Why Give to Others?

Everyone has heard of the saying "money can't buy happiness". And we know that the relationship that money has on happiness obeys a diminishing return function. But, there has been new recent evidence suggesting that "money can buy happiness...when you give to others". This finding is so counter-intuitive that many people fail to accept it as reality unless they are given money with the stipulation that they must give the money as a gift to other people.

Michael Norton has racked up over 2 million views of his Ted talk discussing why money can increase happiness when it is spent on other people. Furthermore, it does not matter how much money is given, nor what the money is spent on. This is an amazing finding when we stop to thinking about it. Giving $5 to a friend brings the same amount of happiness as giving the same friend $100. Giving someone money for Starbucks brings the same amount of happiness as giving someone money for life saving water.

If the above findings were not persuasive enough to begin giving to other people, Norton also discovered that these results are universal. It is human nature to feel the empathy associated with giving to other people. The following graph shows that nearly every single country in the world feels happier after giving money to other people as opposed to hoarding it for themselves. A correlation scale between the feeling of happiness after giving to another person is used. A correlation rating of 1.0 (dark green) means that every person who gave felt happier. Whereas a correlating rating of -1.0 (dark red) means that every person who gave felt less happy. A correlation of 0 means that no relationship exists between giving and happiness.

Norton also found out that companies who gave employees money with the requirement that they must spend it on co-workers saw a huge increase in productivity. For instance, a company gave money to their employees to spend on themselves (as in the case of salary and raise payments), and the company experienced a 70% loss on their capital they paid employees. However, a company gave out the same amount of money to employees with the requirement that employees must spend money on their co-workers. Under this test, the company realized a 420% return on their capital. Maybe companies should start paying their employees and require them to give to co-workers?

Lastly, money can corrupt people. CNN did a mini series on showing the negative experience of lottery winners a full year after their "spectacular day". I will conclude with one final quote Henry Ford. "Money does not change men, it merely unmasks them." Go give $1/day to your family, close friends, or distant acquaintances that you wish to get to know better. See what happens.

What are the key steps to becoming more productive when facing a new daunting project?

We all have experienced it. You are thrown into a new project, team, or role, and you're trying your best to make sense of this new environment. When asked to create your first product in your new atmosphere, the feeling of being overwhelming can sink in. Where do you start?

However, there are three simple steps that can lower stress and set you on the fast track to returning a product to your team members. The linear process proceeds as follows. First, you develop your product. Second, you must determine if your product met the necessary metrics to over exceed expectations. This stage requires a feedback loop to make iterations to your original product. Third, you continue to make adjustments until all of the pre-defined metrics meet the goal that your team leader has bestowed upon you.

But, in terms of terminating procrastination, the keys to getting off the launch pad for beginning a new product is to reverse engineer these three high level steps. Although this may seem common sense, the first step is to determine the goal and break it down, with the latter being more essential.

You're goal is to deliver a great presentation. How would a great presentation be determined? By feedback from the audience. What kind of feedback would be benevolent? Any improvement to the audiences line of business. What improvements can we make to their business? They have not been receiving the best financing options available. And there is the goal: improve the clients business's financing options. This process will truly narrow down what goal one must be accomplished.

The next step in the planning phase to becoming more productive in the face of a daunting project is to determine the metrics that will determine success. These should be quantifiable and measurable. The metrics should be testable and verifiable under the scientific method. Continuing off the previous example, specific financing option measurements should be noted in the presentation. But also, a quantitative way to measure audience engagement through questions asked should also be measured. These measurements can be taken by delivering practice presentations to peers.

Finally, the devil is in the details. It is time to start building this presentation or product. Remember, you have the defined metrics already. So, how can you build this product to meet those metrics. If one of your metrics is audience engagement through questions, then incorporate ways to interact the audience in your presentation. Do not just stand up there and blabber on, but instead, ask the audience questions as well.

In the end, reverse engineering is a successful method to use for a plethora of projects. When unsure of where to begin, ask yourself what the end product will accomplish? Then ask yourself, how can I measure whether my end product accomplished the goal I set? Finally, you have to just get started and begin building a product that answers those metric questions.

4 Arguments Favoring Mobile Devices Over Mobile Applications

Now a days, everyone is familiar with the trend of mobile technologies. When a person hears mobile in a technological environment, their minds immediately jump to smart phones. From this point, the next logical step in this process is to begin envisioning mobile applications when given the initial "mobile technology" buzzword. However, the exponential trend towards mobile technology encompasses so much more than mere applications.

