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Episode 46 - Review and Summary of The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor Jun 28, 2017

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Often as parents, leaders, and entrepreneurs, we are afraid of happiness. Or we don’t fully understand it. Because we feel if we become happy, our pursuit of success will change. We think that if we are happy, we will become complacent or not have the hunger to push ourselves to achieve our goals in life and in business. Modern society associates happiness with pleasure, but pleasure is fleeting. This is what Shawn tries to open our eyes on. At a very young age, we are taught to study hard, find a safe secure job and be successful, and then we will find happiness. But every time we achieve something in life, we move the goal post, because of this mindset, tells us to keep pushing forward. This rat race never ends, because we are always in pursuit of happiness that seems unattainable. And when we attain it, we feel temporary pleasure, before the goal is moved again, and the cycle of unhappiness continues. Shawn Achor the author is from Harvard and is one of the world’s leading experts on the connection between happiness and success. What he found in his research was that Figuring out what makes us happy, pursue it and we’ll find happiness and success will follow. His research shows, that happiness is one of the primary tools we can utilize to increase our performance, which helps us move faster toward our goals. He tells us that “Happiness is not the belief that we don't need to change; it's the realization that we can.” We wants us to consider that Happiness is the joy we feel in striving after our potential. He offers seven (7) principles to help us to do just that. So lets dive right in. Allow me to leave you with this final thought Success does not equal happiness. On the contrary, our success, depends on our level of happiness. It starts in our brain, and radiates outwards and jumps to another person, then to a group, a community, and beyond. While the investments in happiness can be small, the dividends of happiness are enormous. Discovering happiness does not mean big changes in our lives, in fact, all we have to do is adjust our mindset, and notice positive things that are there already there and build on that to start living a more positive and happy life.

Episode 45 - Review and Summary of The Lean Startup by Eric Ries Jun 27, 2017

Show notes

As entrepreneurs and leaders in organizations, we come up or are presented with many great ideas. We’ve all had those products, or business startup that we sank our time, money in and ended up being a black hole, draining our motivation, resources and more importantly our time. Eric says “A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” ― Eric Ries, Imagine if there was a way for you to semi-scientifically avoid that, and find a sustainable business model and a product that our target audience clamors for. That is exactly what Eric Ries presents in this book. He came up with this, through his own personal struggle in a Start up. In 2004, he was a part of a Startup called IMVUm which was a 3D social communication platform to chat and meet other people. Being a part of the founding team and was its CTO, they all believed their idea. They spent almost a year developing their platforms. They integrated all know communication and popular chat engines of the time. They put their heart and soul into building all the best features they could think of in their platform. And were excited to launch. When they did, to their surprise. CRICKETS were what they found. Very few were interested in their platform. And they were demoralized. I am sure we would be too if we experienced this. So they then talked to their customers and found that their main assumption of integrating exisiting social chat platforms was completely wrong. Users preferred a whole new platform and did not want to use their existing chat networks. If they knew this ahead of time, they would not have wasted time building all those features and focused on what their target audience really wanted. That is how the Lean Startup Methodology was born. Today IMVU is the #1 avatar social community in the world with millions of users. Allow me to leave you with this final thought As entrepreneurs, we often rely on our guts and intuition for our businesses, but we should consider utilizing The lean Startup methodology to test the core assumptions of our product or business. Our goal should be to develop a viable business model based on validated and actionable metrics, instead of solely relying on our guts. We should employ the build, measure and learn loop in order to put our ideas to the test. This will allow us to test and validate our ideas as fast and as often as possible to know when to pivot or persevere. By applying the Lean Startup Framework, we can ensure viability, profitability and create a growth engine we can semi-scientifically bank on before sinking our entire life on an idea that may or may not work.

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