The best paragraph (and a half) I’ve read today

July 8, 2009

From Alex Mann’s interview with Philalawyer:

I’m referring to solving actual, human problems using available communication tools, regardless if it’s called “social media” or not. The tools will never replace humans, but they can help.

Look at the reaction to the Iranian election online. A lightweight Internet application, Twitter, has created a sense of healthy transparency in a geographic arena that has been traditionally stubborn by design in the past. The conversation has always existed, but now it’s being funneled and aggregated online. The tools haven’t created the conversation; they just created an outlet. That’s more democracy than Iran has ever felt.

The whole article is great. Read it here.

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Posted by Andrew Lynch

The summer job market

July 5, 2009

I’m struggling to find much work this summer. I’ve applied for perhaps thirty positions, heard back from about twenty, and been given work at two. Unfortunately they were just temp work, one or two days at a time – nothing permanent and no guaranteed paycheque.

It’s frustrating, that’s for sure (although at least I’m not the only one – thanks to Charlie for the link). But I’m trying to be productive with the down time, mainly through lots of reading and more exercise.

Also, this post from Seth Godin caught my eye. He recommends that, if you can’t find a graduate job, you should take a year off and try to teach yourself a wide array of skills to make yourself much more employable in a year’s time.

It’s not a bad idea, but I don’t think it could all be accomplished in the three months of summer that I have left.But that’s not to say I shouldn’t try and do at least something.

If you had 3 months, with (almost) no other time commitments and few living expenses, but no resources to travel, what would you do? How would you spend your days? What skills would you try to learn? What books would you read? Who would you try to talk to?

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Posted by Andrew Lynch

On the right track

June 2, 2009

This time last year, I had just finished my first year Law exams, and was back home for the summer, just about to change onto the BA Economics course instead of Law. It was a pretty big decision – it set me back a year and took me off what could have been a very stable, easy, well-paid career path.

Of course I wasn’t sure if I was making the right decision. Sure, I liked this subject when I’d studied it before, but this was advanced stuff. It would be more difficult. I didn’t know what I wanted to do afterwards. Unlike law, there was no set career path, no list of boxes I had to tick off before slotting into the ‘right’ job after I graduated. But I did it anyway.

Today, I knew I was right. I walked out of my first serious economics exam knowing that I had made the right choice. Because I enjoyed it. I actually ENJOYED taking the exam.

I still don’t have the answer to any of the questions I keep asking myself. There’s still no clear goal, no obvious, defined path for me to take that leads to that elusive place on the horizon called “success”. But if I’m enjoying the journey then I’m pretty sure things will turn out OK in the end.

(Also, I thought I’d plug this blog, because it gave me some fantastic revision advice. Go to Study Hacks, browse through the archives and then buy his book. Best £8 I ever spent, apart from my DVD boxset of the Godfather films, and that pizza I got the other day)

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Posted by Andrew Lynch

Erin Pavlina is a crazy person

May 20, 2009

I like to think that, generally speaking, I can be fairly objective and rational and think things through to their logical conclusion. I’d like to think that I choose any course of action or belief based on the evidence in front of me and a careful analysis of the facts.

Which is why this shit scares me. From Erin Pavlina’s blog post, What Happens When You Die (as if ANY person in the world has the authority to speak about this subject):

First we need to understand how we got here.  Your consciousness, your soul, your energy made a decision to incarnate into a human body so that you could have experiences that you can’t get in the ether.  You agreed and decided to take physical form to work on karmic issues, personal growth, or to help the planet evolve.  You chose your parents, planned some major life events, worked things out with some other souls who would also be around when you were, and got busy gettin’ born.  Then the veil was drawn over your memory so you could act out your life without knowing why you were there.

I’ve never heard anything so outlandish in my life. It’s suggesting that toast is made by a piece of bread choosing that it wants to be heated on both sides for a minute before being coated in delicious butter and a blob of marmalade. It’s fucking nuts.

Why do people convince themselves of these things? How does anyone come to such a ridiculous belief? What has happened in these people’s lives that they choose to believe this, with absolutely no evidence?

And why the hell is there a week-long waiting list to pay $500 for a phone reading with this crazy woman?

Some things really worry me. This is one of them.

