Credit for the iPhone optimization goes to the great team over at contentrobot and their iWPhone plugin and theme.

Here’s a few screenshots of how the blog now looks on an iPhone:

What do you think? If you’ve got an iPhone or iPod Touch, this plugin should make reading this site a lot easier and nicer of an experience. Let me know if you have any suggestions, issues, or any other thoughts!

• How I Quit Smoking In Less Than One Minute And You Can Too! Part 1

Also subscribe to my feed to ensure you catch the whole series!

In the first part of this series we discussed how after 18 years of living nicotine free, a drunken encounter with the cancer stick led me down the desolate path of addiction to cigarettes. I say addiction to cigarettes because the addiction goes behind being hooked on a drug, it’s also a lifestyle, a social enhancer (and destroyer), and it’s something to do. It’s the last one that really gets you too. While waiting for a bus, walking down the street, taking a break from the cubicle, listening to someone talk, reading a book, and so on and on goes the list of activities made more bearable with a smoke in hand.

To those who’ve never smoked, it’s tough to explain why it’s so difficult (yet, easy) to stop. Before I started smoking I always thought that if I ever did smoke I could easily just quit whenever and be done with it. Once I started smoking I realized my previous thoughts weren’t quite 100% valid. There was some truth to the idea of just quitting, but when social factors such as friends, advertisements (the stop smoking ads would just remind me I hadn’t had a smoke lately), and other social situations are added into the mix it becomes tough to separate smoking from your daily, weekly and monthly activities.

The post-dinner smoke becomes a habit and eventually all activities are associated with how they relate to you having a smoke. Getting up in the morning means your first smoke of the day, showering means you can have a smoke while you wait to dry off, finishing your homework is a cause for a cancerous celebration, and look at that, the end of your cigarette is just a reason to light another one with its butt so you don’t waste lighter fluid. It’s not so much that quitting is difficult, it’s that returning to your regular life without a cig in your hand is awkward, foreign and overwhelming.

With that, as promised let’s get to the pros of smoking:

• It’s a social enhancer.

At a party or other social event, smokers automatically have something to discuss or use as an introduction.

• It’s legal.

I’m sure a lot of smokers would prefer a nice, fresh Cuban cigar to their cancer sticks, but alas the non-free market doesn’t work.

• Help Southern farmers.

Though many people in the Southern states have expanded to other crops, there still exist a lot of people who rely on tobacco for their livelihood. You might be killing yourself slowly, but at least you’re putting food on someone’s table!

• It’s a relatively cheap drug.

Compare to alcohol or coffee or any of the other legal drugs and the per smoke cost of cigarettes seems cheap.

• Get a nicotine high every now and then.

Most smokers stop getting a high from their cigarettes a few packs into the habit and pack a day smokers are lucky to get any kind of feeling off the first puff of the day, yet alone the countless other butts they consume.

• Save medical costs by dying early.

Grim but true.

• Or smoke so much your lungs are encased in a protective layer of tar.

Unrealistic but very rare cases do exist where people live into their 100′s and smoke a pack a day. I don’t recommend this strategy.

Now, for the cons of smoking:

• It’s a social crutch.

Opposite to what I said above, cigarettes can become a social crutch for some, where they run to the smoking area at parties and stay there for the night’s duration.

• Increase pollution locally and globally.

Butts everywhere, mass-production emits tons of carbon and other chemicals, transport spews more pollution and even consuming the cigs puts smoke into the air.

• Smelly clothes.

You might not notice it but non-smokers will be repulsed by your stinky aroma.

• Less disposable income.

Here in Massachussets cigarettes costs about $6 per pack. If you smoke a pack a day, that’s $42 a week, $168 a month and a whopping $8,736 $2,016 a year! That’s insane!

• Being reliant on a foreign substance.

One of the big reasons I quit smoking was my desire for independence and freedom (this desire also led me to ditch the car and buy a bike). While a conscious smoker your happiness will be tied to whether you’ve gotten your nicotine fix recently or not. Not only that but it determines your daily schedule and what you can and can’t do.

