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Posts tagged iPhone
What Can Software Developers Teach us About Crushing the ‘Perfection Bug’?
May 15th
Imagine this: Your desk is full of paper and it’s all related to unfinished work. Also, your task list never seems to shrink – instead, it’s growing bigger and bigger.
Even if you work hard on your tasks, you have this nagging feeling of incompletion in your head. You also feel that it is impossible to meet your inner critic; you are never satisfied to your results.
You are frustrated and burnt out. And even if that’s not enough, you start to procrastinate on your tasks.
You only wish that you could leave the office at 5PM and spend time with your family. And then you look at the piles of paper on your desk.
It is going to be yet another night spent working.
There is no finish line in sight
Unfortunately, this image is way too common in offices around the world. Most people are overwhelmed by the amount of unfinished work they have.
There are really four reasons why this is happening:
First, it’s because the amount of distractions. They don’t have a chance to work in a focused manner and their work performance slows down.
Secondly, it is because working on too many things (tasks, projects, etc.) at once. When they work like this, they are unable to get anything properly completed.
Third, they don’t have an organized way of handling the workload; they have issues with prioritization and they don’t know what tasks to focus on next. This in turn may be caused by a non-existent day planning.
Now, even if those three previous conditions are met, there is still one thing that causes people to procrastinate and be overwhelmed: It’s the unfinished work and the fact that they are never 100% percent satisfied to the quality of their work.
When they are unsatisfied to their work quality, they keep tweaking and tweaking the results but they are unable to finish anything. This is a sure way to overwhelm their selves and generate unnecessary stress.
It is also a sure way to make other people angry – especially if their performance is dependent on the person who is never capable of finishing his/her part of the task/project.
If it’s not perfect, it is not ready!
Inability to let go of tasks and never finishing them are symptoms of perfectionism.
The fact is that you are never going to satisfy your inner critic because you think that there is yet another tweak that you have to do until you can let go of the task.
What is causing all this?
It’s the underlying fear that is holding you in its arms; the fear that others label you as a failure if you release something imperfect. The fear that you are letting yourself down (and not meeting your standards) if everything is not 100% perfect.
Well, I have some news for you — perfection doesn’t exist!
I admit that in certain circumstances (for e.g. professions) you always have to be striving for perfection, for example when you are an airline pilot or a surgeon.
But in 90% of other cases perfection is not serving you. Instead, it is slowing you down, making you procrastinate and increasing your stress levels.
Let’s talk Scrum
If perfection is slowing you down, help can be found from a surprising source; from the world of agile software development and Scrum.
“Hmm… Scrum? What is Scrum?” you are asking.
Scrum is a software methodology that software developers use and one of its components is “Definition of Done” (DoD). It describes what a development team has to have ready by the end of the development iteration (also known as sprint).
When the team declares something as done, it means that the new functionality is fully tested, documented and could be even put to production.
Even if the DoD is used in context of software development, it can be easily applied to individual productivity needs as well.
Definition of Done describes clearly and explicitly what needs to be achieved until a task can be declared as done. And when you define your “done”, you can get rid of your perfection bug.
What is your definition of done?
Let’s take the concept DoD, simplify it a bit and put it into the context of personal productivity. To create your definition of done, follow these steps:
- Define a task you want to accomplish
- Explicitly describe (in written form) what requirements have to be met before it can be called ready
- Mark a task as checked when it’s ready
- When all the rows are checked, that particular task is done
Let’s say that you are blogger, you want to define your “done” regarding a new blog post. In that case part of your DoD could look like this:
Writing a blog post:
- Outline a post [checked]
- Write a post [checked]
- Proofread the post [ ]
- Create a compelling headline [ ]
- Find a accompanying picture [ ]
- Schedule the post in WordPress [ ]
- Write an email message to your autoresponder [ ]
- … [ ]
The previous DoD is clearly explaining what has been achieved so far and what still needs to be done.
To make your DoD even more effective, share this with an accountability partner if you have one. This way you can make continuous checks on how you are progressing with your work and if the individual tasks have been accomplished or not.
If you still try to strive for 100% perfection, your partner can remind you of the agreement that you have created (your DoD). This way you are not endlessly wasting your time by making irrelevant tweaks to your tasks.
Conclusion
I have been guilty of striving for perfection and this bad habit has slowed me down on my projects.
However, once I started defining my “done” (in a written form), I was able to see clearly which parts of the project were finished and which still required my attention.
Once the item on the list is checked, it’s done and I can move to the next task or project.
How do you handle perfection?
(Photo credit: Program code on a monitor via Shutterstock)
Timo Kiander, a.k.a. Productive Superdad, teaches WAHD super dad productivity for work at home dads. If you want to get more productive in your own life, grab 222 of his best Tips for Becoming a Productivity Superstar.
It’s Time to Change Your Life
May 15th
Too often we come home after a long day at work and open the takeout food, then plop down on the couch and watch TV until it’s time for bed.
The next day, we do the same thing again.
