So here it is…my first real podcast. I probably broke ever rule in podcast etiquette hehe but here goes!
This podcast is actually based on a guest post I wrote, Every One Promotes, a few months ago at Glenn Danker’s blog.
I already know how much I suck at speaking and it juices me to know I can at least improve!:)
As far as I can remember I’ve had a strong curiosity to know how things worked. Growing up I’d constantly tair things apart, until one day I figured out that it costs too much. Entrepreneurs love to build business systems, they don’t often have to bother with small details. Once the entrepreneur has mastered his own skills, and his mind, his work becomes very simple. Not easy … but simple. Something we all learn eventually is that the person who knows how to create a simple life, and still get everything he wants, is paid more than the multitasking yes-man who micromanages everything. The more technical a job is, the more average the pay. Even a technical consultant gets paid more for teaching others how to do their work than he does working him self.
If you ask someone to spent four years of their life in college will tell you it was a “great learning experience” but they never learned anything about on the job activities. In other words it got them a job with a yearly salary of 36K, barely enough to pay bills and rent/mortgage never mind other little things that add up…oh and student loans. If you don’t need to know something, don’t muck up your brain. Time is too important. For example, the other day I was installing Kubuntu on a computer for one of the people I serve, and a screen came up asking which processor we use. I didn’t know … so what did I do…take a crash course on computer processors? Hell no…all I did was Google it…it took a max of 3 minutes. No degree needed. No college experience needed…maybe I can spend those 4 years building wealth so I can sun tan while everyone else is still looking for a job.
Why do old companies die, old people live in the past and old habits die hard? This is why…they’re all based on the past! What worked back then wont work now days. Lately, the world has had a habit of rearanging itself every few years. If you stick to your outdated way of thinking you’ll get rearranged out of a job. Don’t pre-suppose that just because something has been done the same for decades or cenuries that it’s been proven. It may been been proven 40 years ago but might not make any sense now days.
There are laws that dictate time and space, there are also laws that dictate our finances, our business, what we do subconsciously, the friends we make and the person we become. Timeless principles don’t change with time but rather prove themselves with time. Make it a habit to get curious about life and learn principles that dicatate life. This way, whether you’re in a down economy or the horse and buggy age you’ll know more about life than the people who study the markets, or stay stuck in practices that were rendered ineffective years ago. Principles are more important in an age where things can change over night than in any other age.
Who makes the most money in a free enterprise system? People who know how to leverage resources, money and time to serve them. These are the entrepreneurs, leaders, CEOs, salespeople, connectors and inventors. In all my reading and learning I constantly look for ways to leverage. How can I leverage time? How can I leverage one spending habit or one working habit that makes a long term difference on my income? Even learning is leveraging. Because if you’re constantly learning to leverage everything, you’re leveraging your life. People who rely purely on conventional wisdom stay at the bottom of the bin.
So again, don’t spend time learning what you don’t need to know. There are very few wealthy PHds, so that should tell you something. Challenge old ways of thinking and learn new ways, the past is the enemy of the future. The past is gone so prepare for the future, all your hope is in it. Learn Timeless Principles…practices are great but even practices go out of date. And finally, learn how to speed seduce and leverage life and use the latest human and computer technologies to simplify and streamline various aspects of your life.
Photo by scottburnham
“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” – Henry Ford
The word “team”, instead of staff, has become popular among many organizations now days and corporate leaders and entrepreneurs are understanding why teams are important. The days of management and carrot and sticking is slowly but surely coming to an end. It has far outlived its time.
John C. Maxwell, one of the world’s experts on leadership, says that strong teams compensate for individual weaknesses. Everyone has special strengths and talents. But no matter how talented we are we’ll always have weaknesses. A strong team goes through self-assessment and finds strong points in the their team members. They then coordinate and use these strong points to compensate for members with weaknesses. For example, a web design firm would assign technical tasks to people are gifted in technical areas, presentations would be given by people who are gifted at presenting, design would be given to people who are good at design, etc.