Now there’s of course plenty of other negative aspects of smoking but I’m quite sure the vast majority of visitors here will be aware of the dangerous and unhealthy aspects of cigarettes so I’ll spare everyone from reciting the evils of smoking.

In the next (and possibly final) post in this series, we’ll tackle what I did to quit smoking, how you can use my strategy and we’ll open up the discussion for any other strategies or ideas you have. My strategy really did work and it’s simple enough that anyone can use it and logical enough that I feel it could work for a significant amount of you.

Being relatively smoke-free for more than six months now I’m here to tell you about the immense benefits of not smoking and how to quit smoking in less than one minute. There’s simply too much material to cover in one post so we’ll have a 3-4 part series about cigarettes, their dangers and how to quit. Today let’s go through some of my personal history. Next we’ll talk about the pros and cons of smoking, focusing on health, economics, and time. Finally, we’ll discuss how to quit smoking in less than one minute. If you’re not subscribed to the RSS feed, now would be a good time to subscribe!

For the first 18 years of my life I never smoked a cigarette and was very adamant about the dangers of smoking and trying to get people around me to quit. When I was a little kid there was one or two incidents where I threw a cup of water at my step-father while he was smoking. Needless to say I quickly figured out this was not a very good strategy! I’d also see my mom smoking on very rare occasions and would take the cigarette from her and threaten that I’d start smoking it if she didn’t put it out. So, you can see I was certainly not a smoker, knew the dangers and publicly promoted not smoking.

Alas, a few months into my freshman semester at the University of Southern California, I got a little too drunk and ended up smoking a cigarette and enjoying it. Though I smoked on only very rare occasions for a few months, eventually I degraded to being a pack a day smoker. The low point came that summer, while working for my step-dad as a construction worker, I smoked nearly two packs a day!

The next school year, I incidentally transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, home of Tobacco Road. Though I didn’t repeat the mistakes of smoking two packs a day I still smoked way too much. Even as a poor college student, I could easily find ways to scrounge up the $2-$2.25 for a pack of smokes. Yup, they are dirt-cheap there as much of America’s tobacco is grown in the region.

So my drunken slip turned into a habit and six years later at the age of 24 I was still smoking nearly a pack a day. At this point though my desire to quit was growing exponentially every day. A few incidents pushed me past the tipping point. In January of this year I quit smoking cold turkey. I had one relapse, which I expected to happen, but it only served to further convince me that not smoking is clearly the right move. Seven months into my smoke-free existence and I’m wicked happy and healthy. Buying and riding a bicycle personally helped me remember to keep my lungs clear and over the course of this series we’ll discuss similar strategies for kicking the habit and staying clean. Remember to sign up for the RSS feed or e-mail updates to stay up to date.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

So let’s see if there’s any hidden treasures among my trash!

• Emacs

I prefer Aquamacs, though there is certainly nothing wrong with Emacs.

• Meetro

Meh, AIM, facebook, twitter, and pownce are enough (in fact more than enough).

• Tomato Torrents

I prefer Transmission though Tomato Torrents works fine Transmission seems to be faster and better organized.

• Launchbar

Quicksilver rules. Launchbar just did not seem to be as extensive or as intuitive as Quicksilver and thusly in this household we obey the shortcuts of Quicksilver!

• Joost

Joost is a great idea, but at the moment there is not enough good content to take up my hard drive space and time.

• Vienna

Now that NetNewsWire is free I much, much prefer it to Vienna. While NNW was not free Vienna performed admirably but there’s just no need for it now.

• Aptana

Looks cool but a bit beyond my league at the moment. Might go back and download this later as I learn more but right now it’s just clutter.

• Colloquy

See Meetro above. My geek status will lose points for not having an IRC client installed but I can live with it for now. Besides nearly everyone I know is on AIM or twitter so I won’t be losing touch with anyone.

• Comic Life

Cool but frivolous. In essence this program allowed you to comic bookize your photos by adding speech bubbles and comic book style actions.

• iProcrastinate

I didn’t use this once. I knew I wouldn’t when I downloaded it but I installed it nonetheless. No wonder I struggle to get things done sometimes.

• Keynote

30 day Trial I never deleted from when I got my Macbook Pro a year ago.

• Pages

See Keynote.

