Sometimes you've just got to get out.
Out of town.
Out of your head.
Out of your routine.
Out of your pattern.
Things look different from the outside, so get out there once in a while.
You never know what you'll discover.
Now, on to this week's ideas...
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"The shorter the average attention span gets, the more valuable your ability to focus becomes."
The most valuable skills are rarely taught in school, don't appear on your resume, and are consistently overlooked and underappreciated.
I also offer suggestions for how you can improve each of these crucial skills.
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"When it comes to generating in-game currency, the most common strategy is to trade your play time for dollars."
It's not often an animated four-minute stick figure video can change the way you think about life, but this one does just that.
The Casually Explained YouTube channel compares life to a video game and points out the first 18 levels of the game are basically a tutorial in which most of what you learn does not apply to the rest of the game.
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"Choose a keyword for the week. Even though this was good, I had to streamline it a more. My reading list was still crowded. I decided to filter this down based on a particular keyword for the entire week."
This post is a bit of a choppy read, but the underlying idea is a good one.
Kasturi Shrivastava wanted to ensure the time she spent reading was optimized for learning so she developed a system to learn 35 new things a week.
She chooses a series of keywords relevant to her interests each week, reads 10 articles a day on those topics, and pulls out the five most valuable ideas each day to collect and share.
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"Here's the hard truth for marketers: clarity trumps creativity. Every time."
The greatest marketing in the world will fail if it's not aligned with great messaging.
The trick involves creating messaging to clearly explain what you do, how you help the customer, and how their life will be better once they pay you.
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"Most people think the knees and hips should be at the same level, so that the angle between your torso and legs is 90 degrees. But you'll be more comfortable — and less likely to slump — if that angle is bigger than 90 degrees."
This is the rare article that features information you can implement as you read it.
Plus, they've got GIFs demonstrating each technique so get ready to become a master sitter!
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"A long email is a dead giveaway that the sender had a lot of extra time and emotional investment in the subject matter of the email, the person they're sending the email to, or both."
One of the reasons people struggle to manage their email is because they (and the people they deal with) write unnecessarily long and confusing emails.
Frankie Rain explains how to write short emails and offers tips including to think before you write, stick to one topic per email, and use email templates for questions you find repeatedly answer.
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"All world-class companies must have a strong sales force. So — how do they get there?"
This one gets a little technical, but it's an incredible resource for startup founders or anybody who needs to build out a sales team.
Venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz shares 16 mini-lessons about sales for startup founders including videos with advice about how much to spend on marketing vs. sales, how to understand and define sales channels, and how to compensate sales reps.
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"Many people don't have time or mental space (yet) for a yoga class or a full-on meditation practice—but that doesn't mean there aren't simple ways to build small pockets of mindfulness into your morning routine."
Everybody's got their own unique morning routine, but if you talk to enough people certain patterns emerge.
The routines include to avoid social media in the morning, move before the rest of the world is awake, and give yourself a "me moment."
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"The conversation that has not happened yet in society is that happiness is the ROI, not a fucking BMW and a mansion."
For all the hype around the hustle culture Gary Vaynerchuk inspires, there's not enough attention paid to his thoughts about how happiness relates to money.
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"Don't just do a lot of things, do a lot of different things. Try new projects with new people in new fields to broaden the scope of your network. The more diverse it is, the more valuable it becomes."
One of the most valuable things I've accomplished in my career is to build a network full of talented, creative, and successful people.
But I did so despite being bad at traditional networking.
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WHERE I FOUND THIS STUFF
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Josh
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