A Code of Conduct

A few rules.

1.Never stop thinking. This is important. If someone ever says to you ‘You need to stop thinking so much,’ call them ignorant in your head and keep thinking deeper. It is this mentality that breeds stupidity and sheeple. Your mind is the most important tool you have, if you stop using it, it will atrophy. Question everything.

2. Stare into space blankly and don’t mentally punish yourself for doing it, even if it is for that split second. If you have a problem with staring blankly, think of it as daydreaming.

3. Root Beer sucks after having spicy food.

4. Everything is going to be just fine. If you worry about acne, you’re going to get a fucking pimple.

5. Don’t be afraid to talk about anything. You shouldn’t be afraid of reality.

6. Everyone is a hypocrite.

7. You are all original. Every life experience is case sensitive and unique. Every time you wake up or go to the bathroom or quote someone else, you are becoming more you than anyone has ever been.

8. Do pointless things. Don’t actively restrain or hide yourself from the redundant.

9. Stop rushing. Shut up and embrace the sound of silence.

10. Religion shouldn’t be taught, it should be found. No one should tell you what to believe except you. And while were on the subject…

11. Don’t be restrained by one religion. People change every moment of everyday. Minds grow and evolve. Religion has no law so feel free to mix and match. Make your own.

12. Going to the bathroom is not a right nor a privilege. it’s an act of nature.

13. Talking to yourself is healthy. Is there anyone that you have more in common with?

14. There is no such thing as time. The sun never sets or rises. Days and years don’t exist. There is only your life. Earlier today you were born and death is predicted later in the evening.

15. We will always be in a transitional phase. Look outside and know that everything will be replaced at some point. This existence is temporary.

16. Its not half empty or half full. Its half a glass.

17. Every now and then take something that you see everyday and try to see it in a different light. Renew its existence.

18. Be happy, but don’t force it.

19. You will always succeed in trying.

20. We are all crazy. Every person you read about in the history books had some kind of ‘disorder’, they just knew how to use it.

21. We are all about as similar as we are different.

22. Ideas are just as valuable as people. Why do you think we keep making people?

87. Numbers don’t have to go in order.

24. Words will always be just words. Love is just another four letter word, only the feeling is real.

25. Ask a child for advice. They may not know much, but they know what is important.

26. Prove you’re alive. Do anything from dancing in the supermarket to screaming ‘Fuck’ during a moment of silence. Remind the world you are still here.

27. Don’t take anything, even this, too seriously.

Source: www.tickshady.com/code_of_conductt/

The Thought-Patterns of Success

Your passion for your career can sabotage your attempts to succeed.

When you go from feeling energized, excited and in control of your work to feeling an overwhelming compulsion to achieve and produce, you’ve tipped from helpful harmonious passion into harmful obsessive passion.

But when you’ve grown accustomed to operating from a state of obsessive passion, you may want to act differently, but you just don’t know how. Your deeply ingrained mental and behavioral patterns naturally lead you toward seemingly uncontrollable compulsion to work. Paradoxically, these natural reflexes inhibit the quality of your professional output. And when you do make small attempts to change, like leaving the office on time, you experience withdrawal symptoms, which send you scurrying back to your familiar habit patterns.

Fortunately, there is hope. You can rediscover a life of harmonious passion by intentionally changing your behavior and by replacing harmful thought patterns with helpful ones. To help you with this process, I’ve disclosed the thoughts I most commonly see coursing through people’s minds when they feel stuck in a state of obsessive passion and offered suggestions on how to modify them.

READ MORE ON…Promise it’ll be a good read. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/04/the_thought-patterns_of_succes.html

Intelligence Is Overrated: What You Really Need To Succeed

Albert Einstein’s was estimated at 160, Madonna’s is 140, and John F. Kennedy’s was only 119, but as it turns out, your IQ score pales in comparison with your EQ, MQ, and BQ scores when it comes to predicting your success and professional achievement.

IQ tests are used as an indicator of logical reasoning ability and technical intelligence. A high IQ is often a prerequisite for rising to the top ranks of business today. It is necessary, but it is not adequate to predict executive competence and corporate success. By itself, a high IQ does not guarantee that you will stand out and rise above everyone else.

Research carried out by the Carnegie Institute of Technology shows that 85 percent of your financial success is due to skills in “human engineering,” your personality and ability to communicate, negotiate, and lead. Shockingly, only 15 percent is due to technical knowledge. Additionally, Nobel Prize winning Israeli-American psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, found that people would rather do business with a person they like and trust rather than someone they don’t, even if the likeable person is offering a lower quality product or service at a higher price.

With this in mind, instead of exclusively focusing on your conventional intelligence quotient, you should make an investment in strengthening your EQ (Emotional Intelligence), MQ (Moral Intelligence), and BQ (Body Intelligence). These concepts may be elusive and difficult to measure, but their significance is far greater than IQ.

