http://books.google.com/books?id=FSUgGQAACAAJ&dq=physics+of+the+impossible&ei=uHMvSbu4NafKzASpuMz7BQ

This seems so far like a good book about the cancer of obsession and greed
check it out
Over Success

one of Glenn Beck’s TOP recommended.

More details

Many of my peers at work have this book on thier bookshelf so I cant help but make sure I read it too !

 The 8th habit from Effectiveness to Greatness

The 8th habit is the voice of the human spirit (pg 5)

the author help form http://www.grameen-info.org

The most important contribution management needs to make i the 21st century is to increase the productivity of KNOWLEDGE WORK and the KNOWLEDGE WORKER.

Paul Rogat Loeb, author of Soul of a Citizen  and The Impossible Will Take a Little While: Hope in a Time of Fear, lectured today and I missed it.

I really like Soul of a Citizen .It speaks about living with a purpose of community and when applied ownership in our great country.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me ?
And if I am only for myself, what am I ?
– Rabbi Hillel

Our problems can best be solved through common effort - and apply it on a larger stage as well, addressing major issues of our time. When we open ourselves up to those around us, asking for and offering help and support, we discover strengths and passions we never knew we had. We begin to reconnect with our fellow human beings …

Choose causes but carefully — which ones are wisest…

this book is awesome and a great insight into making our lives count for something !

This is a great insight into what I feel is a critical component of tomorrow’s reinvigorated American Entrepreneurial spirit.

n’joy  Paul Rogat Loeb

It was my pleasure to meet him at the end of his lecture… I bought both books in fact an look forward to reading them… thanks again for signing the Paul… Im a big fan for sure !

A real cool mom with incredible real world progressive traditional standards for raising successful children!

[ order her book ]

I also like

Young Bucks: How to Raise a Future Millionaire by Troy Dunn

I am looking forward to reading this book I just ordered.

 I got Poison Ivy this last weekend cutting grass in areas of my mother-in-law’s house that hadn’t been touched for three summers! LOL so in my turmoil and peering through one and a half eyes ( since my right eye is almost swollen shut) I spent tonight studying thru 392 pages of pure PM goodies !

I have listed the most important take-aways from studying and reading The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun of Microsoft. I list these points in hopes to help others in thier PM adventures…

When scheduling became something I was responsible for, I realized the unspoken truth about schedules. .  .

They are not gifts from the future. There is no magic formula or science for creating perfect schedules. Despite my youthful perceptions, scheduling is not an isolated task: it always represents and encompasses many different aspects of what the project is now and will be later. Schedules are simply a kind of prediction. No matter how precisely they are drafted or how convincing they appear, they are just a summation of lots of little estimations, each one unavoidably prone to different kinds of unforeseeable oversights and problems. Good schedules come only from a leader or a team that relentlessly pursues and achieves good judgment in many different aspects of software development. You can’t be an expert in one narrow part of the making of things and ever expect to schedule well.

By the simplest definition, good work estimates have a high probability of being accurate, and bad work estimates have a low probability. I don’t expect to win any awards for these definitions, but they do imply at least one useful thing: it’s the judgment of team leaders that defines the bar for a given project. It requires an active process of reviewing estimates and pushing, leading, and nudging others to get them to the level they need to be. I think it’s smart to openly involve the test/QA team in the estimation process, letting them participate in the design discussions and ask questions or offer commentary. At a minimum, this will help them with their own estimates for testing work, which may not correlate to programming work estimates. Often, QA has the best insight into design oversights and potential failure cases that others will overlook.

One thing that makes scheduling difficult is that few people enjoy estimating complex things that they will be held accountable for. It’s always fun to brag and make bets about our skills (”This book/movie/web site stinks: I could make one soooo much better”), but when we’re pressed to step up and deliversigning our names on a contract detailing our responsibilitythings change. We know that it’s entirely possible that whatever we commit to doing today might be impossible or undesirable to do when that time comes. It just might turn out to be more difficult than we thought. Programmers are just like everyone else and have good reasons to have estimation anxiety. By saying that something can be done in a certain amount of time, they risk being very wrong.

