My Startup Has 30 Days to Live, a raw, uncensored look at a startup going down told by a guy who takes responsibility for everything that’s gone wrong.
A raw, uncensored look at a startup, going down, told by a guy who takes responsibility for everything that went wrong.
In the research for our book the superacheivers we spoke to told of us past failures. What set them apart was their honesty about how they had contributed to their own failures. Because they challenged their beliefs, they were able to reinvent themselves and find entirely new ways of approaching their work. (Which we wrote about here.)
On the Tumblr blog, My Startup Has 30 Days to Live by an anonymous author about an unknown company, we are witnesses to a moment of real-time failure. What strikes us is the author’s brutal honesty about what has gone wrong. He is in the throes of defeat so he doesn’t yet have any answers about how to reconfigure his strategies—but based on how important we found that self-assesment is to success we would guess that he has a good shot at eventually sorting out what went wrong and figuring out how to do it differently the next time.
Astronomer, Jill Tarter, the TED Prize–winning, former director of the world’s most ambitious search for alien life at the Center for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research, offers SETI’s 9-point plan should an extraterrestrial attempt to communicate with us.
Just over 30 years ago this month, E.T., The Extra-Terrestrialhit the big screen and made everyone feel warm and fuzzy about aliens with E.T.’s sweetly urgent message about wanting to “phone home.”
This summer, Hollywood alien fare paints a far gloomier picture with a deadly alien monster in After Earth, a zombie invasion in World Z, giant robots in Pacific Rim and more robot invaders in The World’s End.
So what do the experts really think?
We asked astronomer, Jill Tarter, the TED Prize–winning, former director of the world’s most ambitious search for alien life at the Center for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research, who we interviewed on How to Find Extraterrestrial Life for our book on success. Tarter gave us SETI’s 9-point plan should there be an extraterrestrial attempt of any kind to contact us: Continue reading “What Will Happen If E.T. Phones Us?”
A recent U.K. study showed that the average office worker spends around 16 hours in meetings each week. That’s over 800 hours a year, for a grand total of 4 years of your life over your career. Here are 10 strategies to get your office meeting off life support. Plus a bonus tip on meetings from Mark Zuckerberg.
Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, Nilofer Merchant, Clay Shirky, Valentina Rice, Guy Kawasaki and others, know about getting things done, being productive and keeping a crowd engaged. So when they talk, we should listen.
A recent U.K. study showed that the average office worker spends around 16 hours in meetings each week. That’s over 800 hours a year. For a grand total over an entire career of–are you sitting down?–37,440 hours of meetings. That’s more than 4 years of your precious time.
There are few tried and true strategies for running productive meetings: Be prepared, have a leader, an agenda, a fixed time to start and stop, a conclusion and plan to follow up. But if we have to sit around in a windowless conference room for 9,000 hours, can’t we come up with something more . . . engaging?
On June 17th we had the great fortune to be invited to speak at The Science of Success Symposia at Harvard where scientists discussed who or what succeeds and why.
Cambridge, Mass just may be one of the world’s Ground Zeros of Success
Imagine over a dozen brilliant scientists who have been exploring concepts of success—from why some hashtags go viral to why certain types of leaders can save or destroy the organizations they lead—being brought together for one day to share their knowledge. Continue reading “The Science of Success”
Congratulations, after running on fumes for years—pulling all nighters, consuming Adderall and cramming for your exams—you’ve finally made it. You’ve finished school and earned your degree. But before you’ve even had a chance to catch your breath everyone’s asking, “So, what’s next?” To arm you in the coming struggle to pursue your post-graduate goals it may help to take a look at some proven practices from real life.
Congratulations, after running on fumes for years—pulling all nighters, consuming Adderall and cramming for your exams—you’ve finally made it. You’ve finished school and earned your degree. But before you’ve even had a chance to catch your breath everyone’s asking, “So, what’s next?”
To arm you in the coming struggle to pursue your post-graduate goals it may help to take a look at some proven practices from real life. These core practices come from over three-dozen superachievers who we interviewed for “The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It Well,” including actor Alec Baldwin, Zappos’s CEO Tony Hsieh, sports icon Yogi Berra, Dog Whisperer Cesar Millan, and Laura Linney. Continue reading “5 Tips for Graduates From Superachievers”
George Clinton has been in the business for 60 years, and is still going strong. The founder and shamanistic frontman of the seminal funk bands Parliament-Funkadelic and the P-Funk All Stars reflects on his long career and shares lessons he learned along the way.
He’s been in the business for 60 years and he’s still growing strong. The founder and shamanistic frontman of the seminal funk bands Parliament-Funkadelic and the P-Funk All Stars reflects on his long career, and shares lessons he’s learned along the way.
George Clinton was born in an outhouse in North Carolina in 1941.
At 13 he persuaded four friends to form a doo-wop band, the Parliaments. Years later Clinton moved the band to Detroit to try to get signed by Motown. But it was too late. The ’60s, with its cacophonous rock ’n’ roll, race riots and psychedelic drugs, had changed Clinton. “One day I put on a sheet and cut my hair in a Mohawk and walked around town,” he said. “I thought if nobody kicks my ass or arrests me, we’re gonna take this craziness to the stage.”
Within a couple of years, Clinton had become a grand funk provocateur. Under his management style of anarchistic humanitarianism, the musicians of his sprawling funk collective have flowed in and out of the bands that Clinton formed, splintered and merged, putting on outrageous shows and recording music that reflected America’s counterculture and black consciousness. Now in his 70s and still touring with the P-Funk All Stars, Clinton’s musical legacy that began in the era of doo-wop is a still a staple of the era of hip hop. Prince once said of Clinton, “They should give that man a government grant for being so funky.”
1. Someone has to be the ringleader. I was always pushing something. I was just a kid when I started our little doo-wop group, the Parliaments because we were all in love with Motown. I’d go into New York City, knocking on doors to try and make the deals. After we got our hit “(I wanna) Testify,” I moved the band out to Detroit because I wanted us to be the Temptations. Years later we had so many people coming and going on different labels with different acts, I got us our own studio and label. Sure it felt like responsibility, but the guys always left it for me to do all the business stuff. Someone’s got to be in control and if you know what you want, it might as well be you. Continue reading “The Mothership Connection: Funktastic Career Tips From Funk Legend George Clinton”
Join us June 18th at 7 PM for an Art of Doing talk, reading and book signing at the Harvard COOP.
We will be talking SUPERACHIEVERSand ways to think about success, reading from the book and signing copies at:
The COOP at Harvard Square on Tuesday June 18th at 7 PM.
Please join us!
Buy “The Art of Doing” here. Signup for “The Art of Doing” free weekly e-newsletter. Follow us on Twitter. Join “The Art of Doing” Facebook Community. If you’ve read “The Art of Doing” please take a moment to leave a review here.
