This is a quick tutorial that will walk you through turning display errors on in your php.ini file.
Author: Jonathan Whiting
I enjoy sharing what I am learning and hopefully it's of interest and help to you. I live in Canada with my wife. Follow me on Twitter.
In part 1 of this series I posed the question, are you building something bigger than yourself? “A company needs a core vision, a rally cry, that everyone on staff can come behind.” Today, I want to focus on the second half of the question, “What does it mean to actually believe that you have everything you need to build something way bigger than yourself?”
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great ones make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Mark Twain
Categories
Achieve great things
To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time. – Leonard Bernstein
Struck by the response I received from last weeks post, Why Motivated People are Waaay More Productive, I asked myself this question, “What does it mean to actually believe that you have everything you need to build something way bigger than yourself?” If you are an entrepreneur who wants to build something great then you need to ask yourself this question as well. This is part one of this series.
This tutorial will walk you through the steps to repaint your scooter (or any vehicle) using spray cans at home. This is what my scooter looks like after respraying it. I’m not a professional, this is my first time working with most of this stuff. If I can do it so can you.
Good entrepreneurs intentionally surround themselves with people and activities that motivate them. We know that to win we need to stick with it when the going get’s tough. For some entrepreneurs that means getting good coaches and for others it’s engaging in the stuff that inspired them to get into their line of business in the first place. When you are motivated you work harder, for longer hours and your productivity goes up. This article will discuss your role (as the entrepreneur/CEO) in motivating your employees and why that matters.
This is a graph of Machiine.com’s web traffic over the last 12 months (April 2012 – April 2013). You will notice that while the number’s aren’t huge, they show steady growth. I’ve posted on 3 blogs over the last 4 years and noticed some similarities between all of them. Here is a summary of what I’ve learned about blog traffic.
If you have a blog you write content on, it’s probably because you’ve learned something and want to share your experience or knowledge with others. It’s encouraging to see that the time you spend on writing the articles is paying off. Conversely seeing little to no growth in traffic is über discouraging. If you are at this point, before you give up, read this article. I hope it will encourage you to continue. Maybe it’s not the way you write, but the types of articles you are writing. This tutorial will walk you through the steps to grow your traffic.
There’s a reason rockets are stored in silos. Working on stuff in silos kill startups. I laugh at how we ran things when we first started our company. Fired up about every new idea we had we tried to do them all… independently. I was especially bad for this. Focusing on the next great idea, I would mentally block out what the rest of the team was doing and put all my energy into the task at hand. While it might not be the worst way to build a company, it’s still a terrible way. If we were to survive we knew we needed to change, so how did we change our core culture and align our focus?
Every day ordinary people live extraordinary true stories. A few weeks ago I met Amanda Lindhout. She’s a smart caring person working hard to raise the level of woman’s education in the failed state of Somalia. The story doesn’t start there. We’ve all heard of the pirates of Somalia, kidnapping ships off the nearby coast. Amanda understands the dangers of Somalia all too well.
In 2008 Amanda, a then journalist, was sent on a free-lance assignment to the displaced interment camp of Mogadishu. About 4 days in her journey, she and an Australian photographer were kidnapped. And their horror began. After sometime, they planned an escape. Using a nail clipper they chipped away at two bricks until after a couple weeks were able to dislodge them and escape. They planned to arrive at a nearby mosque around the mid day prayer, when it would be packed with people.
When they arrived no one could understand them. They tried to explain through hand gestures and actions, but it was too late. The kidnappers had heard them escape and arrived shortly after them firing their guns in the air. A lady in the mosque wearing a burqa, the only lady Amanda could see, came over and tried pleading with the kidnappers. The kidnappers listened for a couple minutes and then got annoyed. While the kidnappers were dragging Amanda out of the mosque the lady tried holding onto Amanda until breaking free.
After that it was a truly dark time. Amanda was kept in a dark room, raped and beaten daily. By the time she was released 460 days after intially being taken as a hostage, hair had fallen out and her teeth knocked out. Yet three years later you would never guess the experience she endured. While I was still processing her story she was talking gracefully, clearly at peace. Today she is passionate about helping educate woman in Somalia. She is passionate about making a difference in a place where she was so brutally taken hostage. It’s a remarkable story. And it’s true. Today she has been interviewed by Anderson Cooper, raised millions of dollars for woman half way around the world and is at peace. When I meet people like this I am in awe and I am inspired. I hope it inspires you as well. You can discover more about her story and the cause here http://www.globalenrichmentfoundation.org/.
Comfortable lives do not lend themselves to extraordinary things Stephen Whiting
Last week I finished a course on building a Startup by Steve Blank. The guy is a genius. Here’s 5 slides worth your time.
Almost everyone has it wrong about how to get market traction in a startup. It doesn’t matter if you are bootstrapping your company or have raised 35 million dollars. A lot of companies hire a sales team right away. They are looking to scale their business and jump on the sales wagon. WRONG. Don’t hire a sales team, don’t hire a VP of sales, the only people who should be making sales are the founders. I’ll explain why in the next few paragraphs.