• NewsFire

See Vienna.

• Vendetta

This game looked really cool but also time-consuming and I just don’t have oodles of free time (contrary to popular belief, quitting your job does not give you tons of free time) to devote to learning the intricacies of this game.

• RSSOwl

See Newsfire and Vienna.

• q [QEMU]

Yeah, I really just never needed this, see Aptana but much more so.

• ircle

See Colloquy.

• Tofu

Good idea but in the end it’s just another application that rarely gets used adding to my digital clutter.

• Stickies

I use Devonnotes for all my note taking needs. It’s an awesome program btw. Didn’t really use stickies enough to comment on them one way or the other but it seemed functional.

• ecto

Cool program but don’t have the monetary flow to buy it right now. Anyone know any good free open-source alternatives?

Any programs up there that I should give another try?

Bill Drayton is one such individual; his attention to micro situations such as the “bubble”¹, an air zone that allows us to associate pollution to a polluter, and searching for individuals, “…who will become references in their field, who will set or change patterns at the national level or, in the case of a small country, at a larger regional level²“, led to macro-level improvements in environmental standards and growth of social entrepreneurship.

Through a majority of his professional career, Bill has shown a passion for innovative ways to infuse ethical values ["the language used by Drayton...is caring, compassionate and moral"³], and positive change into society.

At a time when socialism has been proven to be a dismal failure, and government programs have created as many problems as they solve, Ashoka may well be showing us the path to a better world.⁴

At the Environmental Protection Agency, Mr. Drayton championed a trading system for environmental credits, which companies could buy to offset their negative impact on the environment, or sell for profit, if they produced in an environmentally friendly manner. Bill recognized that financial incentives are a crucial motivating factor for American business and that combining economics and environmentalism would lead to fruitful results for companies, government, and society as a whole. At the time, his idea was unpopular among environmental groups

‘Concepts that Bill was advocating twenty years ago, that were considered radical cave-ins by the environmental movement, are today advocated by nearly everybody as better ways to control pollution’ explains Jodie Bernstein, the director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, who worked with Drayton at the EPA.²

By the late 1990s, emissions trading had drastically reduced sulfur dioxide pollution and was implemented in the European Union’s strategy for complying with the Kyoto Protocol.¹ This visionary ability of Drayton’s would carry over to Ashoka, where he worked to empower social entrepreneurs to affect change in their communities by first changing the perception of non-profit organizations, from purely looking at organizations to searching out individuals. To do so, Drayton first instilled other social entrepreneurs into Ashoka, to increase the efficiency of finding new socially driven individuals.

Every aspect of Ashoka exudes change, from the transformations in society that allowed for the birth of Ashoka, to the mission of Ashoka of empowering social entrepreneurs to enact improvements within their communities, Ashoka is in the business of change.

Drayton sees Ashoka’s success as coming at a critical time. ‘The last two decades have seen the emergence of a competitive citizen sector,’ he says, ‘a rapid multiplication of the number, size, and skill level of citizen organizations. It’s as important as the emergence of the competitive business sector many centuries ago.’⁵

We especially see this emphasis on change instilled into Ashoka’s vision and mission.

Vision:

Ashoka envisions a world where Everyone is a Changemaker: a world that responds quickly and effectively to social challenges, and where each individual has the freedom, confidence and societal support to address any social problem and drive change.

Mission:

Ashoka strives to shape a global, entrepreneurial, competitive citizen sector: one that allows social entrepreneurs to thrive and enables the world’s citizens to think and act as changemakers. ⁶

It comes as no surprise then, that Bill Drayton heavily utilizes change-oriented leadership to accomplish his and Ashoka’s goals. When describing Drayton, Michael Northrop and Julien Phillips are amazed at Bill’s “…unshakable faith in what’s he’s doing and in the value of each person’s life toward effecting change…That’s a tremendously powerful combination.”⁷

