Today is the last day of the decade. I still remember how my day was at December 31, 1999. The whole world was waiting for the new millennium. There were big celebrations all around the world. Some people worried that the computers would crash when the new millennium began. It’s hard to believe, but that day had been ten years ago! It’s amazing how fast time flies. How has your life been this decade? How are you today compared with you were ten years ago? Do you think you’ve been the best that you can be? Let’s ponder these questions as the new decade coming. And let’s make the new decade a much better one for all of us. Happy new year! Photo by mangloard
Note: This is a guest post by Mark Foo of 77 Success Traits If you’re leading a group of people towards success, you must learn how to motivate others. If you concentrate on understanding what motivates others and you meet the needs of these people, you’ll be on the right track for a positive and enlightening experience for all involved. Once a person’s base needs are met, they usually move on to working on certain needs of self fulfillment. For example, if someone is hungry, they won’t be able to concentrate on a critical thinking task. In this case you’ll need to make sure that this person has had lunch before the task needs to be completed. But how can you motivate them to complete certain tasks once base needs have been fulfilled? Try one or more of the following ways of motivating people: 1. Treat People Kindly. As a leader you need to treat the people helping you with the utmost respect and kindness. Hand out praise when it’s warranted. You might not know it, but it’s a big motivation booster when people are treated right. People enjoy knowing when they’re doing a good job and enjoy working with […]
Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be. Abraham Lincoln There are times in life when things don’t go as expected. Perhaps an important project of yours ended up in failure. Or you got laid off from your job. Whatever it is, it might make you depressed. But you need to get things back under control. You need to keep moving forward. For that, you need to make yourself feel better so that you can face the situation with a positive attitude. Here are some tips to make yourself feel better when you’re depressed: 1. Calm down Before anything else, calm yourself down. Don’t panic. Close your eyes and take a deep breath. You can only apply the tips below if you are calm. 2. Feed your mind with positive thoughts When you’re depressed, it’s easy to fall into a vicious cycle of negative thoughts. The negative cycle makes things look worse than they actually are. It’s important that you break this cycle so that you don’t become a victim of your own thoughts.
Do you want to make your career crisis-proof? Do you want it to thrive even in difficult times? The key is to be quick to adapt to changing conditions. Change is the only constant in the market and you are crisis-proof only if you can quickly adapt to new conditions. As I wrote in my post about learning and people skills, these quick-to-adapt people are called versatilists. But how can they be crisis-proof? And how can we be one of them? We will answer these two questions here. Wikipedia has a good description of versatilists: To illustrate this using a math phrase, the versatilist has a higher area under the curve rating. Think of a person having some level of knowledge/experience in 15 knowledge areas. That person may have a very high competency (score 5) in 3 areas, a medium level of competency (score 3) in 5 areas an introductory level of competency (score 1) in 4 areas and no competency (score 0) in 3 areas. This creates an area under the curve of 34. This is different from a specialist who may score very high in 1 area and have no competency in others. This is also different from […]
As you may know, Amazon has a best-seller list that shows the hottest books at the moment. I often browse it to find interesting books to read. Not surprisingly, the list is dominated by newly-published books. This makes me curious: is there a book that remains in the list years after its initial publication? If there is, then the book deserves a closer look. After all, the book has passed the test of time. So I went through the list to find non-fiction books that are at least three years old. As it turns out, there were only five books that met the criteria (out of 100 books). Here they are along with their years of publication and Amazon ranks (at this time of writing): 1. Mastering The Art of French Cooking (1961) – #41 This is the oldest book in the list (almost 50 years old!). The book actually holds two spots in the list; the box set edition holds #69. I don’t know much about cooking, let alone French cooking, but it seems that many people love it.