Merce Cardus's Blog, page 86
July 14, 2015
Most Startups Fail. The Few That Don’t, Follow This Advice.
Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, co-founder and CEO of GLAMSQUAD; co-founder
of Gilt Group; and an advisor, mentor, and angel investor to startups in the New York Tech community, offers a few key tips to maximize any startup’s chances of success. She is the author of By Invitation Only: How We Built Gilt and Changed the Way Millions Shop
Are you grounded?
It’s so typical that when you start a business or have an idea for a business, they’re going to be so many people who tell you why it’s a bad id...
HUMP DAY LINKS ~ Best Reads on Writing, Self-publishing, and Better Living: Drinking Water
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Quote of the dayWhat is it that leads people from vastly different cultures to view drinking water as special with strinkingly similar tales of water providing eternal youth, passages to the afterlife, miraculous cures, and mystical wisdom?
In all of these stories, the physical act of drinking these special waters creates a medium to the supernatural, a means of connection the physical and the metaphysical. And the mythmaking continues today, implici...
July 13, 2015
Techniques for Discovering and Taking Advantage of Life’s Good Breaks
In How to Get LuckyMax Gunther shows you how you get lucky. The fact is th
at some people really are luckier than others and not by accident. Lucky people arrange their lives in characteristic patterns. They tend to position themselves in the path of onrushing luck; they tend to go where events are moving fastest and where they can find their lucky break. Lucky people take risks but not silly ones. They stick with a cause, a job, or a partner, but not when all hope is lost. In short, they mov...
July 9, 2015
Understanding The Roots Of Jealousy
Emotional Wellness: Transforming Fear, Anger, and Jealousy into Creative Energy
leads us to understand the roots of our emotions, to react to situations in a way that can teach us more about ourselves and others, and to respond to life’s inevitable ups and downs with far greater confidence and equilibrium.
What makes you jealous?
Possessiveness.
Jealousy itself is not the root. You love a woman, you love a man, and you want to possess the person just out of fear that perhaps tomorrow they ma...
How To Spot a Liar?
How to Spot a Liardelves deeper into how and why people lie. In it, the a
uthors respond directly to reader requests for more details on reading and using body language to your advantage.
In the following Ted-Ed Lesson, Noah Zandan uses some famous examples of lying to illustrate how we might use communications science to analyze the lies themselves.
We hear anywhere from 10 to 200 lies a day
And we spent much of our history coming up with ways to detect them, from medieval torture devices...
WEEKEND LINKS ~ Reads on Writing, Self-publishing, and Better Living: More Human
Photo Credit: ajari via Compfight cc
Quote of the dayBeing inhuman is not the natural order of things. People don’t instinctively behave that way: they’re made to by the circumstances they’re in and by the structure of the world around them. And being inhuman is not just about bad behaviour–it’s actually a big part of our deepest problems.
~STEVE HILTON, author ofMore Human: Designing a World Where People Come First
WRITING
How do you choose the right viewpoint and narrator for your nove...July 8, 2015
The Biology of Exchange: It’s a Jungle Out There
In Coined: The Rich Life of Money and How Its History Has Shaped Us
,author Kabir Sehgal casts aside our workaday assumptions about money and takes the reader on a global quest to uncover a deeper understanding of the relationship between money andhumankind.
A quest to understand money
At the most basic levels, humans exchange with one another to acquire the items that we need to survive, like food and shelter. While money is a human invention, all organisms exchange in order to survive.
Com...
The Art Of Choosing
We all think we’re good at making choices; many of us even enjoy making them. 
Sheena Iyengar looks deeply at choosing and has discovered many surprising things about it.
Her book The Art of Choosing
shares her research in an accessible and charming story that draws examples from her own life.
Americans tend to believe that they’ve reached some sort of pinnacle in the way they practice choice.They think that choice, as seen through the American lens best fulfills an innate and universal desir...
THURSDAY LINKS ~ Reads on Writing, Self-publishing, and Better Living: Focus, Focus, Focus.
Photo Credit: Scarleth Marie via Compfight cc
Successful people know that hours, like capital, can be consciously allocated with the goal of creating riches—in the form of a changed world, a life’s work—over time. Indeed, successful people understand that work hours must be more carefully stewarded than capital because time is absolutely limited. You can earn more money, but the mightiest among us is granted no more than 168 hours per week, and it is physically impossible to work for all of...
July 7, 2015
The Six Essential Skills of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs
The Creator’s Codeis based on inteviews with 200 entrepreneurs who have started companies that generate more than $100 million in annual revenue or social enterprises that serve more than 100,000 people. Some of these creators have started businesses that generate more than $1 billion in revenue every year.
Crisscrossing the country, I spent hours interviewing creators in technology, retail, energy, health care, media, mobile applications, biotechnology, real estate, travel, and hospitality...
