Inside Larry & Sergey’s Brain [Book Review]

June 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Imagine if you had been a fly on the wall during the inception of Google straight through to today when they’re one of the most powerful brands in the world.  That is exactly what Inside Larry & Sergey’s Brain (affiliate link) by Richard L. Brandt does.  From the back cover:

Based on interviews with their current and former employees, competitors, professors, and friends, Brandt details their early lives, the origins of their idealism, and the strategies underlying Google’s relentless expansion.  He explores misconceptions about the company’s culture, especially its motto, ‘Don’t be evil,’ and rule number one, ‘Focus on the user and everything else will follow.’

I really enjoyed how Brandt structured the book and I learned a lot about Larry, Sergey and Google that I didn’t previously know.  This book is definitely worth picking up if you’re fascinated with Google, their culture, their growth and the way in which they view the world.

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Enabling Your Abilities

June 29, 2010 By 4 Comments

Knowing that I’m a huge fan of Timbaland and gadgets, a friend of mine recently sent me a video of his new tour bus. The tour bus has been completely outfitted with everything imaginable to allow him to record and mix a song whenever he has a stroke of creativity or when he has time in between performances, appearances and other responsibilities.

Besides thinking that the tour bus was awesome and being slightly jealous that I couldn’t have something uber-cool like that, it got me thinking about why Timbaland invested the money to build the tour bus.

Timbaland is one of the most sought after producers in the music business and also an award-winning artist. His ability to be creative anywhere at any time is critical to being able to stay on the top of his game. Without a tour bus with these capabilities, he would either have to turn down opportunities or do a lot of flying back and forth.

This brought me to consider whether or not I have an optimal set up with me at all times to enable content creation and fuel creativity.

To enable myself the ability to create content on-the-fly, the following tools are standard in my gear bag (mostly affiliate links):

In addition to the main gadgets, I also always have all of the cords, chargers, memory sticks, and other accessories that will allow me to transfer and upload my content and always be charging.

There certainly is some duplication between the capabilities of each of these gadgets but they do provide me the full suite of tools that I inevitably need during my travels.

I also always have a magazine or two and at least a book besides the magazines and books that I keep on my iPad and iPhone. While this doesn’t necessarily enable content creation, unless I’m reviewing a book for this blog, it does help to keep my mind sharp and inspire ideas.

Depending on where I’m traveling to, this bag will be tweaked but this is my standard day-to-day gear that I always carry with me.

While there may be some tools that could be upgraded or other tools that I want to add to my gear bag, my assessment is that I do have a complete set of tools to enable content creation and creativity from anywhere I may be.

Are you enabling your ability to be creative and create content anywhere you go? What say you?

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Slaying the Inbox

June 28, 2010 By 10 Comments

chrispennsword

A consistent theme through many of the conversations I have regarding productivity, work/life balance and time management focuses on the never-ending deluge of emails that many of us are receiving nowadays.  In addition to more and more email piling in, we’re being expected to and judged by how fast we can respond to said emails.

This is a constant battle that I fight on a daily basis.  The first thing I do when my alarm goes off is grab my iPhone and check what emails have come in over the past few hours.  This continues throughout the rest of the day and ends with a last check of my iPhone right before placing it back on the nightstand where I grabbed it at the start of the day.  I know, I know, the productivity cops are coming after me as we speak for saying the first thing I do is check email.  For me, it helps to set the pace for the day and allows me to prioritize the morning especially if something happened with a client.  On any given day I receive 200-300 emails and send upwards of 100+ emails per day.  Between my laptop, iPhone, and iPad, I ensure that I’m consistently plugged in and attempting to stay on top of my inboxes.

Of course, sometimes I fall off the wagon and fall deeply, deeply behind where I have to spend an entire day catching up.  Whenever this happens, I tend to fire up Merlin Mann‘s famous “Inbox Zero” talk.  Have you seen it before?  If not, check out the video below.  Though it is about an hour long, it is worth every second of your time, especially if you’re having problems organizing or keeping up with your inbox.

What I’ve found is that I can’t use the exact folders that Merlin suggests because I find that when I tried using a “Defer” and/or “Do” folder, I never followed up with the emails.  Also, after trying out a few different folder structures, I decided that what helped me process (and reference) email the fastest was to use the following folders for my primary inbox, which happens to be my New Marketing Labs account:

  • External – this is for all communications that are not from a client or someone on the New Marketing Labs team.
  • Clients – all client emails go into this folder.
  • Internal – any email from a New Marketing Labs team member is kept in this folder.
  • Misc. – any email that doesn’t nicely fit into one of the other folders or may be a personal note that I want to save for personal reference is stored here.
  • Travel – because of how much I travel, I’m always receiving travel confirmations, updates and changes. Though I heavily depend on TripIt to keep my travel organized, I keep all backups here.

This allows me to quickly decide where an email needs to be stored instead of spending 5 seconds per email deciding exactly which of 100 folders it needs to go in.  It also helps me with trying to locate a reference email because of how fast email searches are nowadays and the variety of ways that your email can be sorted.

This is just how I attempt to slay the inbox.  How do you handle your email?

