Guiding Principles from Year 2010

Year 2010 is a special year for me. I've gone through some significant changes during this year. As it draws to an end, I'd like to summarize what I have learned in this year. They will serve as guiding principles in my life.

1. It's OK to leave an unhealthy situation. In most time, you are only stuck "mentally".

2. A good name is more desirable than great riches; to be esteemed is better than silver or gold. (Proverbs 22:1)

3. What goes around comes around (in positive way). Offer helps to others and you'll likely get the helps from them.

4. Build the relationship first and do business second. Similar to previous point, you can't go wrong with that.

5. Your actions speak much louder than your words.

6. If you fail to trust others, they won't trust you either.

7. If you are the only one see an issue, you could be the issue. If many see the same issue, it's a REAL issue. Before making conclusion, validate it with others.

8. We are more productive in "zone" and chosen places, not necessarily in the office. I found myself work better at a coffee shop in the morning.

9. Participate in meaningful causes and contribute to them with actions, they will empower your life.

10. Remember "The Parable of the Mexican Fisherman". Are we trying to find the answer to the wrong question in our life?

Despite all the predictions about the economy of upcoming year, the year 2011 will be a great year and let's make it so.

Fred Wilson: 10 Ways to Be Your Own Boss

Fred Wilson: 10 Ways to Be Your Own Boss from 99% on Vimeo.

You can find more good entrepreneur information on Fred Wilson's blog.

Photoelectric Flashlight: Product and Leadership Lessons

Thanks to my wife for drawing this cartoon.  There are two lessons to learn in this cartoon.

1. If a product does not function well for its intended purpose, such as a printer that requires outside help to print, it's a product failure
2. A leader should be showing the vision and lead the way. If he requires other people to "carry" him to form the vision and lead, it's a leadership failure.

Multi-tasking and Space-saving Furniture

Superior design. Multi-tasking furniture that are usable and save space!

Leadership Lessons From Nehemiah

We are doing an in depth study of the book of Nehemiah lately and I have discovered a lot of leadership lessons from the book. It reveals to me some leadership qualities we need to acquire in order to become great leaders.

Great leaders have great EQ (emotional quality), particularly empathy. Emotion usually follows by actions. If a person doesn't have any emotional response, he usually won't take any action.

• Nehemiah heard of the mournful and desolate condition of Jerusalem, and was filled with sadness of heart. At length the king observed his sadness of countenance and asked the reason of it. Nehemiah explained this to the king, and obtained his permission to go up to Jerusalem.

Great leaders choose solitude to access situations and plans.

• On his arrival in Jerusalem, Nehemiah began to survey the city secretly at night, and formed a plan for its restoration. While he surveyed the city, he did not tell what God was putting on his heart to do for Jerusalem. The official do not know where he had gone or what he had been doing.

Great leaders set goals and expectations, then follow through.

• Nehemiah announced a plan after assessing the situations which he carried out with great skill and energy, so that the whole wall was completed over an astounding 52-day span.

Great leaders focus on the goals even when there are oppositions. Oppositions and nay sayers are always there when you set out to do great work. Despite all the rumors and attackers, leaders always look at the end goals.

• Nehemiah then asked God to battle their enemies for them. He depended on God to fight the battle. God gave him a work to do, and he would not be distracted from it.

Great leaders take time to reflect and usually choose confrontation instead of compromise.

• Nehemiah was very angry when he heard the outcry and complaints about wrong doing of his officials. After taking time for reflection, he called a meeting and confronted the wrong doing with his people.

Great leaders lead by example and would choose self-scarification to accomplish a higher goal.

• Nehemiah was a great example of putting the work of God ahead of his own personal interest. He certainly had the right to tax the people for his support (others had done it before him), but he didn't take that right because it wouldn't help the work of God.
• Nehemiah, in his own life, lived the way he told the nobles and rulers to live - to not take personal advantage of another’s need. He did what every godly leader must do: he never expected more of his followers than he expected of himself.

Great leaders have generosity and look after others.

• Nehemiah not only did not take when he could have; he also gave when he didn’t have to. He received a lot of food from the king’s provisions, which he could have sold for his own profit. Instead, he gave them away to be the example of generosity - feeding as many as 150 people regularly.

