Thursday, February 27, 2014
Learn and Earn
Chuan and Jing joined a wholesale company together just after graduation. Both worked very hard.
After several years, the boss promoted Jing to sales executive but Chuan remained a sales rep. One day Chuan could not take it anymore, tender resignation to the boss and complained the boss did not value hard working staff, but only promoted those who flattered him.
The boss knew that Chuan worked very hard for the years, but in order to help Chuan realize the difference between him and Jing, the boss asked Chuan to do the following. Go and find out anyone selling water melon in the market? Chuan returned and said yes. The boss asked how much per kg? Chuan went back to the market to ask and returned to inform boss the $12 per kg.
Boss told Chuan, I will ask Jing the same question? Jing went, returned and said, boss, only one person selling water melon. $12 per kg, $100 for 10 kg, he has inventory of 340 melons. On the table 58 melons, every melon weighs about 15 kg, bought from the South two days ago, they are fresh and red, good quality.
Chuan was very impressed and realized the difference between himself and Jing. He decided not to resign but to learn from Jing.
My dear friends, a more successful person is more observant, think more and understand in depth. For the same matter, a more successful person sees several years ahead, while you see only tomorrow. The difference between a year and a day is 365 times, how could you win?
Think! how far have you seen ahead in your life? How thoughtful in depth are you?
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Determination and Persistence
This is a real life story of engineer John Roebling building the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, USA back in 1870. The bridge was completed in 1883, after 13 years.
In 1883, a creative engineer named John Roebling was inspired by an idea to build a spectacular bridge connecting New York with the Long Island. However bridge building experts throughout the world thought that this was an impossible feat and told Roebling to forget the idea. It just could not be done. It was not practical. It had never been done before.
Roebling could not ignore the vision he had in his mind of this bridge. He thought about it all the time and he knew deep in his heart that it could be done. He just had to share the dream with someone else. After much discussion and persuasion he managed to convince his son Washington, an up and coming engineer, that the bridge in fact could be built.
Working together for the first time, the father and son developed concepts of how it could be accomplished and how the obstacles could be overcome. With great excitement and inspiration, and the headiness of a wild challenge before them, they hired their crew and began to build their dream bridge.
The project started well, but when it was only a few months underway a tragic accident on the site took the life of John Roebling. Washington was also injured and left with a certain amount of brain damage, which resulted in him not being able to talk or walk.
“We told them so.” “Crazy men and their crazy dreams.” “It’s foolish to chase wild visions.”
Everyone had a negative comment to make and felt that the project should be scrapped since the Roeblings were the only ones who knew how the bridge could be built.
In spite of his handicap Washington was never discouraged and still had a burning desire to complete the bridge and his mind was still as sharp as ever. He tried to inspire and pass on his enthusiasm to some of his friends, but they were too daunted by the task.
As he lay on his bed in his hospital room, with the sunlight streaming through the windows, a gentle breeze blew the flimsy white curtains apart and he was able to see the sky and the tops of the trees outside for just a moment.
It seemed that there was a message for him not to give up. Suddenly an idea hit him. All he could do was move one finger and he decided to make the best use of it. By moving this, he slowly developed a code of communication with his wife.
He touched his wife’s arm with that finger, indicating to her that he wanted her to call the engineers again. Then he used the same method of tapping her arm to tell the engineers what to do. It seemed foolish but the project was under way again.
For 13 years Washington tapped out his instructions with his finger on his wife’s arm, until the bridge was finally completed. Today the spectacular Brooklyn Bridge stands in all its glory as a tribute to the triumph of one man’s indomitable spirit and his determination not to be defeated by circumstances. It is also a tribute to the engineers and their team work, and to their faith in a man who was considered mad by half the world. It stands too as a tangible monument to the love and devotion of his wife who for 13 long years patiently decoded the messages of her husband and told the engineers what to do.
Perhaps this is one of the best examples of a never-say-die attitude that overcomes a terrible physical handicap and achieves an impossible goal.
Often when we face obstacles in our day-to-day life, our hurdles seem very small in comparison to what many others have to face. The Brooklyn Bridge shows us that dreams that seem impossible can be realised with determination and persistence, no matter what the odds are.
Inspirational Speech by Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs (1955–2011, 56), founder of Apple Inc, gave this amazing and inspirational speech to Stanford University graduates on June 12, 2005.
Read below his wise and thoughtful words.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out 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.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Original Source: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
Steve Jobs Biography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
there is just what it is.
“People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get ahead in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.”
George Bernard Shaw.
The 10 Worst Habits Holding You Back From Success
The path of success is often littered by our own trash, obstacles that we place ourselves. Habits, by definition are behaviors that are so ingrained that we no longer become conscious of them; actions that turn into autopilot. The power of habit is severely under-recognized as driving force toward success. When the incredible Brian Tracy was asked about the key to success, he replied, “Successful people are simply those with successful habits.”
While there are many people that possess many successful habits, these habits are being undermined by toxic habits- it is taking one step forward but then two steps back. Breaking the bad habit could be the game-changer that you are desperately needing.