While I have been known to indulge in this from time to time, there’s an issue with this lifestyle. You basically spend each day, trying to get through it. You’re just living for the weekend.
The weekend is never long enough, of course, and then it’s another week of the same.
The problem with this is that months — or years — can go by. That’s time you won’t get back.
It wouldn’t be so bad if you knew how long you had on this spinning rock called Earth. The truth is, we aren’t really sure. So I propose to you to make the most of it.
Spend some time learning something new, or creating something…or taking up a new hobby. There’s a thousand different things that you can do. You might even return to an existing hobby that you haven’t indulged in for a while.
You dont have to be a productivity guru or sell your television. Just get up off the couch and do something.
Write a blog post. Start a novel. Pick up a paintbrush and make art. It only costs you some time…and you were wasting it anyway.
The key to this is: don’t worry about whether or not it’s good enough. You don’t have to show it to anyone. The first draft of anything is never all that good anyway. You can always revise it later or learn from the mistakes that you made.
Just do it for the sake of the craft. You just might surprise yourself. You might even start learning a new skill, one that may get you out of your current job and into a new one.
The clock is ticking…
For some people, they feel that because they have a ton of ideas, they are doing something productive. Sadly, there are a million people with a million ideas. The difference between those million people and you is execution.
It’s not enough to have the idea, you have to do the work. If you want change, you have to put in the effort.
The other end of the spectrum is taking this advice too far. Remember that this is not your job. It’s your time to relax, to do something fun. Taken too far, you will stress yourself out even more.
Think about “The Soccer Mom Syndrome”. You spend so much time doing other activities that you don’t have any down time.
I’m suggesting a balance between your job and relaxation. Just…turn off the TV once in a while and go create something. You’ll be a lot happier.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments.
(Photo credit: Time for Change on Blackboard via Shutterstock)
Brian K. Vagnini is a musician, designer, engineer and writer of fiction and technical topics. He was a technical trainer for five years and learned about almost every class of software. His additional writing can be found at Grey Matter Ideas and "a href="http://www.wicketbang.com">Wicketbang.com.
The Top 5 To-Do Apps for iPhone
May 15th
To-do apps are great because they help you to remember and complete the tasks that you need to do. Whether it is a task in business or family life (or any other field), to-do apps can help you keep on top of them and complete them in time. They make your life easier. They make you more productive.
The iPhone has many to-do apps available, but it can be difficult for you to find out the best to-do app for your iPhone from the plethora of choices from both paid and free app lists. To help you get started on being more productive with your iPhone, let’s take a look at the top five to-do apps.
1. Orchestra
Orchestra is a free to-do list app. You can create your to-do list and even share the list with others. It also allows you to send tasks to others. Even if the other people are not using Orchestra, then also they can check the tasks sent to them. You can add task in several different ways. You can type the task; speak to the app or forward emails. There are several filters that you can use to filter your tasks and you can also organize your tasks in different methods. It is very simple and easy to use.
2. Wunderlist
Wunderlist is another popular to-do app — and it is also free. It is a simple to-do app that focuses on the basic features necessary for managing your tasks. It has got its Windows and Mac counterparts and allows you to create multiple lists. You can add different tasks to the lists you make and can also sort out the tasks by due date and priority — as well as add notes to the tasks. Then when your task is done, you can check items off the list and it syncs with the Wunderlist servers, meaning that no matter what version or platform you’re using Wunderlsit on you will have an updated list. As a bonus, the app allows you to add tasks using your e-mail, which is great if you find you spend a lot of time in your email inbox.
3. Reminders
If you have iOS 5 in your iPhone, then you can easily use this very good built-in app. Reminders is one of the simplest to-do list apps that you will ever find. Another great advantage is that you can make use of your location and the app will remind you when you’re near a place that allows you to complete a task. You can also create to-do items with deadlines attached to them. And Reminders integrates with Siri on the iPhone 4S, allowing you to add tasks, appointments and errands using your voice.
4. ToodleDo
ToodleDo is a popular paid to-do app, costing $2.99 USD in the App Store. You can easily add your tasks using its simple interface — a common theme throughout all of the to-do apps mentioned here. When adding tasks, the app allows you to set priorities and due dates and you can also assign the tasks to folders, schedule reminders, and much more.
5. TeuxDeux
TeuxDeux is another solid paid to-do app that also comes in at $2.99 USD. It got its starts as a web app and has since moved into the world of iOS. Featuring a stylish interface, the main focus of the app is on your to-dos. It doesn’t offer many features like other to-do apps, but you can sync your tasks with the web app and rearrange your tasks as well. But if you feel you need lots of additional features, then this is not an app for you.
Do you have any to-do apps for the iPhone that you use that deserve consideration? Let me know about them in the comments.
Bikash Kalita writes for the technology blog Take the Plunge and also manages Nirvana Sutra, the complete Content Management Agency. He is a netpreneur, who is working on some other online projects for offering more value to the Internet users.
