One Step to Get the Most Out of Your Life

We all want the most out of our lives. However, when we pursue any activity with our own desires in mind, we fail. I am here today to tell you the one single mindset that will yield you the greatest returns - regardless of what area of your life you focus on.

The simple answer is to set your own personal gain aside and concentrate on your team's overall success. This is simple. This is hard to practice. If you care more about your team's results rather than what you did, you will win in the end. You may not always be the one on top, but as long as your team succeed, then so did you. Corruptness emerges from individuals carrying more about themselves than the greater good of everyone else. Selfishness is a terrible motivator, especially in business (i.e. personal bonuses).

Its not about how many points scored, how much work you put into a project, how much effort you put into cleaning the house or anything else. Its about your team winning the volleyball game, your project achieving success, and the fact that the house is actually clean. These three simple steps will help you achieve what you want in life by helping others succeed.

1. The team's results are more important than your own. As long as you contributed to the team in a positive way, you will be happy and more satisfied.

2. Focus less on the I part and more on the we part. Your company will not fail if you don't get ALL the credit that you deserve. If your team wins, you get to play another game. If they lose, your season is done and it doesn't matter if you scored 40 points in the basketball game.

3. You have a team that you are on everyday of your life. It may just not be a formal team. Your team consists of your spouse, your friends that you haven't spoke to in a while, and even the stranger sitting across from you at the coffee shop. If you make them better and happy, you will find yourself becoming better and happy. 

If you follow this simple rule, you will find yourself on the winning side every time. These messages are counter intuitive, but this is the definition of karma. So, go out there and treat every person as they are your teammate with the goal of helping them succeed in life.

Which One Creates the Best Life: Your Past Self or Your Present Self?

There are two types of happiness that appeal to the human psyche. The first one is content happiness, which is experienced in the present moment, and hence I will call this type Present Happiness. This type of happiness emerges from enjoying yourself at your current task, such as eating food or participating in a hobby that you enjoy.

The second type of happiness is meaningful happiness, which can only be experienced by reflecting on your own memories, which I will call Past Happiness. Typically, in order to fill your brain with meaningful happiness, you must have encountered a tough journey towards achieving a goal. For instance, raising kids is a great example of meaningful happiness. Kids rarely bring any happiness to you in the moment (Present Happiness), but when they are grown up and you are old, you get to enjoy your memories and enter into a state of Past Happiness.

So, which one is better? In the end, Present Happiness is temporary while Past Happiness is permanent. Past Happiness is where we truly get satisfaction out of our lives. However, the trick is that a life composed of 100% Past Happiness and 0% Present Happiness is not ideal. This life would consist of committing only selfless acts for every waking moment of your life. Not a single person has the capacity to live this type of life.

However, if you still want to achieve Past Happiness, the correct way to do so is to sprinkle sporadic moments of Present Happiness into your life. For example, if you volunteer for an entire day of community service (which will contribute to your Past Happiness), you should indulge afterwards with a beer or a Chocolate Molten Cake. In this way, you will create memories of Past Happiness, but you will not be completely miserable through the process of creating these memories. Who truly enjoys the present moment of community service? It is the memories that we create which are the root cause of true Past Happiness. But, a dessert here or there helps create enough Present Happiness to get you through the adversity of the present in order to create the everlasting Past Happiness Memories.

In the end, Past Happiness is what has the greatest impact on us. A year from now, you probably won't remember your Chocolate Molten Cake. But there is a greater chance that you will remember your community service efforts. My recommendation is to try to be as selfless as possible, which will create memories of Past Happiness. But, whenever you are feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or drained of energy, take some time off, eat a dessert, go play basketball, or anything else that your present self would enjoy.

I am going to leave you with one final thought. Socially eating dinner or grabbing a drink together with friends is the a great combination of Present and Past Happiness. You create memories with your friends, establishing Past Happiness, but at the same time, you enjoy yourself and establish Present Happiness at the same time.

Please feel free to comment or reach out to me if you want to carry on a further conversation.

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.