Michael and Julien, an Ashoka employee and an Ashoka founding director (respectively) witness the supreme self-confidence and concrete belief Dayton places in himself and his ideas, a telling sign of charismatic leadership. Northrop felt that Dayton’s charismatic leadership made it seem he had a whole army of supporters, when in reality he only had a few individuals, and that the sheer force of his belief in his ideas seemed to lend them a quality of inevitability.¹ In addition to this super self-confidence and conviction in his ideas, Bill displays the other characteristics of charismatic leaders, defined by Afsaneh Nahavandi as high energy and enthusiasm, expressiveness and excellent communication skills, active image building and role modeling.⁸

In an interview with U.S. News & World Report, Bill shows us his high energy and enthusiasm for social entrepreneurship while answering a question about difficult times at Ashoka, How could any entrepreneur, confronted by such amazing opportunities to help transform the world and to do so with such extraordinary colleagues, be tempted to lose focus?⁹ Mr. Drayton clearly loves his line of work and is able to utilize his full energy and utmost enthusiasm to distribute the Ashoka vision and mission because of his belief in the virtues of Ashoka and the satisfaction he gets from working to distribute the Ashoka vision.

Muhammud Yunus and Bill Drayton [left to right]:

Role modeling is also very evident at Ashoka and in Bill’s leadership style:

When Drayton calls someone a ‘social entrepreneur,’ he is describing a specific and rare personality type–someone, in fact, like himself…Ashoka’s social entrepreneur is a pathbreaker with a powerful new idea, who combines visionary and real-world problem-solving creativity, who has a strong ethical fiber, and who is ‘totally possessed’ by his or her vision for change.²

These are characteristics evident within Bill Drayton, and characteristics which Ashoka seeks to find in other social entrepreneurs, after all Bill Drayton is, as David Bornstein describes in an interview with David Creelman of HR.com…the social entrepreneur of social entrepreneurship.¹⁰ Bill saw a gap between the commercial and social sector and realized social entrepreneurs could bridge that gap. Before anyone heard of micro-finance or sustainable investments, Drayton acted to aid individuals in solving social issues through good business logic and sense.

Traveling around the world he began to see that the most valuable resource are the people whom he called ‘social entrepreneurs.’ People who decide in their hearts that they want to effect a certain kind of change and because of the quality of their motivation and their particular brew of talents they actually do go out and build organizations…Drayton’s insight was that if you want to cause system change, you have to move away from the mentality that we should support projects. Ultimately, the seed for all change is in the heart of a person. His goal was to create a selection system to find this kind of person early in their careers.¹⁰

Yet, charisma on its own will not necessarily succeed. Bill and his followers are crucial to the successful use of charismatic leadership, but so is an amicable crisis situation; in the case of Ashoka, the crisis involved a growing gap in productivity between the consumer sector and the social sector. We see a sense of real or imminent crisis in Bill’s time at the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA], where he uses contacts in the media to publicize harmful budget cuts and gain support for the EPA and at Ashoka, where social entrepreneurs are helped at their most critical moments.

As he conceived of it, Ashoka would be the most ‘highly leveraged’ approach to change possible, intervening at the ‘most critical moment in the life cycle’ of the ‘most critical ingredient in the development process’²

Bill also clearly articulates followers’ roles in managing crisis; for instance he put together a strong case to show that the [budget] cuts would effectively double Americans’ exposure to toxic pollutants by 1990 to aid journalists in writing sensational articles about the Reagan administration’s planned budget cuts for the EPA. At Ashoka, where the very vision of the organization is to empower individuals to solve societal problems, Drayton and his followers push potential fellows to formulate logical plans to affect change.

For Drayton, social change isn’t romantic. “It’s not a poem; it’s not like Xanadu,” he says. “There are many people who are creative and altruistic, but they are never going to change a pattern across a continent.” In other words, a vision of Xanadu is nice, but it won’t happen without a transportation plan and a sewerage system.¹¹

We also see the three tenets of transformational leadership in use at Ashoka, charisma and inspiration; intellectual stimulation; and individualized consideration. Bill’s charismatic leadership inspires followers, fellows, and supporters to believe in Ashoka’s goals and continuously seek to improve society, as shown by half of Ashoka itself containing social entrepreneurs. People seamlessly volunteer for projects as “…Drayton’s enthusiasm for a project has a way of sweeping up bystanders who question how they end up laboring in the eye of his storm.”¹¹The nature of the work Ashoka volunteers and staff perform requires constant use of emotional intelligence and analytical logic to decipher the probability of success when evaluating social entrepreneurial ideas and individuals.

