David Lidsky's Blog, page 2749
April 11, 2016
5 Habits To Get Over Self-Limiting Beliefs
"Iceberg beliefs"—self-limiting, below-the-surface doubts—could be major obstacles to your success. Here's how to overcome them.
Sometimes the biggest thing holding you back from greater success is something you might not even be aware of.
Inside Bernie Sanders's Social Media Machine
From #FeeltheBern to Slack: The man behind Bernie Sanders's social media agency talks the tools, techniques, and missteps of their campaign.
Ask most any political pundit a year ago who the 2016 Democratic nominee for president would be and virtually all of them would have told you that Hillary Clinton had the lock. But then something unexpected started happening: Bernie Sanders, the relatively unknown Independent senator from Vermont who was 60 to 70 points behind Clinton started attracting massive crowds to his burgeoning campaign.
Why The Gender Wage Gap Might Ruin The Future U.S. Economy
Women earning less over the course of their careers could spell poverty in retirement—and affect the entire U.S. economy.
Just ahead of Equal Pay Day (coming up on April 12) Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), ranking member of the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee (JEC) released a new report that takes another hard look at the gender pay gap and its long-term effects on women, their families, and the economy.
Two Reasons Not To Turn Your Side Hustle Into A Full-Time Gig
My brother, Mike, is a jazz musician in New York City. Over the years, he's invested countless hours developing his skills and reputation in the music scene. He's lugged his saxophone all over New York and all over the world, gradually moving up in his industry and making a name for himself.
If you ask him why he chose to be a musician, his answer is simple: Music chose him. That was the only thing he ever wanted to do, and he made the sacrifices required to do it, especially in the early days when he could barely pay his bills. With success, he's found that he can live a much better life than he might have imagined a decade ago. Perhaps he'll even hit it big someday.
Still, if he were looking for fame and a big payday, he'd have chosen a different path. Mike once told me that he sees being an artist today as akin to being in the clergy. You do it for passion, not for money, and in that sense, you've already struck it rich.
The time and focus required to launch and lead a company takes a toll on you and everyone in your life.
I see entrepreneurship much the way my brother sees music. Contrary to popular perceptions, you don't become an entrepreneur because you want to be rich or famous. You become an entrepreneur because it chooses you. That may sound overly romantic to some, but no matter when you take the plunge, you know in your gut that you just have to go for it.
Perhaps you're the person who's been launching businesses since you set up your first lemonade stand. Maybe you knew from the outset that you were never going to work for anyone else. Or maybe you reached that decision after years working for other people. However you got there, you had to accept first that success is terrific if it comes but that it can't be the only thing driving your decision.
Entrepreneurship is simply too hard a road if you try heading down it for the wrong reasons, or without thinking long and hard about what lies ahead. Sometimes a great side gig should stay a side gig. If you're considering taking that project full time and setting up shop on your own, here are two perfectly rational reasons why you might opt not to.
In September 2014, an entrepreneur named Ali Mese published a post on Medium titled "How quitting my corporate job for my startup dream f*cked my life up." Mese, a former Bain & Company consultant, chronicled the unexpected personal, familial, and social stresses that resulted from his decision to leave the safe and prestigious world of management consulting to start his own company.
Having been caught off guard, Mese wanted to make sure that all the bored consultants, understimulated corporate types, and frustrated bankers who dreamed about startups from their cubicles also saw the other, darker side of the entrepreneurial allure, so he laid it bare. Clearly, the risks and trade-offs of pursuing entrepreneurship are on a lot of people's minds; Mese's post went viral, racking up millions of views.
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The time and focus required to launch and lead a company takes a toll on you and everyone in your life. You have to rethink your financial goals, your lifestyle, and your definition of success, all while being plagued with self-doubt.
It's generally believed that divorce rates among startup founders are the highest of any occupation, as a result of the long hours and stress. Even if your company thrives, your lifestyle may not be luxurious. If you leave your corporate law job to open a bakery and finally make a business out of your grandmother's famous cookie recipe, you may find yourself working far more hours for a fraction of the pay. Sure, you have "freedom," but you also have long hours, demanding clients, and the stress of making ends meet on less money, at least at the outset.
Lives, like careers, are rarely in balance, and you may find that your "dream job" has even less equilibrium than your previous job. After all the hard work and sacrifice, how terrible would it feel if you opened your bakery only to discover that you should have stayed at the law firm? It took you going all in to realize that while you enjoyed baking a few batches of cookies for your friends, you hate doing it 12 hours a day.