Here are 10 of the worst habits that are holding you back from success:
1. Waiting for the ‘right’ moment
How many times have you said, “I’m just going to wait until I have enough money saved up,” or “I need to research more.” As the Chinese proverb goes, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”Stop waiting for the unicorn and take the bull by the horns now. Any action is better than no action.
2. The approval of others
While it is important to receive validation for your work, constantly seeking that pat on the back from others will get you nowhere. Do not feed into the ego of your ever-needy self-esteem. It is nice to receive good comments on your work. But do not mix up what is good for the ego for what is good for your productivity.3. The need to always be perfect
Perfectionism is crippling. By all means strive for excellence and seek to produce the best product you are able to deliver. But spending far too much time on any task can become detrimental when you have people waiting for you to deliver. If your work meets their expectations, then drop the product. If you exceed it, even better. But do not keep them waiting too long. You could spend an eternity improving a product.4. Giving too much respect
Even Einstein made mistakes. Just because someone is in a prominent position, it does not mean they have all the answers. This habit cripples many people who listen to ‘respectable’ figures who are in a completely different field to them.How many times have you seen an actor endorsing a product they know nothing about and people listening just because they are famous? Terrible habit.
5. Germophobia
It should not only be great leaders that aren’t afraid of getting their hands dirty, but anyone striving after success. Getting your hands dirty means engaging in a task that is outside of your responsibility.Win the respect of others by doing something beyond your duty.
6. Not learning from people ‘less’ than you
Pride is like putting poison into your own glass of water. Great knowledge can come from anyone. But if you simply shut someone off because they do not have a PhD or they are not a CEO, you are potentially robbing yourself of a golden nugget. You never know what kind of experience a person has or who the person may be connected with.7. Rushing the last look
You are so excited with finishing your work that you just want to ship it straight out the door without giving it a final once-over. This is the Achilles Heel for most writers. But what separates a good writer from an average writer is patience- many writers will let an article sit overnight and then make more edits in the morning before sending it. This applies for other industries also, take time to give it one last thorough check. Even get someone else to have a look before you ship or hit the send button.8. Not being vulnerable
It is easy to feel the need to put on a mask in your career, particularly if you are in leadership. No doubt there is a clear line that needs to be drawn between employers and employees. But you need to take off the iron suit every now and then.Admit to making mistakes, make apologies when you are in the wrong. You will be respected.
9. Too stubborn to let go
While grit, tenacity, and perseverance are all great qualities, they can be crippling when they are directed toward the wrong goal. This is difficult with any project that you have poured your heart and soul into. But if it is not profitable nor bringing you closer to your goal, then you need to recognize when you are being stubborn and let go. Treat any humiliation like water off a duck’s back and direct your energy toward the next project.10. The contentment plateau
There is a dark side to being satisfied with your work and accomplishments. Being content and comfortable is the enemy of improvement. Take time during your journey to stop and smell the roses, but do not let be left standing there when the roses are long gone.Keep setting the bar higher. Knock down a goal, celebrate it, move on.
On a final note, Samuel Johnson gives a great warning on the crucial need to break detrimental habits – “The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.” If you are suffering from any of these 10 toxic habits, then you need to nip it in the bud today.
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Skip The Hedge Fund: We Need Young People To Take Risks And Build Inspiring Things
That’s success and the American way. And yet how excited are you about Cole’s trajectory? Think about it for a second. I’ll admit that I’m not too psyched about it, even though I have friends at hedge funds who are very intelligent, stand-up guys and even philanthropists, and I know that hedge funds are positive in that they provide diversified investment opportunities to large pools of capital.
My lack of enthusiasm comes down to a few things. If Cole successfully analyzes an opportunity for the hedge fund and it invests slightly more effectively, that will be a win for the fund’s managers and its investors. But there will very likely be an equivalent loss on the other side of the investment (whoever sold it to them makes out slightly less well for having undervalued the asset). It’s not clear what the macroeconomic benefit is, unless you either favor the hedge fund’s investors over others or have a very abstract view toward capital markets working efficiently.
Cole is almost certainly very smart. But what has he done to merit his almost immediately elevated stature in life? He’s never hazarded anything. He hasn’t demonstrated any outstanding character or virtue, unless you consider studying math and being really smart intrinsically virtuous. He’s never had to go against the grain or go out on a limb. His rewards seem a little bit exaggerated for his accomplishments.
Finally, Cole’s life is very quickly going to become quite different from that of the vast majority of humanity. His housing, education, and professional circles will take him into rarefied air. He’ll donate to causes and he’ll retain an intellectual interest in policy matters. But his experiences are going to be wildly divergent and probably make it tougher for him to understand others’ customary everyday concerns and struggles over the coming years. Ultimately, Cole’s pursuits don’t reflect a sense of value creation, risk and reward, or the common good.
Not to say that Cole’s not a good dude. I have no idea. I’ve never met him. And if your daughter got engaged to him five years from now you would probably think she was all set (and your grandkids would be good at math).
