"Why would you lie at all?"
Be well. Do good.
BG
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Scariest thought I've ever had
Broken rib earned me some happy pills. And after 2 days...
Already know this is a bad path. Flushing any leftover pills after this week and the pain subsides. But damn these things are fantastic!!!
Be well. Do good.
Don't do drugs.
BG
Already know this is a bad path. Flushing any leftover pills after this week and the pain subsides. But damn these things are fantastic!!!
Be well. Do good.
Don't do drugs.
BG
Standout & Smile
Lately I have found myself being professional (read, straight-laced and serious) even when I am not in the office.
BORING!
WE ALL NEED TO REMEMBER TO SMILE!!!
With a day like we had here in NYC, it shouldn't be that hard, but we all fall into the trap sooner-or-later. To help avoid "falling into the trap", I have decided to make it a game. I plan to smile at as many as people as possible and 'win' +1 point when someone smiles back. If nothing else it may brighten someone's day. I just hope that people don't think I'm flirting. I'll let you know when I get to key milestones (20, 50, 100pts).
After all, Cee-Lo has an incredible smile; it literally disarms people. You can't help but smile in response.
Be well. Do good.
Smile.
BG
Monday, April 25, 2011
Calling All Cube Monkeys
Yup. Just like me. YOU need to get up and stretch. Get exercise. NPR released a great story that scares you into the truth about inactivity.
Don't go to the Starbucks on your corner. Go to the better one a couple blocks away.
Don't order in food tonight. Go for a walk and find a new place.
Be well. Do good.
BG
Don't go to the Starbucks on your corner. Go to the better one a couple blocks away.
Don't order in food tonight. Go for a walk and find a new place.
Be well. Do good.
BG
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
There is NO X in Espresso
Reblogging the truth for all Euro-trash and White-trash everywhere to hear/understand/hopefully-employ:
There is NO X in Espresso
Be well. Do good.
BG
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Another day
Monday, April 18, 2011
Ten Things You Need to Do if You Were Hired Today
Ten Things You Need to Do if You Were Hired Today:
Photo: Thomas Northcut
This is a cross-post from James Altucher‘s blog Altucher Confidential. His previous appearances on the Freakonomics blog can be found here. Last week, James wrote about the Ten Reasons You Need to Quit Your Job.
The woman right next to me was alive one second, then a taxi came up on the sidewalk of 42nd Street between 6th and 7th Avenue, hit her and veered off, and now the woman was dead. This happened on the first or second day of my job at HBO. I tried to call 911 on the payphone (there were still payphones in August, 1994), and then I had to go. The woman was dead.
And I had to go to work.
I loved HBO like I would love a parent. I wanted them to approve of me. And kiss me as I went to sleep at night.
Before I got the job offer to work there, I would watch HBO all day long. My friend Peter and I would watch HBO or MTV for 10 hours straight. I’d go over to his house around 1pm in the afternoon, and by 10pm we would look at each other and say, “What the hell did we just do.” Everything from the The Larry Sanders Show on HBO to Beavis & Butthead on MTV. We couldn’t stop. I loved the product. I wanted to work there.
10 Rules If You Are Hired Today
Rule No. 1: Love the product. You have to love the current output of the company. If you work at HBO, love the shows. Watch every single show. No excuses. If you work at WD-40, know every use of WD-40. Make up a few more that nobody ever thought of. If you work at Otis Elevators, understand all the algorithms for how the elevator decides which floors to stop on when. If you work at Goldman Sachs, read every book on the history, study every deal they’ve done, know Lloyd Blankfein’s favorite hobbies and how he rose through the ranks. You have to love the product the way Andre Agassi loves playing tennis or Derek Jeter loves playing baseball.
When I started at HBO, I would every day borrow VHS tapes from their library. I watched every show going ten years back. In my spare time, I’d stay late and watch TV. I’d watch all the comedians. I even watched the boxing matches that initially made HBO famous. Which leads me to…
Rule No. 2: Know the History. When my first company, Reset, was acquired by a company called Xceed, I learned the history of the mini-conglomerate that Xceed was created out of. There was a travel agency for corporations. I visited them in California. There was a burn gel company. I visited them and met all the executives and learned the technical details of how the gel was invented. There was a corporate incentives company. I met with them to see if any of their clients could become my clients.
