Six Keys to Excellence

1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That's when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
3. Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.
4. Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
5. Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It's also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
6. Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeisterhas found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you'll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

How to Create Comedy

Never forget : Craft and Technique will trump Talent. If you rely solely on talent, then, one fine day, when you lose "it", you won't be able to create anymore because you don't know the underlying process.

To write a joke, start off with words at random. For those words, find more than one meaning. Write a sentence using the word. What do people normally conclude when they hears this sentence? This first sentence is the setup.

Written jokes work best with twists and punchlines. Performed jokes can depend solely on exaggeration.

Unix Directory Recursive Copy File Damn the Link

cp -L -r

will copy the actual file instead of the link. Sometimes, the links will persist and annoy you ad nauseum.

Vancouver-Seattle Border Crossing Tips

Friday afternoon - bad idea - expect 2 hr wait in the heat while you inch along in your car. Canada is idle free - so I had to keep shutting off and restarting - almost 20 times total. Engine off means no AC. Go figure.

Get plenty of drinking water on hand unless you want to pay multiple dollars per bottle to get some from the guy with the pushcart.

Then, inside the building, no restrooms, no water, go figure.

That's Educational Art - Super Art

What do you think of Allan Gilbert's masterpizza? (1873-1929) "All is Vanity"

Ask Me about the MatchFaker

Can't lie. Things aren't going particularly well with this expense account. At the happy hour where we first discussed the prospect of business, all I heard was "We have to work together. The best thing about you is you've got good teeth." The teeth thing kept coming back again and again. Once she had me committed, it was, do sessions with Joann to develop "edge." No matter how nice you are, there needs to be that se.ual tension otherwise, there just isn't that chemistry. Really? If you knew this much, why not tell me this upfront so I could save the money I gave you and spend it on that instead and then I might be able to do without your services?

Anyhow, one of the early emails was :

I feel my service is well worth
My cost and I have offered you a discount and allowed payment arrangements
And we are still negotiating ?? This is not car sales and I feel like I have
Come down on my service above and beyond. I hope you understand where I am
coming
From. I really like you and want to represent you and I look forward to
talking:)


My take : honesty is the best policy and what goes around comes around. I haven't given substantially to charity in a while, so I can take a hit on writing this off. All part of the recent lifestyle upgrade I did. I did have second thoughts when I first visited her office - folders with peoples' names scattered on the floor near her computer. "My boyfriend wants to organize my computer, but I'm clueless about that." 


I probably should have been firm on the trial. Well, that's what I'm going to tell people from now on. If you get an email like this one, beware :


 I also really like you and feel confident that
I can
Get you in a relationship. I already have a couple of great girls picked out
and we
Need to move on this soon.


My experience - all three intros so far have been huge disappointments. One no-show, one really mean and one golddigger (it's always the one you least expect.) The "need to move soon" should have really given me pause.

Bossidy and Charan on Leadership

In a good evaluation, the leader looks closely at how the people under review met their commitments. Which people delivered consistently? Which ones were resourceful, enterprising, and creative in the face of adversity? Who had easy wins and didn't push for better results? And who met their commitments at the expense of the organization's morale and long-term performance.

Tamara Loew - The Ultimate Transformation

Going from 10 years of drugs and dealing to a motivational speaker who hobnobs with successful celebs and world leaders. How's that for a comeback?

Question is - how did she do it? The short answer is she started with helping those she understood best - people with her problem. First, she got motivated. Rest is H.

Adler - The Key to Business Success

1) Get a group of motivated, team-oriented people

2) Have a clear vision of where you're going.

I would add Jack's 2c : Establish a fair system - In a fair system, everyone knows where she stands and what she can do to improve. Metrics are the key. When you're in school, you have your GPA. But, how do you measure social success? What is a person's social GPA? Then, after school, what is your GPA? Salary? Maybe that's why recruiters want to know what your salary is.

Another good quote from Lou (paraphrasing someone else) : Work on your department, not in it. That's management - game plan and team building is management. How many times have you seen this being violated? The manager has to get in the lab and show the guy how to do something? Coaching is one thing - you have a training session where you point out common mistakes and ways to work smarter. Fixing problems on a live project is not coaching and it's not managing.

Lou Adler - Hire With Your Gut

Team skills, organizational ability, commitment, technical competence. Winners have a consistent track record of success.

There is nothing more important to your success than hiring great people. Even if you're not a manager, "hiring" is winning people over to your side, getting them to join your team.

Hire smart, or manage tough. I've never met anybody who could manage tough. No matter how hard you try, you can never atone for a weak hiring decision. A weak candidate rarely becomes a great employee, no matter how much you hope for improvement or how hard you try to train the person.

Reminds you of Jim Collins in "Good to Great" - the right people don't need to be managed. Guided, led, yes, managed - no. You need to get the right people on the bus first. Else, nothing matters.