I bet the last thing you want to hear when you are coming out of college is that your grades will get your nowhere. In fact, as a night owl of both college and high school, I like to think that the hard work I put in to pull A’s was all worth it.
He argues that getting the grades is not always worth the sacrifice. Sure, having good grades when you can get them is the perfect scenario, but your priorities might be out of whack if you pull the kind of all nighters that Jon did limiting himself to just 3-5 hours of sleep most nights.
Of course, Jon has lots of work experience that allowed him to be very successful in getting a great job straight out of college and wasn’t planning on pursuing more degrees or law school elsewhere. He had a lot going for him. If you don’t have the kind of expertise that Jon did, your grades might matter more. At the same time, if you have the opportunity to get the kind of work experience that Jon did, even if it means sacrificing a few A’s for B’s, it might be worth it.
Having real world work experience is better than grades in my book, and proving yourself in the work force is much more valuable than proving you can slave away in a classroom.
Don’t become a slacker in college, but know that a healthy dose of networking and work experience can get you an amazing job opportunity just as much as grades can.
A guest post I wrote for Business Pundit this week went live today. I have to thank Rob for presenting me to a new audience of business moguls and young leaders. If you haven’t seen the post, check it out and become a regular of Business Pundit like me. The post discusses a new breed of employee that may or may not define the generations coming out of college today. I hope you enjoy it.
For those of you here for the first time, consider subscribing to my RSS feed and perusing the recent posts. Here’s a few you might find of interest:
I can’t emphasize enough how important I think it is to surround yourself with quality, motivated people–especially in a startup situation where your few employees are led by that strong support of the chief officers. CEOs cannot make any calls based upon personal relationships. They must pick the people who will create the best environment for success to help them lead the company. Keeping the bad ones only makes it worse.
The presence and influence of bad chief officers’ makes the employees under them revolt and despair. From such corruption lies perversion. All the good employees will be gone and the rest of the workforce will adapt to the changes and become just as corrupted as their superior. How can a company survive if everyone is only thinking about profiting themselves? What is worse is when these officers start to work with the enemy.
The blame for failure in leadership always falls on the CEO whether it is their own leadership or the leadership of those close officers around them. Make sure you select the best, inspiring people who get the job done, and don’t be afraid to quickly replace those individuals who don’t fit the needs of the job.
Twitter has the hype. Competitors like Pownce are springing up to offer more, but it’s hard to beat a simple 140-character messaging service. It’s simple.
Marketers and public relations professionals have embraced the service and seen how useful it can be to connect with publics. Some analysts champion it as the best new opt-in direct marketing network.
For general users, Twitter is a great way to stay in touch with all your friends and broadcast what you are doing. Your messages can be met with no response or could start up a conversation–even while you are out if you forward your Twitter to a cell phone. Unlike a blog, you don’t control the conversation with comment moderation, and if you are on the public timeline, anyone can see what people are talking about.
The beauty of it is that you are always connected with one message sent, but if you are utilizing Twitter-like services in Facebook or competitors, it can difficult to keep the tool simple so that you can update all your networks at one central location.
Through doing some research on message boards and the Web, I found an easy way to link up your Facebook status, your Twitter updates and your Pownce updates. You could probably easily apply it to any other service you do as well.
Here are the steps to sync your Pownce updates with your Twitter updates:
First off, if you are going to link Pownce to Twitter, you need to set up an account at Twitterfeed.com. Twitterfeed provides a nice little service to sync RSS feeds into your Twitter updates. You can have Twitterfeed check for updates as often as every 30 minutes or just every 12 hours. The service uses OpenID, a handy universal login option that is becoming more popular online, so don’t hesitate to create one if you don’t have one already. WordPress.com logins even work as an OpenID.
Once you have an account at Twitterfeed, you can syndicate your Pownce updates through your public feed. Just login to Pownce and click on the link to your “public profile” in the bottom of the right sidebar. On the “Public Notes” header just above all your messages, you’ll see a tiny orange RSS symbol (orange square with three curved white lines inside) that you can click on to get the address of your public RSS feed.
Setup your Pownce feed as an input RSS feed for Twitterfeed and set it to update every 30 minutes. You can customize all the feed options however you wish to make it work for you.
Now, anything you post to Pownce will also be posted to Twitter–you don’t have to choose! Unfortunately, if you would prefer your Twitter updates to update to your Pownce so you can use a program like Twitteroo or Twitteriffic, you are in no luck until the Pownce loosens up a bit with their API. Pownce offers a nice software tool though.
I would suggest that if you run any blogs, you try out also feeding your RSS feeds from your blogs into Twitter on a more infrequent basis–like every 6 or 12 hours. Posting blogs to the Twitter public timeline can attract attention to a young site or start up conversation on the latest buzz topics. You can also make it easy for friends to see when you have posted an update. Just don’t post up so many that you make Scoble look like an absentee twitterer.
Now that your Twitter and Pownce are linked together, you may want to set up your Twitter to sync with your Facebook status so that you don’t have to login to Facebook or text Facebook directly to change it. This one is much easier.
