Category: General

A new book by Timothy Ferriss promises:

* How to outsource your life and do whatever you want for a year, only to return to a bank account 50% larger than before you left
* How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs
* How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of little-known European economists
* How to train your boss to value performance over presence, or kill your job (or company) if it’s beyond repair
* How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent mini-retirements
* What automated cash-flow “muses” are and how to create one in 2-4 weeks
* How to cultivate selective ignoranceand create timewith a low-information diet
* Management secrets of Remote Control CEOs
* The crucial difference between absolute and relative income
* How to get free housing worldwide and airfare at 50-80% off
* How to fill the void and creating meaning after removing work and the office

Forbes has an essay by Nassim Taleb:

It’s impossible for the editors of Forbes.com to predict who will change the world, because major changes are Black Swans, the result of accidents and luck. But we do know who society’s winners will be: those who are prepared to face Black Swans, to be exposed to them, to recognize them when they show up and to rigorously exploit them.

Things, it turns out, are all too often discovered by accident–but we don’t see that when we look at history in our rear-view mirrors. The technologies that run the world today (like the Internet, the computer and the laser) are not used in the way intended by those who invented them. Even academics are starting to realize that a considerable component of medical discovery comes from the fringes, where people find what they are not exactly looking for.

Steven Johnson points to an article in PhySorg: “What they found were some general correlations of size and resource consumption that more or less fit the biological organism metaphor, meaning as the city grew in size it required less energy (resources) to sustain it in a proportion called sublinear scaling. What was surprising to the team was when they measured creative output (jobs, wealth generated, innovation) as cities grew, the scaling of this output was not sublinear, but superlinear, meaning as the city grew its creative output grew faster and faster.”

AlwaysOn features an interview with Anastasia Goodstein, author of “Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online.”

Teenagers are connected to each other, lots more information, and media 24/7. They need parents and adults to set limits on this use and act as guides as to whats credible as well as to help them be more media and marketing savvy. It means that there is a new way of communicating that adds an element of distance, the possibility of anonymity, and the reality of much of this communication is public or can easily be made public.
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Teens put the social in social networking. Being a teen is all about individuating from your parents and spending more time with peers. We did this by hanging out in malls, parks and parking lots. Todays teens are much more scheduled and structured, and todays parents are more reluctant to let teens hang out unsupervised.

Forbes writes about 15 people who changed the world since 1950 as part of a special issue.

WSJ writes:

Just seven years after the great bull market of the 1990s thudded to a halt, a small group of seasoned investors — including some with no vested interest in selling stock — believe the U.S. market is in the midst of another long period of gains.

This group of extreme optimists believes that global economic strength will keep shares rising for much longer than has been common in previous eras. Not only China and India, but also Japan, Western Europe, Latin America and other parts of Asia are feeding on one another.

Here. Guy Kawasaki writes: The commonality youll see in these winners is big fonts, big graphics, and a ;storytelling’ orientation. These are three crucial qualities of a good presentation.”

The latest issue of Business Today has a cover story on the Indian Internet. It also features an article by me. I will publish it here on Monday.

Fortune has compiled a list of 24 innovators.

Chris Anderson writes:

pare cycles are the most powerful fuel on the planet. It’s what Web 2.0 is made up of. User generated content? Spare cycles. Open source? Spare cycles. MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life? Spare cycles. They’re the Soylent Green of the web.
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Web 2.0 is such a phenomena because we’re underused elsewhere. Bored at work, bored at home. We’ve got spare cycles and they’re finally finding an outlet. Tap that and you’ve tapped an energy source that rivals anything in human history. Solitaire Players of the World Unite!