In my experience, even programmers who understand the estimation process and believe in it, don’t like to do it. Part of it is the mismatch of imagination (”How will this work, given the very limited information I have?”) with temporal precision (”Tell me exactly how many hours this will take to do.”). But sympathy here should be limited: everyone who works in engineering and construction has the same kind of challenge, whether it’s building skyscrapers, remodeling a kitchen, or launching spacecraft to land on other planets. From reading about how these folks estimate things, it doesn’t seem that their challenges or techniques are fundamentally different from what web developers and software engineers face. The primary difference is in how much time they are given to generate estimates and how disciplined they are in the use of that time

A handy technique I found was that whenever a programmer balked at giving an estimate, I’d ask, “What questions can I answer that would make you more confident about giving an estimate?” By getting him to be specific, I gave him the opportunity to confront the fear or frustration he might feel, which allowed me to help solve his problem. Of course, I’d have to help find answers to his questions, and possibly debate the issues I felt it was his job to investigate, but at least we’d be talking about getting better estimates

Planning for the software or solution :

Marketing requirements document (MRD).

Vision/scope document

Specifications document

Work breakdown structure (WBS)

In Tom Peters and Nancy Austin’s classic, A Passion for Excellence (Warner Business Books, 1985), a sort of behavior to build informal relationships/friendships with developers is called management by walking around (MBWA). It is a good form of commnication. It also breeds a good work attitude. It’s described as a central quality in the successful managers they observed (an entire chapter in their book is dedicated to it). But it’s not easy to do well. They recommend explicitly picking a small number of people, at different levels and roles in the team, and investing time in building this kind of informal relationship with them

Because I couldn’t find a published history of annoyance, I’m relying on my own observations in summarizing why people get annoyed. I have a fair amount of experience in this area: I’ve been annoyed many times, have witnessed other people in a state of annoyance, and have been known to, on occasion, annoy others. While there are certainly other causes of annoyance beyond the ones in the following list, these are the most common and important ones I know of.

For the full effect in understanding these examples, they are described in the first person (it may help to think of a specific person you have experience working with, who you respect, when reading through these).

• Assume I’m an idiot. If I have been hired to do X, which I am capable of doing, anytime someone treats me as if I cannot do Xor need a 20-step procedure, rulebook form, template, daily evaluation, committee, or other process to enable me to do XI will be justifiably annoyed. Part of my job should be to help define my work in a way that satisfies whatever objectives management decrees. But until I fail and prove incompetence, I should be treated as competent. I should be free to define, within reason, the best way to get my work done.

• Don’t trust me. If, on a daily basis, I am expected to check in, double check, triple check, and report on decisions that are well within the range of my responsibilities, I will be annoyed. If I must confirm everything, what authority do I really have? Why does everything need to be documented and recorded if I’m doing a good job? Even if I’m not initially trustworthy for some reason, it should be management’s job to provide a fair path for me to earn trust and to help me progress on that path.

• Waste my time. If the way the team functions forces me to repeat (tedious) tasks many times, or go far out of my way to protect against contingencies and management paranoias that are comically unlikely and insignificant, I will be annoyed. This includes flip-flopping on important decisions or being grossly inconsistent in messaging or behavior without making any attempt to explain it (or at least apologize for it), even when asked.

• Manage me without respect. If I am ever sent on a wild goose chase, given assignments that have no basis in reality, or set up to fail and take the blame for things beyond my scope of responsibility, I will be annoyed. Someone should be looking out for me and making sure my efforts align with the project’s, guiding me toward success. Therefore, my requests for assistance should be taken seriously and not be excessively delayed or ignored.

• Make me listen to or read stupid things. Anytime I am required to listen to someone else or read something another person has written that has no meaningful bearing on the work we are doing, I will be annoyed. We have a triage bar for bug quality: why not one for stupidity? Just because someone calls a meeting, writes a paper, or sends an email doesn’t mean it’s worth my time. The more secondary or tertiary things I’m asked (or forced) to do, the less productive and happy I am.

