The Profit Prophet

This ties into why Gen X is so despondent and explains to a great extent why GT kids really hate school. This unfortunately, is the future of our country. (The original article was published by Paul Graham . You'll find this and 14 others in Hackers and Painters .)   When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards." We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how popular everyone else was, incl...

I just finished reading a pretty interesting book titled, “ The Experience Economy” written by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore. In it, they describe how a company, in order to be successful in the market, will have to change from supplying commodities, to go above supplying goods and beyond offering a service to staging an “experience.” Lots of good “how-tos” but the one underlining theme they really are talking about and what I have chanted often in my product marketing and sales career is: you need to Differentiate or Die . Part of parcel of this differentiation comes from that belief that business is theater, and in order to keep customers, you need to keep them entertained. In Business School, when you are forced to take statistics, the focus is on the Central Mean Theorem, or finding the average of a large population. This unfortunately has been transferred into the marketing strategies of most large and mid-sized companies. As a “safe” strategy, this might seem like a good ide...

In all our lives, we go through periods where a little advice might have come in really handy.  Sort of like a "cliff-notes" for getting by or little phrases that help us look at our situation differently.  Hopefully, these 41 quips help you in some way? 1. Life isn't fair, but it's still good 2. When in doubt, just take the next small step. 3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone. 4. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does. 5. Pay off your credit cards every month. 6. You don't have to win every argument. Agree to disagree. 7. Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying alone. 8. Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck. 9. Love your parents because they will be gone before you know it. 10. Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the present. 11. It's OK to let your children see you cry 12. Don't compare your life to others'. You have no idea what their ...

Below is a video how much things are changing in the modern era. Cool statistics and just all around interesting, especially about how many jobs our kids in college will have by the time they are 38!