At HBO, I learned how Michael Fuchs (the head of HBO Sports at the time; later CEO of HBO) in 1975 aired the first boxing match that went out on satellite. And how Jerry Levin (the CEO of HBO, later CEO of Time Warner) used satellites to send the signal out to the cable providers. It was the first time that had ever happened. Ted Turner was so inspired that he turned his local TV affiliate, TBS, into a national TV station, and the rest became history.
Rule No. 3: Know the history of the executives. At HBO, I studied the org chart religiously. My title was “programmer analyst, IT department” and yet I was always asking around: how did John Billock become head of marketing (he trudged around house to house selling HBO subscriptions in Louisiana when Showtime started up, for instance, decades earlier). Where did my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss work before arriving at HBO (Pepsi). Where did the head of Original Programming get his start? (He was a standup comedian, later CEO of HBO, before being forced to quit after choking his girlfriend in a Las Vegas parking lot.) It was like reading about the origins of all the superheroes. I was a fanboy and my heroes were the other executives. I wanted to be one of them. Or better.
Same thing: know all of your colleagues and what their dreams and ambitions are. Get to work two hours before they get to work. If they need favors, do them. You have a whole two hours extra a day. You can do anything.
Rule No. 4: Make your boss look good. Your entire job in life is to make your boss look good. You don’t care about yourself. You only want your boss to get promotions, raises, etc. Remember, you can never make more than your boss. So the more he makes, the better he does, the better you will do. It’s the only way to rise up. Work hard, give him full credit for everything you do. Don’t take an ounce of credit. At the end of the day, everyone knows where credit belongs. But even then, thank him for everything and direct all credit back to him (or her). Here’s how you make your boss look good:
- Get to work two hours before him. If that means you have to wake up and go in at 5am, then do it. Two extra hours of work a day is an extra 500 hours of work a year. None of your co-workers can compete with that.
- Walk with him to his car, train, etc when he leaves work. You need to know his goals, his initiatives, his plans, his family troubles, etc.
- And, again, give him full credit for everything. And thank him regularly for the opportunity to do the work you are doing.
Rule No. 5: Know all the secretaries. It’s a cliché but the secretaries run the company. They control all of the schedules. They dish out all of the favors. Take as many secretaries out to lunch as possible. Not just in your department but in every department. Particularly HR. HR knows all of the gossip. Knows everything that is happening. It’s not so hard to do this. First off, HR gives you all of your intro material when you join the company. Ask those people out to lunch after you’ve settled in for a few weeks. If someone writes an internal company newsletter, ask that person to lunch. Ask your boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s secretary out to lunch. Nobody will think you are going over their head. You’re asking to lunch “just” a secretary. This was invaluable to me at every company I’ve ever worked at.
Rule No. 6: Constantly test your value on the market. The job market is like any other market. There’s supply and demand. And you’re just an item for sale at the great bazaar. Every year you need to find out what your value is on the market. For one thing, the best way to get an increase in salary and status is to move horizontally, not vertically. Second, you don’t want to get inbred. A good friend of mine was in HBO’s marketing department for 17 years. I set up a dinner between her, me, and the CEO of an advertising agency that was hiring. The CEO was one of my closest friends. Still, she couldn’t hire my HBO friend. “She’s too inbred,” she said. “She will never be able to get the HBO way of doing things out of her head.”
When I was at HBO, I was constantly talking to people at other companies. I had lunch with the top people at Showtime. I knew people from all the other divisions of Time Warner. I was always asking people to lunch or breakfast. I would get offers from the banking industry. I would try to work within different divisions of HBO. Every time I got another offer, I got another raise and promotion at HBO. Sometimes substantial (up to 35 percent increases). My bosses would resent me for it, but then go back to “Rule #4,” and often they would get raises also.
Rule No. 7: Study all the marketing campaigns. In 1996, they switched their slogan to “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.” That slogan lasted for 13 years. Before that it was “Simply the Best,” then “Something Special’s On.” When they switched to “It’s not TV,” Eric Kessler, the head of marketing, gave a talk on how they came up with the slogan. All his employees were in the auditorium. And me from the IT department. Nobody else would go with me. I knew every slogan HBO ever had.
