Surround yourself with excellent people: Matt goes out of this way to point out that this is not “hire excellent people”. I think this is really important for freelancers, and entrepreneurs who don’t necessarily have the budget or need for employees in the traditional sense. As the saying goes, “show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future”. As an entrepreneur, you don’t have to hire excellence. You can surround yourself with excellent advisors, excellent suppliers, excellent mentors and yes, excellent (entrepreneurial) friends.

Make your decisions be great: Again, notice that this is not “make great decisions”. I think the key is that you have to be courageous enough to make a choice and put a stake in the sand. You then move forward and don’t look back second guessing or having regrets. Just choose that where you are is the place to be.

“…act like wherever you are, that’s the place to be."

-Mike Damone, Fast Times at Ridgemount High

Here’s the full video:

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Over the years, I have developed Brick’s Law of Time Estimation. It works like this: when asked how long it will take to do x, think about it for as long as is practical, but don’t stress over the estimation. If you only have a few moments to come up with an answer, you can rely on your subconscious and just go with how long you intuitively think it will take. If you have time to put pen to paper, you might look at past experience, factor in the resources available, add a buffer for contingency, etc. In any event, by all means do your due diligence, but don’t stress over whether you considered everything or not. Let’s say you guessed that x will take you y (minutes / hours / days / whatever). Your final, best estimate will be as follows:

Time to do x = 2y

That’s it! Take your best guess and simply multiply that by 2. You’d be surprised how accurate this method can be.

Seriously, I have seen project management books that suggest calculating such an estimate as follows:

Time to do x = 3((t/r)^0.333)

where t is the overall level of effort in units of time per resource, and r is the number of resources. Wow – how does one even attempt to take a number to the power of one third in their head when they are just planning a trip to the store? My method is better because it is simpler. I win. Intuitively factor in the resources at hand into your best guess and multiply by 2. What could be easier?

Let’s run through an example: Your friend telephones, “how soon can you be over here?”. You start thinking to yourself “well, she’s about a 15 minute drive away, and I need 5 minutes to wash up before I leave, so I could be there in 20 minutes”. Wrong! Where’s the time to find your keys? Where’s the time to account for the traffic signal being down and having to wait through some unexpected traffic? Where’s the buffer for anything else Murphy throws at you? This is what you say: “I can be there in 40 minutes.” You put down the phone. You wash up, and you actually have your keys, but you can’t find your cell phone. You call your cell from the home phone to locate it by ring tone, and so what if it takes an extra 5 minutes. No traffic problems, but you realize you need some cash along the way – no problems, just stop at an ATM, you’ve got loads of time. You get to your friend’s place 34 minutes after you put down the phone. You are happy and relaxed. She admires your promptness, your respect for her time, and how you are one calm, cool and collected person. You achieve time management greatness.

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We have the knowledge and intuition to maintain health, but we ignore it by taking ourselves out of the present. We plan meal times instead of eating when we are hungry. We go on diets instead of living healthy. We have deferred life plans instead of choosing and doing our passion.

Source: The Huffington Post

The last part really resonates with the whole 4-Hour Workweek philosophy. It’s a great article, and by the end of it, you’ll take up yoga.

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So part of my friend job is to identify manufacturers that currently do not have distributors in the US Northeast or Eastern Canada. Given the popularity of this territory, these manufacturers would typically be smaller, or new, or perhaps overseas.

In the course of this identification process, my friend contacts Manufacturer X using the number provided on their web site. A receptionist answers. The conversation goes something like this:

FRIEND: Hi, I am wondering if I could speak to the person responsible for sales in the US Northeast or Canada.

X: Why?

FRIEND: I would like to explore the possibility of distributing your products in these territories.

X: We do not sell through distributors.

FRIEND: I see. So you must have a salesperson or salespeople handling this area already.

X: Yes, we have a gentleman that covers this territory.

FRIEND: Would it be possible to speak with this gentleman? Perhaps you could provide my contact info to him, or you could give me his number.

X: I’m sorry, but we do not sell to distributors who will resell our products.

FRIEND: But I am sure that you sell to customers, right? It would be great if you provide my contact info to him.

X grudgingly takes down my friend’s email and phone number.

There is one thing I forgot to tell you: my friend has been working in the industry serviced by the manufacturer for years. Besides working with some of the largest companies, my friend is often asked by his existing customers to source products even when he is not selling them himself, because his customers rely on him for information and advice, not just sales. Even if he cannot represent Manufacturer X, he might like to refer his clients to their salesman if he had a knowledge of their products and a relationship with their salesman.

You would be right to say that you were not aware of this critical piece of information when you read the passage describing the conversation between my friend and Manufacturer X. But that’s exactly the problem: either did the receptionist answering the phone. Surely the salesperson, whose job it is to sell would be the best person to qualify any contact that expresses a desire to speak with him! In this case, just speaking with my friend may have added the salesperson to my friend’s network on people to call on when trying to source something my friend does not sell. The receptionist is part of a department that I see alive and well in many companies: the Order Prevention Department. Do you have any Order Prevention Department stories to share?

