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Don’t simply “communicate” with others, but find ways to authentically connect with others.
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Use the right toolkit of people skills, conceptual skills, judgement and character that helps them succeed in finding new opportunities and re-framing setbacks to their advantage.
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Swing for the fences when a big, fat pitch of opportunity comes their way.
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Know when to lighten up and maintain perspective.
How successful people make themselves luckier
How successful people make themselves luckier
Among the lessons in the book, the luckiest people:
Interesting stuff. The book is called Be Luckier in Life by Craig Forman.
How positivity affects success
How positivity affects success
The positive quotient (PQ) is, according to some research led by Shirzad Chamine, who graduated from the Stanford School of Business in 1988, is a more revealing factor of success than IQ or EQ.
Here are some interesting tidbits from the article:
Psychologists have long observed a human tendency to attend disproportionately to the negatives, since our ancestors’ survival was aided when they noticed threats.
And:
If negativity aids survival, positivity makes it possible to thrive. As a result, people with higher ratios of positive to negative emotions are more likely to flourish in life, experiencing better health, more satisfying relationships and greater professional achievement.
A secret formula for designing successful Kickstarter campaigns
A secret formula for designing successful Kickstarter campaigns
On average, they were mentioned in 73 tweets (compared to an average of 20 for failed campaigns), they had an average of 262 backers (compared to just 25 in failed campaigns), their average goal was $9,600 (compared to an average $35,000 for failed campaigns), and successful campaigns received 217% of goal funding (compared to 11.4% in failed campaigns).
Vincent Etter, a PhD candidate from Switzerland has decided to make a website called Sidekick in which the probability of success of Kickstarter campaigns is measured in realtime.
Take a look if you ever want to start a Kickstarter campaign.
Coyle tells the story of Simon Clifford, a gym teacher from Leeds, England, who traveled to Brazil in 1997 to better understand why the Brazilians were so good at soccer.
While conventional wisdom had held that the main factors were poverty, soccer as a dominant national sport and a good climate, Clifford found that until the late 1950s, the Brazilians were not a soccer powerhouse. But during that decade, Brazil became obsessed with a type of indoor soccer called futsal. The game is played with a smaller, heavier ball in a much tighter indoor space. Because the ball is heavy and small, it can’t be kicked in the air easily. As a result, precision in passing is key.
In one minute of futsal, the average player passes six times as much as in a minute of regular soccer. And in soccer, passing precision is key in separating great from good. So inadvertently, the Brazilians were acquiring the right soccer skills through futsal in a much more deliberate way than if they had been training on large, outdoor fields. In 1958, Brazil won the World Cup, beginning a dynasty of soccer domination.
Asking whether 10000 hours of practice can help achieve entrepreneurial excellence, Jon Auerbach of Charles River Ventures tell us this story. The upshot is that sometimes, practice isn’t deliberate; so perhaps you have been practicing for something but you are not aware of it yet.