In Ashoka each member of the selection panel interviews each candidate independently. Then Ashoka asks the “jury” to essentially decide whether they trust the person. As a test, they are told to close their eyes and imagine something they find fearful, like walking near the edge of a cliff or holding a snake, and then imagine that this person is with you. Do you find yourself feeling uneasy or relaxed? For many, the test provides a sense of whether you trust the person or not. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. It’s an appeal to the gut, not the intellect.¹⁰

Ashoka fellows and staff are also encouraged to find the hidden networks amongst the fellows that will allow all fellows to share in the collective wisdom of the Ashoka family and to pass on efficiencies gained in their own communities. For individual considerations, Ashoka reviews each potential fellow on an independent basis and provides unique support. For instance, rather than awarding a set stipend to each fellow, Ashoka matches the…social-sector salaries in each country, with some flexibility to accommodate fellows’ specific needs, such as if a fellow needed to hire a special care worker to look after a disabled child.¹

The class of 2003 at Ashoka’s School for Young Social Entrepreneurs in Poland.

Based on Bill’s role models, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.,1 Thomas Jefferson, and Jean Monnet¹¹ [among others] it’s clear to see why and how Bill developed as a charismatic, transformational visionary. Just like Gandhi’s supreme belief in the need for change in India; MLK Jr.’s desire for equitable civil rights; Thomas Jefferson’s battle for a free nation; and Jean Monet’s vision of a united European economy, Bill’s aspirations of empowering social entrepreneurs with the funds, resources, and connections they need to enact their paradigm shifts shows his confidence that the time was right for social entrepreneurs and the need was real.⁷

Bill appreciates that Gandhi showed himself and the rest of the world that change comes faster and far more permanently by helping people understand when their behavior contradicts what an empathic response would dictate.⁹ Bill understood that utilizing the principles of free-market economics to make profit, while discouraging competition and innovation in the social sector led to great disparities in the ability of the social sector to help others, when compared to the commercial sector.

Bill showcases his self-awareness when admitting he is “…modestly an introvert, yet Bill also motivates himself to…spend most of my days dealing with people.”⁹, as he understands entrepreneurship relies on relationship building. Bill is willing to step outside of his comfort zone and interact with new individuals, a sign that Bill is a creative leader⁸. His kind descriptions of the individuals he interacts as “…wonderful, caring, creative entrepreneurs…” shows Bill’s exemplary leadership by “encouraging the heart”⁸ and his high-LPC side. However, Bill also has low-LPC side, as he enjoys accomplishing his goals, as shown through his fight to keep his improvements intact at the EPA.

Bill Drayton is able to promote Ashoka ideals among businesses, governments, non-profit organizations and communities by exerting his expert power; as Bill is the “social entrepreneur of social entrepreneurship”, he has verifiable proof that his ideas work.

Marmor went on to describe Drayton as a ‘wispy, carefully controlled, blue-suited fellow [who] has got enormous power. And connected to it is a shrewdness about the way institutions operate and the world really works.’²

The massive adoption of emissions trading as an effective method of reducing pollution also verifies his visionary ability in seeing and creating new ideas before they’re ready for the rest of society. For Ashoka staff, their ability to help social entrepreneurs cope with uncertainty by providing stipends to support themselves provides the staff with power to execute Ashoka’s vision and mission. The social entrepreneurs in turn hold centrality power⁸, as they are the achievers of Ashoka, without whom the vision and mission would crumble. These are the classic sources of power at Ashoka, but much more emphasis is placed on total empowerment.

Drayton declares that Ashoka:

…must be an integrated/decentralized organization that in every way enables and strongly encourages each of us to fly and yet that channels all that energy to serve the organization’s goals….Ashoka’s job and, indeed, our field’s most important job is to empower people. Our ultimate objective is everyone a changemaker.⁹

By empowering Ashoka fellows, socially entrepreneurial leaders are created who act as role models for other social entrepreneurs. Drayton truly believes that the power of Ashoka is in the ability to empower social entrepreneurs to not only pursue their goals, but to also gain experience and help other social entrepreneurs to change their own communities and societies. In this way, everyone across the world eventually becomes a social entrepreneur and is able to change their local surroundings to better match their needs, thus creating a world where each local community acts to improve itself, thus eliminating the need for large-scale organizations to pursue micro-philanthropy, which is pointed to by Ashoka’s critics as a negative aspect of Ashoka, when in fact it is the very aim of the organization and Bill Drayton’s dream.

