Why You Need to Fail to Succeed

Thats a rather provocative title I suppose. Surely if you can avoid failure that is better right?  Not necessarily. There are two ways to avoid failure. 

1. Working so hard and doing such a good job that you succeed.
2. Only taking on projects that are so far below your capabilities that failure is never a realistic possibility.

If you want to succeed–really succeed, you have to be willing to take on things that have a high chance of failing.  If you only attempt things that you know you can do, you aren’t challenging yourself properly.  If you never have any failures it is a pretty good indication that you aren’t taking on things that are true challenges for you.

Of course the idea isn’t to try to fail.  You need to try to succeed, but you need to try to succeed at things that are right on the threshold of being beyond your limits. When you take on challenges that stretch you, it will increase your capabilities.  When you only do things that are not challenging, what you are capable of remains fixed and sometimes even regresses.

Dealing with Difficulties

I was reading a biography of Albert Einstein and was struck by his determination and persistence.  It wasn’t the way that he developed his theory of relativity that was impressive.  I was impressed with the way he approached difficult reading materials when he was young.

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11 Steps in Becoming Educated for Your Dream Job

I had quite a few comments about taking classes online in my post "17 Things You Should Stop Doing".  When LifeHacker linked to the article they had even more comments from their readers. Many of the comments were negative saying that you shouldn’t take classes online. So I wanted to take some time and talk about the best way for college to fit into your career.

First here is a little background about my education to give you an idea of where I’m coming from.  I have a bachelors and master’s degree in music composition (both taken at physical universities where I was sitting in class).  I am currently working on my thesis for a master’s focused on software engineering that I took primarily through online classes.  I am 31 years old and (apart from one semester after I got married) I have been enrolled in a college or university since graduation from high school. (My areas of interest tend to exceed what a single person can learn in one lifetime.)

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TIP: Synched Address Books

My wife and I both have cell phones and both have computers.  This means there are four places where we could potentially have a phone number or address and invariably the phone number I need is on my wife’s cell phone or computer.

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Cost vs. Benefit for Productivity

Most people are really bad at comparing cost and benefits. Hybrid cars are a good example of this. For example the cost of the cheapest (that I could find) new gasoline Honda Civic is around $14,800. The cost of the cheapest hybrid Civic is $22,000. Assuming that you drive 13,000 miles per year, they hybrid will save you $369 per year in gas–assuming gasoline costs an average of $2.80 per gallon.

So you are paying an extra $7200 to save $369 per year. It will take nearly 20 years before you end up saving money with the car. Even if you consider that the government will give you something like an extra $2,100 off your taxes for buying the hybrid, it will still take nearly 14 years before you break even. Also consider that if you do manage to drive the car for a very long time, in 10 years it is probably going to need it’s batteries replaced making it even less valuable than the gasoline model

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Productivity501 Community

I wanted to take a post and thank the people who have taken the time to comment here over the past week or so.  I’ve really appreciated all the feedback we’ve been getting and I’ve learned a lot from the many insightful comments.

Below is a list of blogs from people who comment here.  I actually made the list several days ago, so I apologize if you are a recent commenter and your blog is missing.

Thanks again to everyone who participates here.

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Thanks for Your Help & Thoughts on Technology at College

My talk to the high school students went very well.  Thank you to everyone who made suggestions.  I worked a lot of your comments into my talk.

Talking to a high school seniors made me remeber my first year as a freshman working on my bachelors degree. When I went to college, the internet was just becoming something you could get access to outside of the academic world.  Netscape was the hub for finding anything else on the web and the only way to check your email in your dorm was to signup with AOL or a local BBS system.

Out of a campus of 5000 students in 1995, I was the only student with a
cellphone (I did a lot of work for a health care system and they needed
to be able to get a hold of me).  I wonder what percentage of students
have mobile phones now.

Freshman at college today expect to have highspeed connection in their dorm and possibly wireless access covering the entire campus.  It is quite a different environment.  While the internet is a wonderful tool, I wonder if it really helps students learn more. 

The convenience of all this wonderful technology is offset by the distraction level.

My first few years of college, research involved going to the library, looking things up on the card catalog computer and then manually finding the physical resources or the CDroms the resources were stored on.  This was a slow process and the amount you could review in a single hour was very low by today’s standards.  However, it was a very focused time.  There were no incoming emails, chat windows, SMS, phone calls or popup banners trying to get my attention.

Just because a particular piece of technology has the ability to make you more productive doesn’t mean that in practice it won’t actually make you less productive.

7 Ways to Wakeup in the Morning

Your method of waking up is the first thing that starts your day. I’m not saying that waking up to an annoying alarm will ruin your day, but it probably isn’t going to help anything.

Here are a few ideas for waking up:

1. Wake up to a CD. Many stereo’s have a build in alarm clock that will start the CD at a certain time. (This can also be the basis of a nice college dorm prank.)
2. Wake up to the radio.  Most clock radios let you wake up to whatever is being broadcast instead of the normal alarm.
3. Wake up to light. A simple outlet timer, hooked to a bright light can be a great way to wake up because the light will help tell your body that the day is starting. (You might want to set a backup alarm when trying this for the first time.)
4. Wake up to cool air. In highschool I concocted an elaborate mechanism for waking up that I would tinker with each night.  On of the more interesting things I tried was hooking up a fan at the bottom of the bed sheets.  It would come on and start blowing cool air under the covers.
5. Wake up to your cell phone. Many cell phones have alarm clocks and the ringing of your cell phone might be much more pleasant than the buzz of your regular alarm clock.  You might even be able to set it to vibrate and then just sleep with it under your pillow.
6. Wake up to coffee.  I hate coffee so waking up every day with the thought "what is that awful smell?" isn’t my idea of a good way to wake.  However, I’m told other people like to wake up to coffee, so a pot with a timer might be a good option.
7. Wake up to your iPod. iPods have alarmclock functionality built in.  You can set them to play a particular playlist at the appropriate time.  I don’t recommend sleeping with headphones, but if yo have external speakers of some type this can be a nice way to wakeup.  One of the advantages of this over a CD player is that the CD player will make a "spin up" noise when it starts, so if you are a light sleeper you may wake up to the spin noise instead of the music.  (As a side note the best piece of music to wake up to is the music from the ballet Appalachian Spring. The worst music to wakeup to is anything played on a  harpsichord.)

So do you have a creative way to wake up?  What do you use presently?  What things have you tried in the past?

Taking the Time to Read

There are few people who wouldn’t benefit from spending a little more time each day reading a good book.  If you want to keep yourself at maximum creative capacity, you have to make sure you are taking in new ideas and thoughts.  If you aren’t continually feeding your mind, you’ll eventually find your creative reserves starting to run dry.  Continually producing output without taking any input is a good way to burn out.

Here are eight tips that I’ve found help me in my personal reading habits:

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Excel Transpose Trick

This one minute video shows you how to take a list of items in a column and copy it to a row. It is pretty simple, but when you need it this can really save you a lot of time. 

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