Thursday, November 29, 2007

10 Positive Habits to Develop

This is an extract from an email i got from the Internet. Please read and zenduse it.


Here are 10 positive habits that you can consider incorporating into your routine.

Quite often we get so caught up in day-to-day activities that we get distracted from thinking about and developing little positive habits that could make the difference between having an okay day and a upbeat, positive day.

Some of them may seem so simple and obvious that we don’t even think of implementing them regularly.

1. Start the day with a positive mind-set.Upon awakening make the commitment to face the day and whatever it brings with a positive frame of mind. Prepare yourself for the fact that everything may not go smoothly or as planned, and be willing to handle any challenges you’re faced with (we know there will be some).


2. Practice Gratitude.Be grateful for and focus on the good things you have in your life. Many of us get in the habit of sweating the "small stuff" and let it get in the way of appreciating the important things – family, friends, good health, freedom and the many opportunities we enjoy. When we let that happen it downplays the fact that we really do have much to be grateful for.


3. Learn something new. Make a conscious effort to keep your brain active and functioning at optimum levels. Learn a new vocabulary word or a new piece of information as often as you can. It will keep you sharp and alert.


4. Have a good laugh.Read the comics or tell a joke just to loosen things up. It will help relieve stress, keep things light and change your perspective.


5. Smile at someone.When you walk through the office, down the street or are in a store, make it a point to smile at someone to acknowledge them. It will make you both feel good. We’re usually so preoccupied and caught up in activity that we don’t take time to notice those around us.


6. Give a heartfelt compliment.If you notice someone at school/work that has a new hairdo or outfit and looks especially good, or has just given a good presentation, don’t hold back give them a compliment. Everyone enjoys positive feedback.


7. Tell your spouse, family member or friend how much you appreciate them.Just as we enjoy a nice compliment now and then, it makes us feel good to know a loved one appreciates us. Quite often we take those we are closest to for granted.


8. Perform random acts of kindness. Do something nice just for the sake of doing it. Help an elderly person lift or carry a parcel. Clear the table after a meal if it’s not your normal routine. Offer to take your neighbor’s kids to the park or the show along with yours. It generates and promotes good will.


9. Be a better listener.Take the time to listen to another’s point of view. Even if you don’t agree with what they are saying, try to put yourself in their place and understand where they’re coming from.


10. Take 10-15 minutes quiet time.Give yourself a break. You deserve time to reflect and regroup too. Even a little 15-minute catnap can be surprisingly refreshing and rejuvenating.


These 10 positive habits can be incorporated into your routine at whatever intervals are comfortable for you. To be aware of them and to practice them regularly will help make each day more pleasant for you and those around you.

Monday, November 26, 2007

10 Mental Blocks to Creative Thinking by Brian Clarks

To be a good writer and thinker certain skills need to be developed and this includes eliminating the blindspots that prevent us from seeing the consequences of our decision. The next one is avoiding the mental blocks to creative thinking.

This is an interesing article written by Brian:

Whether you’re trying to solve a tough problem, start a business, get attention for that business or write an interesting article, creative thinking is crucial. The process boils down to changing your perspective and seeing things differently than you currently do.

People like to call this “thinking outside of the box,” which is the wrong way to look at it. Just like Neo needed to understand that “there is no spoon” in the film The Matrix, you need to realize “there is no box” to step outside of.
You create your own imaginary boxes simply by living life and accepting certain things as “real” when they are just as illusory as the beliefs of a paranoid delusional. The difference is, enough people agree that certain man-made concepts are “real,” so you’re viewed as “normal.” This is good for society overall, but it’s that sort of unquestioning consensus that inhibits your natural creative abilities.

So, rather than looking for ways to inspire creativity, you should just realize the truth. You’re already capable of creative thinking at all times, but you have to strip away the imaginary mental blocks (or boxes) that you’ve picked up along the way to wherever you are today.

I like to keep this list of 10 common ways we suppress our natural creative abilities nearby when I get stuck. It helps me realize that the barriers to a good idea are truly all in my head.


1. Trying to Find the “Right” Answer
One of the worst aspects of formal education is the focus on the correct answer to a particular question or problem. While this approach helps us function in society, it hurts creative thinking because real-life issues are ambiguous. There’s often more than one “correct” answer, and the second one you come up with might be better than the first.

Many of the following mental blocks can be turned around to reveal ways to find more than one answer to any given problem. Try reframing the issue in several different ways in order to prompt different answers, and embrace answering inherently ambiguous questions in several different ways.


2. Logical Thinking
Not only is real life ambiguous, it’s often illogical to the point of madness. While critical thinking skills based on logic are one of our main strengths in evaluating the feasibility of a creative idea, it’s often the enemy of truly innovative thoughts in the first place.

