1) "If You Want to Get Better at Something, Ask Yourself These Two Questions" by Peter Bregman
Source: https://hbr.org/2018/11/if-you-want-to-get-better-at-something-ask-yourself-these-two-questions
[Quote] It was the last race of the ski season. My son Daniel, 10 years old, was at the starting gate in his speed suit, helmet and goggles, waiting for the signal.
But he wasn’t smiling. 48.37 seconds put him solidly in the middle of the pack.
Later though, I asked him how he felt about the race.
“I never get in the top 10.”
This is delicate terrain — coaching your own kids — and I chose my words carefully.
I had coaching ideas. Ways I could help him get faster. While I am an executive and leadership coach, I coach skiing on the weekends and I was a ski racer myself at his age. But I held back my feedback, hugged him again and told him I loved him. That’s what he needed in that moment.
“I have two questions for you,” I said. “One: Do you want to do better?”
If the answer is “no,” then to attempt to coach would be a fool’s errand (a mistake I have made in the past).
“Yeah” he said.
“Here’s my second question: Are you willing to feel the discomfort of putting in more effort and trying new things that will feel weird and different and won’t work right away?”
Whatever it is, you can become better at it. But here’s the thing I know just as clearly as I know you can get better at anything: you will not get better if 1) you don’t want to and 2) you aren’t willing to feel the discomfort of doing things differently. [/Quote]
2) "How to Make the Right Connections When You Don’t Already Have an 'In' " by Dorie Clark
Source: https://hbr.org/2017/11/how-to-make-the-right-connections-when-you-dont-already-have-an-in
[Quote] What if you still don’t have any friends or contacts who can be helpful to your business? In that case, speak for free, even in unlikely places. Todd Herman, now a performance coach for executives and top athletes, grew up as a sports fanatic in Western Canada, and began speaking for free to local youth sports associations about his work coaching teens on “winning the mental game.” He had one important request, though: “I’ll come up and give a talk for free,” he’d tell them. “But one parent for each of the kids has to be there.” Otherwise, he knew the buyers of his service would never hear his message.
The talks – a prodigious 68 of them in a 90-day period – kickstarted his business, and opened up new opportunities he couldn’t have imagined. The head of a National Hockey League team attended a talk to support his son, and as a result of their conversation, Herman soon ended up coaching NHL players. Similarly, a Canadian government official saw how Herman’s concepts could be applied to his own workplace, and brought him in to consult. With the Canadian government as his first non-sports client, he immediately garnered massive social proof he could leverage into work with other prominent organizations.
Finally, you can create content to attract the right people to you. When I started my marketing strategy consulting business in 2006, I didn’t know the right people – at all. Unlike some consultants, who went solo after years rubbing elbows with high-end corporate clients, my most recent job had been as the head of a small bicycling advocacy nonprofit – not exactly the best place to meet business leaders who could hire me. I didn’t know those people, and I didn’t even know the people who knew them.
I realized that instead of going to them, I’d have to attract them to me. I began blogging frequently for publications like HBR and Forbes, ensuring that my target audience became familiar with my ideas and, over time, recognized my name. It’s not a quick-hit strategy – indeed, it took between 2-3 years for me to start receiving a significant amount of inbound inquiries for speaking or consulting engagements as a result of my writing. But thanks to the lingering imprint of high-end publications in search engine results, it’s an effective strategy that compounds over time. [/Quote]
3) "4 Trends Shaping Creative Leadership in China" by Charles Hayes
Source: https://www.ideou.com/blogs/inspiration/4-trends-shaping-creative-leadership-in-china
[Quote] Over the course of the decade that Charles Hayes has spent in China, business culture has changed significantly. The government’s decision to declare innovation and entrepreneurship the twin engines of growth “legitimized the entrepreneur in a way that we had never seen before,” he says. A once stiff, hierarchical business leadership paradigm has begun to become more flexible; the end of the one-child rule has taken some pressure off of young people, opening up the possibility of taking greater risks; and a rising consumer class has created demand for new products and services. “I had nothing but questions when I moved there 10 years ago,” Charles says. “But what I love about China is that I continue to have 90 percent questions. I have a couple of answers every once in a while, but what I have found is that those constantly change.”