Most of these reasons for annoyance explain why many people loathe the idea of work processes. They fear that any attempt to systematize their work can result only in bureaucracy or other forms of suffering. I think the fear is unfounded. People design processes, just like everything else, and if the designer is smart and has the right goals in mind, the processes can benefit everyone. Process can help people instead of restricting and annoying them.

As remedial a subject as it seems, email is still the most annoying system people on projects deal with. Simply as a result of the volume of email we receive, it’s easy to feel pressure to read and respond to new messages as quickly as possible, often sacrificing good reading and writing skills. Most of us, most of the time, just don’t read or write email very well. What’s ironic is that the speed and convenience of email are squandered when we can’t understand what the hell the other person is trying to say, or we can’t get her to understand what we’re trying to tell them.

And perhaps of most importance to project management: email is a primary means of communication for leaders and managers. In both creating new mail and responding to mail sent by others, a leader influences and controls the flow of information through a project. If a leader has clear thoughts and asks solid questions, she encourages others to do the same. One response to a large discussion with dozens of people can send a wave of clarity through the organization. But, the leader hurts the team’s ability to communicate well if she expresses fuzzy thoughts and makes obscure or obfuscated points.

One major challenge is that few people admit that they send bad email. (Their inability to recognize bad email is part of why they’re bad at writing it.) For example, take the following test: using your own subjective judgment, what percentage of email that you receive from people within your own organization is high quality? Average quality? Totally useless? Now ask yourself what percentage of the email you send fits into each of these categories. As an experiment, I once asked a small group of PMs, testers, and programmers this very question. By a factor of almost 2 to 1, everyone claimed that other people wrote crappier mail than they did. Because they all worked together, this anecdotal data implied that everyone thinks the problem is email generated by others, not themselves. I don’t have harder data to support this claim, but it rings true. Somehow, when there’s a communication failure, on average people tend to blame the other guy (for copious evidence, see any history of international politics in Western civilization).

Smart managers value good email. Managers read so much poorly written email every day, and if they don’t take the time to reward those who communicate well, they’re unlikely to see more people do it. Little side emails take about 15 seconds to send, and as my story indicates, may mean more to others in your organization than you think.

But praising others is easier than taking responsibility for your own bad email habits. As I mentioned previously, I’m convinced that most people think they write better email than others think they do (and the more senior you are, the harder it might be to get honest feedback about your email etiquette). Because leaders and managers send more email than others, it’s critical to sort out what bad habits you have and invest energy in curbing them. Here is some project management-style advice on what good email looks like and what some of the common bad habits are.

• Be concise, be simple, and be direct. Pascal, the mathematician for whom the language is named, once wrote “If I had more time, I’d write a shorter letter.” Language, like code, can be optimized, although the goals are different. Instead of optimizing for logical efficiency, you want to optimize for communication efficiency. Unlike code, a grammatically and logically correct three-word message is useless if the recipient can’t figure out what the hell it means. Consider who is reading the email and how you would explain or ask whatever it is you need to say if you were talking with him face to face. What details would be needed? Omitted? What concepts can you assume he knows? What metaphors can you use? For important email, step away from it for a few minutes and then reread it, with these questions in mind, before you send it. Or for important mail, or mail going to a large number of people, have one of the people on your team skim it over and give you feedback.

• Offer an action and a deadline. The best kind of email has a specific intention or request that is clearly stated, and, if appropriate, is tied to a reasonable deadline. It should be easy for people reading the email to understand why they are receiving it, how they are impacted by the action, and what they need to do (before the deadline). Assuming you enforce the deadline (”Requests must be in to me by Friday”), you set yourself up for people to be attentive to future actions you communicate through email, which puts you in a position of power.

