David S. Finch

Your Weekend Reader - Morning Edition

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Send Business Cards to an Inbox or Mobile Phone: As a rule of thumb, if you want to get your name out there and continuously make connections when traveling or attending conferences, having a business card is your best bet. While there are a variety of ways to make your business card, the costs of making them can be pretty expensive and it kills a ton of trees. Why not send your business cards via the web or your mobile phone instead?

iPhone Office: 100 Ways to Turn Your Device into the Ultimate Productivity Tool: Honestly, being productive is hard on an iPhone. It's just so fun to play with! Check out the tips for how to make your iPhone the #1 Productivity tool.

How to Stay Motivated Without Wax & Wane: We all know that true motivation stems from being passionate about what you’re doing. But there will still be times when your motivation will wax and wane. If there is one way to “hack” your success, remaining consistently motivated would have the biggest impact. A highly motivated person is likely to take action consistently. Without action, there are no results.

How to Stop Living Paycheck to Paycheck: Right now, more than 80% of households in the United States live on a paycheck to paycheck basis. This means that a lost job could result in financial disaster for a large chunk of the population. Once you get into the trap of relying so heavily on one paycheck, it can be pretty hard to break free from that cycle. There are ways however to reduce your reliance on that paycheck and get other streams of income rolling in.

The Vital Importance of Your Network: How do you stay connected to your network’s news? Do you watch the news stream on LinkedIn? Do you watch the updates on Facebook, Friendfeed, and other social networks? 20 minutes or less on these platforms often gives you some interesting pieces of information, and might sometimes prompt a message out to people in your network.

The Secret Of Warren Buffett’s Success: One of the effects of Buffett’s approach is that he won’t buy companies whose businesses he doesn’t understand or he deems “too difficult to run”. As a result, the portfolio will contain very few companies in certain industries, such as Technology. As any good quant can tell you, a lot of return risk can be explained by industry weightings and such a lopsided portfolio will have returns that are very different from the S&P 500.

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Do You Know What Obstacles Are?

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"Obstacles are what you see when you lose sight of your goals." Henry Ford

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The Missing Links: Your Weekend Reader

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Back to Basics: Your Task List: Everyone makes a task list (or “todo list”) at least now and again. Usually, we wait until we’re overwhelmed with stuff to do, and then we’ll sit down and list everything we need to get done in the next day or two. Then, one by one, we go through the items on our list, do them, and cross them off.

How to Build Your Online Brand: There are only so many hours in a day, and you’ve got to determine which social media tools drive business, which ones build community, and where you can learn the most in the process. Maybe you’ve built a blog or a home page or some other starting point for your online presence. How do you manage the rest of your online presence, and how do you keep track of everything?

How to Outsource Your Life to the Right People: There are tons of willing people ready to help you achieve a life of luxury – or at least take on your most hated chores. Before you kick up your feet and relax, though, you have to find the best people to take over for you. Poor providers end up costing more in the long run. Hey, you have to pay someone else to clean up the mess, right? Worse, you may have no money left and end up picking up the pieces on your own.

Copywriting - The 10 Magic Words: In reality though copywriting is what fills the pockets of the famous Internet marketers. Without the magic input of a good copywriter, many product launches will simply flop. Despite this, if there is no sufficient list, or the marketer failed to study his target customers needs accordingly, the best copywriter will not be able to pull you out of the trenches.

Buffett in 1974: A Reminder For Turbulent Times: Buffett’s rare ability to separate his emotions from the Dow Jones Industrial Average was a big part of his success. In the sixties, when he had been making tons of money, he had been full of fearful prophecies.

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The Missing Links: Your Weekend Reader

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Get a Life!: Writers must put in the hours alone, in front of the keyboard, but too much of that or only that, and there’s nothing there to write about. Fiction is about living. You should have a life first in order to have anything meaningful to say to others about living.

14 Apps for Your Portable Office: Here's a great list of the very best that you should know about if you want to have a truly “portable” office.

5 Must-Dos Before Submitting Any Content on Social Media Sites: The fact is that signing up on a social media sites is quite easy. However, from this point, there are a lot to do – and lots of fun to have! Here are, in my own opinion, the 5 must-dos before submitting content. I think it may help you to have a good experience of social media sites. In addition, I think it may also help you to build up a wide network and a strong brand.

Why Telecommuting Will Explode in the Next Decade: Telecommuting. It’s just a bunch a lazy ne’er-do-wells hanging around the house in their pajamas, soaking up a paycheck and doing nothing, right? Why should they get to do their work at home, relaxing in that favorite chair, while the rest of us slave away in our cubicles under the watchful eye of our often malevolent superiors?

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Do You Know How to Stage a Comeback?

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Everyone fails. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone makes bad decisions that the wish they could change, but you can live in the past for only so long. At some point you have to regroup and make your comeback. You have to get up and try again.