One of the best ways to escape the constraints of your own logical mind is to think metaphorically. One of the reasons why metaphors work so well in communications is that we accept them as true without thinking about it. When you realize that “truth” is often symbolic, you’ll often find that you are actually free to come up with alternatives.


3. Following Rules
One way to view creative thinking is to look at it as a destructive force. You’re tearing away the often arbitrary rules that others have set for you, and asking either “why” or “why not” whenever confronted with the way “everyone” does things.

This is easier said than done, since people will often defend the rules they follow even in the face of evidence that the rule doesn’t work. People love to celebrate rebels like Richard Branson, but few seem brave enough to emulate him. Quit worshipping rule breakers and start breaking some rules.


4. Being Practical
Like logic, practicality is hugely important when it comes to execution, but often stifles innovative ideas before they can properly blossom. Don’t allow the editor into the same room with your inner artist.

Try not to evaluate the actual feasibility of an approach until you’ve allowed it to exist on it’s own for a bit. Spend time asking “what if” as often as possible, and simply allow your imagination to go where it wants. You might just find yourself discovering a crazy idea that’s so insanely practical that no one’s thought of it before.


5. Play is Not Work
Allowing your mind to be at play is perhaps the most effective way to stimulate creative thinking, and yet many people disassociate play from work. These days, the people who can come up with great ideas and solutions are the most economically rewarded, while worker bees are often employed for the benefit of the creative thinkers.

You’ve heard the expression “work hard and play hard.” All you have to realize is that they’re the same thing to a creative thinker.


6. That’s Not My Job
In an era of hyper-specialization, it’s those who happily explore completely unrelated areas of life and knowledge who best see that everything is related. This goes back to what ad man Carl Ally said about creative persons—they want to be know-it-alls.

Sure, you’ve got to know the specialized stuff in your field, but if you view yourself as an explorer rather than a highly-specialized cog in the machine, you’ll run circles around the technical master in the success department.


7. Being a “Serious” Person
Most of what keeps us civilized boils down to conformity, consistency, shared values, and yes, thinking about things the same way everyone else does. There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, but if you can mentally accept that it’s actually nothing more than groupthink that helps a society function, you can then give yourself permission to turn everything that’s accepted upside down and shake out the illusions.

Leaders from Egyptian pharaohs to Chinese emperors and European royalty have consulted with fools, or court jesters, when faced with tough problems. The persona of the fool allowed the truth to be told, without the usual ramifications that might come with speaking blasphemy or challenging ingrained social conventions. Give yourself permission to be a fool and see things for what they really are.


8. Avoiding Ambiguity
We rationally realize that most every situation is ambiguous to some degree. And although dividing complex situations into black and white boxes can lead to disaster, we still do it. It’s an innate characteristic of human psychology to desire certainty, but it’s the creative thinker who rejects the false comfort of clarity when it’s not really appropriate.

Ambiguity is your friend if you’re looking to innovate. The fact that most people are uncomfortable exploring uncertainty gives you an advantage, as long as you can embrace ambiguity rather than run from it.


9. Being Wrong is Bad
We hate being wrong, and yet mistakes often teach us the most. Thomas Edison was wrong 1,800 times before getting the light bulb right. Edison’s greatest strength was that he was not afraid to be wrong.

The best thing we do is learn from our mistakes, but we have to free ourselves to make mistakes in the first place. Just try out your ideas and see what happens, take what you learn, and try something else. Ask yourself, what’s the worst that can happen if I’m wrong? You’ll often find the benefits of being wrong greatly outweigh the ramifications.


10. I’m Not Creative
Denying your own creativity is like denying you’re a human being. We’re all limitlessly creative, but only to the extent that we realize that we create our own limits with the way we think. If you tell yourself you’re not creative, it becomes true. Stop that.

In that sense, awakening your own creativity is similar to the path reported by those who seek spiritual enlightenment. You’re already enlightened, just like you’re already creative, but you have to strip away all of your delusions before you can see it. Acknowledge that you’re inherently creative, and then start tearing down the other barriers you’ve allowed to be created in your mind.

Now you can start to write. Write on your diary, write on anything that pertains to your expertise, your domain knowledge. Or better still write something that interest you most. Then create an account in blogspot.com and share your writings to the world. It may not generate enormous amount of traffic but at least it will stay there waiting to be uncovered by a passerby and learn from your wisdom.

Sunday, November 25, 2007

Today's Focus Problem: Antartic Ice Sheet Melting Rapidly




Do you know that the ice flowing into the sea from several Greenland glaciers are reportedly speeding up?

Do you know that the amount of water added to the oceans is equivalent to the total amount of freshwater used in homes, businesses and farming in New York, New Jersey and Virginia each year?