The 9-5 Guide to Staying Active
May 15th
Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Matt Madeiro of Make Every Day Count.
Let’s see if this rings any bells.
When the clock hits 8, I sit. I plop back in my rolling chair, crack open the laptop on my desk, and spend the next nine hours with my butt glued firmly to seat. I stand on occasion to step into the bathroom, but I’m back to my post again shortly thereafter — hunched over, bleary-eyed, and nursing my coffee like it’s the greatest thing since toilet paper (I make no claims to the contrary).
When that clock hits 5, I bolt. I’m out the door in the blink of an eye, gunning my way through traffic to finally make it home. There, at long last, I do what I’ve been dreaming about doing all day: sit. I sink into the couch, smile, and seize the remote, content to shut the brain down for a few glorious hours before calling it a night.
Rinse. Repeat. See the common theme here?
We’ve grown used to idleness. The modern life too often asks us to sit, type, and keep off our feet, inviting the kind of sedentary lifestyle our waist lines are so better off without. As someone steadily entrenched in my chair over these last few months in the office, I’ve had to get creative. I’ve had to try and puzzle out how I can devote my daily 9 to 5, in other words, to the betterment—not the detriment—of my health. Here’s what I’ve come up with.
1. Move.
Any motion is better than no motion at all. That’s the core idea behind each of these tricks, and that’s the biggest bullet point worth incorporating into your daily routine.
Your job might demand you spend a lot of time in a chair. You can’t always change that, but there’s nothing stopping you from doing your best to work within those (admittedly comfy) constraints.
2. Set a timer.
Most modern phones come with a built-in timer, but you can always just keep an eye on the clock if you’re not keen on the sound of an alarm. The idea, in either case, is the same: to remind yourself at regular intervals to get up out of your seat and take a quick stroll around the office. I’m the kind of worker who gets quickly absorbed in my work, eyes locked on the screen as the hours sneak by, meaning an alarm set for every 45 minutes is often the only way I remember to stand up, stretch, and do one of the tricks below.
3. Incorporate bodyweight exercises.
It’s tempting to save all your sweat for the gym, but that’s not always practical — especially when life likes to take our rigorous training schedules, punt them into a trash can, and send us scrambling on back to the drawing board.
Saving your exercise solely for the gym, too, misses a simple point: several small sets of bodyweight exercises—knee or wall pushups and air squats as an example—throughout the day can be just as beneficial as thirty dedicated minutes on the treadmill, especially if those sets are timed to interrupt hours otherwise spent barely moving at all.
If you’re aiming to add a little more motion to your routine, in other words, don’t forget that you have a weight room already available. Have arms? Experiment with the Hundred Pushups program, a personal favorite of mine, and don’t be afraid to enjoy some wall pushups in the privacy of your own office. Have legs? Air squats, so long as you go slow and ease them into your routine, work the body like few other movements, and you don’t need more than five minutes to get the blood flowing before you’re forced to move back to your seat.
If you’re keen on setting a timer, too, this is the perfect opportunity to have a mini-workout. When that clock strikes 0, crank out 10 to 15 pushups, lunges, etc., and see how many you can collect over the course of the day. As the weeks progress, so will your totals, and so too will your overall fitness.
4. Capitalize on the size of your bladder.
This might be the first time in your life where a small bladder comes in handy. The next time you hoof it over to the toilet, why not spend an extra few minutes inside the stall? You can easily do twenty to thirty air squats in the privacy of that little box, and there’s nothing stopping you from doing five to ten wall pushups while you’re there. (Nothing, that is, aside from hygiene concerns). Put a thin sheet of toilet paper between each hand and the wall, however, and embrace the additional chance to work in a little exercise without having to wash your hands for the next hour.
And when you walk to the bathroom in the first place? Opt for the one the farthest away from your workstation, even one that forces you to take the stairs to a different floor. The additional minutes spent walking might not seem like much, but they always add up over the course of the day.
5. Keep walking.
You’ve heard the usual tricks: take the stairs where possible, park out as far as possible, and so forth. That’s solid advice, to be sure, but there’s no reason to stop there. Why not go further? Why not keep walking as much as possible?
When your timer goes off, pace around your office for five minutes. At the end of your lunch break, don’t sneak back to spend some time on Facebook — take a walk around your office instead, or head outside to soak up the sun while you circle the block.
When you take a phone call, don’t lean back in your chair to accept it. Pop up and move around for the duration of the call instead. In the case of long calls, this can easily—and effortlessly—add minutes of walking into your daily routine, minutes you otherwise might spend with your jaw flapping and both legs stuck motionless to the floor.
6. Take a stand.
This is revolutionary thinking, so brace yourself: standing is not sitting. It’s so far-removed in how it tasks the body, in fact, that you could call it a kind of exercise in itself (especially when stacked up next to relatively motionless hours spent in a chair). Standing desks, unfortunately, haven’t hit the mainstream, but they’re still a great start if you’re looking to tackle the core problem of the modern office: big, comfy seats, and jobs that demand we spend hours getting intimate with them.
