5 Things to Un-learn What You've Learned

You spent a lot of time getting an education. But if you want to make it as an entrepreneur, it's time to forget some of what you learned.

1)     If you only do what you're told, you'll excel.  I know. School was hard.  But not that hard.  If you did what you were told--go to class, do the reading, turn in assignments on time, etc.--you could get As. Initiative was not required and in fact, was often frowned upon.  Now--whether you work for someone else or run your own business--doing what you're told makes you average. Not superior, not excellent... just average.

To be above average or to achieve better than average results, you must do two things

• Do what others are willing to do and do it better
• Do what others aren't willing to do

2)     Being micro-managed is to be expected.  Sure, you felt overly-controlled in school: Dates, timelines, rules... not to mention the seemingly arbitrary policies and nonsensical assignments. You saw graduation as the day you would finally have more freedom.  Nope.  In school you paid people to criticize, direct, and at times micro-manage you. Now you're the one getting paid... yet you somehow don't feel it's fair that investors, partners, or customers can dictate what you do, sometimes down to the smallest detail?  Don't expect someone to trust you to perform a task or service–and give you money to perform that service–until you've proven you can be trusted to perform that service.  Then, once you've proven your skills, if you still feel micro-managed it's your responsibility to change the situation. Communicate before you are communicated to. Answer questions before questions are asked. Demonstrate your value before you are asked to prove your value.  No one wants to micro-manage you. They have better things to do with their time.  If you're being micro-managed it's probably because you need to be.

3)     Your time off is the highlight of the year.  You may have forgotten your mom's birthday, but I'll bet you knew the exact day every semester ended and the start and end of Spring Break. And you lived for snow days.  So it only makes sense to see weekends and vacations as the highlight of your working year, right?  Actually, No: If you feel you endure the workweek just to get to the payoff of the weekend, you're in the wrong business. Find work you enjoy; then you won't see time off as a chance to finally do something fun but as a chance to do something else fun.  While you'll never love everything you do in your professional life, you should enjoy the majority of it.  Otherwise you're not living–you're just working.

4)     Getting criticized means you failed.  Here's another pay/paid dichotomy. In college you paid professors to critique your work.  So now that you are the one getting paid, why is it unfair for someone--like a customer, investor, or key partner–to critique your work?  It's not.  When you get negative feedback, see it as an opportunity. Think, "Wow, I didn't realize I wasn't doing that right. I didn't realize I wasn't doing that as well as I could."  Criticism is a chance to learn--and this time you're getting paid to learn.  Never complain when someone pays you to learn.

5)     5. Success is based on toeing the line.  Say you disagreed with a professor's point of view on a particular point. You may even have been right... but the only way to get an A in the class was to parrot the professor's take on the subject. Except in rare cases, confirming and following the rules was everything.  In business, conforming only ensures that you will achieve the same results as other people.  If you want to achieve different results you'll have to think and act differently. Do your homework, think critically, and don't be afraid to create your own path.  But don't be different just for the sake of being different. Be different because it's who you are and what you believe... and because it will get you where you want to go, with your integrity and your sense of self intact

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Give Great Feedback: An 11-Step Primer

Star employees aren't born.  They're made by the feedback

they get from bosses and colleagues.

What You Want to Do

1. Give feedback as quickly as possible.  If someone does something great;  tell them right away.
2. Go public with positive feedback.  Praise in public is worth more than praise in private.
3. Be specific.  "Good job" tells your best manager nothing.  "I really liked the accuracy of your report," tells her what she should keep paying attention to. 
4. Ask questions about what made a meeting, survey, interview or sales call so effective.  Asking questions is a terrifc way to pay a compliment;  it shows you know you can learn from someone else and value that person's perspective.
5. Inquire about other peoples' contributions.  Who else worked on the project?  This gives the obvious author a chance to share credit and identifies other high achievers you want to notice.
6. Monitor improvement and progress.  If a group or team is getting a lot better at something, say so.  Everyone likes to feel that they are making headway so ask yourself;  what are these people doing better now that they didn't do a couple of months ago?

What You Don't Want to Do

1. Overdo your praise.  Make it meaningful, not routine.
2. Embarass.  Keep negative feedback private and use it sparingly, when it really counts.
3. Fudge.  Be very detailed and suggest remedies so that you don't inspire hopelessness.
4. Get stuck in the past.  Suggestions for doing better next time are more motivating than rehashing past events that can't be changed.
5. Above all:  remember what it was like when you weren't the boss.  What made you want to strive for improvement?  Whether it was a good experience or a bad one, use it--only to do it better for others.

