.”

Let’s jump to October 2010. In those six months, Hocking has raised not only the $300 she needed, but an additional $20,000 selling 150,000 copies of her books. Over the past 20 months Hocking has sold 1.5m books and made $2.5m. All by her lonesome self. Not a single book agent or publishing house or sales force or marketing manager or bookshop anywhere in sight.

So let the historians take note: Amanda Hocking does get to Chicago to see the Muppets. And along the way she helps to foment a revolution in  global publishing.

I’ve come to Austin, legendary birthplace of Spam (the canned as opposed to the digital version), to find out what this self-publishing revolution looks like in the flesh. I can report that, from the outside, it’s surprisingly conventional. Hocking no longer lives in that pokey apartment, but then she’s no longer a struggling would-be author. She’s bought herself her own detached home, the building block of the American dream, replete with gables and extensions, its own plot of land, and a concrete ramp on which to park the car.

But step inside and convention gives way to a riot of colour. It is just before Christmas, and Hocking has decorated the house with several plastic trees bedecked in lights and two large Santa stockings pinned expectantly over the mantelpiece. The sofa is scattered with animals, some of the cuddly toy variety and others alive, notably Elroy the miniature schnauzer and Squeak the cat (apparently they get on very well).

She greets me at the door and, without preamble, we talk for the next two hours about her extraordinary rags-to-riches tale and what it means for the future of the book. At 27, and with only a few months in the limelight, she is patently new to the fame game. She seems nervous at first, answering my questions in short bursts and fiddling with her glasses; but gradually she relaxes as we discuss what for her has been the central passion of her life since an infant.

She was brought up in the Minnesota countryside on the outskirts of Blooming Prairie about 15 miles north of Austin. Her parents divorced when she was young, money was tight and there was no cable TV to wallow in. “So I read a lot. I would go to the library, or get books at rummage sales. I got through them so quickly I started reading adult books because they were longer. I remember my mom giving me a box set of five books to last me all summer; I devoured them all in two weeks.”

By the age of seven she was reading Jaws by Peter Benchley and anything by Stephen King. Michael Crichton,  JD Salinger, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, Kurt  Vonnegut and many others fed an insatiable appetite.

It was a way, she now thinks, of coping with the depression that troubled her childhood. “I was always depressed growing up. There wasn’t a reason for it, I just was. I was sad and morose. I cried a lot, I wrote a lot, and I read a lot; and that was how I dealt with it.”

What went in had to come out. The child Hocking began telling her own stories before she could walk. She was forever inventing make-believe worlds, so much so that the counsellor to whom she was sent for depression concluded that her incessant storytelling was an aberration that had to stop. Fortunately for Hocking, and for her many fans, her parents took her side in this argument, and she was never sent back to see him.

At 12 she had already begun to describe herself as a writer and by the end of high school she estimates she had written 50 short stories and started countless novels. The first that she  actually completed, Dreams I Can’t  Remember, was written when she  was 17. She was very excited by the  accomplishment, and printed it out for friends and family, as well as sending it to several publishers.

“I got rejection letters back from all of them. I don’t blame them – it wasn’t very good,” Hocking says.

Hocking went on to develop an intimate relationship with rejection letters. She has somewhere in her new house a shoebox full of them.

Yet she would not give up. She wrote unpublished book after unpublished book. “Sometimes I’d say: ‘I’m done, I’m never going to write another book,’ but then a couple of months later I’d have another idea and I’d start again. This time it was bound to work.”

In 2009 she went into overdrive. She was frantic to get her first book published by the time she was 26, the age Stephen King was first in print, and time was running out (she’s now 27). So while holding down a day job caring for severely disabled people, for which she earned $18,000 a year, she went into a Red Bull-fuelled frenzy of writing at night, starting at 8pm and continuing until dawn. Once she got going, she could write a complete novel in just two or three weeks. By the start of 2010, she had amassed a total of 17 unpublished novels, all gathering digital dust on the desktop of her laptop.

She received her last rejection letter in February 2010. Hocking says she hasn’t kept the letter, which is a crying shame because it would surely have been an invaluable piece of self-publishing memorabilia. As far as she can remember, the last “thanks-but-no-thanks” came from a literary agent in the UK. If that agent is reading this article, please don’t beat yourself up about this. We all make mistakes …

April 15 2010 should also be noted by historians of literature. On that day, Hocking made her book available to Kindle readers on Amazon’s website in her bid to raise the cash for the Muppets trip. Following tips she’d gleaned from the blog of JA Konrath, an internet self-publishing pioneer, she also uploaded to Smashwords to gain access to the Nook, Sony eReader and iBook markets. It wasn’t that difficult. A couple of hours of formatting, and it was done.

“I didn’t have a lot of hope invested in it,” she says. “I didn’t think anything would come of it.” How wrong she was.

Within a few days, she was selling nine copies a day of My Blood Approves, a vampire novel set in Minneapolis. By May she had posted two further books in the series, Fate and Flutter, and sold 624 copies. June saw sales rise to more than 4,000 and in July she posted Switched, her personal favourite among her novels that she wrote in barely more than a week. It brought in more than $6,000 in pure profit that month alone, and in August she quit her day job.

By January last year she was selling more than 100,000 a month. Being her own boss allowed her to set her own pricing policy – she decided to charge just 99 cents for the first book in a series, as a loss leader to attract readers, and then increase the cover price to $2.99 for each sequel. Though that’s cheap compared with the $10 and upwards charged for printed books she gained a much greater proportion of the royalties. Amazon would give her 30% of all royalties for the 99-cent books, rising to 70% for the $2.99  editions – a much greater proportion than the traditional 10 or 15% that publishing houses award their authors. You don’t have to be much of a mathematician to see the attraction of those figures: 70% of $2.99 is $2.09; 10% of a paperback priced at $9.99 is 99 cents. Multiply that by a million – last November Hocking entered the hallowed halls of the Kindle Million Club, with more than 1m copies sold – and you are talking megabucks.

The speed of her ascent has astonished Hocking more than anyone. She was so elated to receive her first cheque from Amazon, for $15.75, that she didn’t cash it and still has it pinned up on a noticeboard above her desk. “It went from zero to 60 overnight,” she says. “Everybody was buying my books and it was overwhelming.”

In internet-savvy circles she has been embraced as a figurehead of the digital publishing revolution that is seen as blowing up the traditional book world – or “legacy publishing” as its detractors call it – and replacing it with the ebook, where direct contact between author and reader, free of the mediation of agent and publishing house, is but a few clicks away. There is certainly something to that argument. The arrival of Hocking onto the Kindle bestseller lists in barely over a year is symptomatic of a profound shift in the book world that has happened contiguously. Her rise has occurred at precisely the moment that self-publishing itself turned from poor second cousin of the printed book into a serious multi-million dollar industry. Two years ago self-publishing was itself denigrated as “vanity publishing” – the last resort of the talentless. Not any more.

A survey carried out last year by the book blog Novelr found that of the top 25 bestselling indie authors on Kindle, only six had ever previously enjoyed print deals with major book publishers. With ebook sales reaching $878m in the US in 2010, an almost fourfold increase from the year before, some 30 authors have already sold more than 100,000 copies through Kindle’s self-publishing site. That’s the kind of statistic that made Penguin’s chief executive, John Makinson, say recently that he saw “dark clouds” gathering in 2012.

Continue Reading…

INTEL SOURCE LINK: guardian.co.uk