• Prioritize. Is it really necessary to send that email? The more emails you send, the more work others will have to do to prioritize your requests. How many of the things you’re mentioning are important? If you have 10 issues to discuss, break them into two groups and focus on the most important group. Consider if some things can be better handled on the phone, in the next team meeting, or by going door-to-door. If you don’t prioritize, expect the recipients to prioritize for youin a way that serves their interests, not yours.

• Don’t assume people read anything (especially if it’s important to you). It’s arrogant to assume that because you sent it, someone has read it. People get tons of email every day, much of it from people just as important as you are. The more important the issue is to you, the more energy you have to expend to make sure people actually see it and are actively doing something about it. The more trust you’ve built with the people on your team, the more assumptions you can make about how people will respond to things you send.

• Avoid giving a play-by-play. It’s rare that anyone needs to know the sequence of events that led to something happening. Avoid writing emails that focus on the contributing actions by different players: “When Sally first designed our build process, she was interested in…” or narrative-driven prose like “The meeting started off fine, with Bob and Steve talking through their slides with great passion and conviction. That is, until….” Instead, focus on impact: what happened, how this changes the world, and what we’re going to do about it. If you’re compelled to include background details, list them below the critical points. The same goes for references to slide decks, web sites, papers, etc. Make it possible for anyone to skim the first two lines and know immediately if it’s important enough to them to read any further.

• Sequester FYIs. I’ve been on teams that persisted in forwarding tons of semi-interesting-but-not-directly-relevant-to-anything email. Some people call these FYIs, or for your information emails. Curiosity and industry awareness are fine habits, but don’t let them dominate communication forums used for more tangible work. Set up an email alias or discussion group for “industry trends” or “tech watch,” where your team can post the cool things they find. If your email client supports it, ask everyone to set these kinds of emails to low priority, or add “FYI:” to the front of the subject line. Make this stuff easy for people to filter out.

• The telephone is your friend. If ever you don’t understand something in an important email you’ve received, don’t respond with an elaborate five-part question. See if you can reach the sender of the email on the phone. Interactive communication is always better at resolving confusion and conflict than email. A 30-second phone conversation is often equivalent to a long series of time-consuming email exchanges. If you do get the sender on the phone and resolve the issue, you can then share your clarified understanding in an email sent to everyone: odds are good that if you were confused, so were others. Telephones (or a walk down the hallway) are the great expediters of group email communication.

An example of good email

This email does not tell any stories or try to justify anything: it’s all action. It’s short, clear, and to the point. Instead of talking about proposals, it actually offers one. While it has the flavor of an ultimatum, it serves the purposes of creating escape velocity for the proposal, helping to push it out the door.

From: J Aaron

To: _blank_ internet development team

Subject: New check-in process

The final proposal for the new check-in process is complete and is up on the web site: http://yourURL.

Because this has been a contentious issue, I’ve discussed this proposal one-on-one with much of the team and incorporated everyone’s feedback. If this didn’t include you and you have strong opinions, please send me mail ASAP.

But be warned: this is the second public notice about these upcoming changes. The opportunity for making changes is currently small and is getting smaller by the day. Please act now or prepare to hold your peace.

Friday at 5:00 p.m. is the deadline for contacting me with feedback on the above proposal. I will consider and respond to any questions or comments raised before then (in collaboration with appropriate folks). Otherwise, this matter is closed and will become effective next week.

Thanks,

J Aaron

 

 Controling  A Meeting

Facilitate (v): The act of making things easy or easier.

Good meetings happen only when someone in the room understands how to facilitate. Some people do it instinctively, and others can’t even recognize when it’s being done. Like other interpersonal skills, people have different levels of awareness about the many ways interaction occurs and how to influence it.

Facilitating can be a semiformal role, held by a designated person who runs the show (often the PM), or by whoever called the meeting. Some teams have strong enough cultures of facilitation (meaning that many people have the skill) that they can switch who’s playing this role naturally in the course of conversation. But most of the time, on most projects, meetings are desperately in need of facilitation talent.