Rule No. 8: Study the industry. What made HBO different from Showtime? From Cinemax? From non-pay cable? From broadcasting? I read every book about the history of TV I could find. I would go to lectures at the Museum of Radio and Television on 52nd Street (the best was the day that members of the MTV show The Real World gave a panel. After the panel, I followed one group of other people in the audience for 30 blocks while they talked about the panel and the show. I wanted to break in so many times. They would be my new best friends. We would have parties around showings of The Real World. But I was too shy, and eventually they all split off in different directions, leaving me alone). Jessica Reif Cohen was the Merrill analyst covering media. I knew nothing about stocks. But I read everything she wrote and would scan the Wall Street Journal for mentions of her name.
When I was trying to sell my first company, Reset, I called every company in the industry. Omnicom, Razorfish, Agency.com, etc. etc. I read every SEC filing so I would know the nuances of all their deals and financings. When I was building Stockpickr, I became obsessed with the mechanics of how Yahoo Finance worked and the ways in which she (Yahoo Finance is a “she,” and I love her) delivered traffic to all of her media sources. With HBO it was fascinating to me because at one point the CEOs of Showtime, Time Warner, Universal, Viacom, Fox Sports, etc. were all former executives at HBO.
Rule No. 9: Become the company. I was a lowly programmer in the IT department. We were so far from the normal business operations of the company that they even put us in a different building. But that didn’t matter to me. I WAS HBO. That was my mantra. I became so absorbed in every aspect of the company that I knew that any idea I had would be a good idea for the company. At least I felt this (not sure if anyone else did). I never said, “I think this,” I said, “We should do this.” HBO and I were a “We.” Inseparable. Until you have that feeling of unity with the company you work for, you can’t rise up. Key, though: when you have an idea, make sure you know how to execute the idea also. In detail. Ideas are a dime a dozen. And execution is worth a million dollars. And I mean that specifically, if you execute on a good idea, you’ll make a million dollars or more from it.
Rule No. 10: Leave. All good things must come to an end. From the day you start, you need to plan your exit. Not like in rule #6, “Know Your Value” where you are trying to figure out your corporate salary value. “Leave” means something different. It means you’re going to say goodbye forever. If you master Rules #1-9 at a company, then you’ll know enough about the company and industry to start your own company. To either become a competitor or a service provider. And you will have built-in customers because your rolodex will be filled with people from the industry. If you constantly think like an entrepreneur from the instant you walk into your cubicle on day one of your job, then you will be constantly looking for those missing gaps you can fill. This is how you jump into the abyss. You make sure the abyss has a customer waiting for you.
I did everything wrong my first few months at HBO. I didn’t know New York City. I didn’t know corporate culture at all. I wore the same suit five days in a row until I realized nobody else was wearing a suit, and I never wore one again. I didn’t have the requisite skill set to survive at my job (they had to send me to a remedial programming school despite the fact that I had majored in programming AND went to graduate school for computer science).
I was obsessed with the Internet, and HBO didn’t even own HBO.com at the time. My boss’s boss’s boss would say to my boss, “get him away from that Internet stuff and onto some real work.” One time my boss came into my cubicle and, with everyone listening from every other cubicle, said to me, “We want you to succeed here but you need to know more or else it’s not going to work out.” It was very embarrassing, and nobody around me would meet my eyes for the next week or so. I was the walking dead. I was sure I was going to get fired every day.
But I survived then. And every day since.
"Quote of the Week
“if you stare long enough into the Abyss, the Abyss stares back into you”
— Nietzsche
Custom Book End Table
If I had a dozen books which I loved and were of varying sizes, I would totally do this...
BG
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Nerdiest/Coolest thing in NYC next month?
REBLOG: Attention Smartphone-Toting Bookworms: New York Public Library Planning All-Night Scavenger Hunt: "
Be well. Do good.
Scavenger hunts via mobile phones aren’t entirely new, but the New York Public Library has whipped up a pretty neat one.
