clips of logic

Mark Sanborn says that the way to make yourself and your work irresistible lies in the four-letter word, LOVE. If you are passionate about your work, others can feel it. It shows up in the product you design and the service you provide.

Our lives and work are marked by love when we seek to give instead of receive, focus on how we do something rather than just doing it, see a task as a privilege rather than an obligation, make relationships a priority, and move beyond simple action to the accompanying emotions.

He also provided an acronym to infuse this irresistible ingredient into your work. He calls it P-R-A-C-T-I-C-E-S. Patience, Recognition, Appreciation, Counsel, Time, Instructions, Compassion, Encouragement and Service.

When we deliver them with love, our products and services become more attractive, leading to better customer response, greater employee retention, and more.

Read his manifesto to find out more about how you can make a difference in your work by loving what you do, who you are doing with and who you are doing it for. LOVE is the difference you need to stand out.

The first thing most people do when they are starting out on a new venture, idea or project is to tell the whole world about it. It’s not bragging or showing off. They are genuinely excited about the whole thing and wants to share with the rest of us.

I think talking and discussing about your new idea with as many people as possible is the right approach. You want to find out everything you can about it and rarely anyone is going to steal your idea. It comes down to your execution anyway.

But there are some advantages to staying low profile when you are starting out. First is that it gives the ability to fail without being noticed. You can try a million different approaches in obscurity without worrying about what your neighbors think of you. To the rest of the world, it is as if all those failures had never happened.

When no one knows about you, you can make mistakes quietly. Learn at your own pace. Fail without the fear of failure. Failing in obscurity helps protect your ego and you’ll need your ego later on when you are successful. – Embrace Obscurity from 37signals

The other reason to work on the sidelines is to allow you to improve it until it’s ready for the limelight. You get to decide when to reveal yourself to the world and your competitors will have less time to react. It’s hard to prepare for something when you don’t know what’s coming.

New early-stage start up trend: get big quietly, so you don’t tip off potential competitors. – @cdixon

Businesses and ideas that appears to be overnight successes aren’t what they appear to be. Most of them been through countless iterations and difficult times before anyone noticed them.

So, if you aren’t famous or popular yet, that’s fine. Work on that idea first. Being in the spotlight can wait.

Too often we think some things can’t be improved or changed. There are millions of excuses to keep things the same. It’s been that way since the dawn of time. Why change something that works? You can’t do this because no one ever does that.

Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta obviously don’t agree with that and created yet another RSS news reader for iPad. It made reading news on the iPad more visually appealing and fun. News are presented in a scrollable mosaic with images extracted from the post.

Screenshot from PadGadget.com

Cultured Code, a software firm from Germany decided to build a better to-do list management software even though there are probably thousands of them out there. Things for Mac, their version of to-do list, won multiple design awards and are now available in iPhone and iPad. You can check out this video to see how it works.

We built Showtimes.my believing that there has to be a better and easier way to present movie showtimes. The site highlights show that is coming up next and de-emphasize those that are in the past. It makes it easier to spot the upcoming showtime. It’s probably better than most movie showtimes out there but definitely not the best yet. After all, there’s always a better way to do it. You just have to keep pushing the boundary.

Everyone is busy. Busy with work, busy with assignments or just busy having fun. No matter how pack your schedule is, I’m quite sure you can at least reserve an hour daily for a little me time.

Use this hour to do something that will get you closer to your goals. You could start blogging to improve your writing skills or pick up some dancing lessons to impress your partner.

Sixty minutes daily is long enough to do something significant yet short enough to be easily allocated. I used the time I spend watching TV series to blog instead.

Once you get used to it, you got yourself a healthy and productive habit. You might even decide to spend more time in improving yourself. Start with an hour and see how it goes.