Find out more, visit NASA website at: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/ice_sheets.html

Saturday, November 24, 2007

Cents of Humor: "Lost in hot air"

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago but I don’t know where I am.”

The woman below replied, “You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You are between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude.”

“You must be an engineer”, said the balloonist.

“I am”, replied the woman, “How did you know?”
“Well”, answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct, but I still have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help so far.”

The woman below responded, “You must be in management”.

“I am”, replied the balloonist, “but how did you know?”

“Well”, said the woman, “you don’t know where you are or where you are going. You have risen to where you are, due to large quantity of hot air. You made promises which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, its my fault.” – Story By Philip Allen

Sunday, November 18, 2007

What is 'ZendUse' social enterprise website


The Problem and Its Background

My thesis in conceiving the idea of a “problems and solutions” website revolves around two basic problems: (1) how can a website help “entreployees” and organizations transform themselves into effective problem-solvers describing themselves by the problems they solve rather than just by the product they sell or services they offer, and (2) how do we maintain a community website that is profitable for all its members and sustainable for the website owner.

The two problems complement each other in many ways. By being able to help organization increase their revenue growth and sales performance and helping individual members earn additional income by constantly participating in the ZendUse activities, the website in return is assured of profitability and sustainability.

Current Websites Patterns

A cursory look at the existing Business-to-business websites, and analyzing the problems of declining revenue growth and sales performance in many organization, Keith M. Eades and Robert E. Kear in their book entitled “Emergence of Pseudo-Solutions” examined about 200 B2B companies and their websites from the global 2000 and observed a pattern that suggest the following and I quote:

1. Most companies that claim to sell solutions continue to define who they are by what products they make or provide- more than half of the companies evaluated offered few specifics about what problems they actually solve, and only 1 percent of companies did an exceptional job of providing problem specifics.

2. Most companies assume buyers understand why they are experiencing their problems and what their needs are – 85% of sites offered very little to educate buyers about the causes of their problems.
3. Very few companies provide specific linkages between problems their customers are experiencing and the operational and financial impact of those problems – more than 80% of companies fail to provide material specifics about these linkages.

4. Companies do a reasonably good job of communicating what they provide in the way of capabilities, but again, the clear linkage between problems, their causes, and those capabilities is nearly nonexistent – more than 80% of companies fail to create coherent linkages between the capabilities of their offerings and problems.

Although the above patterns were observed thru samples taken from global 2000 companies’ websites, I believe that the trend applies to all including those websites owned by SME and individuals specially the so called “entreployees” of the informal economy.

The second problem of sustainability and profitability

For the website to be sustainable, target customers must be aware that it exists, it must contain valuable information through contribution from the community, likewise, community should be able to earn points convertible to dollar value, the website must be ever-present/ relevant, easy to use, and it must be easy to manage.

For the website to be profitable and achieve revenue growth, it must continue to meet the needs of the community, able to generate some form of income through sponsorships, donations, advertising, directory listings, subscriptions and grants.

ZendUse website is conceived with a value proposition that by focusing on problems creatively we can connect effectively with real customer’s problems and needs. We help everyone who wants to participate in “problem-solving” to frame their identity and purpose around customer problems and needs and be different. Give your clients unique customer experience by being more consultative in nature, creative and come out with authentic solutions.

ZendUse website is a search engine for problems and solutions that are of high value to its end users, be it an organization, individuals, or group of individuals.

ZendUse website is also a community portal serving the interest of various sectors, from students seeking solution to their school assignments, professionals trying to find an answer to their work-related problems, managers who are constantly facing the challenges of corporate life trying to find solutions to problems their current workforce cannot solve, the legislators, non-government organizations, and environmentalists.

ZendUse website is also a knowledge sharing and story-telling portal for problems that are successfully solved.

What is unexpected but interesting about ZendUse?
ZendUse website will serve as catalyst for knowledge works along the wider domains of infopreneurship – a trend that is sweeping the American continent and Europe today; and second, it promotes and serves the interest of the so called “entreployees” who are predominantly middle class workers trapped in a middle class prison. These two trends are back burners in our bid to compete in the global marketplace because the more problems-and-solutions information is created and exchanged the more we become competitive in the global economy.

This is unexpected and interesting because the ZendUse is not only about entertainment and advertisements that characterizes today’s websites. In fact, we who have access to Internet worldwide are already consumed by entertainment. We spend enormous amount of time on the Internet watching videos, listening to music, playing games, chatting with someone-you-don’t-know in the Internet just to pass time. In the end, problems still persists in our daily lives with no solutions in sight.