The second bias that comes from focusing on individuals is a tendency to ignore the role of organizations and the resources they provide for pattern-breaking change. Researchers have long known that successful ideas require a mix of talents that is rarely found in one person. Indeed, the most compelling research on business entrepreneurship suggests that successful change requires a stream of capabilities including leadership, management, marketing, organizational design, and finance. Whereas philanthropists almost always focus on the individual, venture capitalists almost always focus on the leadership team and the organization to back it.¹²

Ashoka is empowering individuals and creating families of social entrepreneurs who help each other, rather than teams that defeat each other. Ashoka utilizes consensus building as a method of making decisions.

They generally have three to five people in a jury. After each candidate has gone through individual interviews with each juror, the panelists come together as a group. They score each factor on a three-point scale: one means excellent, two means ‘meets our standard,’ and three means ‘doesn’t meet our standard.’ They put their scores on a chart and have a discussion about it. The discussion is not just based on impressions, it’s based on the analysis. All decisions have to be unanimous. There is no voting. Generally speaking they are able to achieve consensus.¹⁰

This normative decision making style⁸ works at Ashoka because the leader, Drayton, has insufficient information on all the social entrepreneurs around the world and must rely on his followers to gather information. The followers of Ashoka also generally agree with the goals of the organization as shown by the majority of followers who are also social entrepreneurs. Bill’s “most important measure of organizational success is the proportion of my staff colleagues who have in fact entrepreneured something in the last year. We’re over 50 percent.”⁹ Though Ashoka focuses on empowering individuals, their true goal is to create enough communities of change-makers that other individuals will be inspired by them, much in the way Drayton was inspired by Ghandi. Once everyone understands their ability to create change, a giant global network is created, through which participative decision making can take place.

To empower social entrepreneurs, Ashoka relies heavily on the path-goal contingency theory⁸, which is basically a leadership model under which leaders remove obstacles so that workers can successfully accomplish their tasks. Adapting this theory to Ashoka, Bill and his colleagues find individuals working to improve an aspect of their community and assist them via financial support or entrepreneurial advice or connecting them with the right people to help achieve their goals.

The tasks Ashoka fellows attack are often unstructured, complex and novel, and Ashoka helps the fellows by repeatedly asking them logical questions derived from Bill’s favorite how to¹ questions, which poked at the holes in the social entrepreneurs’ plans and encouraged them to rationally think how to fix them. Bill picked up this tradition of asking how to from one of his role models, Ghandi. Though Ashoka did not directly provide instructions to the fellows, they did encourage the fellows to analyze the obstacles in their way and create procedures for removing them.

Though there are many reasons for the success of Ashoka and Bill Drayton, his belief in himself and his ideas allowed Bill to seize an opportunity and create an organization that empowers social entrepreneurs around the globe to improve their societies via business logic. Much like Bill’s vision of emissions trading took hold twenty years after the original idea, Ashoka’s vision of a world where individuals have the power and confidence to change their own communities and society at large is gaining ground quickly. Soon, hopefully, people will laugh at the thought of I’m just one person, I can’t change the world.

• Justin from LifeofJustin writes about a random adventure on the USC campus in Parking Lot Drinking at USC. Justin is spot on in describing USC as a movie-esque experience,
  

  What I concluded from this experience, is that I should of went to college at USC. The place is amazing and reminds you of all the movies you see that take place on college campuses.

Really makes me wonder why I transferred from USC…something about new experiences and getting out of the grime of downtown Los Angeles?

• Long time readers here know of my appreciation for the skills of Jay from Scribbles & Words but for you newbies, check out this great, quick tutorial from Jay about how to highlight text using only CSS.

Rather than a quote, here’s how a grey highlight looks.