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Photo Credit: Christopher S. Penn

Filed Under: Email, Productivity, Videos Tagged With: , ,

What Drives You?

June 27, 2010 By 20 Comments

I have a simple question for you: What drives you?

steeringwheel

That’s not a new question, right?  You hear it asked often but have you ever taken time to actually analyze where your drive comes from and why?  Sure, you may be doing the advanced work, but there are always underlying factors that drive us.  It could be achieving success, not wanting to disappoint our family, competitiveness, a need to provide for someone else, or a number of other factors.  You may jump in now and say that it’s a combination of all of those factors.  That’s ok, as long as you have taken the time to truly understand if those are the factors that drive you.

For me, my drive comes from a few different areas however the main source is the need to ensure that I never disappoint my parents.  When I was 17 both of my parents passed away 5 months from one another.  My dad passed away from cancer in October 1999 and my mom passed away from a Lupus-induced heart attack in March 2000.  While the passing of my dad was a shock, we had been dealing with my mother’s illness for most of my life.  It wasn’t a terminal diagnosis but she had an extreme and aggressive form of Lupus that had beaten her up over several years.  My mom had always told me that no matter what happened in life, she would always look over my shoulder.  After my mom passed away I got a tattoo of a blue rose (her favorite flower) with angel wings and her death date on my upper back/shoulder area to ensure that she would always be looking over my shoulder.

Having both of my parents pass away before graduating high school instilled a great fear of disappointing them and it caused me to make a pact with myself that I would never stop.  Never stop what, you might ask?  Never stop anything that I put my mind to no matter how far out of reach it may appear.  Never stop persuing my goals.  Never stop until I could provide the life for my future family that my parents never could (read: I grew up very poor, on food stamps and supplemental help).

Couple this pact that I made along with an unnatural level of competitiveness and being a perfectionist, you’ll start to get a glimpse into what drives me.  It’s not as simple as wanting to be the best or being rich.  A perfect storm of life experiences collided at a young age for me that forced me to take a different perspective on the world in front of me and how I’m going to conquer it.

So, I return to the question I asked at the start of this post: What drives you?

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Photo Credit: Team Dalog

Filed Under: Hustle, Personal Tagged With: , ,

Doing the Advanced Work

June 26, 2010 By 1 Comment

It’s a natural feeling to want to be successful in life.  We constantly set goals, both short and long term, that hopefully lead to success.  Sometimes they’re short, quick wins and other times they are long term goals that lead to success such as saving for retirement.  Time and time again I hear people call others “lucky” or “fortunate” when they achieve success.  Is it really simply a matter of luck that leads to success?  I don’t think so.  Sure, I’ll agree that in almost any victory, a little bit of luck helps.  We all deal with small fires or bumps while achieving our goals.  We all have someone that mentors us, watches over us or gives helps to crack open the door.  What you do with that opportunity is up to each of us.  But, if you just sit back and wait for that door to be opened then you may never reach your goals.  So, what can you do to help achieve your goals, both short and long term achievements?  I’d argue it’s all in the advanced work.  It’s in the preparation and practice that you do leading up to achieving your goal.

In sports there are athletes who people, including me, think were born to play their given sport.  Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky, Serena and Venus Williams.  All examples of people who are extremely gifted athletes.  You could probably come up with another 10 athletes in your favorite sport(s) to list here as well that are amazing at the game they play.  While these athletes may be gifted, it is not simply that they were born to play the sport.  Their excellence is the result of years and years of doing the advanced work.  They spend their lives preparing for greatness.  We’ve all heard the stories of shooting hundreds of foul shots before a game; putting for hours on end; running wind sprints with parachutes attached until reaching pure exhaustion; and swimming hundreds of laps per day.  In this world, improving by just a mili-second can be the difference between reaching the holy grail in their sport.

Doing advanced work isn’t only for sports.  Musicians who are getting ready to go out on tour will practice their concerts for weeks and sometimes months before going out on the road.  Actors practice for hours at a time for what amount sometimes to only a few minutes of screen time.  For an event like the Inbound Marketing Summit, we spend almost an entire year planning every angle of the event to ensure a successful event for our attendees, speakers, sponsors, venue, and our team.

This leads me to consistently ask myself what I am doing to ensure future success.  Do you ask yourself this same question?  If so, you must define what success actually is ahead of time so that you can measure against it.  It’s hard to do advanced work for something you can’t measure.  Sometimes those goals change and that’s ok.  Change your success metrics and the advanced work to achieve those metrics.

A great example of doing advanced work is in planning a presidential event.  President Obama attends and speaks at several events every week, sometimes having 2-3+ events in a single day.  Each one of these requires weeks of preparation including security plans, emergency route planning, media plans, travel and scheduling and a number of other considerations.  Every second of President Obama’s movement is scheduled and planned ahead of time.  This planning isn’t done solely because of the President’s busy schedule, it is also to ensure a successful and safe event for all involved.  During one of President Obama’s visits, the White House Presidential Advance team filmed a couple behind-the-scenes videos as they prepared for an event.

If you can’t view these videos, you can check them out over on the White House’s YouTube channel.

What advanced work are you doing to prepare for your future success?

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Filed Under: Hustle, Videos Tagged With: , , , , ,
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