I list some of the reasons why entrepreneurs need to be thinking about mobile devices in general and not merely mobile applications below. But first, consider these eye opening fact. Only 26% of mobile applications are opened more than once. An astonishingly low 16% of people will open an application for a third time after two unpleasant experiences. Now, we see that your next mobile application can be a home run or a caught-looking-strikeout. There is no in between successful and unsuccessful applications, which means that your next application not only has to function flawlessly, but it also has to be intriguing and stimulate people's sense of curiosity. 

So, now we explore why people will gravitate towards mobile devices in general rather than smart phone applications.

1. People Become Enamored With Physical Objects Easier

To be as blunt as possible, people prefer things that they can touch. The only way that human beings experience the world is through our five senses. Mobile applications short change one of the most important senses. Touching a screen on a phone just is not quite the same as possessing a unique item that stimulates ones sense of touch.

The best possible combination is to join the software world with the tangible world. Some mobile application developers have already accomplished this feat with the mobile credit card reader, breathalyzer, and many more examples. Objects such as these will be used much more than if there was an application that accomplished the same feat. 

Entrepreneurs must appeal to the sense of touch.

2. People Pay More for Physical Objects

For the reason that people are more enamored with physical objects, they will end up paying more for a similar concept that offers the same benefits. Take the Nike Fuel Band for instance. This is a fantastic and genius invention. In as short of a description as possible, the Fuel Band is a wearable bracelet that monitors and tracks physical activity and lets users visualize the results on the internet or a mobile application.

Imagine if someone had created an iPhone application that tracked, recorded, and operated in an identical manner to the Nike Fuel Band. The difference would be the price. The iPhone application developer would have trouble convincing people to not only spend $15, but to download the application for free. There is definitely no way they could garner $150+ for their application.

Simply, people are willing to pay more for a mobile device than a phone application. It may be irrational, but it is a fact of human emotion.

3. Physical Objects Can Also Serve as an Accessory

Next, some mobile devices are multi-talented and solves two problems with one solution. A mobile device should be made into an accessory. One that is stylish, yet is technologically adept with functionality. Smart watches have begun to take the imagination of the public up, up, and away. Not that I would wear the watch below, but at least people are migrating towards wearable devices. Google Glass is another great mobile device example.

People like buying accessories so they can show them off to friends and use them as a status symbol as well. Wearable mobile devices are cool, fashionable, and the future.

4. Physical Objects Are Easier to Understand

Lastly, physical devices are just simply easier to understand. They may appeal to our monkey minds, but people not only pick up the main concept of a tangible object faster while touching it, but also people are willing to spend more time understanding an object that they can touch as opposed to a software program.

Physical objects can be seen by other people as well. This lets one person show off their new (more expensive) purchase to friends. Tangible technologies also provide a talking point. One friend notices a mobile device and then shares his or her own experience while using the device. Contrasted with having a mobile application sit on a phone in someone's pocket, never to be seen or brought up in conversation.

There are a plethora of other reasons why people should be shifting towards mobile devices and away from mobile applications. But to summarize it up as concisely as possible, for whatever reason, people value tangible items more than intangible pieces of software. Don't build a mobile application, build a mobile device.

5 Areas of Your Life that Personal Analytics can Improve

The era of data is among us. The common term thrown around is big data for big corporations. However, I believe that small data has abundant potential applications for individuals. I refer to small data in the sense that it can be opened in a spreadsheet. It is not the size of the data set that matters, but the quality.

Our society has gathered tremendous amounts of data on individuals and there are numerous ways small data can improve your life. I use the term "personal analytics" to refer to utilizing data to harness individual insight. There are five separate domains in which personal analytics can be applied for enhance well-being.

1. Health and Fitness

People have already begun to use data to maximize the results they see versus the number of hours spent in the gym. However, utilizing personal analytics to improve health and fitness is still in its infancy. Imagine overlaying your workout history with a graph of your weight. You could visually see which workouts have more of a profound impact on weight loss.

