Stephen King on what Talent is

"... talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force – a force so great that the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking ... Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle."

 

I banned all E-mail at my work for a week

This article is by Shayne Hughes, chief executive of Learning as Leadership.

“All internal e-mail is forbidden for the next week,” I announced to my staff.

I wish I could say I stated it boldly, chest puffed out and chin held high. Instead, I whispered it in a cowardly manner from behind the conference table as my team’s strenuous objections hurtled at me full force.

“We won’t get anything done.”

“The whole company is going to grind to a halt.”

“We’ll be interrupting each other every two minutes.”

“I can’t wait a week to have a one-on-one to talk about urgent issues.”

“It’ll make my life miserable! How am I going to delegate to my assistant? I already have too much to do.”

“It’ll be chaos.”

Once the panic cooled, we talked about why I wanted our company to return to the Dark Ages, before electronic communication. Here’s the case I made for why our business (and yours) could benefit from skipping a week of e-mail.

In most companies today, internal email is half to three quarters of all traffic. Reading, processing, managing, organizing, and responding to it absorbs vast amounts of time. We clog one another’s e-mail systems and to-do lists with a mishmash of crucial topics and trivial information and then waste hours of every day slogging through a hundred useless e-mails to ensure we don’t look irresponsible by missing the two or three important ones.

Worse, e-mail is rarely the best medium for addressing the issues and opportunities at hand. It brings us quick questions that don’t have quick answers; long, informative rambles with no clear action steps; conversation chains with too many people cc’d and many of them offering oversimplified opinions. And that’s on a good day.

Buried beneath our collective e-mail dysfunction are the important conversations our organizations and relationships need to move forward. E-mail is the worst forum for tackling these. Time and again I see leaders being harsher by e-mail than they ever would be in a direct conversation. E-mail has become a false way of addressing conflict, and the costs in terms of time and trust are dramatic.

E-mail is not a communication tool.

The first truth to tell about e-mail is that it facilitates lazy and thoughtless communication. Too often we put a concern or issue in an e-mail, hit the Send button, and boom: Now it’s your problem. You figure out the next step, provide the missing information, or remember to bring it up the next time we see each other.

We feel relief because we don’t need to think about it anymore.

That relief, however, lasts only until our in box chimes with an e-mail from that colleague or another doing the same to us.

Unfortunately, most of us are suckers for low-hanging fruit. If it’s an easy e-mail to handle, we knock out our reply and feel the high of getting something done. But if it’s not, it languishes in our in box while we search for something else to answer. Leaders in most organizations e-mail past one another—rather than talking with one another.

Being thoughtful about challenging issues is hard work. The rapid-fire, tactical nature of e-mail actually discourages us from stopping and asking ourselves, “Is this a priority that needs to be addressed? With whom?” We stay reactive rather than proactive.

Abusive Subject Line Behavior

Intention: By typing the word “URGENT,” “ACTION ITEM” or “READ ME” in the subject line, she is hoping to stress the actionable items of her email. Her message is clear. Perception: Her subject line implies that she presumes her message is more important than any other correspondence you might have received. The perception is that she is over-confident and thinks very little of your time.

You are the fire hose.

A common complaint I hear from leaders I coach is that they are too consumed by e-mail to be strategic. It’s true. We can’t create space for our prefrontal cortex to do deep, creative thinking if our reptilian brain stem is drowning in a sea of tactical e-mails. But this isn’t something that just happens to us. We do it to ourselves and to one another. Every time we answer an e-mail with content that should have been not written but discussed face-to-face or by phone, we perpetuate the dysfunction.

It was this frustration with my team and my own lack of productivity that pushed me to forbid internal e-mail for a week. I didn’t want to arrive at the end of another day feeling stressed out by frantic activity that accomplished little of importance.

Still, I admit, I was worried. What if their complaints were correct? What if we interrupted one another all the time and reverted back to the pre-e-mail days of paper notes and forgotten tasks? I didn’t want to look foolish—and I couldn’t take it anymore.

We’re addicted for a reason.

By the end of the first day, flurries of new e-mails had stopped capturing my time. A sense of calm descended, and an unsettling question arose: What should I be doing with my time?

Like many leaders, I had a long list of move-the-organization-forward endeavors that I never seemed to find time for. What’s most important to do, however, is often what’s most difficult. In the absence of e-mail’s ever-distracting background noise, I was forced to confront how I had unconsciously allowed it to keep me from taking action on those high-priority but uncomfortable items.

I began to carve out power hours in which to tackle those challenges head on. As my team did the same, our high-octane, stay-on-top-of-whatever-is-happening-via-e-mail mentality disappeared. In its place we experienced a more focused and productive energy. Many people mistake urgent e-mail activity for productivity, but that stressful busy-ness is invariably tactical and rarely strategic and creative. When we stopped sending one another e-mail, we stopped winding one another up. The decrease in stress from one day to the next was palpable. So was our increase in productivity.

This was when I grasped the most damaging cost of thoughtless e-mail: It prevents us from doing our best work.

Counterintuitively, this is also e-mail’s most seductive ego-benefit: It protects us from taking the risk of focusing our best effort on our most challenging endeavors.

Limiting e-mail helps us make choices.

Outlawing internal e-mail for a week challenged us not only to be more thoughtful about what we worked on but also to be more deliberate about what we addressed and with whom. In losing the illusion that we could do everything if we just kept sending one another e-mails, we zeroed in on our most pressing priorities. When information or an opportunity came across someone’s desk, we learned to ask ourselves, “Is this important enough for me to bring to the team as an agenda point?” instead of reflexively forwarding it by e-mail. Talking gave us a chance to define if and why an idea was interesting enough to merit our attention.

