We’re all born with a set of gifts that set us apart from others. These gifts can be anything from being born a natural athlete, to having a photographic memory, or being very intelligent. These differentiate us and, if nurtured, we can be utilized as the building block for a successful life. Our gifts may help us do well in school, sports, or find a career where these gifts are given the air they need to shine through.

The one gift that we’re all born with is that of choice. Each of us decides, as an individual, what choices we will make. We have influencers and life experiences that may weigh in on those choices but we’re still given the power to make the final decision.

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, discusses the difference between gifts and choices during a commencement speech at Princeton University.  During this speech he suggests, as highlighted by Princeton in the description on their YouTube channel, that “one’s character is reflected not in the gifts one is endowed with at birth but rather by the choices one makes over the course of a lifetime.”

You may be quick to jump and say that it is our experiences that make us who we are. I would agree with you. But, it isn’t just the experience that makes us who we are, it is the choices that we made as a result of those experiences that make us who we are and put us into our next situations.

Watch Jeff Bezos’ speech and see what your thoughts are about the difference between gifts and choices.

If you would like a full transcript of the speech, you can grab it from Princeton’s website.

What say you?  Do you think it is the gifts you were born with or the choices you’ve made that define who you are?

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An issue in many offices is that the real work gets done outside of the office, either early in the morning, at nights or on the weekends because team members are in meeting after meeting during regular work hours. Those meetings typically only add more to the to-do list and also soak up time that could otherwise be spent being productive working on projects.  When not in a meeting, the remainder of the day is filled with interruptions, emergencies that usually aren’t true emergencies, and just simply trying to get settled in to actually get into a flow.

Right about this point you’re probably nodding your head up and down admitting that you’re experiencing this same issue.  It’s not surprising because the modern workplace has become addicted to meetings and other forms of interruptions.

This is a consistent issue for me even though my team tries to run as lean as possible and reduce the number of meetings and miscellaneous interruptions we have. However, when I’m not traveling, a normal week will have 40-60 meetings appear on my calendar. One of the reasons for this is because we’re a fast-growing company with big ambitions and a lot of moving projects that require our attention while the other part is that we have weekly status calls with each of our clients and I lead the majority of these calls.

As more meetings and interruptions have continued to find their way into my work day, I’ve learned to block out time on my calendar that is marked “DO NOT SCHEDULE!”  This allows me to schedule blocks of time to get work done instead of only small windows of time.

With how often I travel, I’ve also learned how to be productive from anywhere and how to leverage any time available even if it is only 15 minutes.  This has lead me to become very good at getting work done with short pockets of time in between meetings and at home.  Even if I have a day without a lot of meetings, I have found that I am more productive on projects when I’m workshifting because I find that I can focus more because it’s just me, my laptop and some great music.

Just as I was thinking about this while sitting on my couch doing work on a Sunday afternoon, I came across an interview with Jason Fried,co-author of Rework (affiliate link) and Founder of 37Signals where he addresses exactly this issue. Jason describes some of the tactics that his team uses at the 37Signals office and offers some tactical advice that you could implement into your office.

Have you broken your company of their addiction to meetings and other interruptions? If so, what were the tactics you used?

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Have you had a chance to pick up your copy of Facebook Marketing yet?  If you’re still deciding whether or not it is worth your $20-ish, you might wander over to a few of the reviews so far of Facebook Marketing to see if that helps to convince you.

First up is a video review by Chris Brogan:

Next, here are a few other reviews that you may find interesting:

• Tim Peter – Facebook Marketing by Justin R. Levy (Book Review of the Week-ish)
• Valley PR Blog – Book Review: Facebook Marketing
• Deidre Breakenridge – Book Review: Facebook Marketing
• iMedia Connection – 6 Beach Books for Marketers
• Get Social PR – Facebook Marketing 9-Part Series

If you’ve written up a review of Facebook Marketing, please let me know in the comments.  I will keep this post updated with more reviews as I find them.

If you have already read Facebook Marketing, would you mind leaving a rating and review over on Amazon?

Most importantly, thank YOU for all of your support since the book launch!