Building trust

Trust (n): Firm reliance on the integrity, ability, or character of a person.

“Trust is at the core of all meaningful relationships. Without trust there can be no giving, no bonding, no risk-taking.”

Terry Mizrahi, Director of Ecco (Education Center for Community Organizations)

Trust is built through commitment

When you make a new friend, and he tells you he’ll meet you somewhere, you take it on faith that he’ll be where he says, when he says. But if two or three times in a row he stands you up, and you end up watching a movie or standing in a club alone, your trust in him will decline. In effect, he’s broken his commitments to you. If it continues, your perception of him will change. You will no longer see him as reliable, and you will question your trust in him in matters of importance.

According to Humphrey’s Managing the Software Process (Addison Wesley, 1989), one of the central elements of well-managed projects is the leader’s ability to commit to her work, and to work to meet her commitments. Humphrey believes this is so important that he precisely defined the elements of effective commitments.

Trust is lost through inconsistent behavior

Eventually, people listened to me because of their confidence in my ability to have good reasons for my opinions.

Priorities make things happen

A large percentage of my time as a PM was spent making ordered lists. An ordered list is just a column of things, put in order of importance. I’m convinced that despite all of the knowledge and skills I was expected to have and use, in total, all I really did was make ordered lists. I collected things that had to be donerequirements, features, bugs, whateverand put them in an order of importance to the project. I spent hours and days refining and revising these lists, integrating new ideas and information, debating and discussing them with others, always making sure they were rock solid. Then, once we had that list in place, I’d drive and lead the team as hard as possible to follow things in the defined order. Sometimes, these lists involved how my own time should be spent on a given day; other times, the lists involved what entire teams of people would do over weeks or months. But the process and the effect were the same.

A fundamental law of the PM universe is this: if you can’t say no, you can’t manage a project.

No, this doesn’t fit our priorities.

No, only if we have time.

No, only if you make happen.

No. Next release.

No. Never. Ever. Really.

Know the critical path

Crtitical Path Methodology

In project management terminology, the critical path is the shortest sequence of work that can complete the project. In critical path analysis, a diagram or flowchart is made of all work items, showing which items are dependent on which others. If done properly, this diagram shows where the bottlenecks will be. For example, if features A, B, and C can’t be completed until D is done, then D is on the critical path for that part of the project. This is important because if D is delayed or done poorly, it will seriously impact the completion of work items A, B, and C. It’s important then for a project manager to be able to plan and prioritize the critical path. Sometimes, a relatively unimportant component on its own can be the critical dependency that prevents true priority 1 work from being completed. Without doing critical path analysis, you might never recognize this until it is too late.

Always have a sense for the critical path of:

• The project’s engineering work (as described briefly earlier)

• The project’s high-level decision-making process (who is slowing the team down?)

• The team’s processes for building code or triaging bugs (are there needless forms, meetings, or approvals?)

• The production process of propping content to the Web or intranet

• Any meeting, situation, or process that impacts project goals

 Be relentless

“The world responds to action, and not much else.”

Scott Adams

Summary

• Everything can be represented in an ordered list. Most of the work of project management is correctly prioritizing things and leading the team in carrying them out.

• The three most basic ordered lists are: project goals (vision), list of features, and list of work items. They should always be in sync with each other. Each work item contributes to a feature, and each feature contributes to a goal.

• There is a bright yellow line between priority 1 work and everything else.

• Things happen when you say no. If you can’t say no, you effectively have no priorities.

• The PM has to keep the team honest and keep them close to reality.

• Knowing the critical path in engineering and team processes enables efficiency.

• You must be both relentless and savvy to make things happen.

 

The simplest way to manage up is to initiate a discussion with your manager where you propose specifics for the following points.