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Posted by Andrew Lynch

The MPs expenses scandal, and transparency

May 19, 2009

For a few days I’ve been wanting to write about the MPs expenses scandal. I was planning to write a speech that I thought Gordon Brown should give about how the scandal has been terrible for british politics, severely undermining the trust that we have in our MPs, and how Parliament needed to move towards radical transparency to foster trust and better inform the electorate. But David Cameron is a step ahead of me. It’s not often I say this, but I agree with a lot of what he said in this interview.

And Cameron has actually put his money where his mouth is (he may or may not have claimed expenses for this money). If you go here and click on the link about halfway down it opens a Google Docs spreadsheet outlining expenses claimed by his shadow cabinet – when, by whom, why, and how much.

That’s fantastic.  I still don’t get how Owen Patterson was able to claim for £108.16 worth of newspapers, but now I know that he did, and if it bothers me I can do something about it.

It shouldn’t have taken a huge scandal like this for such a system to be implemented, but the more initiatives the government has like this, the better. The more transparent Parliament is, the better. And the more informed the electorate are about what’s actually happening inside Westminster, the better.

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Posted by Andrew Lynch

New college students: make the most of ‘diet’ real life

April 24, 2009

Charlie Hoehn has just written a fantastic post with some great advice for those about to graduate from college:

You don’t have to walk down the path that everyone else takes. If you haven’t realized it by now, there is no such thing as job security. You’re fooling yourself if you think a steady paycheck will ensure a safe future. The only real form of security is working on yourself. Read as much as you can. Put experiences under your belt that can open doors in the future. Meet smarter people than you and do some free work for them. These are the kinds of things that can help mitigate your risk against a bad job market. And in the long run, you’ll be in a far better position than everyone else.

That seems great advice as far as I can tell, but I’m not entirely qualified to say, as I’m still at university (and will be for a couple more years yet). And I didn’t want to just quote and link his post, as there’s not much value in that.

Instead I wanted to write about something that I am qualified to write about. While Charlie’s advice is great for those just leaving college, what about the incoming freshmen and first years? That’s what I want to write about today.

College is a fantastic place. I’ve been here almost two years now, and I’ve loved every second. But it’s not all as Asher Roth would have you believe. Sometimes you will have to work your ass off, grinding away for maybe even a couple of months at a time, especially if you leave all your work until the all-too brief period just before exams, like I’ve done in the past.

Nothing in life comes without a tradeoff. But the tradeoff in college is that if you can get the work out of the way, you have an unbelievable amount of free time, and an outrageous lack of responsibility. You’re young, your parents love you and your student loan is yours to do with whatever you please.

I can’t remember where, but someone I once heard someone describe college as ‘diet’ real life – you have all the freedom to essentially do whatever you want to, but you rarely have to personally deal with all of the consequences if you screw up.

So make the most of it. Try everything and anything you can. If there’s something you’ve always wanted to try, just give it a shot. That library has a lot of books that you don’t have to read for your course -read one of them anyway, and see if you like it. Go to all your classes, sure, but go to someone else’s as well – you might learn something interesting.

Google give all of their employees 20% of the week to work on their own projects, and it doesn’t have to be directly related to their core business. That has produced phenomenal results like Gmail and Adsense. Not all of the projects come to anything, but a couple are huge.

As a student, the amount of time you have to work on your side projects is probably closer to 40% or even 50%. Imagine what you could do with it.

I’m not just talking about businesses, or societies or sports teams. Use some of that time to get some experiences – everyone loves to have a few cool stories to tell at the bar. What I’m saying is, in the downtime between handing in your last essay and starting on the next one, don’t sit down and see if you can top your best score on Halo 3. Go and experience as many different things as possible, and just see where it takes you.

Your free time in college is an incredible gift. Don’t waste it.

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Posted by Andrew Lynch

You’re a pub, so serve some ****ing pub food

April 9, 2009

One TV show I love is Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Gordon Ramsay is obviously a great chef, but more than that, he’s a great businessman. He seems keenly aware of what is required for a business to survive, and this show follows him around as he tries to turn around failing restaurants.

I was watching it last night, and Gordon went to a pub called The Fenwick Arms, in Lancashire, North England. Let me tell you a couple of things about rural Lancashire. It’s not a fast-moving place. It’s not on the cutting edge of anything, and it’s not where all the trend-setters go to seek out the next big thing. It’s certainly not a place where people want to be made to feel like they’re dining in a restaurant in Soho.