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Anyone that has worked the startup life before knows how different and difficult it can be and how important marketing and lead generation is to the survival of the company.  Especially when you’re first starting out, the win of a single customer could be what pays the light bill for the month or the loss of a single customer could be enough to put the company on life support.  For those of you reading this who work at a startup, if there were a set of tips from a successful startup that would help you be a better marketer at your company, you’d want to know about it, right?

Recently Mike Volpe, VP of Marketing at HubSpot spoke at Atlassian Starter Day in San Francisco about startup marketing.  Mike used his experiences over the past 3 years of spearheading marketing for HubSpot while it grew from 5 to 160 employees and from a few customers to over 3,000.

I think you’ll find this presentation really useful as it has all sorts of actionable nuggets hiding inside of it. I know I took down a few notes and already shot off a couple of ideas to my team at New Marketing Labs. I would encourage you to sit back, relax, and hit play because I think you’ll do the same thing.

In case you missed it during the presentation, Mike broke down the ABCs of startup marketing into the following:

-Avoid Addiction
-Blog Beforehand
-Create Convenience
-Data Drives Decision
-Employ the Exceptional

You can read a short description of each of these over on the OnStartups blog.

If you don’t already know Mike, you should get to know him. As any good marketer would be, Mike can be found all over the web on his personal blog, the HubSpot blog, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, just to name a few. He’s works for an awesome company and is a good friend of mine that I think you would enjoy following.

Were there any letters in the alphabet that you think Mike was missing? List them in the comments below along with a short description.

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Would you like your chance at being co-director of a film that will be premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival? Well, depending on how interesting and creative your life is on July 24th, you may just have your opportunity.

While jumping around YouTube testing out the new mobile HTML5-compatible version that was launched today, I came across an experiment that YouTube has launched along with executive producer Ridley Scott and Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald. The project is being called “Life in a Day” and its goal is to document a single day in the life of the world.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to capture, on video, an aspect of your life on July 24, 2010 and upload it to the Life in a Day YouTube channel before July 31st. If you’re video is selected for the final cut, then you’ll be credited as a co-director and will even have a chance of attending the premier of the Life in a Day film at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

The Life in a Day crew has created an introductory video and also have posted the official guidelines.

This is a cool concept and it will be interesting what the response from the community will be. Will you participate? If so, what aspect of your life are you going to capture on July 24th?

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Google News has been my go-to source for news and has served as my homepage since it was released in 2002. I have always liked how Google News allows me to see what’s going on with top stories and then broken out by different interest areas such as Business, Technology, Entertainment, Local, and more. For each story listed, if I’m interested in reading other angles, Google News provides all of the other sources for a given story.

What I like the most about this is that I’m not boxed into a certain opinion just because I like a particular source. For example, when I used to receive the print version of The New York Times and only watched CNN, those were my two main sources for news. While both news sources try to stay in the middle and report the full details of a story, of course, there are other stories, access, and angles that different media sources receive. When Google News debuted, it immediately solved my curiosity to read multiple angles and to consume as much news as I could get my hands on.

Since Google News launched it has only had a few updates to it.  However, the Google News team has just launched a new, refreshed version with the goal of giving users more access to the specific news that is important to them.

The most noticeable aspect of this is when you first log in to the refreshed version, in the “News for You” section, Google asks you to customize your experience by telling them how often you read news from the different sections that Google News provides. Your choices are “Never”, “Sometimes”, or “Always”. You also have the option to provide custom topics that interests you besides the standard topic areas. Once you submit your choices to Google it adapts to your experience to show you news that is curated to your interests.

This is just one of several features of the refreshed Google News. To see all of the new features, check out the video below.

I’m really excited to have seen Google make these updates and I’m looking forward to seeing how well it provides more relevant news based on the ratings and interests I provided.

Do you use Google News? What are your thoughts on the updates? If you’re not a Google News user, how do you receive your news?

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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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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):

• MacBook Pro
• iPad
• iPhone 4
• Nikon S8000 digital camera
• Livescribe pad & pen
• Western Digital 1TB portable hard-drive

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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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

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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