Monthly Archives: June 2009

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Mission Statement

My mission is to always seek to change for the better, for the betterment of everyone – that is the nature of love.

My mission is to always be truthful, to myself and others. To explore the depths and intricacies of the truth and not be satisfied with surface level complacency. That is the nature of truth.

My mission is to be compassionate, to seek to understand before seeking to be understood. To listen to others with a heart large enough to forgive the small, insecure voices inside inside everyone, including myself, and large enough to hear what they’re really saying, large enough to see the good in everyone reaching out to be recognized. That is the nature of compassion.

And for us to laugh together, loudly and often.

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Values

I value love. Love, above all, becomes truth, becomes friends and family, becomes compassion and laughter. Love is the upward spiral, the heart of all that is good. Love is that will to change or be changed for the better.

I value truth. Truth is being honest, to the best of our abilities, and most of all with ourselves. We must be at peace with the unknown and the uncontrollable in the world. Once we are truthful with ourselves, we can proceed with calm and power.

I value compassion. To know that there are those who are worse off and to reach towards them, offer a hand, to not get so caught up in our own lives and to step outside our boundaries for others. To try to understand others before making yourself understood.

I value laughter. Because, deep down inside, I know that for every stubbed toe, every broken heart, every tragedy, there is some combination of words that will make it better and bring a smile to your face.

I value smiles!

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Our good friend ROI

The rules on return rates are being rewritten in the web 2.0 era.  What was once scarce is now easily duplicable.  In writing a presentation for a new web marketing strategy, one of the linchpins of the pitch was that the return on investment had the possibility of being infinite.

    What?

    Yes, infinite.  By spending absolutely zero dollars on advertisement on new advertisement tools, you can reap disproportionate rewards.

    Gary Vaynerchuk did it.

    That’s the magic of social media marketing.  The exchange of value made between yourself and your customers is no longer subject to an “advertising tax.”

    Less tax is good for everyone.

    Think about it.
    Kung

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    Time and Tides 3: Parallelize

    Parallelize

    Parallelizing is not multitasking.  Parallelizing is the source of human success – it is what Stephen R. Covey terms interdependence.

    By sourcing tasks to other people and working on vision greater than its parts, you are parallelizing.  It is thousands of people in parallel that make things like the Linux operating system possible.  It is the basis of every team.

    It does, however, require a strong central vision – one task, or mission,  on which all the team members are working on.

    To parallelize effectively requires assessing your strengths and weaknesses honestly.  If you are not the most socially or organizationally savvy team member in a startup, then it’s probably best to leave the management to someone who is.  By capitalizing on strengths rather than weaknesses, by bolstering each others’ deficiencies, we rise to become more than the sum of our parts.

    The word parallel means running in the same direction without interfering.  Remember, the key to parallel is that there is more than one.  People in parallel means people moving in the same direction and covering twice as much ground.

    But it is the vision, the mission, that makes this possible.  If not for the guide posts, there would be no criteria for strengths or weaknesses.  It would be akin to staring into the nausea of Sartre’s void.

    So, do you have mission in life?

    Don’t get me wrong, this is not to get you to jump up and write one down at this moment.  And don’t expect your mission to remain unchanged throughout life.  In fact, count on it changing.  But as long as you are aware of some higher calling, or the absence of one, you are better than most people living their lives from day to day.

    Best,
    Kung

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    Time and Tides 2: Efficiency

    Improve Efficiency

    You can improve efficiency by organizing and multitasking.  Organization is key for quick access and staying on track, and the GTD system is a fine one.  I have found the overhead for the full GTD system to be too much, as one spends a great deal of time maintaining the madness, but you are welcome to try.  As David Allen said in his book Getting Things done, it can be merely seen as a collection of efficiency tips.  Take it for what it is – I would highly recommend at least one read-through with a notebook and pencil in hand.

    Multitasking is an arcane art.  I like to say that multitasking is doing two or more things twice as badly.  However, it can be done.  The key is to recognize successful combinations of activities.  For example, I enjoy biking.  I also enjoy listening to podcasts and playing tennis with a friend at a local tennis court.  Noting that the bike ride to the tennis court does not take much more time than if I were to drive a car, and that my podcast is about the same length of time, I can multitask by biking to tennis whilst listening to my podcast.  Similar time-saving activities include anything that can be left to do work passively while you do something else.  Set your computer to defrag while putting a load of laundry in the dryer and then turning the stove on to boil a kettle of hot water gives you a lot of time to catch up on reading.