Sadly, this fact had escaped the owner of The Fenwick Arms, as he tried to impress everyone with his fancy sauces, his overly elaborate menu, and the outrageous place settings that made the place look like the Queen was visiting.

Gordon Ramsay took one look at the place and said, “You need to get back to basics. This is too much. You’re trying to do far too much all at once, and you’re missing what the locals want. They want good, simple British pub food, not this fancy crap.  Focus on doing the basic stuff, and doing it well.”

Amen. Any enterprise needs to focus on its core business, its raison d’etre, and focus on doing it really well. Don’t try to be all things to all people. I met one entrepreneur at university a couple of weeks ago, and he said he was thinking of making a new online application for setting agendas for meetings and conference calls. Someone pointed out to him that you could basically do that with Google Docs or PB Wiki. And he replied, “Yeah, you could, but they’re not designed for that specifically. I want to take just this one little thing and do it really, really well, better than anyone else will.”

That’s probably a good way to get people to pay attention.

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Posted by Andrew Lynch

What I’m reading

April 2, 2009

I’ve binged on books over the last couple of weeks – here’s some of what I’ve been reading:

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson. Like I said a week or two ago, I’m a little behind the times with this book, but it was full of fantastic graphs, explanations and theories as to how the internet has changed so many business models for the better, and the important of niches.

The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. Again, I’m hugely behind the times, but I finally got around to reading this, and I thought it was great. I can’t instantly put into practice much of what Tim talks about (in order to escape 9-5 I would first have to find myself a 9-5 job from which to escape) but I really admire what he’s done, and I think it’s inspiring. Your life doesn’t have to be work all week, party on friday and saturday night, rinse and repeat for 40 years: you control it, you can shape it and you can do what you want. There’s some fantastic productivity advice in here as well.

The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation by Lafley and Charan. This book is a fascinating look at how Proctor and Gamble focus on customer-centric innovation and how every decision is driven by trying to improve the day-to-day life of the customer. I knew P&G were a big company, but I was blown away by the sheer number of brands they own. 21 brands with sales of over $1bn per annum. A lot of P&G’s success comes from hugely extensive market research, immersing themselves in the customer’s world and seeing things as they do, defining what the issue is and then coming up with a way to ‘delight’ the customer.

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Posted by Andrew Lynch

Being familiar with the ideas

March 24, 2009

Anyone who’s seen my list of google reader subscriptions or my delicious account can tell that I spend a large portion of my time online. And while my parents may think that that’s a huge waste, I do spend at least some of my time trying to learn new things, new ideas and new concepts. A lot of what I know and what I consider my marketable knowledge, I learned online (either directly from wikipedia or blogs, or indirectly from being told what books to read etc).

One of these books that I’m currently reading is The Long Tail (I know, I’m late to the party), which I was reading on Ryan’s recommendation:

There is not much that needs to be said about this book other than it defines current net economics. There’s the head of the tail which is the stuff you find in Borders, and the tail, which is the infinite inventory on Amazon. You need to be familiar with this theory.

That’s a fair point, but it made me think – what ideas or theories should people be familiar with?

I could think of another two:

What others are there? What ideas should young, smart and ambitious people know to help them succeed?

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Posted by Andrew Lynch

Advice for students: get involved

March 11, 2009

Today I took part in the first of a two day competition called the “Big Business Challenge”, run by the enterprise society at my university. It was great fun. I signed up for it a week or two ago when I saw a small advert on our uni website describing it as “Two days of ‘Apprentice-style’ challenges”. I thought ‘Why not?’, as I’m a big fan of the TV show, and could really do with the £100 prize money.

This morning (at 8.30am, far too early) I turned up and was put into a team with 4 other people I didn’t know. We were given a very broad brief:  we had 7 hours to come up with a viable retail business to be located on our university campus, and then pitch it to 4 local entrepreneurs. It was exhausting, stressful and difficult, and I loved every second of it. Had I not taken a chance and decided to get involved in this, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet 4 really cool new people, learn a lot about working as part of a team and develop my leadership and presentation skills. And this was all free. If our team does well tomorrow, I might even earn some money out of it.

These sorts of opportunities are all around you, especially when you’re at university. Take advantage of them. You’ll get a lot more out of it than you think.

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Posted by Andrew Lynch

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