Our culture of achievement has grown to emphasize visions of success that are, for the most part, fairly predictable. Cole skipped a couple of steps. The basic plan is to go to Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, or the like, then maybe to a top-ranked business school, then back to banking, consulting, private equity, hedge funds, or a name-brand tech company. Or maybe go from law school to top firm to partner or in-house at an investment firm, and live in New York, San Francisco, Boston, or Washington, DC.*
Again, these institutions and roles are necessary, and they’re natural developments in our economy. We need them. But we need people doing other things too. We need people willing to take risks and, yes, to occasionally fail. Like real-world consequences fail. We need people committed over extended periods of time to creating value, no matter how hard that is. We need people who care deeply about the work they’re doing.
Imagine someone who you think could stand to take on some risk--someone well educated who would always have something to fall back on, whose family might have some resources so he would be unlikely to starve. And this person would probably be young and free of major life obligations. Someone sort of like... Cole.
What’s interesting is that many of the people I meet who are young, highly educated, and from good families are among the most risk-averse. They feel like they need to be making progress along a ladder with each passing month or year. Their parents have often set high expectations for them. They measure themselves each period against their peers, who are generally following various well-defined paths.
Yet, as Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, and others have pointed out, remarkable careers are unlikely to advance in a straightforward, linear fashion. They are more likely to contain breakout opportunities that lead to unusually rapid gains (and, of course, relative dips and plateaus).
We need smart and hardworking people to build businesses around the country as much as or more than we need them to do anything else. We need more intelligent risk takers and value creators who see their communities reflected in the work they do. We need to restore the culture of achievement to include value creation, risk and reward, and the common good so that more of our top people are in position to create new enterprises and opportunities.
If we succeed in this, our best and brightest will build the engines of future economic growth. If we don’t, our talent will continue to heed purely market-based incentives, our economy will likely continue to underperform, and our culture will become more and more bifurcated.
I just had a son. I’d like him to be very well educated. But I don’t want him to necessarily enter a parallel universe where everyone is smart, well paid, and well dressed while the rest of the country wonders where the jobs went.
This is easy to say, but very hard to achieve. People like Cole have every factor turning them toward their current choices; they’re heavily recruited and offered money, prestige, training, a network, community, and opened doors. Expecting people like Cole to completely ignore these inducements is unrealistic.
What would the ideal be? There’s a renewable energy startup in Providence, Rhode Island, called VCharge that probably could have used Cole too. Its chief science officer, Jessica Millar, has a PhD in math from MIT. VCharge is trying to make our energy grid more efficient using energy storage and transmission algorithms. It’s not a sure thing, but if it succeeds we’ll all be better off for it.
How could you get Cole to head to VCharge instead of to the hedge fund? First, you would hope that immediate income maximization is not the main driver--maybe Cole has a longer time horizon, believes he can make money down the road, and thinks that tinkering with the power grid sounds interesting. Maybe he even has an instinct toward value creation, building things, and having an impact. And second, you could employ resources to recruit him and offer him prestige, training, network, a community, and open doors to head in that direction. You could make it a rational, principled choice as opposed to a vague hope that he decides to do something value creating.
One entrepreneur I met said, “You don’t want to be in the army, you want to be an arms dealer.” He meant that you want to build a business that doesn’t rely upon someone winning or losing but that would benefit from supplying both sides (say, a component manufacturer like Qualcomm that sells to all smartphones, as opposed to a smartphone manufacturer that has to duke it out in competition with the others).
The quote sounded smart, but I’ve concluded that if our young people all follow his advice, we’re sunk.
One reason the finance business is always busy is that it functions much like the arms dealer. You don’t need to figure out precisely who’s going to win or lose. You wait until a business gets to a certain point, and then you help them access capital in the form of equity or debt, give them a credit line, and help them get acquired. And if a company goes down, you’re there to assist with reorganizations, divestitures, and bankruptcies.
Yet the real innovation and value are being created by the fighters who are forming little squads and cobbling together businesses. Some fail, some succeed. If they succeed, they wind up building an army that’s providing new software, better services, tastier food, or whatever else the world needs. They also create organizations that form the character of the people in the army who believe in what they’re doing.
Which would you rather have, better arms dealers or better fighters? And which should our young people want to be?
Personally, I always dreamed about going into the woods and fighting the dragon, not selling the guy a sword.
The strength of group work
Once a US president went out to see the situation of the city. Somewhere a group of soldiers was trying to lift a large branch of a tree from their way.
The Corporal was standing by their side instructing them to work harder, but they were unable to move it.
A stranger was riding on his horse and he observed what was going on. He said to the Corporal – “if you help them they will be able to move it. Why don’t you help them? ”
The Corporal replied – “That is not my job, I am the Corporal. It is their work, they should do it.”
The stranger did not hesitate a moment, immediately he dismounted from his horse, and helped the group of the soldiers to move that log.
This additional strength helped them to move the log. After moving it, the stranger mounted his horse and said to the Corporal – “Next time you need to move some heavy thing and you need a help, call for the Commander-in Chief” and went away his way.
It was then that the men realized that the stranger was none other than George Washington – the first President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief of the army.
Author Unknown
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