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TIPS to Repair Credit & Improve Credit Score

How to repair your credit and improve your FICO credit score

It's important to note that repairing bad credit is a bit like losing weight.  It takes time and there is no quick way to fix a credit score. In fact, out of all of the ways to improve a credit score, quick-fix efforts are the most likely to backfire, so beware of any advice that claims to improve your credit score fast. The best advice for rebuilding credit is to manage it responsibly over time. If you haven't done that, then you need to repair your credit history before you see credit score improvement. The tips below will help you do that. They are divided up into categories based on the data used to calculate your credit score.

3 Important Things You Can Do Right Now

1.   Check Your Credit Report – Credit score repair begins with your credit report. If you haven't already, request a free copy of your credit report and check it for errors. Your credit report contains the data used to calculate your score and it may contain errors. In particular, check to make sure that there are no late payments incorrectly listed for any of your accounts and that the amounts owed for each of your open accounts is correct. If you find errors on any of your reports, dispute them with the credit bureau and reporting agency. 

2.   Setup Payment Reminders – Making your credit payments on time is one of the biggest contributing factors to your credit score. Some banks offer payment reminders through their online banking portals that can send you an email or text message reminding you when a payment is due. You could also consider enrolling in automatic payments through your credit card and loan providers to have payments automatically debited from your bank account, but this only makes the minimum payment on your credit cards and does not help instill a sense of money management.

3.  Reduce the Amount of Debt You Owe – This is easier said than done, but reducing the amount that you owe is going to be a far more satisfying achievement than improving your credit score. The first thing you need to do is stop using your credit cards. Use your credit report to make a list of all of your accounts and then go online or check recent statements to determine how much you owe on each account and what interest rate they are charging you. Come up with a payment plan that puts most of your available budget for debt payments towards the highest interest cards first, while maintaining minimum payments on your other accounts.

Some more tips on how to raise your credit score and maintain good credit

Payment History

Contributing 35% to your score calculation, this category has the greatest effect on improving your score, but past problems like missed or late payments are not easily fixed.

• Pay your bills on time. Delinquent payments, even if only a few days late and collections can have a major negative impact on your FICO score.
• If you have missed payments, get current and stay current. The longer you pay your bills on time after being late, the more your FICO score should increase. Older credit problems count for less, so poor credit performance won't haunt you forever. The impact of past credit problems on your FICO score fades as time passes and as recent good payment patterns show up on your credit report. And good FICO scores weigh any credit problems against the positive information that says you're managing your credit well.
• Be aware that paying off a collection account will not remove it from your credit report.  It will stay on your report for seven years.
• If you are having trouble making ends meet, contact your creditors or see a legitimate credit counselor.  This won't rebuild your credit score immediately, but if you can begin to manage your credit and pay on time, your score should increase over time. And seeking assistance from a credit counseling service will not hurt your FICO score.

Amounts Owed

This category contributes 30% to your score's calculation and can be easier to clean up than payment history, but that requires financial discipline and understanding the tips below.

• Keep balances low on credit cards and other "revolving credit".  High outstanding debt can affect a credit score.
• Pay off debt rather than moving it around.  The most effective way to improve your credit score in this area is by paying down your revolving (credit cards) debt. In fact, owing the same amount but having fewer open accounts may lower your score.
• Don't close unused credit cards as a short-term strategy to raise your score.
• Don't open a number of new credit cards that you don't need, just to increase your available credit.  This approach could backfire and actually lower your credit score.

Length of Credit History
If you have been managing credit for a short time, don't open a lot of new accounts too rapidly.  New accounts will lower your average account age, which will have a larger effect on your score if you don't have a lot of other credit information. Also, rapid account buildup can look risky if you are a new credit user.

New Credit

• Do your rate shopping for a given loan within a focused period of time. FICO scores distinguish between a search for a single loan and a search for many new credit lines, in part by the length of time over which inquiries occur.
• Re-establish your credit history if you have had problems.  Opening new accounts responsibly and paying them off on time will raise your credit score in the long term.
• Note that it's OK to request and check your own credit report.  This won't affect your score, as long as you order your credit report directly from the credit reporting agency or through an organization authorized to provide credit reports to consumers.

Types of Credit Use

• Apply for and open new credit accounts only as needed.  Don't open accounts just to have a better credit mix – it probably won't raise your credit score.
• Have credit cards – but manage them responsibly.  In general, having credit cards and installment loans (and paying timely payments) will rebuild your credit score. Someone with no credit cards, for example, tends to be higher risk than someone who has managed credit cards responsibly.
• Note that closing an account doesn't make it go away.  A closed account will still show up on your credit report, and may be considered by the score.

