Author: knjohn

This is the One Bad Habit Keeping You from Achieving Your Goals | Page19

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Winter is almost over. How many of your resolutions did you keep? Gretchen Rubin’s Better than Before presents a framework to help readers to understand their habits and to change them for good.

Thanks to the notorious fallibility of New Year’s Resolutions, if you’re like most people, chances are you’re not quite where you hoped you would be this time of year. Maybe you’ve held on. But statistics show that you probably haven’t.

Forming new habits is hard. We humans spend a lot of time trying to change ourselves, indeed, there are entire industries dedicated to selling self-improvement. But we rarely succeed. Why is this? According to Gretchen Rubin, this might be because we’re conceptualizing the whole thing wrong.

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Save Yourself Time With A Time Audit | Forbes

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downloadDo you need more time? For most people, the answer is a resounding yes.

Yet many of us waste time every day, or spend it on things that don’t make us satisfied. Time is a precious resource, so it is worth checking up on our spending now and again.

Do you know exactly where your time goes?

By doing a time audit we can boost our productivity. It’s a way we can improve our time management skills, and make sure that we are using our time for the things we want to spend it on.

Often, time management is a case of redistributing our time. After all, we know that we’ll get 24 hours a day, every day; no more, no less. Some people tend to somehow be able to do a lot more with that same amount of time. How do they manage it?

Have a look at where your time is going:

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Top 10 Happiest Countries Are All in Latin America | Live Science

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For the first time in a decade, the top 10 happiest countries in the world are all in Latin America, according to the 2014 Gallup Positive Experience Index.

Paraguay placed first out of 143 countries, with its people reporting the most positive emotions on a daily basis, according to the survey. Gallup researchers released the results for the United Nations’ third annual International Day of Happiness today (March 20).

To gauge happiness levels around the world, researchers interviewed about 1,000 people in each country, either in person or over the phone. All of the participants were age 15 or older, and answered questions about how happy they felt the day before.

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The Entrepreneur Lighting Up Communities in Need | Inc.com

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nokero_53176On a cold Denver night in 2010, Steve Katsaros walked past a building under construction that was lit up like a Christmas tree by incandescent bulbs strung along each floor, all powered by a diesel generator. “I wondered about all the fuel being used and the pollution caused by keeping those lights on,” he recalls. The next morning, Katsaros, then a patent agent at a law firm and a trained mechanical engineer, woke up and sketched a design for a solar-powered light bulb. Four days later, he filed for a patent.

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4 Qualities of Dogs That You Also Want in Your Customers | All Business

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You might think dogs are an unlikely source of inspiration for your customers, but you’d be surprised how similar they can be. I don’t mean to denigrate your customers! Quite the contrary. I think if customers were more like dogs in the following four ways, we’d all have more business than we could handle.

1. Loyalty

What’s the first quality you think of when it comes to dogs? Loyalty! They’re there with wagging tails, whether we feed them, walk them, or ignore them. And when we treat them well? That loyalty skyrockets.

You already know that having loyal customers is great for business. It’s easier—and cheaper—to get past customers to come back than to find new ones.  So consider ways you can build loyalty with your customer base.

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Tech Bubble? Maybe, Maybe Not | TechCrunch

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I’ve heard people wonder if we’re in a bubble with regard to startups. Is it as bad as the 2000 dot-com bubble? Might it actually be worse? I thought it would be worthwhile to look at the available data to see if we can figure this out with more than just a personal opinion. So I asked our engineering team at Google Ventures to dig into the bubble question and find out what the data say. In this post, I’ll share what I learned.

Back in the late 1990s, venture capitalists got very excited about the Internet. A whole lot of money was poured into some companies that failed rather spectacularly, and a lot of people lost a lot of money.

Fast forward to 2015. If you read the headlines about multi-billion-dollar valuations for companies like Uber (one of our portfolio companies), Airbnb and Dropbox, it’s easy to see why some people are feeling antsy. Is everyone irrationally excited about new platforms and economic models in the same way folks were excited in 1999? Or is this different? There are two sides to the case.

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Thanks to Google, TV Ads Are About to Start Watching You | WIRED

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GOOGLE IS ABOUT to make ads on television work just like ads on the web. Through Google, advertisers will know how many times their ads were viewed. They’ll be able to target audiences based on location and viewing history. In other words, TV advertisers will have access to the same audience intel online advertisers take for granted.

Finally, after all this time, your TV is going to know as much about you as your web browser.

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Bad Business Habits That Small Biz Owners Want to Break | Small Biz Trends

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Of all the bad business habits out there, which one would you most like to break? Micromanaging? Overspending? Procrastination?

Would it surprise you to learn that “wearing too many hats” is the bad business habit that 35 percent of business owners say they’d want to kick?

Yes, that’s right. Taking on too many roles and responsibilities is what more than one-third of small business owners said they want to change.

That was the top choice of bad business habits to break, in the sixth annual Brother International Small Business Survey, conducted by Wakefield Research.

We small business owners are notorious for wearing many hats. Apparently, quite a few of us do not see that as a good thing.

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  Ecommerce Product Description Writing Driving You Nuts? Here are 6 Ways To Describe Almost Anything | Getentrepreneurial.com

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There I was – stuck, staring at my computer screen and gritting my teeth. “All these calculators are virtually the same. All calculators add, subtract, divide and multiply.” I huffed, “How am I supposed to write different copy for 25 calculators that are all pretty much identical?”

Ever been there? Ever had several catalog or ecommerce descriptions or pages of copy to write that deal with products that are the same, but different? What’s the biggest problem? Knowing how to identify those all-important differences!

Strategy #1 – Create a List of Methods Used Before

One way to get around this would be to make a list of the different ways you have described products in the past. Then, you can simply refer back to your list for ideas. If you’ve written about USB speakers before, check your copy to see how you described them. Can some of that information be repurposed for current descriptions? Create your own cheat sheet.

Strategy #2 – Problem/Solution

What problem does the product solve? And for whom does it solve the problem? Here’s one example from Sauder:

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