“It ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward, how much you can take and keep moving forward!” - Rocky Balboa

Eric, from The Public Speaking Blog, outlines five life lessons that can improve your speaking skills. The life lessons that he builds upon are wisdom keys to your comeback. Eric suggests:

1. Embrace failure as a wonderful thing
2. Remarkable people go to the extremes
3. Kaizen to the limit
4. Do not set goals, set adventures instead!
5. Always choose the path of least resistance

How can you take these lessons and use them to launch your comeback? What does the future hold if you embrace your failure? What would happen if you push yourself to the extremes?

Technorati Tags: personal development, self-development, success

How to Work Through the Beginning Phase

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Let's face your not who you were and your not yet who'll you be. In other words, everything you are and do evolves as you evolve.

The challenge to starting a new business, blog or any creative initiative, is that the beginning is far from the end that you have intended. In all reality your first attempt at producing this new creative idea is probably going to suck. Accepting that it sucks and moving forward is the key to arriving at the desired results.

Ira Glass, host and executive producer of the public radio show, This American Life, recounts his early mistakes in attempting to create quality content that is enjoyable to listen. There is some priceless wisdom in the video... Enjoy!

[via 43folders]

Technorati Tags: blogging, business, personal development, podcasting, video, writing

Compiling my Summer Reading List

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Books for me are like doorways into new worlds. When searching for new doors I usually break my reading down into two categories, informative and experience. The ultimate goal is to learn and to be exposed.

This morning while engaged in my Sunday morning ritual which consists, of coffee, the local newspaper, the print edition of the New York Times, a book and a journal, a few books jumped out at me that I knew I had to add to my summer reading list.

Adding to the never ending list are:

"City of Thieves: A Novel" (David Benioff)
"The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed" (Michael Meyer)
"Origins: A Memoir" (Amin Maalouf)
"The Leopard: A Novel" (Giuseppe Di Lampedusa)

If your reading any of these books, let me know. I would love to hear your thoughts. Finally, if none of these books are on your summer reading list, what are you reading this summer.

image by: michellebrea

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Your Weekend Reader: Early Edition

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10 Things to Do Before You Quit Your Day Job: Who doesn't want to fire your boss, however before you do you probably should have a few things in order. Having a plan should be your first task. Here are 10 things that can get you pointed in the right direction.

The Big Bang Theory of Launching a Product: "Many people will tell you the best way to launch a product is to do so early and iterate constantly. I’ve said the same thing, and generally agree with that sentiment. You don’t want to spend a year building a product without any serious customer feedback, without putting your feet to the fire in the wilds of the marketplace."

7 Steps to Completing Your Projects on Time: "How can you ensure that your projects, both personal and business are delivered on time and on budget? How do you learn to anticipate the obstacles, identify the exact goals, and plan for success? Well, here are 7 simple steps I take to help properly plan my projects."

A Practical Guide to Earning Six Figures: Re-inventing What You Have: "You’ll need to supplement (or eventually replace) your income through strategies that are high-yield, low time, and enjoyable in their own right. If you’re already working 40 hours a week, the time you spend trying to set up supplemental income streams should not feel like work. Ultimately, I would suggest taking up an income-producing hobby."

Passive Income for Freelance Web Workers: Is it Realistic?: "Despite the benefits of doing contract work, there are other ways you can capitalize on your web working skills and make an alternative source of income. It could be a great change of pace from the hard work that often goes into contract work. And what could be better than a passive source of income?"

image by: deapeajay

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How to Develop Your Blogging Workflow

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For many, developing a blogging workflow is created by trail and error. However, you can save yourself time and energy by learning from those that are doing it well. Why reinvent the wheel when you can gleam knowledge from those that are a few steps ahead of you.

Chris Brogan, blogger and community developer, breaks down the blogging workflow into three areas, goals, tasks and tools. Chris suggests when setting your goals:

Seek link traffic - I write certain posts (like anything with a big number) with a secondary goal of deriving links from you to the story. Why? Because that tells Google and Technorati that I’m doing good things over here, and that matters.
Seek advice - I often write posts where I ask for your opinion. Why have a blog if you can’t start conversations?
Establish thought leadership - When I write about something way off from the norm of what others are blogging about, it’s to show you that I’m not a “me too” blogger.
Promote something interesting - This might be people or software or an event. One point about promotion posts versus other kinds: if you’re looking for comments, promotion posts rarely get them.
Link love to others - Sometimes, I want to give other people the spotlight, or point out good writing elsewhere. It’s important to keep that in mind. Linking out promotes linking in.

After setting your goals it's then time to use the right tools to achieve your tasks as a blogger. Check out the rest of Chris' post as he breaks down the blogger's workflow.

A Sample Blogging Workflow [Chris Brogan]

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