To summarize, "fixing" a credit score is more about fixing errors in your credit history (if they exist) and then following the guidelines above to maintain consistent, good credit history. Raising your score after a poor mark on your report or building credit for the first time will take patience and discipline.

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How to Refresh Your Brain in 10 Minutes

When you go from one task to the next--all day long--your mind constantly races to catch up. Hit the reset button with this underrated trick.

 

Andy Puddicombe is a former Buddhist monk and co-founder of Headspace, an entrepreneurial venture designed to demystify meditation and make it easily accessible to all audiences. Puddicombe promotes an idea that almost sounds too easy to be true: refresh your mind in just 10 minutes a day and you might be happier at work.  Puddicombe seeks to provide “meditation for the modern world,” eliminating stereotypes of incense and cross-legged monks. And he might just be on to something.

Here are two problems that plague modern-day workers--and how Headspace’s bite-sized meditation plan can help.

Problem #1: Inability to Focus  “The average office worker changes windows [on her computer] 37 times an hour,” Headspace’s head of research Nick Begley says in a meditation tutorial.  According to Begley, when your mind changes gears that rapidly, part of your brain is still engaged in the previous task and you don’t have all of the attention and resources necessary to concentrate on the current task. This slows down productivity and reduces your ability to filter relevant information from irrelevant information.

Problem #2: Stress When people get stressed, there is a part of the brain called the amygdala that fires up the “fight or flight” part of the nervous system that helps you make quick, impulsive decisions.  “It signals to our hormonal system to secrete adrenaline and cortisol and increases our heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure, so we can escape this immediate physical danger,” says Begley.  The problem arises when there is no immediate physical danger--when, say, you’ve forgotten to hit “save” on an important document and your computer crashes, or you arrive unprepared for an important business meeting. The “fight or flight” impulse is not actually helpful in those situations and merely puts undue stress on the body, Begley explains. 

The Solution  Refreshing your brain is easier than you think. Here's the first and only step: Do nothing.
Puddicombe recommends simply setting aside 10 minutes each day to quiet your mind. Practice observing thoughts and anxieties without passing judgment--simply experience them. Focus on the present moment and nothing else.

We can’t change every little thing that happens to us, but we can change how we experience it.

Thanks to Francesca Louise Fenzi | Inc.com for this article

6 Things Every Customer Wants

Contrary to popular belief, customers are less interested in price than in these six things.

All customers want the highest quality at the lowest price, right? Well, sort of. That stuff is important but, surprisingly, the quality vs. price formula is not usually on the top of the customer's list of concerns, especially when it comes to selling B2B.

According to numerous surveys, B2B customers want the following six things from the people who sell to them:

1. Preparation

Customers want you to do your homework before talking with them. They resent it when you ask questions that can easily be answered by a few minutes on the Web.

• Wrong: "And your VP of manufacturing is who?"
• Right: "How are purchasing decisions made between the manufacturing and engineering group?"

2. Simplicity

Customers, like everyone else, must cope with the complexities of business. They want you to make what you're selling simple but without being simplistic.

• Wrong: "Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced new next generation social analytics for the Marketing Cloud. With the expanded Marketing Cloud ecosystem, which now includes 20 industry leading social analytics vendors, companies are able to make better business decisions based on the massive amounts of social media data created every day, all from a single dashboard." (BTW, this is a real example, selected pretty much at random.)
• Right: "We make it easier to find sales prospects on the web by gathering the results from multiple social media searches into a single convenient place."

3. Creativity

Customers already have ideas on how to solve their problems and create their opportunities. They want you to surface new ideas that won't turn up during in-house discussions.

• Wrong: "We can address your list of requirements."
• Right: "Have you considered an alliance that might let you outsource that function?"

4. Loyalty

Customers are risking their companies and careers by doing business with you. They therefore want you to represent THEIR interests and not just those of your company.

• Wrong: "Is there any reason why you wouldn't buy from us?" (Move to the close.)
• Right: "If you're not 100% certain this is a good idea, then we should reassess the situation together."

5. Accessibility

Customers want to know they're a priority and that you'll get back to them immediately if they have a problem. If you don't, they conclude they're not important to you.

• Wrong: (recording) "I'm out of the office for a few days. Leave a message and I'll get back to you when I return."
• Right: (recording) "If this is important, please text me at [number]. Otherwise leave a message."

6. Accountability

Customers don't want you to pass the buck to anybody else in your company. If they're going to work with you, they want your skin in the game.

• Wrong: "You'll have to take that up with the sale support team."
• Right: "I will call the sales support team right now and have them give your problem immediate attention."

The list above is based upon scientific research conducted by The Chally Group Worldwide.

Thank you Geoffrey James from Inc.com for the blog post.

Let us know your thoughts.

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