As the Chinese economy has moved its focus from manufacturing to the creation of digital products, trends in creative leadership are moving in parallel with it. Here are some of the shifts Charles has seen over the last decade.
Leading through questions
In China, leadership isn’t about having all the answers anymore. Charles points out that leadership in China used to be very top-down, with the proverbial chairman who sits at the end of a boardroom table and makes big decisions about where the company will go. But in recent years, leaders have begun to realize they have more questions than they have answers. “And they have a great deal of confidence in the belief that if they build the right teams, if they’re looking at the right areas and getting inspired by a wider set of things going on in the world, they will be able to lead in a different way, and help their companies grow in the right way,” he says.
As the country has shifted from a manufacturing-led economy that is often trying to catch up with growth of scale, to a consumption-led economy, leaders have had to think more about who they serve and why, and why they exist beyond making money and growing really fast. Together with Tsinghua University, IDEO has created a year-long leadership program for CEOs and Chairmen in China to explore the roles that creativity and design can play in strategizing the growth of a business. “It can be quite scary to ask these big bold questions on your own,” Charles says. “There’s been tremendous value in bringing together leaders from different industries who share common challenges, even if the question they’re trying to answer is in a very different industry, filling a different need.” [/Quote]
4) "Billionaire Investor on Market Cycles (How to Survive the Bad Days & Win the Good Days)" by James Altucher
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/billionaire-investor-market-cycles-how-survive-bad-days-altucher
[Quote] He (Howard Marks) told me his favorite quote. It’s from a guy named Christopher Morley (an English writer): “There’s only one success… to be able to live your life your own way.”
I asked Howard how he did this… How did he create life the way HE wants it to be? Here’s what I learned:
1. THINK IN LAYERS
Howard writes about something he calls, “second level thinking.”
Second level thinking is how he mastered A) market cycles and B) personal cycles
He said, “In the investment business, we sometimes know what’s going to happen. But we never know when. We should never act with extreme conviction… The world is too uncertain to permit certainty.”
Acting without “extreme conviction.” That’s key. Meaning, rather than wondering “Will it fail?” “Will I fail?” He thinks. He takes a step back.
2. DON’T BELIEVE YOU’RE RATIONAL / UNDERSTAND YOUR UNDERSTANDING
People always talk about failing fast. And risk. Risk requires thought. Howard doesn’t take blind risks. He relies on universal facts…
You can’t predict the future. No one can. There’s always an element of the unknown in everything. And then he evaluates the psychology of people. Because markets aren’t run by money. They’re run by people.
Howard puts this idea in his new book, “Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side.”
People are often irrational. And not just “other” people. You, too. I need to know I’m irrational.
This will help me from taking risks that hurt me. It will help me zoom out. And think in layers.
3. THERE’S ALWAYS A POSSIBILITY YOU’LL LOOK STUPID
The market cycle can be described as a pendulum. So when the pendulum is moving in one direction, more and more energy is going in that direction. Until finally, there’s no energy left.
And then, just when it seems like things are going to go on forever… the energy runs out. The pendulum goes back to the middle. And then all the way in the opposite direction.
And Howard uses the pendulum analogy to describe investor psychology. And then he uses that psychology to invest.
I’ll give you an example. The crash of ‘07-’08 was a total devastation to millions of people. They didn’t see it coming. And the people who did see it coming (like Howard) didn’t know a key factor… When!
And Howard has a lot of quotes about this in the book like this one from: History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes.” – Mark Twain
But he relied on the pendulum theory. If everything was going great, eventually it’d have to go back the other way. So he got to work. He raised 10 billion dollars. Then, when the timing was right, he invested it in distressed assets.
And because the government intervened with bailouts, the pendulum swung back to the good side pretty fast.
It could’ve taken 100 years. It could’ve taken 20. But Howard got lucky. He couldn’t predict WHEN the market would rebound. But he could predict that it would eventually. And he invested in that.
And all of this (mastering market cycles) relates to mastering your personal cycles. If you know yourself as a pendulum, you can see which way you’re swinging.
You can see “Oh, I’m feeling depressed right now. Or anxious.” And then you can predict that you’ll swing back to the middle.
I like this idea of studying markets cycles as a way to understand people. And vice versa. This way you’re not thinking in tunnel vision. This way you, can think deeper. And connect dots.