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- Marianne Williamson

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However, that leads to one very important finding from my experiment with HIT: while I did not become Arnold, I certainly did not lose any size or muscle. What this means to me is that it is probably not necessary to spend a lot of time in the gym to have an effective weight training program. In fact, I would take this one step further: most people doing weight training probably over train, and get little benefit from so much time spent lifting. I look back at the hours I used to spend at the gym and I think it probably just helped me get injured (torn rotator and hamstring to name just a couple injuries I’ve sustained at the gym).

Back For The Attack

Dr. Mike provided a nice comment here a week ago, recommending The New High Intensity Training: The Best Muscle-Building System You’ve Never Tried by Ell Darden. I went out and bought it, and if you are at all interested in HIT, you might do the same. I’ve read a few chapters and it is really good. One part of the book that struck me was a description of Arthur Jones supervising a set of arm curls. It was an epiphany. One aspect of a set in HIT is that you choose a resistance level such that you lift to failure within a limited number of repetitions. I realized that when I was doing the HIT program I developed, I was not really lifting to failure, at least not the way it was dramatically described in Ell’s book!

So back to the gym this week to try again in earnest. Here’s what I did: lifted to where I would stop before and then squeezed out a couple more reps, sacrificing a little form if necessary. I then quickly dropped the resistance by 25% or so and squeezed out two or three more reps. Let me tell you, I was be in agony after each set! I also understood for the first time why the HIT people suggest only two or three training sessions per week. I could still feel the effects of my Wednesday workout in my legs and biceps as I started my Friday workout!

So I’m back!

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Story by Robert McKee: Storytelling is perhaps the premier instructional technique. In this book, McKee discusses the "substance, structure, style, and principles of screenwriting". Imagine the Gettysburg Address as a powerpoint instead of the story delivered by Lincoln and you start to understand the importance of being able to tell a good story.

Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell et al.: The subtitle says it all - "100 ways to enhance usability, influence perception, increase appeal, make better design decisions and teach through design". Packed full of tips, each presented in a about two pages!

Toothpicks & Logos by John Heskett: "Design in everyday life". Toothpicks as developed and used by Europeans and the Japanese are different. Read this book and you’ll know why.

Buddhism by Smith and Novak: A fantastic introduction.

CSS Cookbook by Christopher Schmitt: For the techno in me. Cascading style sheets are perhaps the most blatant place where the technology of the web and design meet. Anyone creating web sites and applications should learn CSS.

As Will Smith says, whatever problem you may have, whatever you need to know, someone has written about it (he also advocates running!):

So what are you reading these days?

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The basis of RTM is the concept of tasks. Like Sandy, tasks can be tagged, have a due date, include a url and a location. While Sandy used special tags like "@todo", RTM allows you to organize tasks into lists. So being the Getting Things Done wannabe I am, I created the following lists:

• Action Items
• Someday
• Waiting On

These are fairly self explanatory. Since RTM integrates with Google Calendars, I also have the following list where I add tasks with due dates that are part of the hard landscape of my schedule:

• Calendar

Lastly, I created lists for all my major projects. The one area where RTM really shines is their Smart Lists. Basically, any search you perform on all of your items can be saved as a smart list. It is like the concept of a "view" in a database - as tasks are added, modified and deleted, the smart lists are automatically updated to include the latest list of tasks that meet the criteria defined for them. This is great for readily identifying tasks in a given context. For example, I may have any number of items tagged as "errand". These items may exist in my Action Item, Someday, Calendar, or one of my project lists. A smart list based on all items tagged "errand" immediately provides me with a list of items relevant to that specific context! If I am about to get in the car to do some shopping, I can click on my "errand" smart list and see if I can knock off any tasks while I am in that context (you can also access RTM from your Blackberry and iPhone). So for me, context, which might include things like:

• Errands
• Phone Calls
• Home Maintenance
• At The Computer

are all handled via tagging and smart lists.

Improvements

The most glaring weakness with RTM, and this as a consequence of my having been using Sandy, is the ability to send RTM a list of tasks in a single email. When I am working through my email inbox (already well integrated), I like to fire off tasks to RTM. RTM allows you to add one task per email if you update RTM that way. That’s a severe limitation I would like addressed. I suppose I should spring for the pro account and submit this request. Money talks!

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Story Behind the Video

I should say my story behind the video: I follow Guy Kawasaki on twitter (feel free to follow me). He posts (or should I say "tweets" - I can’t stand the term) every 3 minutes as far as I can tell. I am quite sure he’s outsourced his twitter to virtual assistants. Last night he sent out a link to the above video. I thought it was cool, but I was too tired to write about it. This morning, I couldn’t find his "tweet", but I recalled him labeling the video "F-A-N-T-A-S-T-I-C", so I searched twitter for "F-A-N". And now we can see how these things go viral.

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