Working on a new project

Inspired by all these reading on chasing your dream and pursuing your passion, I have taken a huge leap of faith and is exploring a project, full-time, Teachzer.com that provides education opportunities to learners, based on Singapore’s renowned Math & Science curriculum.

I’ll probably be blogging even less here at theoptimalist.com, but instead will concentrate more on Teachzer.com’s blog, Everyday’s a lesson, as soon as I get more content available on the site. Be sure to check it out!

How to be great at what you do

Just came across this article on Harvard Business Review Blogs. Felt it was very interesting and decided to post it here:

If you want to be really good at something, it’s going to involve relentlessly pushing past your comfort zone, along with frustration, struggle, setbacks and failures. That’s true as long as you want to continue to improve, or even maintain a high level of excellence. The reward is that being really good at something you’ve earned through your own hard work can be immensely satisfying.

Here, then, are the six keys to achieving excellence we’ve found are most effective for our clients:

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 Baumeister has 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.

Be afraid (of Google), Be very afraid……

Google’s obsession to be the number 1 web company and the world’s key source of information has taken to another stage with the launch of Google Buzz. With real-time search becoming a significant component of information, and that they even had to integrate Twitter results in their Google Search, they definitely had to own that piece of the pie.

There were so many rumors of Google wanting to buy Twitter (which was started by ex-Googlers and Google has a history of buying start-ups built by ex-staff) but the sale never happened, probably due to a ridiculous asking price. Some people may have forgot that they actually acquired Jaiku a couple of years ago that provided the same service. So it seems like Google’s new mantra is that “If you don’t sell me, we’ll built one, make use of our huge following, and crush you pieces”.

Google’s acquisition path in the social media area is starting to resemble that of Oracle’s in the enterprise IT side where they bought Peoplesoft, Siebel and most recently Sun. Perhaps as Google’s focus shifts even more to the enterprise web from the consumer web, they will start gobbling up web companies like CRM provider salesforce.com or ERP provider Compiere.

We’ll definitely have to wait and see how this fight against Twitter turns out and if David really gets to defeat Goliath.

Success is…

“Success is waking up in the morning, so excited about what you have to do, that you literally fly out the door. It’s getting to work with the people you love.

Success is connecting with the world and making people feel, it’s finding a way to bind together people who have nothing in common but a dream. It’s falling asleep at night knowing you did the best job you could.

Success is joy, and freedom, and friendship, and success is love.”

Brick walls weakened with the power of technology

“The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.” – Randy Pausch (1960 – 2008)

A while ago I was speaking to a group of physically challenged individuals in their late teens on the functions of a sales unit within the company and also the life of being a sales person. I started the presentation by posing a question, “Who plans to be a Sales person when they grow up” – nobody raised their hands.

I thought to myself, what may be the reason for this? I mean sales was never a popular choice amongst my peers when I was younger, but to get a “Zero” response was too much. Then it occurred to me that one of the possibilities was that they felt their disabilty may be a hindrance in this career path.

Seeing this response, I then completely overhauled my presentation and began talk to them about how technology has enabled us to sell even without having to meet with the prospect, the power of web presentation tools, and the willingness of consumers in these days to use self-serve tools (web videos, community forums) and purchase online without a physical invoice, and the willingness to do business on the phone.

Likewise, in the old days, regional expansion was limited by the capital a company has to build regional offices or for business travel. Right now with VOIP, the Web, Cloud Computing Applications and so much more, technology has reduced greatly the need for such expenses and global domination is no longer a dream that Fortune 500 companies can pursue.