Emotional Intelligence

EQ is the most well known of the three, and in brief it is about: being aware of your own feelings and those of others, regulating these feelings in yourself and others, using emotions that are appropriate to the situation, self-motivation,  and building relationships.

Top Tip for Improvement: First, become aware of your inner dialogue. It helps to keep a journal of what thoughts fill your mind during the day. Stress can be a huge killer of emotional intelligence, so you also need to develop healthy coping techniques that can effectively and quickly reduce stress in a volatile situation.

Moral Intelligence

MQ directly follows EQ as it deals with your integrity, responsibility, sympathy, and forgiveness. The way you treat yourself is the way other people will treat you. Keeping commitments, maintaining your integrity, and being honest are crucial to moral intelligence.

Top Tip for Improvement: Make fewer excuses and take responsibility for your actions. Avoid little white lies. Show sympathy and communicate respect to others. Practice acceptance and show tolerance of other people’s shortcomings. Forgiveness is not just about how we relate to others; it’s also how you relate to and feel about yourself.

Body Intelligence

Lastly, there is your BQ, or body intelligence, which reflects what you know about your body, how you feel about it, and take care of it. Your body is constantly telling you things; are you listening to the signals or ignoring them? Are you eating energy-giving or energy-draining foods on a daily basis? Are you getting enough rest? Do you exercise and take care of your body? It may seem like these matters are unrelated to business performance, but your body intelligence absolutely affects your work because it largely determines your feelings, thoughts, self-confidence, state of mind, and energy level.

Top Tip For Improvement: At least once a day, listen to the messages your body is sending you about your health. Actively monitor these signals instead of going on autopilot. Good nutrition, regular exercise, and adequate rest are all key aspects of having a high BQ. Monitoring your weight, practicing moderation with alcohol, and making sure you have down time can dramatically benefit the functioning of your brain and the way you perform at work.

What You Really Need To Succeed

It doesn’t matter if you did not receive the best academic training from a top university. A person with less education who has fully developed their EQ, MQ, and BQ can be far more successful than a person with an impressive education who falls short in these other categories.

Yes, it is certainly good to be an intelligent, rational thinker and have a high IQ; this is an important asset. But you must realize that it is not enough. Your IQ will help you personally, but EQ, MQ, and BQ will benefit everyone around you as well. If you can master the complexities of these unique and often under-rated forms of intelligence, research tells us you will achieve greater success and be regarded as more professionally competent and capable.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/keldjensen/2012/04/12/intelligence-is-overrated-what-you-really-need-to-succeed/?goback=.gde_4322397_member_110171872

9 Timeless Leadership Lessons from Cyrus the Great

Forget 1-800-CEO Read. The greatest book on business and leadership was written in the 4th century BC by a Greek about a Persian King. Yeah, that’s right.

Behold: Cyrus the Great, the man that historians call “the most amiable of conquerors,” and the first king to found “his empire on generosity” instead of violence and tyranny. Consider Cyrus the antithesis to Machiavelli’s ideal Prince. The author, himself the opposite of Machiavelli, was Xenophen, a student of Socrates.

The book is a veritable classic in the art of leadership, execution, and responsibility. Adapted from Larry Hendrick’s excellent translation, here are nine lessons in leadership from Xenophen’s Cyrus the Great:

Be Self-Reliant

“Never be slow in replenishing your supplies. You’ll always bee on better terms with your allies if you can secure your own provisions…Give them all they need and your troops will follow you to the end of the earth.”

Be Generous

“Success always calls for greater generosity–though most people, lost in the darkness of their own egos, treat it as an occasion for greater greed. Collecting boot [is] not an end itself, but only a means for building [an] empire. Riches would be of little use to us now–except as a means of winning new friends.”

Be Brief

“Brevity is the soul of command. Too much talking suggests desperation on the part of the leader. Speak shortly, decisively and to the point–and couch your desires in such natural logic that no one can raise objections. Then move on.”

Be a Force for Good

“Whenever you can, act as a liberator. Freedom, dignity, wealth–these three together constitute the greatest happiness of humanity. If you bequeath all three to your people, their love for you will never die.”

Be in Control

[After punishing some renegade commanders] “Here again, I would demonstrate the truth that, in my army, discipline always brings rewards.”

Be Fun

“When I became rich, I realized that no kindness between man and man comes more naturally than sharing food and drink, especially food and drink of the ambrosial excellence that I could now provide. Accordingly, I arranged that my table be spread everyday for many invitees, all of whom would dine on the same excellent food as myself. After my guests and I were finished, I would send out any extra food to my absent friends, in token of my esteem.”

Be Loyal

[When asked how he planned to dress for a celebration] “If I can only do well by my friends, I’ll look glorious enough in whatever clothes I wear.”