    If you really must handle multiple streams of high priority tasks, though, it’s best to visualize the cue for the next step and the next step itself.  The Roman room memory trick is as valid today as it was for the Romans.  Go here for a review of the technique.

    The reason this works is because the human brain has a huge capacity for visual processing, a capacity that we tend to under-use.  For example, children have been taught to process huge operations on numbers, beyond 7 digits, by visualizing abacuses in their minds.  See  a video here:  Soroban: All in the Mind

    Sweet dreams,
    Kung

    PS, watch that video.  Really makes you wonder what else the human brain is capable of.

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    Time and Tides…

    …wait for no man.

    It’s almost frustrating to write these every day because I realize every night that I have failed to achieve some goal, and I go over what I could have done better, more efficiently.  Every night I find myself wishing there was more time in the day.

    There are a few ways to improve on this:

    • Increase available time
    • Improve efficiency
    • or Parallelize

    I’ll be going over each in the following days in more detail.

    Increase Available Time

    You can increase the time that’s available to you in multiple ways, and not necessarily by reducing the amount of sleep you get.  In fact, that should be a last resort – sleep is necessary for all the mental functions that you need to be successful, and should be a priority for any high achieving person.

    First, make sure you have your priorities straight.  If there’s something that absolutely needs to get done by 12am tonight, but you normally get an hour’s worth of casual reading in, you’ll obviously want to prioritize the task above your leisure.  Having your priorities straight, with a list of 4 or 5 top priority items that supersede any other daily task can keep your mind clear.  Make time for those 4 or 5 at the expense of others.

    Once you have your priorities straight, you can take breaks.  Yes, make more time by taking breaks.  I experimented with a polyphase sleep schedule once during college, wherein I slept 15 minutes out of every hour.  Yes, the Kramer sleep schedule, if you’ve watched Seinfeld.  What ended up happening was that I knew I was on a deadline – at xx:45 every hour, I knew I had to sleep for 15 minutes and thus I had to be productive in the given 3/4 hour.  Giving yourself scheduled breaks should have the same effect.  But this is not the only benefit.  A state of relaxation is necessary for someone to access certain neurons in the brain that are heavily tied to creative problem solving.  So you are not only making time for the replenishment of your faculties, you can enjoy yourself at the same time and replenish your soul.

    Finally, if  you must sacrifice sleep, do it with a certain eye to your sleep cycles.  Normally, everyone goes through two full sleep cycles including all the stages of sleep, including the oft-mentioned REM (rapid eye motion) sleep.  In fact, in between the two complete cycles, you are actually awake, you just most likely will not remember it in the morning.  To cut yourself off in the middle of a sleep cycle can be jarring – if you’ve ever been awoken by an alarm and gotten clumsily to your feet with a headache, the fine motor portion of your brain was probably dormant at the time your alarm went off.  So log your sleeping patterns, and how long you sleep, and aim for the half-way point if you do choose to get less sleep.  I warn you, though, it will eventually be very taxing.  See my post here for tips on getting through the day.

    I’ll be continuing this line of thought tomorrow.

    Good night and good luck,
    Kung

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    Priorities

    Everything has priorities.  For instance, I have less than twenty minutes to both write this post, shower, and get to bed.  I figure I can get five things.  Let’s prioritize:

    5.  ???  I don’t know, I’ll read something.
    4.  Write this post
    3.  Shower.
    2.  Sleep at 11.
    1.  Get.

    Back.

    On.

    Track.

    Only the best,
    Kung

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    Techniques for Lasting All Night Long

    This will be the second purposeful all-nighter I’ve pulled this summer.  The first all-nighter was purely for nostalgia’s sake.  During the second, I actually accomplished a great deal of things including listening to an entire lecture series on argumentation, biking to Deerfield, and successfully resetting my sleep schedule the following day.