Howard filled his book with brilliant ideas. And they’re all well-explained. He gives quote after quote from brilliant mathematicians, writers, economists and so on. And with each one, I kept thinking, “Oh, this quote sums up the book perfectly.” And then I’d read another. Then he came on the podcast. And gave me quotes of his own. I like this one:
“Investing is a competitive game. You are in there trying to find the cheap assets. And so is everybody else. You are in there trying to hold more at the right time and less at the wrong time. And so is everybody else. So to some extent you have to learn how to think different than everybody else and better. Thinking different isn’t enough if it’s worse. Ot has to be different and better…” [/Quote]
5) "4 Ways to Overcome a Bad First Impression" by Dorie Clark
Source: https://hbr.org/2016/05/4-ways-to-overcome-a-bad-first-impression
[Quote] We’ve all been there — accidentally alienated a new coworker with a bad joke, underwhelmed the new boss by botching our first assignment, or had a client we didn’t just click with. The trouble is that initial impressions are hard to shake.
In a psychological phenomenon known as the “fundamental attribution error,” humans are quick to “essentialize” the behaviors of others. You might have simply been having a bad day, or you might have been off your game because of a recent breakup or death in the family, but your new colleague isn’t likely to extend that generous of an explanation. Instead, they’re far more likely to assume that your subpar performance is an essential trait — making it extremely challenging to overcome their negative perception. But, as I discuss in my book Reinventing You, it’s not impossible to change how others view you. Here are four ways you can begin to overturn their entrenched beliefs.
Surprise them. The reason people don’t often change their initial impressions is that our brain is optimized to conserve energy; if there’s not a compelling reason to re-evaluate something, then we won’t. So you need to manufacture a reason by surprising them. Your colleagues may have built up a certain, inaccurate impression of you — that you’re not leadership material because you’re too mousy and quiet, for instance.
Overcompensate over time. A forceful change in behavior may get your colleagues to take notice. But if you only do it once, they can write it off as an aberration: He must have had too much coffee that morning. Instead, keep up your new behavior over time, and recognize that in order to change perceptions, you’ll need to do it far longer than the original behavior for which you were pigeonholed.
Get closer to them. If you’ve started out on the wrong foot with a colleague, it can be tempting to avoid the problem by staying away from them. But keeping a distance is likely to exacerbate the problem, because — since they’re not receiving any new inputs about who you are — it will only reinforce their existing perceptions. Instead, force yourself out of your comfort zone and find ways to get to know them better. Ben Michaelis, a psychologist and the author of Your Next Big Thing, says that when it comes to changing perceptions, “Don’t use words; use actions. Once people have a point of view, the best way to shift it is through mounting behavioral evidence rather than just half-hearted niceties.”
Wait it out. Finally, sometimes the bad impression your colleagues may have formed has literally nothing to do with you. Nearly a decade ago, I met a woman at a conference. Today, we’re close friends and see each other regularly, and have collaborated on several projects together. But, she revealed to me several years after we first met, she hadn’t actually liked me at first. A slightly cynical New Yorker, she thought I seemed “too positive” — and therefore somewhat fake. It was only after knowing me for several years that she determined it wasn’t a façade; that’s actually how I was. “It was my own baggage,” she told me. There was nothing I specific I had done to make her think I was fake; she had projected her past experiences onto me. If you’re patient and continue to act in ways you’re proud of, most people will eventually come around.
It’s frustrating and unfair when we feel misunderstood. But while initial impressions tend to stick, they can — with time, effort, and strategy — be changed, so that your true talents can be appreciated. [/Quote]
6) "5-Hour Rule: If you’re not spending 5 hours per week learning, you’re being irresponsible" by Michael Simmons
Source: https://medium.com/the-mission/the-5-hour-rule-if-youre-not-spending-5-hours-per-week-learning-you-re-being-irresponsible-791c3f18f5e6
[Quote] “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none. Zero.”
— Charlie Munger, Self-made billionaire & Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner
Why did the busiest person in the world, former president Barack Obama, read an hour a day while in office? Why has the best investor in history, Warren Buffett, invested 80% of his time in reading and thinking throughout his career? Why has the world’s richest person, Bill Gates, read a book a week during his career? And why has he taken a yearly two-week reading vacation throughout his entire career?