• Random breaks occur on this blog as I tend to life first but I’ve learned to warn users, or at least put a quick message letting you know I’m still here. Jarko’s tips over at North x East gives a few reasons for taking a break from blogging and how to correctly do so. One of the tips is to save posts for a rainy day, which I already do (perhaps a bit too much with nearly 70 draft-posts). Jarko is right on about why to take a break when he states:
  

  …most importantly, the time away refuels your passion. After a few week’s break you are filled with new energy to pursue your goals with new determination and power.

  Each time I’m away from this blog tons of ideas come flowing to me that otherwise I don’t think of. Some of these ideas get implemented and some don’t but letting myself get away from a schedule and allowing my mind to wander certainly makes writing here much more enjoyable.

• All of us have a fight or flight instinct that controls many of our basic functions. This instinct derives from our ancestors having to quickly decide whether they could realistically succeed in a fight or if they should flee and fight another day. Marc from MarcandAngel discusses how to flee like a Bushido Samurai warrior.

There’s some great tips in Marc’s list, my favorite among them is:

Trust only those who have earned it. Be wary of those who have not.

Though it seems like common-sense, many of us throw our trust around to anyone and everyone within range. I tell this to people all the time, before you trust someone you should ask why you should trust them. Are they trying to sell you something or persuade you in some way? If so, most likely they should not be immediately trusted.

• Finally, Daniel from Daily Blog Tips wrote about Larry Page, one of Google’s founders, and Larry’s advice on how to change the world, a theme here this week. Daniel sums up Larry’s advice quite well:
  

  If you want to succeed on the web, you will need to let your fear of failure go away, and to try new and innovative things.

  Though Daniel frames it in terms of a web business, his advice applies to life in general. If you fear life, then sadly you’re already nearly dead. In the end, I’d rather die young but doing something I enjoy rather than dying of old age having successfully run away from anything that might be dangerous.

  I’m sure many of you have had similar thoughts but fear is a powerful emotion. Grasping that emotion and facing it head on is a thrill and can be used as energy to pursue any goal you have. Once you conquer your fears, they will go away and you’ll become more free.

  Related Posts:

  • Web Quotes and Counterpoints VI
  • Saturday Shout-outs: WQAC X
  • Web Quotes & Counterpoints XII
  • 3 From Every Tree: My Favorite Blog Project Entries
  • 3 Useful Del.icio.us Tags, Life Quotes, & Traffic Generators
  ]]> http://adamp.com/college/web-quotes-and-counterpoints-v/feed/ 6 http://adamp.com/management/want-to-change-the-world/ http://adamp.com/management/want-to-change-the-world/#comments Mon, 05 May 2008 16:58:15 +0000 Adam http://adamp.wp42.com/umass-amherst/want-to-change-the-world/ Is today’s world perfect? If you’re like most people, you’re realistic and can easily say our modern world is imperfect. What’s wrong with it? Is there one part of our global environment that severely impacts our lives in a negative manner? Surely you can list a number of issues that need our immediate attention, such as pollution, hunger, poverty, war and so on. We all know of these big problems, but what can you do? You’re just one person, right?

  Wrong!

  You are not just one person, you are a whole entire human being! Throughout history we’ve attributed monumental achievements solely to one person. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, Hitler killed millions of people, and Ghandi liberated India. These men did not achieve these huge shifts in society all by themselves, but through a great confidence in themselves and, more importantly, their ideas they were able to lead movements that turned their ideas into results.

  The great power that coursed through these people runs through each and everyone one of us. Young or old, male or female, black or white or in between, we all have the potential to change the world. This week, we’ll be taking a look at this potential and how to tap into it. Hopefully you and I utilize it to positively change the world, as Bill Drayton did.

  Who is Bill Drayton?

  Bill is a social entrepreneur who changed the world by empowering others to change the world. Stay tuned later this week for a paper I wrote on Mr. Drayton and his world-changing ideas and results for the graduate level Perspectives on Leadership course at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. By the end of this week, we’ll turn this potential for change into energy and drastically improve the world!

