Here’s a great way to teach kids the alphabet… a lot more interesting than ‘A is for Apple’:
Interestingly, this alphabet has been doing the rounds on the internet and has been a fantastic way for Mark Jones to raise his profile.
See the full alphabet here (prepare to be shocked): Better Together .co.uk
My friend Murray has a mate, Demis, who is a talented musician, web developer, film editor… I’m beginning to think there’s nothing he can’t do. Anyhow, Demis is sitting around, bored, and decides to re-edit ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ and turn it into a trailer for a horror film. There’s nothing new about that. ‘The Shining’ has been re-edited to become a love story… but here’s where Murray steps in.
For years I have been coaching jobseekers to focus on their talent and not their skills and experience. Talent is the reason why some people are stars at their jobs while others are just ok… and you can’t train or teach talent. But I was reading an essay by Malcom Gladwell, when these few sentences grabbed my attention:
They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing.
He’s talking about Enron, Arthur Anderson, Worldcom etc… big companies that hired and financially rewarded young MBAs to become stars by pushing them to think outside of the box. And while they were doing this, the whole place fell apart.
I’m summarising Malcolm’s essay dramatically here but he made a case that creating a talented organisation is far better than relying on a plethora of talented people. In other words, an extraordinary busines can make ordinary people achieve extraordinary things. We often assume that people make organisations smart… often it’s the other way around.
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Buried in these pages is a pearl of wisdom that seems to be striking quite a chord with readers, so I thought I might bring it to light with its own topic.
People and companies always use their x years of experience as a reason to hire them or trust them. Many years ago I had the displeasure of working with a marketing lady for a small company who would dismiss my ideas by telling me she had 7 years marketing experience in this particular industry so I told her:
” The truth is you’ve only had one year of experience and you’ve done it 7 times”.
While I was bashing monster.com at job secrets revealed someone emailed me and asked me to show how having a talent in a certain area was better than a degree, skill or qualification. I found a great way to do this and you can play along too with this neat little test…
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Just finished listening to an excellent podcast from Steve Pavlina about how to make money without a job. I’m not going to mention home business so please keep reading. When you build a house you build it on more than ONE foundation, but most people support their lives on just one foundation; their job. So their life looks something like this:
More like a diving board isn’t it. If you were to lose your job then your whole life can come crashing down around you. Now let’s say that you have a few ideas, crafts, hobbies or investments that bring you in small income streams – your life would now look something like this:
So if you lose your job it is a nagging inconvenience but your whole life doesn’t collapse around you. Understand I’m not suggesting you become some money hungry ‘Donald Trump wannabe‘… I’m just talking about enough money to give you some choices in life. Let me give you some more ideas…
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Business and job lessons from a niche market I started 15 years ago that lead to my boss practically firing me. See how and why the business went broke after I left and laugh at my pain when I discover that he and his partners’ businesses are going ‘gangbusters’ using the very ideas that I was fired for.