Supporting the rise of Cyberworks

Professor John M. McCann of Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, compiled articles around the topic on “Digital Work CyberTrends”, and I quote:

“Knowledge workers, selling their labor to new species of business that will flourish in the wired economy, may need to be ready to go at a moments notice…. Professor Thomas Malone of the Center for Coordination Science at MIT says such wired workers will form overnight armies of intellectual mercenaries. Imagine a company with a task that needs urgent attention – say, designing a lawnmower or writing a computer program. The company might not maintain a cadre within its ranks to do the job. Instead it trolls the net for talent, sending out a bulletin that describes the tasks to be done and the skills required of team members. The notice might go directly to qualified applicants, based on resumes filed online. Specialists anywhere in the world instantly submit bids to do a piece of the job, simultaneously triggering a query to their personal references. Winning bidders work together via video hookup, each at his or home base. The project might last a few weeks or a few days or a few hours. Afterwards the team disbands and the members melt back into the talent pool to bid on new job.”

Today, November 2007, we will chase those dreams by Prof. Thomas Malone, and make them happen through ZendUse website. We enable problem senders to describe the problems or tasks that need to be solved and break it down further into sub-tasks or sub-problems, trigger an email alert or SMS to invited bidders or to everyone in the community who are qualified to participate. Winning bidders from anywhere in the world work together in a borderless workspace, solve the problem, post their solution back into the website as one of their project portfolios, get paid, disbands and melt back into the community to bid on a new problem to solve.

A Cradle for Entreployees

My favorite futurist Alvin Toffler describes in vivid terms the rise of entreployees, and here I quote:

“We are moving into a world in which for many the job may no longer be the primary source of income. We are moving into a world in which the faster the rate of change, the more complex the society, the more information must be generated, stored and transformed into knowledge, the more information must be exchanged and the more competitive the global economy becomes. We are creating an economy with less and less room for uneducated or less skilled workers. Indeed, even highly skilled workers can have the wrong skills at the wrong place at the right time and find themselves vulnerable. We may be moving from an economy based on employment to one in which we do not have employees but have in fact “entreployees”, some cross between entrepreneur and employee”.

The above paragraph is lifted from Alvin Toffler’s Keynote address, “Future Shock in the Present Tense”, during the Cyberspace and the American Dream Aspen Summit ‘96.

ZendUse Problems and Solutions website is designed to provide every member the facility to generate, store, and transform knowledge in the form of problems and solutions (problems and their solutions are more intelligible, concrete, and easy to understand) by sending them to the portal and using them to compound on existing know-how and capability; enabling the society specially the middle class to compete head on in the global economy, in the words of Alvin, “the more information must be exchanged the more competitive the global economy becomes”.

Zenduse your ideas and thoughts about this concept and email to Nes_oidem@hotmail.com.

About ZendUse Campaign


ZendUse is about helping people develop valued contents, send it to the web for the world to see and use the content to build upon another content, compounding knowledge and events that hopes to create surprising and impressive results.

Everyone has a treasured secret in life hidden somewhere in a distant past, in the place where only memory dwells. Everyone needs these secrets to be buried in the annals of an online portal and allowed to surface only in the right moment in time like a treasured archeological artifact.

Everyone has stories to tell. Lessons learned that we warn others not to repeat the same story and experience failures; valuable lessons for costly trial and errors that could have been avoided.

Everyone has some best practices and subject matter expertise that we want to share to the world. So that others may model them and build their own best practices and let alone the world generate exponential wave of stories, ideas, products and services creating opportunities with no upper limits.

Valuable ideas and insights are like life itself full of complexity. Sometimes we want to create contents drawn from a representation of a reality colored with an image of our own world, and we want to share it to others and allow them to build upon it. We reduce complexity through the artful use of analogy and metaphor, category trees and come out with an outcome that sticks into the mind.

It is in this light that ZendUse is conceived to take us to the state of being there in the right mood of sharing to the world and opening our hearts to others who are willing to listen; to express our thoughts, our feelings and share useful segments of our experiences in writing, through video or any multimedia platform; send and use them, enabling others to make valuable insights, predictions, artful decisions, and timely dispositions in anything that affects the here-and-now of their lives.

ZendUse envisage to be your tool for survival in a global exponential economy.

Our Collective Minds


We envision being the next infopreneurial hub with a mission of delivering knowledge contents to the world.

With this mission of delivering valued contents to the world comes the need to develop a strategy of shepherding the development, creation, send, use-reuse, and compounding of contents that are of value to its provider.

With the goal of achieving exponential growth in content development and delivery comes the need for a secure and energy-efficient data center and connectivity infrastructure responding to the moral obligation of helping reduce the impact of global warming and climate crisis.

With the goal of shepherding the evolution of communities of practice inevitably requires an effective programme management through out the business lifecycle to develop and implement training and engagement plans, perform supporting roles, develop online tools, and achieve full integration into the daily work processes of every middle class infopreneur.

Be part of this entrepreneurial revolution. The revolution of the new middle class in the knowledge-era infopreneurship....