If you’re stuck with a regular desk, however, you can still see the benefits of taking a stand. It might seem like an obvious trick, but try this: when given the choice of sitting or standing, choose standing first. When you’re visiting someone’s office, stand for a decent-sized chunk of the conversation. When you’re enjoying your lunch break, don’t be afraid to stand while you eat or prepare your meal. If you find yourself closing the door to your office for a good think, why not do it up on your feet?
When you get home from work, too, don’t immediately drop down on the couch. Stand in the kitchen while you cook, stay upright while you talk with family, and just try and delay that familiar combo of TV and couch for as long as your legs allow. A sudden increase in your standing time won’t come too easily at first, but stick with it and you’ll see your endurance rise within the span of a week.
The Biggest Step
If you’ll allow a repetition: any motion is better than no motion at all. Given how many hours we spend sunk deep into our chairs, any new emphasis on steady, simple activities can go a long way to helping you keep active. The tips above might not replace dedicated exercise, to be fair, but I think they can do one better: supplement your existing routine, or even put you on the path towards implementing one in the first place.
Remember, lastly, that exercise doesn’t have to be difficult. It doesn’t demand three hours in the gym or long, sleepless nights on the treadmill, but it does ask you, now, to take an interest in your well-being, and to take small, steady steps toward improving your health.
Start today. Set a timer, stand when you can, and take a walk at every chance you get, and I think you’ll realize something exciting: your 9 to 5 doesn’t force you to sit still. Make the decision to start moving, in fact, and you might even find that your time at the office can have a positive impact on your health.
Matt Madeiro is the author of Make Every Day Count, a blog devoted to answering a single question: what does it mean to live well? He explores simple ways to do just that in his latest book, Happiness Is. Follow him on Twitter.
Standing: The One Simple Trick That Can Double Your Productivity
May 15th
A subject of great interest to most of us is productivity. We want to be more productive, and we’re willing to do anything to achieve this, yet we spend a major part of our lifetime doing something that makes us less productive while at the same time posing the risk of reducing our lifespan. Unfortunately, this particular thing is so common these days that a lot of us now see it as something normal.
It is called sitting.
While sitting isn’t a totally bad idea, spending the larger part of our day doing it can damage our productivity significantly.
Unfortunately, in the digital age we are today, we now spend more time sitting than ever before; the average human being spends around 9 hours sitting every day, when sitting down for just 6 hours a day increases your risk of dying in the next 15 years 40% higher than that of someone sitting for just 3 hours a day.
The bad news is, this also crushes our productivity; and while some of us might not be that concerned about living for 100 years, what’s the point of living for a thousand years if you can’t achieve anything significant?
Start Using a “Standing Desk”
Since sitting can be a huge productivity killer, what kind of solution can there be to something so fundamental that it is a part of human nature?
Well, there is standing. And there are desks that make it easy to work with a standing desk.
It wouldn’t be easy at first, especially when you’ve spent the larger part of your life sitting than standing, but this article will be showing you a few benefits of standing while working, and how to get the best from it.
Standing while working has a few advantages that makes it more productive when compared to just sitting, and here are some advantages to why you should stand while working from now on instead of sitting.
1. It constitutes to a little bit of pain.
Comfort can make it difficult for us to produce, but pain makes us concentrate.
Standing for prolonged hours constitutes pain and only leaves us with one thought: “how to quickly finish what we’re doing so we can go back to sitting down”. Unfortunately, this is the natural way of things, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Success isn’t possible without struggles, and productivity is hardly possible in a comfortable environment. The key to productivity is to challenge yourself, leave your comfort zone, and introduce more pain; standing does all that, while sitting is the direct opposite of these things.
2. Unlike sitting, standing is associated with work.
The world we now live in is more about perception, instead of reality, which is why productivity is more of a psychological process than physical.
Creating is a mental process, and this means you have to be in the right frame of mind to create. Unfortunately, sitting is mostly associated with rest and relaxation thereby making it less productive for work when compared to standing; for example, we spend a huge part of our time watching TV, playing games, and chatting with ourselves; the reality about this is that we do all these things while sitting, while the majority of the activities that can be classified as “real work” are done standing.
3. Standing while working is actually healthier than sitting
Health is wealth, and no matter your desire and mental preparation for getting things done, nothing is possible if you’re not healthy enough to do what needs to be done.
Sitting for prolonged hours has its health dangers, but very few people are aware of this. Some major health dangers to sitting that can be eliminated by standing are:
- Death: The reality is that sitting for 6+ hours a day will increase your likelihood of dying within 15 years when compared to someone who only sits for 3 hours a day, by 40%.
- Obesity: Obesity is a great enemy of productivity, and the more obese you become the less you feel like working. Research has shown that obese people sit for 2.5 more hours a day compared to their thin counterparts.