The library will choose 500 people to spend the night of May 20 in its famed Stephen A. Schwarzman building in honor of its 100th birthday. Those taking part will trek through the 70-mile collection, exploring some of the library’s famous objects, such as Jack Kerouac’s glasses and a copy of the Declaration of Independence. For obvious reasons, the library isn’t saying too much about the actual challenges, but promises the event will involve more than 100 quests in total, with each team being assigned three or four tasks.
“There is something to be said for being in the presence of rare, historic objects,” said Caro Llewellyn, producer of the library’s Find The Future celebration. “Wikipedia and Google are fantastic, but to see objects like these in the flesh has enormous power and can truly inspire creativity, which is what the New York Public Library is all about.”
Participants have to find certain objects, then check in by scanning a bar code using a smartphone and then complete a written quest. The event, the first all-nighter for the library, was dreamed up by game designer and author Jane McGonigal.
Though it sounds like a dream for a young bookworm, the event is open only to those over 18.
Those who want to take part can go to the library’s Web site and complete an online application
The game is part of an ongoing effort by New York’s library to tap technology and social media. The library recently became the first public library with its own Foursquare badge for those checking out books.
Be well. Do good.
BG
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Realization from "Fight Club"
reblog: M.S.Corley - You met me at a very strange time in my life
Silenced by accuracy.
Be well. Do good.
BG
Monday, April 11, 2011
REBLOG - Great read!
If Its Important, Youll Find A Way. If It Isnt, Youll Find An Excuse: "
Some people dream of success, others make it happen. Of course, you can dream as much as you like but waiting for things to happen gets you nowhere. Get active and start making things happen.
Whatever journey your path takes you on, the most important thing is to have passion in what you do.
How many of you went to college, got your degree, and ended up doing something totally unrelated to your major? Studying it did not make you passionate about it. It wasn’t your path.
Education or even talent aren’t worth much without passion. So do the stuff that you love and you've always wanted to do because without it, you'll feel stuck and unfulfilled. If you work in a bank but your dream is to be a naturopath, then make those changes now. Make this year the turning point in your life. When you do what you love you will be rewarded — it will just flow naturally.
Look at those around you who just make things happen. They have a clear goal in mind and they know where they want to go. They don't always have a plan but they have the passion and the tenacity to make it work, and they achieve their goals as the end result.
Trust us when we tell you this. If something important to you, you WILL find a way. If it isn't, you'll find an excuse. It’s that simple. Find your way. Make it work, whatever it takes. Are you 10 kilos heavier than you should be? It is simple: Commit, go to that gym every day, no excuses, and train until you lose those 10 kilos. When you accomplish this, you'll have the confidence to do more. Set a goal and make it happen.
Want to stop smoking? Stop making excuses, take control of your circumstances before they take control of you.
Success isn't just about what you accomplish in your life, it's about what you inspire others to do and when you do accomplish something as simple as quitting smoking or losing weight, you'll inspire others to do the same. Anyone can change the world, and everybody should try. And it all starts with your own life.
Stop waiting for the perfect time to do what you want to do. Do it now.
Life begins at the end of your comfort zone, so get used to being uncomfortable. It won’t kill you. Do you need a sign? Here it is: - Bill Tikos
Sadest thing I've read today
42% of people who graduate from college never read another book.:
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42% of people who graduate from college never read another book.
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New Jams
Theophilus London Feat. Devonte Hynes – “Century Girl” Video: "
As time flies by, the always-unbuttoned Theophilus London continues to carve his niche. Somewhat upbeat, while somehow simultaneously downtrodden, this Brooklynite’s analogish approach at Rhythm & Rap finds airplay anywhere from South Central to the South of France, while his unrefined demeanor keeps people both confused and intrigued. During this new visual for “Century Girl” – an unreleased toast to London’s Lovers Holiday sessions – the total package comes together like a retro-active, rap-version of Ready For The World. The mood is right, poses are being struck and this well-rounded pop poet is making many a white woman beam.
Plus, Theo London adds flavor to even the most random of videos? Killer Mike FTW.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Sunday Slow Jams
Overcast and mid 50's. Perfect day for a run and then coffee shop computing.
Be Well, Do Good.
BG
Be Well, Do Good.
BG
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Quote of the Week
"Nothing ever comes to one, that is worth having, except as a result of hard work."
- Booker T. Washington, American educator and political leader
- Booker T. Washington, American educator and political leader
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