It has been an incredibly depressing stretch in professional sports over the past 12 months. Here’s just some of what hit the news for sports fans: The Ray Rice domestic abuse scandal and graphic YouTube video. Adrian Peterson’s child abuse charges. Donald Sterling’s racist remarks. Slava Voynov’s domestic abuse charges. The New England Patriot’s illegally deflated game balls. The steady stream of cases of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in the NFL, NHL and other contact sports. All I can say is... UGH. Normally I look forward to watching the Super Bowl, but with everything that’s happened lately, it was difficult to think about flicking on the TV this Sunday. For the first time, I felt conflicted about the goodness of sports....
There is a little-known company that is Silicon Valley's moral equivalent of “The Smoking Man” in The X-Files. It's one of the most influential tech companies in the world… and hardly anybody outside of Silicon Valley has heard of them. You’ve likely heard of their offspring though: Dropbox, Code Academy, Heroku, Genius.com and AirBNB. Y-Combinator is a company that exclusively focuses on funding and launching tech startups, and readers are given insider access into their exclusive world through “The Launchpad” by Randall Stross. Set in 2011, the book reads like The Shark Tank for tech startups, and is an outstanding overview of what it takes to launch a startup in Silicon Valley… in three short months. Here are five lessons...
“Find a career you love, and then figure out a way to get paid for it” is terrible advice. Ok, now wipe the coffee off your monitor, because I’m sure you spat it out in disbelief as you read that. I am a recovering career fun seeker. For the first decade of my career I made most of my career decisions with “fun” in mind, and it lead to virtually no salary growth, plenty of stress, and interests that had the life sucked from them because they felt like work. Turning Fun into a Career Often Sucks the Life out of the Fun The “fun career” thing got off to a great start for me, but eventually lead to trouble....
My wife and I recently sold almost all of our earthly possessions on Kijiji, and reduced what we had down to two wooden shipping pallets. Since we are a family of five, there was a lot of stuff to sell. Couches, coffee tables, beds, toys, kitchenware, a blender... In total we made about 40 transactions on Kijiji and recouped about $6,000 en route to Abbotsford, BC from Ottawa, ON (which is a journey that spans two-thirds across the second largest country on the world). Selling everything saved us about $8,000 in moving costs, and we are now having a lot of fun picking out new things for our life on the westcoast. Moving this way was hard, but honestly, I’m...
One of the biggest mistakes I see companies make in social media is spreading themselves too thin. There will be a Facebook page for every product (all 27 of them), along with a Twitter account, a Google + Page and a plethora of blogs to support the effort. The flawed thinking behind this is the idea that the more you put out there, the more likely people are to stumble across you and become a customer… and that it’s less confusing to have multiple dedicated websites and social media properties to support your individual efforts. This is Crazy, Don’t Do It! The problem with creating a lot of different online properties is a total dilution of resources and brand understanding....
