Satya Murthy

Written on 10/02/2009 by Ali Hale. Ali is a professional writer and blogger, and a part-time postgraduate student of creative writing. If you need a hand with any sort of written project, drop her a line (ali@aliventures.com) or check out her website at Aliventures.

Even the introverts amongst us – myself included! – are social beings. It’s natural for us to pay attention to what other people might be thinking. The problem is, worrying about what other people think can lead us to take on too many commitments, deny our true goals and passions, settle for a life of “people-pleasing”.
On the other hand, paying no heed at all to how others might be thinking of us can lead to professional and personal relationships turning sour.
Here are some steps that’ll help you find a healthy balance.

Step 1: Pay Attention – But Don’t Worry

Worrying rarely gets you anywhere in life. Don’t spend time feeling unhappy or anxious about how others might be thinking of you. Try not to let your emotions cloud the issue here, and don’t spend time trying to “mind-read” other people.
You’re often your own worst critic – and frankly, most people have far too much on your minds to care whether you’re slightly over/under-dressed for a situation, for instance.

Step 2: Does Their Opinion Matter?

Stop caring what random strangers think of you. If you like to sing as you walk round your local park, and someone passing gives you a weird look – it really doesn’t matter. Their opinion isn’t going to affect you in any way.
The same goes for all sorts of situations. For example, a problem that many overweight people have when they’re trying to get in shape is that they’d like to go to the gym or to an exercise class, but they’re worried what people will think of them. Ask yourself “can what they think hurt me?” or “does their opinion matter?” until you feel confident enough to go ahead with what you want.

Step 3: Use the Feedback

If you get a negative reaction from a key figure in your life, like your boss, then pay attention. If your boss is fanatical about keeping a tidy desk and you couldn’t care less, it’s worth adjusting your behaviour – especially if your boss scowls every time s/he sees your desk.
Don’t make assumptions about what other people are thinking, though: make sure you really do have evidence. In the absence of any real evidence, try assuming the best! For example, if someone sends you a rather curt email, assume that they were just in a hurry – don’t start worrying over whether they dislike you.

Step 4: Put Your Goals First

Perhaps you have very different goals to your family and friends. Perhaps you’re keen to get a great grade in school, but your friends think you should just join them in partying and having a laugh. It doesn’t really matter what they think: your goals should be more important than their opinion.
The same goes for all sorts of situations. Maybe you’ve ended up in a career you hate because it’s what your parents wanted you to do. Your goals should never be dictated by other people.
(If you don’t have any explicit goals, that might be why you’re prone to worrying about what other people think – because you don’t have your own plan for your life. You might want to read 11 Useful Tips on Setting Goals and Achieving Them.)

Step 5: Value Your Values

If other people scoff at your values, ignore them. Perhaps you’d like to read more about personal development and self-improvement, but you’re worried your friends would just laugh at you if they found out. Maybe you’re keen to do your best at work even when the boss is away – but everyone else thinks you’re an idiot for not joining them in slacking off.
Whatever the situation, make sure you’re holding tight to your values, rather than being swept along by other people’s. Many people will actually be impressed (even if they don’t say so) – because you’ve had the conviction to stick to what you believe is important.

Step 6: Remember That You Don’t Have to be Popular

Life isn’t like high school: it doesn’t matter if you’re not popular. You can’t please everyone anyway – so don’t even try. Say “no” to commitments that you don’t want to take on. Be willing to do something that goes against the crowd, if it’s what you truly believe in.

Of course, there are a few people in life who you might want to be popular with – your spouse, your kids, and your boss, for example. But in general, most people’s opinions and thoughts about you are unlikely to have any real effect. Plus, if you behave as “yourself” and people don’t like you – would you really want them to be your friends anyway?

Do you find yourself worrying about what other people think? How do you work past these worries? Are there times when it is appropriate to pay attention to how other people think about you?

From http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/10216/Burning-Cash-Is-For-Toasting-Marshmallows-cartoon.aspx

I’m going to go on a bit of a rant here.

I’m miffed that the industry term for the process whereby  startups invest in building their businesses is called “burning cash”.  If your startup is burning cash (as shown in the cartoon above), you’re doing it wrong.  You should’t be burning money, you should be investing money — with the goal of growing your business.

I find it interesting that when venture capitalists (VCs) take money from their limited partners (LPs), they don’t say:  Hey, we’re going to take your money and go burn it on a bunch of different startups.  Why?  Because that’s not what they do (not the good ones anyways).  What they do is invest the cash in the hopes of generating a good return.

