3Be path to having a great day

Public speaking has been one of my interests right from high school through college to a few company events. So i jumped at the opportunity when i was recently invited to be the target speaker at our local Toastmasters club meeting. The topic had to be something motivational since that was the general theme of the day.

Here’s a short version of the 15 mins speech –

There are two kinds of people in the world – Those who are happy at the end of the day and those that are not. You probably want to be the former. At the end of the day everybody wants to feel good about themselves and the way their day went. One way to try and accomplish that is by what i call the 3Be Path.

1. Be confident – Know your strengths and limits. Accept challenges as they come and have confidence in your ability to meet and tackle them. I’m not saying blind faith. I’m saying be confident enough to accept a challenge because of the next step – the 2nd Be – in this path.

“Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.”

Be also confident enough to be able to turn down challenges if they are outside your limits. If you spend each day looking forward to the next challenge because you are confident about yourself, its the first step to having a great day.

2. Be knowledgeable – So you have accepted a challenge. That’s only the first step. Now you have to find ways to meet them. Read. Learn. Ask for help. A truly confident person is one who does not shy away from asking for help. Accumulate as much knowledge as you can everyday and in your lifetime because that will be your greatest asset. Learn to apply what you have learned. Fail quickly and often so you can learn faster.

3. Be vocal – Now comes the crucial and most important next step and probably the more tougher thing to do. Share your knowledge and experience. Find ways to voice your opinion, voice your thoughts, share it with others. When you spend your day teaching others what you have just learned, you learn more yourself. Talk about it at staff meetings, seminars, conferences, perhaps Toastmaster meetings. It will not only make you the new ‘expert’ but funny enough, you will find yourself feeling more confident about yourself which brings us back to the first ‘Be’. Sharing knowledge and being vocal will make you more confident about yourself.

So the more confident you are, the more challenges you accept. The more you accept, the more knowledgeable you become. The more knowledge you accumulate, the more you will have to share with others and voice your expertise which brings you back again to step 1. It completes the feedback loop and you will find yourself more satisfied with the way your day went. In the end that’s all that matters.

The 3Be path is just plain common sense and you probably already know you should be doing this. Now go ahead and do it.

The Cult of Done Manifesto (@bre)

Love it. Just happened to run into this post and i can’t agree with this more (especially #12). Check out the article for more…

The Cult of Done Manifesto

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.

2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.

3. There is no editing stage.

4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.

5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.

6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.

7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.

8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.

9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.

10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.

11. Destruction is a variant of done.

12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.

13. Done is the engine of more.

via Bre Pettis | I Make Things – Bre Pettis Blog – The Cult of Done Manifesto.

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Simple ideas lead to useful solutions

Sometimes the simplest of solutions can be most useful. For example, if you are out looking for a house and want to calculate how much mortgage you can afford, one simple solution would be look up a mortgage calculator online. I’ve used this tool from Bankrate in the past and found it useful.

Anyway – my point is – sometimes simple tools that focus on a niche area can be very helpful. We are always looking for the next killer app, the next ‘cool’ idea that will solve problems for a lot of people. While we’re trying to build that one solution fits all, we can often get lost in complexity.

Twitter, in my opinion, is a really simple app. I remember years ago, i built a silly little VB client app to post updates on tasks I was working on for this dot com startup. My team mates could also get on the same app running on their machines and post their updates. None of the updates were lost since we stored them in a central dB. Didn’t think too much of it and it got lost in time as we all moved on with our careers. Goodness me… if only I knew.

Here’s another example of a simple app that will have its uses. Kevin Marks is a former Google employee (Read news about his departure). Brilliant guy who worked on all kinds of stuff – Orkut, OpenSocial, Microformats, what have you. You can check out his blog (Epeus’ epigone) for more gory details.

A couple of days ago he put together this application in 12 hours. Amatwit. Using Amazon’s API and the Twitter’s API users can search Amazon for items (currently defaulting to books) and from the search results you can tweet links to those books. Nice.. simple.. useful.

Do you have any simple and useful solutions? Maybe you already have something and just don’t realize it.

Web 2.0 Expo : Eric Ries Lean Startup Presentation

A Disciplined Approach To Imagining, Designing, And Building New Products.