Why do the world’s smartest and busiest people find one hour a day for deliberate learning (the 5-hour rule), while others make excuses about how busy they are? What do they see that others don’t?
The answer is simple: Learning is the single best investment of our time that we can make. Or as Benjamin Franklin said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
“Intellectual capital will always trump financial capital.” — Paul Tudor Jones, self-made billionaire entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist
We are at the beginning of a period of what renowned futurist Peter Diamandis calls rapid demonetization, in which technology is rendering previously expensive products or services much cheaper — or even free.
This demonetization will accelerate in the future. Automated vehicle fleets will eliminate one of our biggest purchases: a car. Virtual reality will make expensive experiences, such as going to a concert or playing golf, instantly available at much lower cost. While the difference between reality and virtual reality is almost incomparable at the moment, the rate of improvement of VR is exponential.
While education and health care costs have risen, innovation in these fields will likely lead to eventual demonetization as well. Many higher educational institutions, for example, have legacy costs to support multiple layers of hierarchy and to upkeep their campuses. Newer institutions are finding ways to dramatically lower costs by offering their services exclusively online, focusing only on training for in-demand, high-paying skills, or having employers who recruit students subsidize the cost of tuition.
Finally, new devices and technologies, such as CRISPR, the XPrize Tricorder, better diagnostics via artificial intelligence, and reduced cost of genomic sequencing will revolutionize the healthcare system. These technologies and other ones like them will dramatically lower the average cost of healthcare by focusing on prevention rather than cure and management.
While goods and services are becoming demonetized, knowledge is becoming increasingly valuable.
“The central event of the twentieth century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth in the form of physical resources is steadily declining in value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.” —George Gilder (technology thinker)
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” — Alvin Toffler [/Quote]
7) "If Your Innovation Effort Isn’t Working, Look at Who’s on the Team" by Nathan Furr, Kyle Nel and Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy
Source: https://hbr.org/2018/11/if-your-innovation-effort-isnt-working-look-at-whos-on-the-team
8) "Bring Your Breakthrough Ideas to Life" by Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux and Michael Wade
Source: https://hbr.org/2018/11/bring-your-breakthrough-ideas-to-life
9) "50 Tough Questions You Never Ask Yourself, But Should" by Marla Tabaka
Source: https://www.inc.com/marla-tabaka/50-tough-questions-you-never-ask-yourself-but-should.html
"13 Questions That Will Change Your Life" by Dr. Travis Bradberry
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/questions-change-your-life-dr-travis-bradberry/
"3 Ways To Keep Resentment From Ruining Your Career" by Erika Boissiere
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaboissiere/2018/11/07/3-ways-to-keep-resentment-from-ruining-your-career/
10) "How to get a job in Venture Capital" by Haje Kamps
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-get-job-venture-capital-haje-kamps/
11) "What It Takes To Lead When You Can't Be There" by John Baldoni
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnbaldoni/2018/09/21/what-it-takes-to-lead-when-you-cant-be-there/
12) Software Testing Topics:
"The dos and don'ts of testing automation" by ena Katz
https://techbeacon.com/dos-donts-testing-automation
"Best Automation Testing Tools for 2018 (Top 10 reviews)" by Brian
https://medium.com/@briananderson2209/best-automation-testing-tools-for-2018-top-10-reviews-8a4a19f664d2
"A Comparison of Automated Testing Tools" by Vu Nguyen
https://dzone.com/articles/a-comparison-of-automated-testing-tools
"6 common test automation mistakes and how to avoid them" by Matthew Heusser
https://techbeacon.com/software-test-automation-6-common-mistakes-how-avoid
"Test Automation vs. Automated Testing: The Difference Matters" by Kyle McMeekin
https://www.qasymphony.com/blog/test-automation-automated-testing/
13) Other informative videos that I have watched in week 45:
HBR Video: 11 Personality Traits That Can Limit Your Career
https://hbr.org/video/5793495362001/11-personality-traits-that-can-limit-your-career
CNBC: LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner shares advice on leadership, hiring and...