So, I’m going to ask that all startups that have raised funding to no longer use the term “burn rate”.  Instead, lets call it what it is (or should be):  An investment rate. As in "our startup has an investment rate of about $400k/month".

Oh, and if you really are burning cash, please start using smaller bills.

Guy Kawasaki is a venture capitalist. He listens to hundreds of people trying to pitch potential products to him. In this article Guy evangelises a technique to keep all presentations to less than 10 slides and no more than 20 minutes and a font size of at least 30.

I suffer from something called Ménière’s disease—don’t worry, you cannot get it from reading my blog. The symptoms of Ménière’s include hearing loss, tinnitus (a constant ringing sound), and vertigo. There are many medical theories about its cause: too much salt, caffeine, or alcohol in one’s diet, too much stress, and allergies. Thus, I’ve worked to control all these factors.

However, I have another theory. As a venture capitalist, I have to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs pitch their companies. Most of these pitches are crap: sixty slides about a “patent pending”, “first mover advantage”, “all we have to do is get 1% of the people in China to buy our product” startup. These pitches are so lousy that I’m losing my hearing, there’s a constant ringing in my ear, and every once in a while the world starts spinning.

Before there is an epidemic of Ménière’s in the venture capital community, I am trying to evangelise the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. While I’m in the venture capital business, this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.

Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting—and venture capitalists are very normal. (The only difference between you and a venture capitalist is that he is getting paid to gamble with someone else’s money). If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business. The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:

1. Problem
2. Your solution
3. Business model
4. Underlying magic/technology
5. Marketing and sales
6. Competition
7. Team
8. Projections and milestones
9. Status and timeline
10. Summary and call to action

You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. Sure, you have an hour time slot, but you’re using a Windows laptop, so it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector. Even if setup goes perfectly, people will arrive late and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.

The majority of the presentations that I see have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you because it can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch.

The reason people use a small font is twofold: first, they don’t know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing. Total bozosity. Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. I guarantee it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well. If “thirty points” is too dogmatic, the I offer you an algorithm: find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. That’s your optimal font size.

So please observe the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. If nothing else, the next time someone in your audience complains of hearing loss, ringing, or vertigo, you’ll know what caused the problem. One last thing: to learn more about the zen of great presentations, check out a site called Presentation Zen by my buddy Garr Reynolds.

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This article was written by Guy Kawasaki at Atherton, California. Guy is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm and a columnist for Forbes.com. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. where he was one of the individuals responsible for the success of the Macintosh computer.

Guy is the author of eight books including The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way.

You can read more articles like this on Guy’s Weblog atblog.guykawasaki.com

From: Mashinsky’s website – http://www.mashinsky.com/ventures.html#Failures

Failures

Most of what I have learned over the years came primary due to my failures. Looking back at the decisions I have made in both selecting ideas to work on and deciding how much to invest in them it is painful to see how many times I have repeated the same mistakes.

It all comes down to decision making and the ability to predict the future and the timing of when things will take off. It is also critical to either do it yourself or only entrust a person who is more passionate than you about the subject.

While most of the projects I failed in where good ideas I usually dramatically underestimated how long it will take for adoption to take place or how much money will be needed. I also have discounted the level of commitment and ability management have presented thinking I could solve things later.

The hardest part I had to deal with was learning to cut my losses and admit my mistakes quickly. Again and again I tried to save these ventures and paid the price of being distracted and drained of resources to only prolong the inevitable.

A focused mind is one of the most powerful forces in the universe my fortune cookie read in a recent trip to a local eatery in Manhattan and I could not agree more.

It is amazing how some lessons take 20 years to learn.

Here is a list of my most spectacular failures and misses. I review them again and again to see what else I can learn and each time as I visit them in a new context a new side of this learning process reveals itself.

May 2008

Novacure 2004 � had the opportunity to invest in this revolutionery cancer treatment process but decided it was too revolutionary.

Skype 2002 � I got a call from a VC asking about my opinion on a small startup doing a VOIP product, since I know the space too well I did not think they prospects were good.

ICG 1999 - ICG was the seed investor in Arbinet and I got pre IPO equity but wired the money too late to participate. Stock went from $7 to $212 in 6 months.

Google 1998 � I was introduced to Sergey by Ester Dyson and after listening to his presentation of how a link based algorithm would provide better search results I said “who needs another search engine, we have AltaVista”

Tradeum 1998 � I contracted to buy software and negotiated equity upside and co-investment but I switched at the last minute to another firm. Tradeum got sold for $1.2b just one year later.