  Related Posts:

  • Posts from the Past
  • The Streak is Over: Graduate Summer 2007 Grades – Umass Amherst
  • The Artistic Scientific Leader (Personal Reflection)
  • Undergraduate Summer 2007 Grades – University of Massachusetts at Amherst
  • You Can Change the World, But Do You Know How to?
  ]]> http://adamp.com/management/want-to-change-the-world/feed/ 0 http://adamp.com/technology/back-up-and-running/ http://adamp.com/technology/back-up-and-running/#comments Tue, 15 Apr 2008 14:27:02 +0000 Adam http://adamp.wp42.com/technology/back-up-and-running/ Something happened overnight to my site and it was not accessible this morning. If you tried visiting here this morning and were denied, sorry.

  The issue seems to be fixed at the moment (knock on wood). I’m not sure if the issue was from wordpress or my theme or something else but I solved it by disabling the wp-cache plugin in my wp-config.php file (e.g. commented out the first line that referenced wp-cache), then loaded my blog, went into the dashboard and de-activated the wp-cache plugin, and cleared the cache. That solved the issue of my blog not loading, but it was reset to a basic installation of my theme without any customizations.

  So then I scrolled through my plugins and noticed that the “Deactivate wordpress widgets” plugin had mysteriously been deactivated. Once I turned that plugin back on, the K2 sidebar manager returned and all my theme customizations were back. It was quite strange and I’m glad it’s fixed and hopefully stays fixed.

  If you experience any issues feel free to send me an e-mail or leave a comment on this post.

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  • Updates Galore
  • Use CommentLuv? Show Andy Ur Luv!
  • Yes, A New Theme!
  • A Few Changes
  • Thesis Theme Comes to Prose of a Pol
  ]]> http://adamp.com/technology/back-up-and-running/feed/ 0 http://adamp.com/technology/social-coupon-savings/ http://adamp.com/technology/social-coupon-savings/#comments Mon, 14 Apr 2008 01:50:05 +0000 Adam http://adamp.wp42.com/technology/social-coupon-savings/ All over the internet we’re seeing the rise and enduring popularity of social network sites. Digg, myspace, facebook and other social networks are among the most trafficked sites on the web today. Yet, with most social networks you contribute content but receive little to no compensation for your time and effort. Not so with a site I stumbled upon a few days ago; Savings.com is a social network revolving around sharing the latest and greatest coupons, promo codes, and discounts.

  The way the site works is a user submits any online coupons or promotional codes they find to the site. Then, the coupon is voted on by the community and the top discounts get put on the front page. You can also browse for savings by company or site name and check out existing deals and their vote rating. For instance, a few days ago I was buying up a ton of domain names (for reasons I’ll reveal sometime soon) and went looking for GoDaddy promotional codes. Thanks to the voting system on savings.com, I was able to quickly find codes that actually worked.

  There are tons and tons of coupons on the site for all sorts of stores so if you’re doing any shopping check out savings.com. I’m now slightly wealthier thanks to savings.com, which I can’t say for facebook, digg, reddit, myspace, pownce, or any other social network site. If you liked this post, there’s good news for you as I’ll be launching a site revolving around money in the coming weeks. The site will publicize saving opportunities, saving tips, and historical information about money. I’ll post to this site when it’s live, but subscribe to my feed to ensure you’re up to date.

  Score: 4/5

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  ]]> http://adamp.com/technology/social-coupon-savings/feed/ 0 http://adamp.com/technology/quick-apple-safari-tips/ http://adamp.com/technology/quick-apple-safari-tips/#comments Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:23:14 +0000 Adam http://adamp.wp42.com/technology/quick-apple-safari-tips/ Did you know holding the control, alt/option, or command/apple keys while hovering over links in Apple’s Safari browser on Mac OS X brings up new options?

  For instance, holding control will bring up a menu (the ‘right click menu’) when you click on a link.

  Holding the alt/option key while hovering will download the linked file once you click.

  And finally, holding the command/Apple key while clicking a link will open it in a new tab. If you didn’t know these tips before, welcome to the club as I just accidentally discovered them and thought I’d share them here with you.

  Know of any good Apple/Safari keyboard shortcuts? If so share them below.

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  ]]> http://adamp.com/technology/quick-apple-safari-tips/feed/ 2