Here are the steps to getting your Twitter updates with your Facebook status:
Set up your login information for Twitter inside TwitterSync and configure the options to fit your purpose. After that, you are good to go. TwitterSync lets you change the verb that comes before your status updates, and now, even adds a filter.
I talked to the developer of this app, Dustin Brewer, when I first started getting this sync working to suggest the addition of the filter for those of us who have blog RSS feeds going into Twitter. I didn’t want my blog posts syncing with my Facebook status since links don’t show up properly that way.
Dustin listened to my suggestion and added a filter in his latest release, so now you can filter out a specific word. Since I have three blogs feeding into Twitter, I use a little cheat by having the filter not sync any posts with “tinyurl” in them. Hopefully, I never post about tinyurl, but filtering just that word keeps any twits with links from Twitterfeed from updating your Facebook status and making it all messy. Only my all text, personal updates go up on Facebook. If you are using Twitterfeed to promote your blogs and share your posts, this solution should work for you too.
Now, since I have the Pownce software installed on my desktop, I can update Pownce right on my desktop and watch the same message sync with Twitter and Facebook in just a few minutes. Try it out for yourself, and keep it simple.
If you want to thank me for this post or just keep up with my latest, follow me on Twitter and send me a message.
If you are not familiar with Threadless.com, they make shirts. Unlike most companies who choose their designs based upon focus testing and select influential parties, Threadless uses the crowd.
Similar to SnorgTees.com, Threadless accepts user-submitted designs. They use a public rating system to determine what shirts to print; therefore, they let the crowd run their product development like open source software.
According to MarketingVOX, the company expects $15 million in sales this year. It emerged from the minds of two Chicago art students who put in just $1,000 seven years ago.
Launched in September, the store has become a great brand-awareness opportunity, since most people coming in aren’t familiar with the website.
And in terms of getting those familiar with the brand incentive to come in, the retail location launches new shirts three days before they hit the web.
It was found that when going after clients the rate of phone use drops by 30% for entrepreneurs in their 20’s compared to their counterparts in their 40’s.
Are we hiding behind our email or is it simply an evolution in the way our generation prefers to do business?
Growing up in a pure Internet social network, many young people getting out of college today probably consider it the norm to communicate through Web 2.0 tech and instant messages rather than an in-person meetings or phone calls. We all grew up socializing on instant messenger clients outside of our regular school day. We ran Xangas and blogs for our friends to keep up with our daily actions. We even got the benefit of Facebook and Twitter just before graduating, so that even when we were busy finishing up classes and getting a job, there was always a social network online for us.
Whether it is this upbringing or not, I realize in business that I prefer to email first and call later. In an email, I feel like I can fully introduce myself and establish a rapport without interrupting someone’s day or badgering them. Once intros are aside, I can move on to the phone.It would seem like our first instinct would be emailing others. In that way, I don’t fully rely on email as my only form of communication.
Does our Internet-first nature make us bad business people?
The study points out that face-to-face meetings are more successful in business and that email is slightly less effective–20 percent less–than these face-to-face meetings.
I don’t personally believe that preferring to communicate through email is that detrimental to business. In sales, one might argue that phone time is the best way to close a deal, but in other business functions, email can certainly be more productive because of the multitasking and less intrusive approach. Email has caught on the primary communication tool for business, so barring getting caught in the spam filter, I feel like it is the most effective way to communicate with business associates and clients throughout my day.
I can email seven people in the time it might take me to make one phone call, so by using email, I manage my time better and get more messages across to others. When a matter is urgent or a relationship is there, I can also jump on the line and use the phone.
If you are about to break into the world of business, think about your own use of email over the phone. If you are a completely email-centric person and use it as a crutch, you should make an effort to build up your skills on the phone. Even if you do think email is a more effective way of communicating–as I do–you have to keep in mind that your bosses and superiors will most likely be of the generation that prefers to go to the phones more often. They will want to see that you are able and willing to handle the phone side of business in addition to your tidy inbox.
When you are young and not so full of cash, the best thing to do for a a business is to make the office a comfortable place to function. You might even go off the deep end providing comforts like extra plush chairs. All five of the top 5 items mentioned by the Texas Startup Blog are related to making the office comfortable. Money is better spent on these comforts than intense spending in advertising or over-the-top software.
Comfortable chairs.
Creature comforts such as ergonomic keyboards (if they are requested).
Bigger monitors.
Free soft drinks.
White boards.
The benefit of this investment may not be immediately obvious, but by making it more comfortable to be there, you not only breed goodwill and morale by making the office nice for the workers, but you also get a higher production out of these morale-boosted and comfy workers who can stay at the office longer.
With free caffeine, nice viewing monitors and plenty of white board space to dream–or plot–tons of work can get done no matter how many hours of the week it takes. I know I do.
Of course, these tips are mainly geared at tech startups who need the large screen real estate for coding and engineering projects, not necessarily every small business that you have in mind. Free soft drinks and white boards can be fairly universal, but chairs/monitors/keyboards might not matter to a company where employees are constantly on a computer.
If you are not familiar with