Lives, like careers, are rarely in balance, and you may find that your "dream job" has even less equilibrium than your previous job.
A recent study of more than 10,000 founders revealed that 73% of respondents pay themselves less than $50,000 a year in cash compensation. Those figures are surprisingly low when you consider how much responsibility they carry on their shoulders. They recruit teams, craft and execute growth strategies, and try to raise millions of dollars of venture capital from deep-pocketed investors who expect the founders to make them richer. All those pressures and obligations for less than $50,000 a year sounds like a raw deal, right?
It may sound like a raw deal, but that is generally the deal.
Investors expect startup founders to put all their eggs in one basket and make money as the value of their shares in a company increase. Now consider that the typical venture capital–backed business takes between five and seven years to go from raising its first round of capital to producing returns for its shareholders, including the founders. Even Facebook, one of the undisputed tech heavyweights of the last decade, took more than seven years to reach its IPO. So even if your company is wildly successful, you're going to have to wait to see the payoff.
Even if your company is wildly successful, you're going to have to wait to see the payoff.
Jonathan Olsen, an entrepreneur who's both founded and invested in early-stage ventures, puts it best: "If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to give up things, starting with your flat-screen TV." And, I'd add, quite possibly much more: You may no longer be in a position to help out your parents with unexpected costs, and you won't be writing generous checks to your alma mater.
If you've gotten used to being the one who takes care of those around you, having to count every penny is not an insignificant change. Everyone likes to tell stories about the founder who ran down his savings and lived off multiple credit cards before finally making it big. No one talks about the founder who couldn't repay those bills.
This article is adapted from The 10% Entrepreneur: Live Your Startup Dream Without Quitting Your Day Job by Patrick J. McGinnis. It is reprinted with permission from Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) Patrick J. McGinnis, 2016.
How To Survive Working On An Underperforming Team
Many of us enter the workplace unprepared for teamwork. Here's how to head off and contain the hazards of poor group performance.
In general, people are poorly educated to deal with workplaces. That's because education is a largely solo affair. Students are asked to work alone. Grades are given to individuals. Indeed, the idea of individual achievement is so ingrained that when kids are assigned a group project in school, they worry how their own grades will be calculated if their team members fall down on the job.
April 8, 2016
The Real Reasons That Amazon's Alexa May Become The Go-To AI For The Home
Amazon made several very smart decisions early in the voice platform's life that may make it a friendlier ecosystem for device makers.
If Amazon's Alexa had just served as a entry point to Amazon's marketplace, it would have been as boring as the failed Amazon Fire smartphone. But Alexa is way more than that.
Apple Suspects The Latest Encryption Case Has Nothing To Do With Law Enforcement
...And everything to do with politics.
On Friday, the Justice Department renewed its efforts in a Brooklyn court to force Apple to help break into a drug trafficker's iPhone, a move that Apple believes is just another attempt to establish a legal precedent that would make such demands on tech companies easier in the future.
Think You Know The News? Take The Fast Company Quiz!
What happened this week? Here's our quiz for April 8, 2016.
Did you follow the news this week? Research says that one of the best ways to solidify new information is to be tested on it. Here's a chance to bolster your knowledge of current events—and earn a special emoji badge. 
#Cancer: Researchers Are Conducting Huge Studies Using Twitter, Facebook
Instead of relying on the small number of patients who go to research hospitals, doctors are recruiting huge numbers of participants online.
Nearly 40% of men and women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes, with about 1.7 million of those cases expected in 2016 in the United States (according to the National Cancer Institute). These patients are hoping for better treatments and, hopefully someday, cures. They could also be valuable resources, helping experts develop better therapies, if only staff at research centers like Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston could study their unique cases. Even patients with the same diagnosis, such as breast cancer, have different genetic makeups, both in their healthy cells and in their tumors. These differences provide clues to new genetic factors that may cause the disease, why some patients respond especially well to certain treatments, why some tumors are so resistant to treatment, and how people of different ages or ethnicities are affected.
Counsyl Lays Off Significant Staff In Product And Development Teams, Say Sources
Layoffs at the genetic testing startup affected about 25% of the company, says one well-placed source.
Counsyl, the company that offers a slew of genetic tests, made significant cuts in its product, design, sales, marketing and engineering teams, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
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