6. I’d set myself the highest objective I could imagine.
7. I’d involve in my project the best people I could find.
8. I’d say more clearly what do I expect and what can I offer to the persons that work with me. And I’d also pay attention to their expectations and goals.
9. I’d be more humble.
10. I’d listen more carefully to all those who already went through the experience.
11. Did I say I’d be more humble?
12. I’d analyze carefully the obstacles I’d probably face and I’ll turn them into challenges I’ll overcome.
13. I’d care a lot more about my health.
14. I’d spend more time with my family and my friends.
15. I’d invest more time in myself.

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I asked myself very often why me, why people tend to trust me in such an untrustful world. With the years, I reached the conclusion that generating trust can be easy if we are honest or at least try to be honest from our hearts. However, we need to work every day to keep this trust and for that there are a few rules we have to stick to as close as we can:

1) Compromise. Do everything you said you’d do. Whe you apply this rule then you suddenly might realize that (just like it happens to me all the time): you say you’ll do too many things, we give excuses, we get frustrated and some times even feel guilty, we distance ourselves from the people we acquire compromises with. Therefore, stop giving excuses as a way to start realizing which compromises are you acquiring.

2) Respect. This is essential. We all make mistakes. We all see very clearly the mistakes from others and have a lot of trouble realizing our own. To listen to someone without judging is the first true step to trust each other.

3) Be honest. We all have less trouble forgiving someone that makes a mistake, even if it hurts us, but who acted so because he/she felt “it was the right thing to do”, than someone who knowingly manipulates us. My experience says that, no matter what you did, if you say exactly what you feel without fearing the reaction from the person in front of you, that’s exactly where real communication starts.

There’s an additional point: patience. Patience with ourselves because we live in a world where we were told that everybody lies, that we have to be better than the rest, that the truth makes us weak. Without noticing, we might use excuses, judge or manipulate others. But we need to be calm and patient since every change has its process.

Photo “Don’t let me fall” de MalyBelen.

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One of the most important rules in branding says: “Be Different“. I’m sure it will remind you to some famous slogans.

In a world where everybody is constantly talking, silence becomes very valuable. Silence is what gives a greater meaning to your words and your actions. Apple knows that and uses it very consciously. It’s no coincidence that Apple’s choose the sentence “Think Different” as its slogan.

Does that mean that we all should stop talking and advertising ourselves? Not at all, only when we learn how to communicate properly is silence becomes extremely meaningful.

Here are some examples about uses of silence in Apple’s general branding strategy. If you have any other example they are more than welcome.

Photos:

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The first step to sell is to make the person in front of you clearly understand 1) what do you have for him/her 2) why should he/she need it and 3) why you are the best at it. To pack all this content in just 7 words might be complicated, but the effort is worth it.

Simplicity is complicated and some times you have to work hard to reach it. However, once you get there to get your message through gets a lot easier. If you know exactly what you you are saying, the people in front of you will have to make a smaller effort in order to understand you and your confidence (because you KNOW that THESE are the words) will generate in the people in front of you a better predisposition to listen to you or, even better to ask you.

Try it, find your seven words, none of them should be superfluous or missing. Whenever you have them, put them to the test.

Photo “{7-365} Seventy times Seven” from Dee’lite.

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Seth Goddin published recently the following about failure:

The math is magical: you can pile up lots of failures and still keep rolling, but you only need one juicy success to build a career.

If you spend your days avoiding failure by doing not much worth criticizing, you’ll never have a shot at success. (…)And yet we market and work and connect and create as if just one failure might be the end of us.

Here’s a small presentation I did myself about this subject a couple of months ago. The quality of the video is bad but the sound can still be understood. I hope you find it useful:

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“Todo comunica, el silencio también”

La crisis de comunicación como gran oportunidad.

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For a while, I accepted everybody. Then I realized how boring it is to have friends you cannot talk with because you don’t know who they are.

Later, I accepted only those who I already knew. But then, I looked at myself in the mirror and I felt proud and selfish. Neither accept nor ignore made me fell good.

But one day, I found the following video from Seth Godin.

This video was like a revelation to me. With it, I realized that I wanted to discover the person behind each invitation. And I started sending messages to those who wanted to be connected to me. I asked them who they were, what did they do and I offered them my help.

Surprisingly, my messages always received an answer. And I met people, people that I knew who they were and who I could talk with.

Moral: we all like others to be interested in us as persons and there is where we can start building up a real relationship. Although it might seem a paradox, we always need to try to reach the person behind the professional because, in the end, we are always one and the same: the professional and the person.

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Last week,  I made myself the following questions:

Do you frequently postpone extremely important tasks that only you can undertake for whatever reason (there’s something more urgent, you have headache, you broke up with your boy or girlfriend or your belly itches)?

Are you one of those many who say “wait, I’ll do it, to me it’ll just take me ten minutes” and then it takes a whole eternity (maybe even a bit longer) until you finally get it done?

My own answer to these questions were  “more than I’d like and should”, specially taking into account that I’ve been working for a while in the subject “learning to delegate” (one of most difficult lessons to learn as an enterpreneur). If you also answered also “yes” to these two questions, congratulations! you are also a perfect specimen of the “neckus bottlelensis” (and therefore you are welcome to the club and that gives you the right to share some beers with others like us).

But don’t worry, like almost every disease, this one also has a remedy. And here I’d like to propose some questions that could help finding solutions to this problem:

1) Is this task (that you and only you can do) really so important? Are you sure that your co-workers have to necessarily wait for you?

2)  Is there anyone else who could do this job? (I know this might sound as a repetition but, are you really, really, really sure?)

Back to my own case, very often those things that seemed crucial to you are not really necessary for your colleagues to move forward with their tasks. I also came to realize more and more that there are very few tasks that cannot be delegated.

It is true that to some other person it might take 3 days to do what for you it would just take you a couple of hours. But is also very true that very often the days go by and the task is still pending. In that case, not only haven’t we accomplished our objectives but also we denied another person the chance to learn how to do this task which would allow us in the future to concentrate in more important things.

When trying to find a way to prevent this problem from happening again I reached the following conclusions (I hope their helpful to anyone):

1) Take your time to plan your tasks and identify which ones are truly necessary to finish a project.

2) Delegate as much as you can (but not so much that you “overload” your colleagues).

and 3) if there’s a task that only you can do, be as executive as possible. Try to clear quickly any obstacle that could slow down the rest of your team and avoid procrastinating tasks that can become “necks of the bottle” (specially if the time you’ll invest in clearing out this task is small than the one it would take you to leave it for a later moment).

And to me, even more important than this, is to constantly remember that your mission as enterpreneur is to  facilitate the job to the rest, not to make it more difficult.

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“Business are flesh and blood. The people are the body, the food is the money and, in our case (Internet), tech is the brain”.

For me, this sentences perfectly sintetizes some of the problems you’ll find as an entrepreneur:

1) Delegating. It’s a lot easier to trust yourself than the others and we tend to try to do it all on our own to prevent mistakes. However, a body won’t work with just a stomach or a leg.

2) If you don’t eat, your body dies.If you are not earning money, the same thing happens to your company. Every succesful entrepreneur that I met worked for their passion, not for the money. But they learned at some point that without money there’s just no project.

If you just think about money you’ll lose the sense “direction” to make your project come true. And yet you cannot forget money either because, without it, your project won’t survive. And that’s what’s really, important you have to pursue, to make your project live and grow.

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