“Did you guys see my new shoes? What do you think?”, I asked my colleagues jokingly at our last meeting. They hadn’t noticed anything, because I was wearing the exact same shoes as before, only fresh out of the box. I buy the same pair of shoes every 9 months or so. I do the same with my t-shirts, sweaters, and pants. Why? Because I find it more efficient and less time-consuming. I don’t have to think about what to wear in the morning, I don’t have to iron clothes, or organize them.
“Doesn’t it get kind of boring? I…
On a bright afternoon in 1958, 11-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger was getting home from school in his native Austria, in the city of Graz. He was walking by a small convenience store when a magazine cover caught his eye. He walked inside to take a closer look. It was a bodybuilding magazine, and on the cover was Reg Park, then 3-times Mister Universe. Upon reading the magazine, young Arnold fell in love with the world of bodybuilding. He could see in it an escape to the life that almost certainly awaited him, and that he didn’t want any part of.
You…
The year was 1990, and Will Smith owed $2.8 million to the IRS. Not a pretty number, especially considering he had spent most of the money on cars, jewelry and his entourage. There was not much left to account for. Smith had just enjoyed a hell of a ride as one half of the hip-hop duo DJ Jazzy & The Fresh Prince. They went on tour all over America, won multiple Grammies, and kept making hit after hit. …
I’ve been blogging for a year and a half now, and anybody who ever gave a serious shot at blogging will tell you it requires a ton of work. You need to write a lot (like, a lot) in the beginning. If you have your own website separate from Medium, you have to maintain that too. You always need new ideas for content, whether articles or downloadable material… And you often need to do all that next to a regular job (to pay the bills).
I like to think I managed fine up to this point, but there’s always more…
If you want to make more money than average, you need to see it as a side effect of success, not an end goal. Whatever entrepreneurial projects you may have lined up for the upcoming year, know that 2021 is going to be a very challenging 12 months.
The International Monetary Fund expects the economy to shrink this year, and the world GDP to lose 6.5 points. These times are unprecedented, worst than the 2008 financial crisis.
In spite of all this, I’m not the pessimistic kind, and I still believe that just like making it in 2020 was still…
“Mister Edison, what does it feel like to have tried and failed over 1,000 times to light up an incandescent light bulb in the hope that it would last for days?”
The whole press room went silent. Edison took a deep breath, as if he was deeply pondering the question. He answered:
“I haven’t failed 1,000 times. I’ve just found 1,000 ways that won’t work. I have found 1,000 ways to not light up an incandescent light bulb.”
The year was 1879, and Thomas Edison was giving a press conference at his Menlo Park laboratory facility. …
“What about the coding? And putting the whole thing live? How are you going to do that?” my friend Lance asked.
We had been talking about my new project for over an hour, and although he thought is was nice, he wasn’t sure I could manage it all by myself.
“Well, I can code a descent website” I answered. “Plus, there are tons of drag-and-drop editors nowadays, which make it a lot easier to build the whole thing.”
“Okay, and how do you put it live, or do the design?” Lance insisted.
“I’ve done that a dozen times when I…
“Make no mistake, what’s happened recently is due to one thing and only one: a major shift in mindset.”
The virtual meeting room went quiet for 5 seconds. A 30% quarter-to-quarter growth, our best quarter of the year, the biggest contract we ever signed, shares soaring… “What is happening? What are we doing right? What have we changed?” Our CEO had asked 5 minutes ago. Now, Alex had taken over the sound waves of our Zoom meeting to answer, and his speech was about to go down as one of the best of the year. He continued.
“A belief that…
Over one year ago, Mark Cuban sat with Wired to answer questions about building a successful business, making money, and best practices in general. If you don’t know who the guy is, he became a billionaire towards the end of the 90s thanks to the sale of his company Broadcast.com. It was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in stock. Cuban also bought a basketball team, a chain of 58 movie theatres, and invested over $33 million across 151 deals on the TV show Shark Tank. …
“I learn from my mistakes. It’s a very painful way to learn, but without pain, the old saying is, there’s no gain.” — Johnny Cash
It’s been a rough year for everybody. Although 2020 is finally coming to an end, the second wave of the pandemic is now hitting harder than ever, and many countries are implementing new restrictions likely to last into the first 2 months of 2021. Does this mean that next year will only be 10 months long? It all depends if you look at the glass half empty or half full.
No matter how good or…