Be an Example

“In my experience, men who respond to good fortune with modesty and kindness are harder to find than those who face adversity with courage.”

Be Courteous and Kind

“There is a deep–and usually frustrated–desire in the heart of everyone to act with benevolence rather than selfishness, and one fine instance of generosity can inspire dozens more. Thus I established a stately court where all my friends showed respect to each other and cultivated courtesy until it bloomed into perfect harmony.”

There’s a reason Cyrus found students and admirers in his own time as well as the ages that followed. From Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to Julius Caesar and Alexander (and yes, even Machiavelli) great men have read his inspiring example and put it to use in the pursuit of their own endeavors.

That isn’t bad company.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholiday/2012/04/19/9-timeless-leadership-lessons-from-cyrus-the-great/?ss=sales-leadership

Share Your Own Job-Search Story (HBR Article)

Interesting Article: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/04/share_your_own_job_search_story.html

Point: “It’s nothing like scoring marks in university. It demands specific skills and you need to develop these skills to win the game.” 

Start now or else you’ll lose the game. 

Five Lessons from World Changers

Now is the time to change the world. The past decade has been one of remarkable transformation and seemingly endless crisis. We’ve seen hundreds of millions rise from poverty to the ranks of the middle class, but we face persistent and difficult problems like disease, economic recession, and financial turmoil. Correspondingly, we need leaders who are willing to address those challenges.

They exist. The Passion & Purpose MBA survey found that, among graduate business students at least, two of the top three reasons for choosing a workplace were “intellectual challenge” and “opportunity to impact the world,” and nearly 85% of those surveyed thought “business people are well-qualified to solve the most pressing problems in the world.”

But what would it take for us, as individuals, to be world changers? That’s the central question in John Byrne’s new book, World Changers.* In it, Byrne recounts discussions with 25 entrepreneurs who have changed the world — people like Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, and Richard Branson. Byrne focuses on allowing those people to tell their stories, but in reading them, I found several valuable lessons for world changers in the making.

1. Start with purpose: Perhaps the greatest common denominator amongst great world changers is the centrality of purpose in their organizations. Google’s mission is to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Whole Foods’ motto is “Whole Foods, Whole People, Whole Planet.” And Facebook’s mission is “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” This purpose is what serves as a compass for the company and its employees. Finding and articulating your purpose are critical to launching a world-changing enterprise.

2. You’re not too old: Too often, we view entrepreneurship as a young person’s game or something for which you must be uniquely suited. Rather, entrepreneurship is about having an idea and the courage to pursue it — no matter your age. Did you know that when Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank started Home Depot, they were 34 and 48 years old, respectively? Further, neither was an entrepreneur: Marcus was a former pharmacist, and both had just been fired from their jobs at Handy Dan Improvement Centers.

3. Seek advice: It’s difficult to start and grow a company in isolation, and mentorship and peer counseling are critical to maintaining your focus and direction. Find those who have been through your experience before and seek their guidance on the situation. Even great entrepreneurs like Howard Schultz seek advice when confronted with difficult situations. Schultz reassumed his leadership post at Starbucks, at least partially, as a result of a bicycle ride with Michael Dell. Schultz and Dell ran into each other vacationing in Hawaii, and during a three-hour ride along the Kona coast, Dell advised Schultz on how to handle Wall Street and the company if he resumed leadership at then struggling Starbucks.

4. Be the expert: Many MBAs, in particular, are tempted to launch businesses they know little about because they seem to have big “upside” — but to change the world it pays to be an expert. Find something you love, become an expert, and see what it would take to innovate in the space. Larry Page and Sergey Brin succeeded at Google at least partially because they were experts on search. To quote Page: “[W]e really benefited from being real experts…we understood all aspects of search. We talked to all the search companies. We really knew a lot about what was going on.” They didn’t know exactly how to bring their product to market or build a world-class organization, but they knew more about how to comb the web for useful information than anyone on the planet.

5. Start small: World-changing businesses are rarely world-changing from day one. Sometimes they’re not even fully formed concepts. Many groundbreaking entrepreneurs simply start with a small idea and grow with it as the idea evolves. If you’re waiting to launch your business because you can’t see the path to changing the world, you may be missing an opportunity to learn through experimentation. One of the most shocking lessons of World Changers was how few of these entrepreneurs started “big” or even with “big things” in mind. Oprah Winfrey launched her career as a TV reporter in Nashville and worked as a reporter of local talk show host until entertainment lawyer Jeff Jacobs encouraged her to create her own show and company. Richard Branson sold records out of the trunk of his car, and Michael Dell got into business for himself, upgrading personal computers from his college dorm room.

It’s a new year with new opportunities. Learning these five lessons is the first step to making an impact. How will you change the world?

Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/01/five_lessons_from_world_changers.html