    From my experiences, I’ve picked up a few habits that work for me:

    Engage the five senses
    Overstimulate any one of your senses by reading too much or listening to music for too long and you run the risk of reaching total system burnout, or habituation.  Basically, your brain starts to say, “I’ve done this too much already.  I give up,” and you start losing focus on why exactly you were trying to stay awake.  Vary your activities, whatever they may be, between aural, visual, tactile, olfactory, and the palate, and you will have a much reduced chance of falling asleep.  This may be due to varying your activities in general, but it works.

    Stay Active
    Humans are the only animals capable of chasing prey for long distances across unforgiving terrain.  It’s how our ancestors hunted, and some tribes still hunt, big game.  We may not be the fastest, but physiologically we were built for endurance.  Take advantage of this and walk around or bike if at all possible, unless it would be dangerously irresponsible to do so.  It will keep the blood flowing and the mind active.

    Be Comfortable
    A major folly of mine during the school year was to attempt to study in uncomfortably cold places, or to under-dress for the frigid AC.  This just increased my desire to wrap myself up and hibernate, an urge I was all too willing to comply with.  Swinging in the opposite direction is just as bad, though, as too much heat encourages drowsiness.

    …But Not Too Comfortable
    Obviously becoming too comfortable can lead to embarrassments like waking up on a couch late to class or a test you were attempting to study for.  If you’re working night shift, it can mean losing your job.  If you’re the type who can nod off in any place, try to engage the senses by doing something atypical.  For instance, last night I noticed I was getting a little too comfortable reclining in my seat and was beginning to nod off.  So I took off my socks and took a walk around on the cold hardwood floor, engaging my tactile senses in a way that shocked me out of my comfortable pre-sleep daze and provided me with a novel, if slightly uncomfortable sensation for my brain to play with.

    Socialize
    This is probably the easiest way to stay awake.  Socializing engages your brain much more fully than doing almost any other activity.  Human beings are social creatures, and are geared to respond well to social situations.  Last night, another friend was working on a project all night, so we contacted each other briefly every hour or so, and when it was all done and over with and the sun had risen, we met for coffee.  Which brings me to my last point.

    Stimulants
    I don’t normally agree with the use of stimulants, but they can be useful tools.  Used wisely and without a chemical dependence, they can be very helpful.  I have been running off a large cup of coffee since 8:30am and since I normally only drink water or tea, I have been oscillating wildly between being on the verge of falling comatose and bouncing from wall to wall.  According to the literature I’ve read, caffeine is best consumed in small doses throughout the day, and before 4pm in order to be able to get proper rest at night.

    As far as getting work done, I’ve seen people who can do work against their wills, but I am personally unable to do so without long breaks between short sessions.  I find it useful to do the kinds of work that engage different senses and piques my interest instead of enforced textbook readings.  Dictate instead of read silently.  Gesticulate, or draw what comes to mind.  If at all possible, my preference for learning on low sleep would be hands-on.  My hands remember what my mind forgets.

    Wish me luck.  I plan on going to sleep at either 10 or 11 tonight and getting a lot done between now and then.  And after that, strict adherence to a regular sleep schedule.

    Au revoir,
    Kung

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    Rise Together, We…

    …rise together.

    Looks like the List will have to wait until tonight.  For those of you who don’t keep in regular contact with me, the List is a list of skills and activities I have set myself to improve upon or do every day.  I don’t think I’ve ever accomplished all of them, but I feel it’s well within my grasp.

    Today, I feel energized and activated.  I’m working on something that I actually enjoy, putting together a marketing pitch.  I’m beginning to think I should have gone with marketing as a career choice – I really like the concept and execution of marketing strategies.  It’s not too late, I guess.

    By the way, Permission Marketing is a worthy marketing concept to test out; it resonates with how I feel marketing should work.

    In terms of entrepreneurial idols, Gary Vaynerchuk is a huge inspiration for me, as well as people like Guy Kawasaki, Michael Simmons, and any internet success story.  Articles by Lon Safko are a huge help (see the Social Media Bible) and inspiration as well.

    I have a little less than three hours to write my business plan.  I’m going to head to the library to finally actually do just that.

    Expect a bit more streamlined experience for your daily dose of 110% Kung to come in a few weeks!

    Best,
    Kung

    Reading: The Student Success Manifesto – Michael Simmons
    Listening to:  Minutes to Midnight – Linkin Park
    Humming: Rise – Flobots
    Mood:  Chipper