ICQ 1996 – Yosi Vardi offered me equity in his company as barter for bandwidth from Arbinet. I said no and ICQ was sold to AOL for $450m a mere 8 months later.

Vocaltech 1996 � I had the opportunity to invest in the company twice before their IPO.

One day a farmer’s donkey fell down into a well. The animal cried piteously for hours as the farmer tried to figure out what to do. Finally, he decided the animal was old, and the well needed to be covered up anyway; it just wasn’t worth it to retrieve the donkey.

He invited all his neighbors to come over and help him. They all grabbed a shovel and began to shovel dirt into the well. At first, the donkey realized what was happening and cried horribly. Then, to every one’s amazement he quieted down.

A few shovel loads later, the farmer finally looked down the well. He was astonished at what he saw. With each shovel of dirt that hit his back, the donkey was doing something amazing. He would shake it off and take a step up.

As the farmer’s neighbors continued to shovel dirt on top of the animal, he would shake it off and take a step up. Pretty soon, everyone was amazed as the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and happily trotted off!

MORAL :

Life is going to shovel dirt on you, all kinds of dirt. The trick to getting out of the well is to shake it off and take a step up. Each of our troubles is a steppingstone. We can get out of the deepest wells just by not stopping, never giving up! Shake it off and take a step up.

"People think that the first draft is the big event and that revision is cleaning up afterward. But the first draft is really setting up the chairs, tables, and cups, and revision isn’t cleaning up after the party, it is the party."

"All first drafts are terrible. I don’t care if you’re Hemingway."

"What comes out unfiltered from anyone’s mind is mud."

The first two quotations come from writing professors whose names I’ve since forgotten (and they were quoting other people whom they’d forgotten). The last one is one I just made up myself. But regardless of the source, the advice is sound: no email should be clicked-to-send without revision.

I’ve found that for your average email, the number of revisions largely depends on the number of recipients. Here’s my experience:

1 to 5 recipients = 2 to 4 revisions
5 to 10 recipients = 8 to 12 revisions
Company-wide or to Executive Committee = 30 to 50 revisions

Even the simplest missive to one person benefits from a couple of extra passes, and if it’s going to the management committee, expect everyone to have changes (and changes to those changes).

Here’s a checklist to consider when revising:

1. Delete redundancies. Say it once. That’s enough. If you’re repetitive, the reader will stop reading and start skimming. (Like you probably just did.)

2. Use numbers and specifics instead of adverbs and adjectives. "The project is currently way behind schedule on major tasks," is not as clear as "The project is 3 weeks late delivering hamburger buns to Des Moines." (If you don’t have numbers, still get rid of the adverbs and adjectives.)

3. Add missing context. Does your reader know that hamburger buns in Iowa are required for the company to collect $37 million? If you’re not sure, remind them.

4. Focus on the strongest argument. Should those hamburger buns get shipped because the delay is embarrassing for the company, because it’s costing children their lunch, or because it’s costing the company tens of millions of dollars? Maybe all three, but one of those reasons (and it depends on your reader) will be enough to get buns on the road.

5. Delete off-topic material. The best emails say one thing and say it clearly. One-subject emails also make it easier for the recipient to file the message once they’ve taken action, something anyone who uses Outlook to manage tasks appreciates.

6. Seek out equivocation and remove it. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" works for Dickens, not status reports.

7. Kill your favorites. Is something in your text particularly pithy, amusing, or clever? Chance are, it’s not. If it sticks out, it’s probably a tap-dancing gorilla in boxer shorts — hilarious when you thought of it, embarrassing when it gets in your manager’s inbox.

8. Delete anything written in the heat of emotion. Will this sentence show them who’s been right about the hamburger buns since the beginning? Yes? Cut it.

9. Shorten. Remember the reader struggling to digest your message on the run — a BlackBerry or an iPhone gets about 40 words per screen. What looks short on your desktop monitor is an epic epistle on their mobile device.

10. Give it a day. With time, what seemed so urgent may no longer need to be said. And one less email is something everyone will thank you for.

Do you agree that even late-night emails sent from the bar should be revised before sending? (Have you ever seen one the next day?) Have you bravely sent something unrevised only to have it come flying back at you? What’s your best advice for revising?

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/silverman/2009/04/how-to-revise-an-email-so-that.html