• What I expect you, my manager, to do for me (e.g., giving guidance, warning me of things I need to know, supporting my decisions, pointing out areas where I need to grow)

• The resources I need to meet those goals, and who I need them from

• The level and frequency of involvement I need from you (No involvement? Quarterly reviews? Daily status reports? Weekly one-on-one meetings? Be specific)

By doing this early, you will know exactly how much support you can expect, and where problems will likely come from. Alarms should go off if your manager is unresponsive, vague, or defensive about committing to any of your requests. It means you may very well be on your own or are set up to fail, and that your manager is not actively working in your mutual interests.

In the end, proactive leadership in your own sphere of influence is the best way to grow your own sources of power. Initially, you might lose favor with your superiors for working differently than they do. But over time, people will like the playing field you’ve created. They will be happier and more effective working with and for you than with others. Unlike with the status quo of the rest of the organization, the quality of your team’s work will continually rise.

Buy it here

There’s much more to southern New Jersey than the Pine Barrens and the Jersey Devil, and this collection by journalists Jim Waltzer and Tom Wilk tells readers all about it. Oceanside and bayside towns offer a box seat from which to observe the region’s rich history and the summery lore of the wonders of nature. Landlocked towns boast their own homespun and hell-raising traditions and idiosyncrasies.

Waltzer and Wilk have compiled almost fifty stories about the state’s southernmost counties. Although the focus is on Atlantic City and its remarkable people, outsize structures, and quirky events, the storytelling ranges across the wider region to provide an insider’s look at history as it was being made. You’ll encounter gangsters and gamblers, baseball hitters and hurricanes, famous piers and hotels, landmark theaters and eateries, splashy events and unheralded oddities ¾ in sum, a cross-section of the region’s character and characters.

The authors divide their book into six sections: entertainment, famous and infamous events, innovations and innovators, leisure and recreation, room and board, and sports legends. Within each section are the rich and varied stories Waltzer and Wilk have collected for New Jerseyans’ reading pleasure.
A delightful read

A night passage about the Broadway Theatre is featured. Originally opened on May 18 1926, it still runs strong! There is also a story about the Apollo Theatre and Club Harlem too. A bit about Dean Martin, Jonathan Pitney and Sara Spencer Washington.

I read this 257 pg book last night and loved it’s concepts, easy to follow and realize… Like many things, my business approach steers my journey by natural instinct - this is reassuring that I am on the right path …

In short the books says dont waste your time in the shark infested bloodied red waters of existing old markets with battered war veteran competitors. This road is a river of damnation for success…

The only way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition. Blue oceans denote all the industries not in existence today. This is the unknown market space.
There is little practical guidance on how to create them simply because they are the unknowns. You focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space.

These businesses who journey blue waters follow a different strategic logic that we call value innovation…

Imagine your clock forward twenty years?or perhaps fifty years? and ask yourself how many new / now unknown industries will likely
exist at this time in the future. If history is any predictor of the future, again the answer
is many of them.

The reality is that industries never stand still. They continuously evolve and the capacity to create new market space that is uncontested.

Cirque du Soleil, truly DID reinvent the circus…

It is conventionally believed that companies can either create greater value to customers at a higher cost or create reasonable value at a lower cost.

Incontrast, those that seek to create blue oceans pursue differentiation and low cost simultaneously.

Cirque du Soleil paid no heed to what the competition did. Instead of following the conventional logic of outpacing the competition by offering a better solution to the given problem? reinvent the circus.

Although the theme of Cirque du Soleil is somewhat vague sometimes (and intentionally so), it brings harmony and an intellectual element to the show - theres magic there…

Of course, there is no such thing as a riskless strategy.

The Six Principles of Blue Ocean Strategy

To address these factors and questions, we turn to the strategy canvas, an analytic framework that is central to value innovation and the creation of blue oceans.

By looking across alternatives, however, Casella Wines, an Australian winery, redefined the problem of the wine industry to a new one: how to make a fun and nontraditional wine that?s easy to drink for everyone.