While writing this post, I found a web page that contains 35 lessons on Godly Leadership from Nehemiah by Dr. Neil Chadwick. It's definitely a better read than mine.

Untangling Social Media Networks

Do all of these social media networks make you dizzy? Do you have the feeling that you are lost in a maze of blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, Four Square etc? Posts are everywhere and sometimes they are repeating the same things. It may annoy your followers and friends and eventually you will get ignored. It doesn’t have to be this way when you know how to simplify and untangle the links that join social media networks together.

I’d like to show you one simple way to link the connections between your social media accounts so that you do less work and still spread your efforts to these social media channels.

1. Blog – This is where you provide value to others by sharing your view point, expertise and experience.  Blogging is also a great way to get organic traffic from search engines and allows others to reference to your posts.
2. Twitter is the springboard and the broadcaster of your social media networks.  Connect your blog to your twitter accounts to make your blog automatically send messages to other social channels you have.
3. LinkedIn has partnered with Twitter. When you set your Twitter name in your LinkedIn account, your tweets will automatically update your LinkedIn status. You can also add your blog’s RSS feed to one of the link in your LinkedIn profile and add Blog Link app to your LinkedIn account to share your blog posts with your connections.
4. Facebook – I don’t think I need to explain much about Facebook. For me, it’s primarily for my personal network of family, relatives and close friends. By connecting your Twitter announcements to Facebook, it can automatically add your twitter to your Facebook status.
5. Google Buzz is the newcomer but not many people understand it yet. To make it work, you’ll want to create your own Google Profile. You then connect your Twitter account to your Google profile and Google Buzz to broadcast your status to your Buzz connection. The Buzz network usually consists of family and friends who use Gmail as their personal email platform. One feature of Google Buzz is that it allows you to share the items from your Google Reader and Blogger account through Buzz network.

Following are the tools that you can use to make the job of untangling your social media network easier:

HootSuite is a powerful tool to manage all your social media accounts. It can post messages to  multiple Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Four Square accounts. It also can connect with your WordPress and RSS.

DISQUS Comments: When you install DISQUS Comments on your blog, it replaces your regular comment forms. Your visitors can then use one of the social media accounts they already have to post comments. It will authenticate their identity to ensure quality comments. It will prevent opening up the blog to spam.

WordPress to Twitter plugins: There are a number of plugins to allow you to connect and broadcast your blog to your Twitter account. Most of them will also allow you to connect to shorten URL app and properly layout your tweets.

Everyone is talking about how to leverage and harness the power of social media but it can appear quite overwhelming. By taking simple steps to ensure the proper linkage of the connections, you can do less AND reap the benefits of the social media networks.

Time Management and Productivity

I've received some great advices on time management and productivity from my mentors throughout my career. Here is a small list I found valuable.

• Build a Default Time Schedule
• Do hardest stuff at your most productive time – for most, this is the morning
• Schedule things that require concentration at your best quiet time – this may be end of day, or even at home
• A way to get back some time is to use lunch to eat and meet
• Have regular meetings at beginning or end of day, so as to break up the day.

Saving even 10% each week by doing this is 4 hours, EVERY week. Which is 17 hours each month, so that we don’t have to work late/weekends to catch up to. Not to mention better performance, which leads to better compensation.

Jim Estill is the master of time management that I follow closely. You will find a lot of great info on business and time leadership on his website.

Harness the Power of Auto Crowdsourcing

You probably have known or heard of crowsourcing that uses groups of individuals doing things collectively that seem intelligent. Wikipedia, iStockphoto and Jigsaw.com are all well-known examples of active crowd-sourcing.

Lately I really see how powerful the crowdsourcing is on solving problems using the collective knowledge of the users and the communities in a passive and automated way. By definition of passive I mean the application wasn't originally designed to get the intelligence from users. But overtime the wealth of information collected from users becomes a very important knowledge database in the application. By harnessing the collective intelligence of user base, it creates a very useful product and a key barrier to entry for the new comers.

Let's take a look at some good examples of products that are harnessing the power of crowds passively and automatically.