- Diseases: Research has also shown that those who sit for 3 or more hours a day watching TV are 64% more likely to die from heart diseases. People with sitting jobs have also been observed to have twice the cardiovascular disease as people with standing jobs.
What’s more? Research has also shown that exercise is nearly ineffective for those who spend a large portion of their day sitting, even if they exercise for an hour a day.
All the stats quoted above can be found here and here.
How to Get the Best from Standing While Working
Now that we’ve seen how critically important standing while working is, it is important that we also realize that there are things we should do to maximize our productivity.
There is a huge difference between being productive and abusing your body. Here’s a couple of tips to help you get the best from standing while working:
- Create a resting interval. Don’t just work for prolonged hours on your feet without taking any measures. Make sure you segment your work into various periods, and take a break every hour or so of standing. A 10 – 20 minutes break per hour can go a long way to enhance your productivity, so make sure you don’t exhaust yourself by working while standing for prolonged hours.
- Alternate sitting with standing. Know when to stand and when to sit. If you think you need to get a lot of work done for a particular day, and that you will probably be working for a very long time, make sure you sit for a few minutes as a way to rest your brain. Standing for way too long can increase your chances of having back pain, so make sure you alternate it with sitting every once in a while.
This is especially important if you’re just getting starting with using a standing desk.
(Photo credit: Two People Standing via Shutterstock)
Bamidele Onibalusi is a young blogger, blogger, and freelance copywriter you should hire to take your business to the next level. He also has a free guide designed specifically for those who want to write for traffic and money titled, The Writer’s Handbook: How to Write for Traffic and Money.
50 Motivational Quotes That Will Put Your Motivation on Overdrive
May 14th
Let’s face it – no matter how excited you are about a new project or priority in your life, there will always be days when your motivation lags. Days when – despite all the progress you’ve made in the past – it just sounds easier to sit on the couch playing video games than to buckle down and crank out the work needed to meet your goals.
In order to be successful, you must be able to motivate yourself past these humps. So whenever you feel your drive and determination lagging, turn to motivational quotes from famous authors to provide the extra spark of passion needed to keep you on track.
The following are some of my favorites, divided up into a few different categories. I hope you find them useful when it comes to sustaining your own motivation through difficult projects!
Motivational Quotes for Work
Great businesses aren’t born overnight. Instead, they require consistent, committed effort to succeed – which means that you’ve got to find a way to maintain your passion over the long-run. Whenever you encounter doubts creeping into your mind, read through the following motivational quotes for work and reference the categories that are appropriate to your unique needs:
Goal Setting
Whether you’re still in the planning phases of your business or whether you’re plotting a plan of attack to bring about your long-range vision, setting good goals is a critical part of succeeding in business. Check out the following quotes for extra inspiration on how to turn your business dreams into reality:
“The tragedy in life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach.”–Benjamin Mays
“By recording your dreams and goals on paper, you set in motion the process of becoming the person you most want to be. Put your future in good hands — your own.”–Mark Victor Hansen
“Give yourself an even greater challenge than the one you are trying to master and you will develop the powers necessary to overcome the original difficulty.”–William J. Bennett - The Book of Virtues
“The entrepreneur is essentially a visualizer and actualizer… He can visualize something, and when he visualizes it he sees exactly how to make it happen.”–Robert L. Schwartz
Excellence in Work
Once you’ve got your goals together, you’ll need to put in 110% of your effort in order to transform these visions into reality. To increase your motivation to work at a consistently high level, take a look at the following words of wisdom:
“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”–Aristotle
“If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.”–Charles R. Swindoll
“Desire is the key to motivation, but it’s determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal — a commitment to excellence — that will enable you to attain the success you seek.”–Mario Andretti
“The secret of joy in work is contained in one word – excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.”–Pearl Buck
“The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.”–Vince Lombardi
Determination and Persistence
Since every business or other endeavor is bound to hit some rough patches, it’s often a person’s level of determination and patience that brings about either success or failure. Read through any of the following motivational quotes for work related to determination whenever you need an extra boost of encouragement:
“Enter every activity without giving mental recognition to the possibility of defeat. Concentrate on your strengths, instead of your weaknesses… on your powers, instead of your problems.”–Paul J. Meyer
“Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.”--Hal Borland
“Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”–Calvin Coolidge
“An invincible determination can accomplish almost anything and in this lies the great distinction between great men and little men.”–Thomas Fuller
Leadership
Leadership is an important quality for businesspeople to possess, whether you use it to run your own company or simply to motivate others to follow your unique way of thinking. To boost your skills in this area, take your cues from the following renowned leaders and their most famous sayings:
“The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born — that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.” –Warren G. Bennis
“All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.”–John Kenneth Galbraith
“Leadership is not magnetic personality — that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not ‘making friends and influencing people’ — that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”–Peter F. Drucker
“The task of leadership is not to put greatness into people, but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already.”–John Buchan
“High sentiments always win in the end. The leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.”--George Orwell
Success