Truly when reading this book I was so excited, this is my favorite most enjoyable wine I have found for myself! I am grateful my Partner turned me on to Yellow Tail and shared how and why to appreciate wines from many regions of the world… Larry the owner of Zucchis’ Restuarunt also inspired me with his many journeys from spain, and northern california… I loved the Winery limestone caverns I explored in Paris. This is such a passion you can get lost within…

Reduce
Which factors should be reduced well below the industry?s standard?

Eliminate
Which of the factors that the industry takes for granted should be eliminated?

Raise
Which factors should be raised well
above the industry?s standard?

Create
Which factors should be created that
the industry has never offered?

… all fuse to a centralized concept:
A New Value Curve

The next chapter goes on to talk about NTT DoCoMo (of who I fear monopoly of Telecomm industry) , NetJets who really have never had any competition in thier niche SMB sized private jetline service…

The Home Depot has transformed enormous latent demand for home
improvement into real demand, making ordinary homeowners into
do-it-yourselfers.

Curves; which exploded demand in the U.S. fitness industry, unlocking a huge untapped market, a veritable blue ocean of women struggling and failing to keep in shape through sound fitness.

Ralph Lauren created the blue
ocean of ?high fashion with no fashion.?

Look Across the Chain of Buyers
The purchasers who pay for the product or service may differ from the actual users, and in some cases there are important influencers as well. But consumer purchasers, although strongly influenced by the channel, do not value these things.

Look Across Complementary
Product and Service Offerings
Another is to consider a theater if they offered like a babysitting service, (my 2 cents to the book) or like Mark Cuban wants to do is sell DVDs of the mivies as the viewer leaves the very movie they just saw… why leave this income to Blockbusters…

other conceots to keep in mind…

Reach beyond existing demand. This is a key component of achieving value innovation.

Go for the Biggest Catchment

Secure a Consigliere on Your Top Management Team

the rest of the book delves into detail and examples but you get the vision of the book… email me if you want it…

I was so hungry from the book I first got through of his, Do what you Think, I was excited to begin The Power of Positive Thinking…

1) believe in yourself - have confidence in your own powers… grow faith in yourself
a) discover why you have self doubt feelings
b) self knowledge of it - foundation to cure/solution
c) deal whit it / confront it . and convince your way through them …
make things flow toward you and draws i to you not driving away from you

2) suggest confidence concepts to yourself and dominate your mind with a positive thought pattern / do not build up problems with imagination…

Emerson - a man is what he thinks about all day long…

3) the same of confidence is also for happiness…
do not manufacture unhapiness or making more problems for ourselves…
do not saturate our minds with resentment, fear, hate and/or worry…

4) embrace love and goodwill to humanity…

5) a peaceful mind generates POWER
- many patients have no problems but thier attitude and ill state of mind.
a) practice emptying the mind
b) daily practice of science / quiessant state
c) Carslie - silence is the environment where great things create themselves
d) develop serenity - Affirm / Spawn peaceful attitudes in beginning a conversation
e) create stimulative ideas… this also can bring peace to your mind.

6) clearly define goals - expect the best from all…

7) be totally released from doubt . life cannot deny itelf when one gives life thier all !
Through your Heart over the bar, and your Body will follow…

8) Remember the rough is only mental…

9) BELIEVE and SUCCEED

I finished this book this weekend and really REALLY dig Ben Franklins auto biography . Good for anyone trying to further develop themselves…

This is good for application of character in business… it sheds light in detail how to influence people. like for example letting people develop in thier minds your ideas for themselves…
i.e. dont tell people they are wrong, that immediately throws up shields of defense and build divides and strips them of thier dignity - instead, gracefully let them take ownership in your idealism…

dont insinuate someone is wrong - just ask what is right in the purpose or methods someone is doing something the way they are doing it… just make mention of something factual to ’spark’ a doubt in thier mind. a little tact and proper ediquette way to say something can go a loonnng way than to simply provoke someone…

Go Ben Go! Happy 500 B-Day !

When I saw his gravestone there in Philly it struck me how frail my life is and that my time to do great works for my brotheren of America is running short too… I tossed him and his wife 2 pennies for the ferry man and good luck and thank yous…