Quicken 2010 has just came out recently. Quicken users have been complaining about spending too much time trying to update and consolidate the spending categories. At the end, users just want to know where the money goes. Mint.com was created to solve this problem by downloading and categorizing the transactions automatically for its users. With the development of Quicken online and the acquisition of Mint.com, Intuit has incorporated this smart categorization into the new Quicken 2010. It learns from all the Quicken and Quicken Online users. If a particular transaction, say “Supreme Court Racquetball” was initially uncategorized, but is later categorized by enough people as a Health/Gym expense, Quicken applies that learning to all future transactions across user.

RescueTime is an application with desktop plugin to collect how you spend your time on your computer. It then sends the information to its server to analyze and show you how productive you are. It also uses crowd intelligence to determine which applications or websites to be considered as productive usage of time and what aren't.

Gmail is a famous email platform but I think the best feature of Gmail is its spam filter. We switched to Google App mainly for this.  Gmail uses the power of crowds to identify the spam messages. We as users are collecting and identifying the knowledge about spams for Google so that all our Gmail inboxes can be free of spams.

Delicious is a social bookmarking application which allows users to save and share their website bookmarks. When you try to save a URL onto your Delicious account, you'll notice that it provides suggestion on the tags to use for that URL. How does Delicious know what tags to suggest for an URL? It uses the tags that are used by other users who bookmarked the URL on its system already.

There are many other examples of passive crowdsourcing. You probably even experienced one from Amazon.com that tells you other books people also bought with the one you are looking at.

I suggest you taking a good look at your own application. It may have already been collecting useful information from your users. How would you make use of this collective knowledge and share the benefits among all users to make everyone's life easier?

Rules to Successful Trading

I just found out my good friend Sam has an Investment Blog called Investocrat. One of the investment insight articles on Rules to Successful Trading he wrote awhile back is really good. I like how he put it:

Successfully trading the markets require strict discipline. A set of rules guide every trade just like the Ten Commandments to a devoted Christian.

These 10 investment rules are:

1. Be Discipline
2. Manage Your Risk
3. Control Your Emotions
4. Listen to the Market
5. Be Patient
6. Ride the Trend
7. Focus on Abnormal Activities
8. Learn From Your Mistakes
9. Keep it Simple
10. Repeat

You can read the full articles on his investment blog.

Build on your strengths, not your weaknesses

As business coach Dan Sullivan says, "If you spend too much time working on your weaknesses, all you end up with is a lot of strong weaknesses!"

Tim Ferriss said in his book that it is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor. The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre. Focus on better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair.

Shefaly Yogendra also wrote a very good post on Serial entrepreneurs focus on core strengths and how core strength enhanced opens new markets. In summary:

• Core strength + new knowledge –> new market
• Core strength + removal of a constraint –> new market
• Core strength + emergent opportunity –> new market

Are you a Leader or just a Boss?

The Practice of Leadership on the difference between being a boss and being a leader

People follow the boss because they have to if they want to keep their jobs. People follow leaders because of who they are and where they are going. Too many leaders today rely on their position to lead. How about you?

It's also quite disappointed when a leader turns into a boss.

iPhone Arts

My wife painted some arts with her fingers on my iPhone using DoodleBuddy. What do you think?

On the left is her first attempt painting on iPhone. On the right is her trying to emulate Chinese free style painting.

We need to have PRIDE

As an individual, we need to have PRIDE.

P - Passion
R - Responsibility
I - Integrity
D - Drive
E - Energy

Why I converted to iPhone

I like things that come in a single package and solve multiple problems at the same time. After using Blackberry for awhile, here are the three main reasons for my switching to iPhone.

1) I want a Netbook. I like the ability to do computing and surfing on the road.

2) I want a iPod. I listen to a lot of audio books, especially when I'm driving.

3) I want a Kindle. Apparently we always end up in some kind of waiting. An ebook reader is a perfect thing to do when I wait.

Here is the last thing I like. I can blog on the road and I blog this post on my iPhone.

Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy

Leadership Lessons learned from Dancing Guy by Derek Sivers. Read transcript at http://sivers.org/ff

Steve Jobs: How to live before you die

At his Stanford University commencement speech, Steve Jobs, CEO and co-founder of Apple and Pixar, urges us to pursue our dreams and see the opportunities in life's setbacks -- including death itself.