Think of success as a holistic process – one which results from the combination of goal-setting, excellence, patience, determination and leadership you prioritize throughout your business career. The following quotes from famously successful business people reflect this reality, providing an excellent source of motivation for whenever you feel your spirits lagging:
“Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment.”–Stephen Covey
“Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.”–Norman Vincent Peale
“Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”–Winston Churchill
“Successful and unsuccessful people do not vary greatly in their abilities. They vary in their desires to reach their potential.”–John Maxwell
“Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success.”-- Thomas J. Watson
“The great successful men of the world have used their imagination. They think ahead and create their mental picture in all its details, filling in here, adding a little there, altering this a bit and that a bit, but steadily building – steadily building.”–Robert Collier
“It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.”–Arnold Toynbee
Motivational Sports Quotes for Athletes
You don’t need to be a Michael Jordan-caliber athlete to draw inspiration from the following quotes. Even if you’re just a recreational player or someone who’s using sports as a means to get back in shape after long periods of inactivity, the following motivational sports quotes for athletes should provide the extra encouragement needed for you to stick to your fitness goals:
“My attitude is that if you push me towards something that you think is a weakness, then I will turn that perceived weakness into a strength.”–Michael Jordan
“Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.”–Lance Armstrong
“Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.”–Arnold Schwarzenegger
“I know what I have to do, and I’m going to do whatever it takes. If I do it, I’ll come out a winner, and it doesn’t matter what anyone else does.”--Florence Griffith Joyner
“Every time you stay out late; every time you sleep in; every time you miss a workout; every time you don’t give 100% – You make it that much easier for me to beat you.”--Unknown
“If you are hurt, whether in mind or body, don’t nurse your bruises. Get up and light-heartedly, courageously, good temperedly get ready for the next encounter. This is the only way to take life – this is also ‘playing’ the game!”–Emily Post
“We must train from the inside out. Using our strengths to attack and nullify any weaknesses. It’s not about denying a weakness may exist but about denying its right to persist.”--Vince McConnell
Motivational Quotes for Students
Education matters, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to achieve! Committing yourself to pursuing knowledge in a single area is a tremendous endeavor – one that often seems overwhelming given the depth and breadth of information that’s available today.
So if you want to better yourself through education, keep the following motivational quotes for students in mind. Hopefully, you’ll find them inspiring when the thought of cracking open yet another textbook sounds as arduous as writing such a tome of your own!
“How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.”–George Washington Carver
“If you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you can dream it, you can become it.”–William Arthur Ward
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”– Aristotle
“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”–Albert Schweitzer
“Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket: and do not pull it out and strike it, merely to show that you have one.”–Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
“He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.”–Chinese Proverb
“Study while others are sleeping; work while others are loafing; prepare while others are playing; and dream while others are wishing.”–William Arthur Ward
“Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life’.”–Helen Exley
“A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.”–Chinese Proverb
Famous Motivational Quotes
Finally, whatever your goals are in life, you can’t go wrong by taking the advice of the following famous motivational quotes:
“Change your thoughts and you change your world.”–Norman Vincent Peale
“Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinion drowned your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”–Steve Jobs
“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.”–Maria Robinson
“Out of clutter, find Simplicity. From discord, find Harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies Opportunity.”–Albert Einstein
“Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.”–Lyndon Johnson
“If we did all the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves.”–Thomas Edison
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”–Wayne Gretzky
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”–Winston Churchill
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”–Ralph Waldo Emerson
To use these motivational quotes effectively, find the one that speaks to you. Although all of the phrases listed above can be considered “motivational,” only you can decide which one resonates with you most directly.
Next, take the quote you’ve settled on and copy it onto small index cards or other pieces of paper that can be stored around your home and workspace. If you’re creative, you can create inspiration boards, signs or other decorative displays featuring your favorite motivational quotes – really, though, the most important thing is that your chosen phrase be accessible in a variety of different places. This will make it easy to access and review whenever you feel your motivation slipping away.
Do you have a favorite motivational quote? If so, how do you reference it throughout your day in order to stay motivated? Share your favorite sayings and recommendations for using motivational quotes effectively in the comments section below!
(Photo credit: Bright Flamy Symbol on Black via Shutterstock)
Pawel Reszka is the founder of Affhelper.com. On his blog he talks about ways to make money through content marketing.
The Difference Between "Money Work" and "Busy Work"
May 14th
Are you doing everything you can to generate new income? The more effective you are with "money work," the more time you'll have for "creative work."
How to Persuade and Influence People to Achieve Personal Power
May 14th
Your ability to persuade and influence people to help you get the things you want in life is one of the most important skills you can develop. By learning how to persuade and influence people, you can achieve greater personal power and get more of the things you want faster than anything else you do. It can mean the difference between success and failure. It can guarantee your progress and enable you to use all of your other skills and abilities at the very highest level. Learning how to persuade people will earn you the support and respect of your customers, bosses, co-workers, colleagues and friends. The ability to influence others to do what you want them to do can make you one of the most important people in your community.