Furthermore, personal analytics can be used to maximize each individual workout. For instance, imagine yourself documenting how much weight you are bench pressing and squatting. You reach the insight that you bench 20% more on Thursdays than on Mondays. Similarly, you realize that you squat 25% more on Mondays as opposed to Thursday. Then, you ask yourself, why you continue to bench on Mondays and squat on Thursdays as opposed to the opposite? This is one example out of a plethora of how analytics and data collection could enhance your health and fitness.

Soon, we will be able to measure other activities, such as sleep quality, calorie inbound and outbound, and even alcohol intake.

2. Work Productivity

Next, work productivity can be enhanced with the use of personal analytics. A simple correlation between output and input needs to be measured, documented, and analyzed. For instance, suppose you could rank the productivity on a Likert scale from 1-10 on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Then, if you could combine this knowledge with the duration you spent in meetings or sending email over the same duration. You would then begin to see extremely profound results in terms of discerning the ideal amount of hours to spend in meetings or emailing on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

3. Social Life

Personal analytics to reassess your social life can have the largest implications, especially in our era of social media. Text messages, phone calls, social media, and an associated emotion with each can open the doors to improving your social life in a variety of directions. Envision what the world would be like if you could determine which friendships increase your self confidence and build you up and which "friendships" slowly deteriorate and demolish your outlook on life. You can re-shift which people you are giving your energy to in order to spend time around people that make you feel better. I will be looking forward to see how people apply personal analytics to measure and evaluate their social life in the near future.

4. Personal Finances

Using analytics and data for personal finances is an obvious one. Would it not be fantastic if you could save more money by eliminating frivolous purchases and increase spending in investments that will pay off in the future? The real power will come from combining analytics in the personal finance domain with any of the other domains listed. You could analyze how your personal spending on gym memberships affects your health, spending on your small business affects your bottom line, or even how spending on other people affects your relationship with them. Lets face it, there are people who you enjoy spotting a few extra bucks because you know they will return the favor and other people that you know just use and abuse your bank account.

5. Recreational Activities (esp. Sports)

Again, this is another obvious one, thanks to ESPN. Sports networks have decades of data and they have become immensely efficient over the past few years with conveying the insights to the public in near real-time. However, the subject of this post is personal analytics. How would you reevaluate your performance in your sport of choice if you had the same capabilities as ESPN. You could use this ability to determine where, on what day of the week, with which teammates, and under which circumstances you play best. The only hindrance is a methodology for capturing this data without hiring an entire team of sports analysts.

3 Reasons Why Engineering Schools Should Teach Selling

In general, engineering schools get the reputation of teaching incredibly bright students to solve extremely complex problems. Most people who have interviewed engineers right out of school know that the majority of these students are not exactly the most charismatic individuals out there. However, I propose a change in the generic engineering curriculum to include at least one course in the art of selling for three main reasons.

Note that for the remainder of this post, I refer to recent college graduates in engineering as simply 'engineers' and I know that all engineers are not the same, but I am talking about the majority of these 'engineers'.

First, selling is pervasive in all aspects of life. These engineers will soon be applying for jobs after graduation. Their sheer intellect is usually not enough alone to convince the interviewer for the job due to the fact that engineers have trouble articulating their thoughts. The engineer must sell him or her self to the employer. Furthermore, any time the engineer has a grand idea, he or she must also persuade others to believe in their idea. This persuasion is directly related to one's selling ability.

Second, an engineer can create the best product, but if they can not convince others to buy it, the product quality becomes irrelevant. In today's society, people buy things not because they need it, but because they want it, which is inherently different. Engineers are taught to create products with incredible sophistication and a plethora of features. However, this is not exactly correct. Engineers must create products that consumers want in their daily lives. The only way engineers can figure out what people actually want to spend their money on requires selling, communication, and feedback from the customer. All of which is not taught in engineering curriculum.

Lastly, engineers must utilize communication and social interaction throughout their job, personal life, and relationships. Engineers become great problem solvers, but they lack the necessary communication skills to ask the right questions. No matter how affluent an engineer is, they becomes irrelevant when they spend their time answering a question that customers do not care about. The only way that an engineer can uncover the correct question to answer is through means of communication and social interaction with their customer. Engineering schools do not train their students to seek the right answer, but rather utilize as many convoluted formulas as possible on their tests.

How to Increase Personal Performance: Activities of Fortune

I, along with every other human being on this planet, want to reach my own individual potential. In order to understand how to increase performance, one must dive under the skin and into the human brain. In a recent TED talk that I watched, Dr. Alan Wilkins described what lies at the abyss of the human psyche. 