The real power of a successful business probably shows its teeth in the way it leverages OPM, OPT. What do big businesses have that sole proprietors or one-man-shows don’t? They know how to leverage man power! I really got excited about this idea when I first really “saw” and understood what this meant. It’s so simple that the world class seem to be the only ones who want to leverage it.
Take for example you work as a self-employed gardener. In the morning, you need to water the plants, open the store, and set anything else that needs setting up. During the day you have to water the plants, be the cashier etc etc. At night you need to close the place down and do whatever else needs doing. You’re the entrepreneur and the technician, the brains and the labor, the person who makes or breaks your business. But lets say you got tired of standing behind a cash register, so you hire someone to take over that area. Now your business has 32hrs of potential man power(lets say a potential 16hr days at max). With the extra time it gives you, you start getting time to think about innovating your business. You add on a little to the green house and set up for plants. The problem is now you’re working even harder than you did before. So you hire someone to take care of the watering and tending to the plants. That now gives your business a potential 40+ hours in a day. Plant sales are good so you add on even more, hiring two more people to take care of customers and other tasks that need doing. You add another 32 hours to your day, that’s almost 65+ hours in one day. Needless to say, 65 hours per day impossible for one person. That’s the power of leveraging.
24 x 1 = 24hrs (limited cash flow, bus factor of one, if you get hit by a bus your business does to)
24 x 2 = 48hrs (Already impossible for one person)
24 x 5 = 120hrs
24 x 10 = 240hrs
24 x 100 = 2400hrs (is that time management or what?)
When people work together an interesting phenomenon happens. Stephan Covey talks about this in his book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Synergy is a dynamic type of state where 1 + 1 = the power of 3 or 4 or more instead of 2. The word synergy comes from the Greek word syn-ergos, which means to work together. Covey explains it as, “When the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” Synergy works in all areas of live, not just business. Synergy works when people work toward a common goal. Take for example a brainstorm session, one person might not have any ideas … until sitting down with another person, then idea begin to flood from both of them as if there were 10 brains brainstorming.
It was like the two brains tapped into a higher form of intelligence and both ended up complimenting and inspiring one another. It wasn’t two brains thinking anymore, it was one super mind. Our minds are wired for communication and when we do so they work like magic.
7 Habits of Highly Effective People is one of the best books I’ve ever read on personal development. It’s the basis of much of my thinking and has been for a few years. A powerful lesson I learned from this book is that we’re all interconnected. Stephan Covey considers co-dependence the highest stage of maturity. He explains that the first stage is dependency, we’re born into this world and have to depend heavily on our parents, teachers, etc to survive. Next comes independence, the stage at which we begin to think individual thoughts and depend on our own reasoning instead of seeking advice or support from the people we depended on as we grew up. The final stage is co-dependence, understanding that we all depend on each other and, in some way, we’re all interconnected and if one link in the chain loosens others are there to fix it. Co-dependence often exists in organizations, intimate relationships like dating couples or married people. It exists in communities, government and other such groups. Co-dependency is acknowledging that you alone can’t accomplish anything great alone.
“No one man can accomplish great things alone” – Maynas Eric Chua
With technology with now days, outsourcing is common place and anyone with a laptop and a Internet connection can become a web developer. We call them freelance developers. People who work for multiple employers or clients. Many of these freelance developers are amazing, they blow your mind and compel you to tell the world. Then, there are those developers that set high expectations of themselves, make big promises to clients, and after the initial deposit you never hear from them again, or they spoof the project. And then there are those developers that are sincere, they work their asses off … but they can’t communicate with you. Maybe they can’t speak your language, or maybe there’s a lack of communication because of the medium you’re using(e.g. Text only gets across 7% of your communication), OR maybe your coder is just one fo those people who think you’re full of crap and don’t want to listen. Have you ever been in one of these situations? Most people who have had any hiring experience have.