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/08/15/linkedin-ceo-jeff-weiner-advice-on-leadership-hiring-and-firing.html
CNBC: In-depth interview with Linkedin co-founder Reid Hoffman
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/11/03/in-depth-interview-with-linkedin-co-founder-reid-hoffman.html
Digital Pioneers: A Conversation With executive vice chairman of Alibaba Group Joe Tsai and Yahoo Founder Jerry Yang
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1IX0W0CVQo
Bloomberg Big Decisions: LinkedIn Co-founder Reid Hoffman
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2018-11-08/bloomberg-big-decisions-linkedin-co-founder-reid-hoffman-video
Y Combinator: Sam Altman on Choosing Projects, Creating Value, and Finding Purpose
https://blog.ycombinator.com/sam-altman-on-choosing-projects-creating-value-and-finding-purpose/
[Excerpt of Transcript]
Craig Cannon: I have a rough outline with a few general topics that you seem to have written about a few times. I figured we can kind of just go into each one. It seems like there are several categories from observing your thoughts, and then choosing what to work on, and then creating actual value, once you’ve chosen a thing. Then past that, purpose in general like purpose in your work.
The first one, the first quote that I liked was from your essay The Days Are Long, But the Decades Are Short and that quote was “Minimize your cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it.”
Sam Altman: It’s very easy to spend a decade being incredibly busy, and incredibly stressed everyday. Feeling like you’re working incredibly hard and creating a ton of movement, but not moving forward. This is like a big trap, and it’s so easy to get caught up in things that are urgent but unimportant. It is so easy to get caught up in the trifles of office politics and playing status and power games that don’t matter, but feel so fun and so important. Just random other bullshit that piles up in life. I’ve at least found for myself, I have a fixed budget of cognitive output per day. I can spend that on whatever. If I let it go on unimportant stuff then I never have time to get to the really important stuff. It’s so easy to get heads down and focused and sort of miss what am I actually accomplishing. The number of people who have said to me, “Man I thought for ten years I was doing incredible work because I felt like I was creating a huge amount of output. But in retrospect it was in the wrong direction,” is always depressing. You do need to focus and do stuff, but it’s really good to focus for some period of time and then step back and think, “Am I doing the right thing?” You also don’t want to make the mistake that’s the stereotypical Silicon Valley, 22 year old, or 21 year old college dropout says, “I’m going to solve all the world’s problems in three months, and if I haven’t done it in three months I’ve failed, so I’m going to give up and do the next thing.”
[/Excerpt of Transcript]
14) inside.com.tw: 傅盛：要花時間把事情想清楚，執行的時候比別人更凶狠！
Source: https://www.inside.com.tw/2015/06/04/fu-ceo?fbclid=IwAR0L6O1Jg6LDGRdGD36VyZPRi1Qm6qBPObniK3iJPTntN-dKlJJPJzu3Wxo
【摘录】蘋果前 CEO 史考特提了一個詞叫（zoom out）抽象和（zoom in）聚焦，前者指從戰略高度看整個行業方向，後者指把每個細節做到極致。既能看大局，又能沉下去。世界少有把這二者完美統一的人。
創業要解決的，就是開放性的環境下，找到方向。這方面，美國公司強很多。因為美國的教育背景鼓勵個人開放性思考，而我們從小做的就是封閉型題目。題目答對，選擇就行。
開放性和封閉性對人的思維鍛煉，不可同語。前者強於方向，後者強於執行。而今天的大環境， 執行已經被認為很重要的前提下，方向反而成為我們最缺的一環。
我並不是說，執行不重要。執行只是基本功。 在執行非常重要的前提下，找到一個正確的方向，這是一件更重要的事情。
美國公司真的是靠執行取勝的嗎？未必。以中國公司視角看，很多美國公司的執行力很糟糕。比如英特爾發明記憶體，當日本公司進入這個領域時，他們發現做不過，只好放棄，重新尋找了一個 CPU，在一個新的 CPU 方向上，變成了全球最偉大的公司之一。
美國公司最牛在於： 它建立了很好的視野，在這樣的視野下，打下從 0 到 1 的基礎，然後用更好的方向，彌補執行力的不足。 當然，同一個方向，戰略差不多的情況，只能靠執行取勝，比如製造業、家電汽車。
最關鍵一點，不斷突破自己的心理界限。如果總是活在自己的世界裡，就會把事情想小。【/摘录】
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