The human system is composed in these layers, in order from external down to internal.

Therefore, we can see that performance is at the top and has five underlying factors. At the bottom, lies physiology. Physiology is raw data coming into the body. Some examples include the light waves from your computer entering your eyes and the carbohydrates from the food you just ate entering your body as nutrients. 

Per the title of this blog, I claim that there is a straightforward method to changing the physiological stimuli which enter your body. Danial Priestly describes one of the key factors to becoming a key person of influence is to create your own luck by putting yourself in lucky positions. For instance, watching TED videos instead of mind numbing television is one way to begin towards increasing your luck. In order to create your own luck, you must immerse yourself in lucky situations, which I call "activities of fortune".

Once you surround yourself with activities of fortune, the positive physiological data will slowly start improving your emotions, all the way up the pyramid to change your behavior and increase your performance. People say that most of life (90%) is what happens to you, but I beg to differ. If you engulf yourself with activities of fortune, such as reading instead of listening to news or teaching others instead of shopping, you will enhance the physiological input entering your body.

However, there is one caveat. You must love the new situations that you place yourself in. If you simply watch a TED video because this blog suggests it, you will not take anything away from the video. You must enjoy the video itself, which will cause your eyes to pick up on the subtle signals which will change your life by improving your performance down the road.

On a side note, this concept can be expanded to sports, such that, you need to not think about the basketball shot or golf putt, but rather appeal to the physiology data in personal practice before the competition even begins. For instance, imagine playing a sport. If you love the sport, you live the sport. If you live the sport, you play several hours a day, watch the professionals on TV, and talk about this sport with friends. While you think you are merely enjoying yourself, you are in fact placing yourself in activities of fortune, which will in turn increase the positive physiological effects entering your body, resulting in an increase in your performance.

3 Sizes Fit All in the Future of 3D Printing

The future of 3D printing is right around the corner. My last post discussed the rapid adoption rate of technology in today's world. Now, I analyze what how the future of 3D printing will look as these devices become ubiquitous in a relatively short amount of time.

First, the small.

Formlabs 3D Printer

The majority of Americans will have their own 3D printer in their home office. This printer will be on the cheap end to appease consumers who aim to print small tools, jewelry, replacement parts, small toys, and works of imagination. Right now, the consumer can pick up a 3D printer for less than $500. The Formlabs printer above is much more expensive, but the average price of consumer 3D printers will be a few hundred dollars, if that. This will enable the average person to express themselves through works of art and build objects together with their social network. A simple click of the button will allow people to download their friends cool unique object, only so that they can one up their friend with a minor improvement, creating an on-going cycle.

Second, the medium.

Stratasys Mojo 

However, people will want to print larger and more complex objects without having to pay the exponentially larger fees for these printers, as they plan to only use this detailed printer a couple of times per year. Enter, the next generation of 3D print shops. In this world, a user may own a 3D printer, but it may not satisfy the requirements needed to print their next work of genius. So, this person creates the digital file at their home, emails the file to a local 3D print shop, and goes to pick it up in a few hours. The user has that specific object in their hands that same day. This would occur on a mid-grade printer, similar to the Stratasys Mojo, depicted above. In fact, Staples is already beginning to offer this service. Essentially, people who desire a custom object with detailed design requirements will use this service.

Third, the large.

Stratasys Objet1000

Lastly, we look at one more use case. Suppose that a user wants an extremely detailed object or one that is grande in scale in such a way that only a $100,000 commercial printer can build this object. For instance, the Objet1000 above would be an analogous example to the size and power of a commercial printer. However, the user does not necessarily need the object that present day. Introducing, cloud 3D printing as a service. The user designs their object on their computer, as they did in the previous case. Now, they send the design to a cloud printing service, such as Sculpteo. The physical location of this business may be in a nearby large metropolis, or across the country. Regardless, the object comes back to the user after a few days has passed from printing this custom object. The user pays for the service of the printer, along with shipping and handling, and all parties are satisfied. Happily ever after.

The world of 3D printing is fast around the corner. I will be looking forward to seeing what other companies adapt or emerge on each scale. The small consumer printer space is rapidly filling up with one Kickstarter project after another. The medium domain has attracted Staples and other new business sprouting up while the large domain has brought in several business that serve this niche. These three areas be an interesting to see how they fill out in just a few years time.