I believe the main pitfall of even experienced programmers is listening to the client from a “coder’s” perspective. Thinking about HOW to get it done instead of truly understanding WHAT the client’s vision is.
A gentleman, I previously talked to about a web project, told me about an experience he had with a non-local freelancer. His complaint was that the coder he was dealing with just simply didn’t listen, he didn’t possess empathy and he couldn’t fully understand what needed to get done. He came to me because he wanted someone local and he liked what he saw on my blog(one of the reasons why I blog in the first place).
Don’t just hire anyone! How much money do you have to spend on people who don’t get the work done? How much of your time and hard earned money will you waste if you don’t hire the right programmer right now … instead of later?
Lesson 1: Empathy is always the 1st trait you want to look for in a freelancer, especially a developer. A developer must always shows he or she cares and make attempts to dive deeper into your vision.
It’s a popular thing to do now days. Hiring overseas to cut costs and widen margins. Everything from Virtual Assistants to Writing Articles can be outsourced to people anywhere from India to Texas to the North Pole. Does lower cost automatically mean lower quality? Of course not. The fact that anyone with a computer and a PayPal can become your employee doesn’t mean there aren’t tons upon tons of excellent, experienced people out there ready and waiting to serve you with every ounce of breathe they have. For people in India, or other foreign countries, your work might mean food or no food for them and their family. Most people won’t fowl that up. Then we have to deal with people who don’t have a concept of professionalism. When you work with businesses all around the world your professionalism has to be peak. For example, spelling mistakes or grammar errors on a resume is a professional leak. Or people you don’t hear from for 3 days because they went on vacation and forgot to tell you.
Lesson 2: Professionals almost NEVER undersell themselves. Why would you encourage people who do?
Let me tell you something: YES! Can you imagine hiring someone who’s uneducated? Let’s avoid the topic of formal education or post-secondary. I believe that there are better forms of education than college. Self education, learning at your own pace, is the most valuable and most overlooked education out there. There is no limit to what a person can learn by simply going to a collage library, picking up a bunch of books and then instantly putting what you learn to practice. Educated people are more passionate, they know how to sell themselves(even if they don’t have a degree) and usually more street smart.
Lesson 3: Having a BS in Computer Science or MBA or Marketing degree does not assure you that the person capable of getting the job done. It’s how much they learned in those classes and how much they put to use. Don’t judge by education alone.
Let me tell you something: HELL YES! I have a saying, “You don’t *know* anything until you *do* it and do it well.” The people who know and the people who do are two very different people. The people who have perfected their skills though practice are the ones you want to hire, not the people who have perfected their knowledge. I have to tell you, in my own career, experience is something I’d pay 10 million dollars for if I could get it the first day. But of course you can’t get sufficient experience in one day, it takes a long time. That’s why it’s important that you pay close attention to how much experience a programmer has before hiring him or her. The less experience a programmer has the longer it takes, and you’re paying for that inexperience.
Lesson 4: A programmer must have lots of experience, and show signs of constant and never ending improvement.
A good programmer or web developer is your best friend. Good people are rare, GREAT people are even rarer. A great programmer has improved VERY FAST! He knows a lot about what he does and has spent hours upon hours experimenting and pulling his hair out. If you run into a bald programmer you’re in luck! 
After all this I’d like to thank you for the opportunity to someday serve your web development needs. I know how hard it is sometimes to find a good web developer and that it can be a frustrating process. I know you might be saying, “what sets you apart from everyone else?” This is why I’ve devoted my web development career to helping people like you find true quality service. And isn’t that the kind of service you want? I’d love to hear from you and learn more about your project, your needs and what you look for when hiring a developer. If you want to know more about what it is I do, please head over to my Service Page. Maybe I can even find someone who could do the job better than I can. Do you have any concerns, any questions? I’d love to hear your comments and opinions on this post. Please feel free to network with me on Twitter.
We share life experiences and discuss development of leadership skills, discovering better methods of growth in business, the innovation of modern technology, social media and the web.