Your job is to become absolutely excellent at influencing and motivating others to support and assist you in the achievement of your goals and the solving of your problems. All truly effective people have mastered the art of getting lots of other people to work with and for them in the accomplishment of their objectives. You can learn this skill set to achieve personal power and master the art of influencing others.
How Human Interaction Affects Your Ability to Influence People
The opposite of being influential is having little or no influence at all on the behaviors of other people. It is the difference between being powerful and being powerless. You can either persuade others to help you or be persuaded to help them. It is one or the other. Most people are not aware that every human interaction involves a complex process of persuasion and influence. And being unaware, they are usually the ones being persuaded to help others rather than the ones who are influencing people to help them.
All successful people with personal power are persuasion experts. They give a lot of thought to how they can get other people to help them. They plan and strategize before they act. They define their goals clearly and then they choose the people whose cooperation they will need to achieve those goals. They then think about what they will have to do in return to get the other people to help them. They achieve their goals of persuasion and influence indirectly.
The key to persuasion is motivation. Every human action is motivated by something. In order to learn how to persuade others, you must find out what motivates other people and then to provide that motivation. People have two major motivations: the desire for gain, and the fear of loss. The desire for gain motivates people to want more of the things they value in life. They want more money, more success, more health, more influence, more respect, more love and more happiness.
Human wants are limited only by individual imagination. No matter how much a person has, he or she still wants more and more. When you can show a person how he or she can get more of the things he or she wants by helping you achieve your goals, you can motivate them to act in your behalf and achieve greater personal power.
How to Persuade Others Through Leverage
You can learn how to persuade others by using leverage. Leverage means that you learn how to multiply yourself and get far more out of the hours you put in rather than doing everything yourself.
You leverage yourself through other people’s efforts by getting other people to work with you and for you in the accomplishment of your objectives. Sometimes you can ask them to help you voluntarily, although people won’t work for very long without some personal reward. At other times you can hire them to help you, thereby freeing you up to do higher value work.
The definition of management is “Getting things done through others.” To be a manager you must improve your personal power and know how to persuade and influence people to work in a common direction. This is why all excellent managers are also excellent low-pressure salespeople. They do not order people to do things, instead, they influence people to accept certain responsibilities, with specific deadlines, and agreed upon standards of performance. When a person has been persuaded that he has a vested interest in doing a job well, he accepts ownership of the job and the result. Once a person accepts ownership and responsibility, the manager can step aside confidently, knowing the job will be done on schedule.
Achieve Personal Power by Becoming an Expert
You can learn how to persuade others and can develop your personal power by always remembering that there are only two ways to get the things you want in life, you can do it all yourself, or you can get most of it done by others. Your ability to communicate, persuade, negotiate, influence, delegate and interact effectively with other people will enable you to develop leverage using other people’s efforts, other people’s knowledge and other people’s money. The development of your personal power will enable you to become one of the most powerful and influential people in your organization. By learning how to persuade and influence people, it will open up doors for you in every area of your life.
I hope you enjoyed this post on how to achieve personal power by learning how to persuade and influence people. Do you think that the ability to influence people is useful in your line of work? Please comment with your answer below!
Topics included in this article include
How to Persuade
Influence People
Personal Power
Desktop to iPad Blogging Workflow with Scrivener, Elements, Dropbox, and Marked
May 14th
One of the keys to a good life hack isn’t just finding the right technology to do the job, but actually finding the right combination of technologies to get the job done. Many of you wonder how us writer folks keep our writing projects on track and in sync, regardless of the where or when we’re doing our writing (sometimes we wonder ourselves, actually). I’ll tell you sometimes it’s not easy, until you find—and set up—the right apps and services to make things all come together. This post is all about how to go from your desktop to iPad and back and keeping everything a couple clicks away from being ready to publish online.
The first, and most essential, part of this whole system is Dropbox. If you’re not using Dropbox, now is the time to sign up and set up. Without Dropbox’s easy and fast file syncing—syncing that works on pretty much any device you throw at it—this system wouldn’t work at all.
Next thing is the file format. Writing for the web—and blogs specifically—is a no Word zone (or Pages either for that matter), basic, boring text files are the files of choice here. Well, text files with a twist. While I’m writing this in a text editor, I’m also using the markup system called Markdown that is essentially a shortcut for HTML and let’s me format this post for posting—even put in links and such—without having to type HTML, per se.
With the foundations in place (Dropbox and text files), let’s move onto the actual writing part. On my Mac my writing app of choice is Scrivener (Mac and PC). I’ve written several books and lots of posts in it already, so I’m no stranger to it in the least, but one of the features I haven’t used too often (though I should have been) is Sync an external folder. The basics of how to do this are pretty simple and this post from Jamie Rubin puts it all together nicely. At the guts of it, you’re just telling Scrivener to look in a particular folder on your machine (in this case a folder within my Dropbox account that my iPad app saves to) and import files from that folder into the project. It’s important to have your Scrivener project be saved in a different location than the sync folder.
The next part for the writing on the go element is, actually, Elements. This is a great, simple iOS (iPad and iPhone—which is one reason I really like it) app that just creates text files. And syncs to Dropbox. And (optionally) syncs to iCloud. And supports Markdown with a nice preview window and the ability to copy (clean) HTML to paste into your blog editor of choice (I’d opt for WordPress for iOS, actually). Elements isn’t the only choice out there—believe me, I’ve bought and tried almost all of them—you can also check out Nebulous Notes, iA Writer, Byword, Plain Text, and Edito (I told you I tried them all). The essential part is syncing with Dropbox so you can write something on the go and have it “automagically” appear on your machine at home when you get back.
The last bit of magic is Brett Terpstra’s app Marked (sorry Mac only). See, while I can copy and paste HTML from Elements on my iPad into the WordPress editor on my iPad, I’d rather pull everything together on my Mac at home. Inserting images and such is still a bit of a chore on the iPad, so forcing myself to open, review, and edit the post on my Mac is a good safety net. While I can export HTML from Scrivener, I don’t like to because the exports are designed as complete web pages, and I don’t want that. This is where Marked comes in. I just drag and drop the text file (with Markdown) onto Marked and I get a beautifully rendered document and when I copy the HTML from Marked, it’s just the HTML needed for a post. Nothing more, nothing less, and no extras that might mess things up.
So I can start a post in Scrivener, then finish it on my iPad, and then post it. Or, like I’m doing now, write the whole post on my iPad, and put the final polish on it on my Mac at home (along with images and such) and post it. All the while I’m still just editing the same files, seamlessly, efficiently, and transparently.
(And if you’re wondering about typing on the iPad, I’ve used the on-screen keyboard for light writing and the Apple Wireless Keyboard for heavier projects. For this post, however, I’m trying out the Zaggfolio keyboard and case…and really, really liking it.)
Tris Hussey is a technologist, author, teacher, and Canada’s first professional blogger. He has written several books on social media and technology including Create Your Own Blog (1st and 2nd editions), Using WordPress, Sam’s Teach Yourself Foursquare in 10 Minutes, WordPress Essentials (video lessons), and Sam’s Teach Yourself WordPress Themes in 24 Hours (forthcoming in late 2012 with Catherine Winters). You can read Tris’ posts on TrisHussey.com, the FutureShop Tech blog, and other sites around the Internet.
How to Survive the Shift to Management
May 14th
To many, a manager title means increased pay and prestige. Sometimes, you’ll get a new boss and a new office too. You’ll also get a totally new job.
You got to this point because you were good at your work, but now you will have to let the details of the work go. Your job now is to grow and position your organization so that others can perform the work in a way that positively impacts the bottom line.
There are many mistakes that new leaders make, but the biggest is refusing to operate at a higher level and spending too much time personally attending to their prior tasks. In this, they limit their contributions as a leader and fail to grow the people on their team.
Patty Azzarello, a Silicon Valley management consultant and the author of Rise: 3 Practical Steps for Advancing Your Career, Standing Out as a Leader, and Liking Your Life, calls this phenomenon missing the “level transition” and claims that it leads to the following management problems:
- Leaders compete with subordinates about who is smarter
- Leaders torture their teams for inappropriate amounts of detail
- Leaders fail to hire smart people beneath them because they feel threatened
- Leaders fail to develop team capacity to do more
So if you’re no longer supposed to do the work that you’re good at, what should you be doing? Ms. Azzarello suggests working on the business instead of in the business and spending more time thinking and less time doing. This includes:
- Building a plan to drive the overall strategy for your team and its role in the business
- Tuning everyone’s workload so that your team delivers on the most important priorities
- Ensuring that there is alignment of your team, peers and managers
- Assessing your organization’s fitness for what it needs to do, and making changes, training, and/or upgrading talent where necessary
- Creating systems and frameworks to execute, track, and measuring the work so that you feel comfortable that you know what’s getting done without getting mired in specifics
- Supporting your team members in becoming better leaders themselves by promoting continuous learning
- Finding ways to steadily reduce the cost of things you do every year to make room for new approaches
- Improving communication and relationships inside and outside your direct organization
- Making connections outside your direct organization to generate positive visibility for your team and create a broader base of support
- Finding senior-level mentors who can advise you on how to raise your focus
Hopefully, if you’ve made the transition to management already, you’ve realized that you enjoy this work, maybe even more than what you were doing before. But if you are still in discussions to advance to the next level, it is worth considering whether or not this is how you want to spend your days.
There is nothing wrong with remaining an individual contributor, and if you truly love what you do, who is to say that you have to advance up and out of it? The desire to rise to the upper echelon of an organization is a matter of preference, so give it some serious thought and don’t allow others to sway you to their point of view.
(Photo credit: businessman writing leadership via Shutterstock)
Alexandra Levit is a career and workplace expert at the Intuit Quickbase Blog , a daily source for advice on how to be exceptional at your job. You can follow her on Twitter at @alevit.