Whether it was the trust built when two team members worked through a conflict or the unexpected creativity we accessed when we tackled a problem together, communicating reconnected us with the neglected power of human interaction.

Effective uses of e- mail.

During our experiment, we kept track of when e-mail would have been a more effective means of getting something done. Here are the four uses of e-mail that enhanced productivity:

• Conveying simple, defined information. Agendas for meetings, say, or directions to a location. There’s nothing confusing or controversial about that type of data-driven content, and no questions are being asked of the recipients.
• Delegating clear administrative tasks. “Can you schedule this person?” “Can you send me that document?” “Can you have lunch Friday at noon?” Make the threshold of clarity high. Restrict these e-mails to very clear, no-questions-needed tasks.
• Transmitting an attachment. After you have agreed in a conversation about the task at hand, e-mail is a good way to send someone the relevant documents. “Can you review the job description we discussed?” E-mail is a courier service, not a project management tool.
• Documenting or summarizing a completed conversation. “Here are the minutes of our project meeting.” “Here’s what I heard in the performance review you just gave me.” E-mail is a good summarizing tool after the fact to ensure clarity.

Stop e-mail cold turkey for one week.

E-mail is so embedded in our way of operating at work that trying to manage it by structuring our use of it (doing e-mail at certain times of the day, or adhering to formatting rules) is typically insufficient. Our company had tried and failed with all sorts of techniques. We needed a week of detox to go through withdrawal and actually feel how much more productive we were in a world with limited e-mail. As with all rapacious addictions, actually stopping wasn’t like just thinking about stopping. Our cold turkey week was essential to breaking our e-mail addiction—so don’t skip it yourself.

During your week without internal e-mail (we considered remotely located colleagues as external), have your team members track their experiences daily.

• Was their experience at work different in terms of things like stress level, pace, and productivity?
• What did they do with the time they would have typically spent on e-mail?
• What topics came up that were more effectively addressed by talking? Why?
• When would e-mail have been a better tool than talking?

Take stock in a meeting at the end of the week, and decide together how you want to use e-mail in the future. Even if your team is part of a much larger organization, you still have influence over your corner of the world. Culture change begins with you. You and your team can choose to be buried by e-mail or empower yourselves to put boundaries around it.

 

I Can't Vote For Romney Because I Have No Idea What He Would Do As President

Article from Business Insider, contributor Robbie Bruens

 

Last month I got a job that pays well enough that I will owe federal income taxes. This 
means that for the first time in my life, Governor Mitt Romney actually cares about me.
 In my first two decades, I was a student.

I only worked part-time jobs that didn't earn
 me enough money to qualify for payment of federal income taxes. Though hundreds
 of dollars came out of my paychecks over the years for federal payroll taxes, I was such 
a lucky ducky because I didn't have to pay any federal income taxes. This also meant 
I could only vote for President Obama.

But now that I have graduated and found a 
well-paying job, Mitt Romney actually deems me worthy of voting for him! This is so 
exciting!



There's no way I'm going to let an opportunity of voting for an experienced businessman
 like Mitt Romney go by. It's not like I get a chance to vote for a multi-millionaire every day.


And now that I qualify to be one of his supporters, all I have to do is take a look at his 
policy agenda and past record to see if he qualifies to be my president. That shouldn't be
 so hard, should it?



I thought I'd start by looking at tax policy, since Governor Romney himself seems 
to care so much about who pays taxes. On Mitt Romney.com, I found a whole page
 dedicated to his tax plans. According to this page, Romney wants to lower taxes to spur
 economic growth while still raising enough revenue to keep the federal budget deficit
 from increasing. This seemed like a good general principle, so I scrolled all the way to 
the bottom of the page past many paragraphs attacking President Obama's record on 
taxes in order to get to the details of Romney's plan.



But the details didn't add up, quite literally. Romney specifies that he wants to cut
 federal income taxes for everyone who currently pays them by twenty percent. He also
 wants to eliminate something called the Death Tax (on Wikipedia, it rerouted me to
 a page for the Estate Tax), and maintain current tax rates on interest, dividends and 
capital gains except for those whose incomes are under $200,000 (like me!), who 
will see taxes on those kinds of earnings eliminated altogether. That all sounds like it
 could help me, but nowhere on the page does the Romney campaign explain how it
 will accomplish its second goal, which is to lower all these taxes without increasing the 
federal budget deficit, since Romney says he thinks it is far too high already.



Because I couldn't find the answer on his website, I started to look at news websites 
to see if Romney had cleared this up in a campaign speech or interview of some kind.
 It turns out, he believes the best way to lower federal income taxes by twenty percent
 without increasing the deficit is to eliminate all those loopholes and deductions mucking
 up the tax code. That makes perfect sense, since taxes are so complicated at this point 
that Romney can't even find where he put all his tax returns from before 2010.



But I wanted to know which specific loopholes and deductions he wanted to eliminate,
 since if I ever want to buy a house I might really need something like the mortgage tax
 deduction. So I watched a Fox News interview with Romney's sharp-looking running
 mate, a fellow Wisconsinite by the name of Paul Ryan, who said that Romney would 
eliminate tax deductions starting with people at the higher end. Whew, I thought. That
 shouldn't affect me, since I don't make that much money. Then he declined to name
 which deductions a Romney administration would eliminate because he didn't have
 time to go through all the math. I understood why he said this because television is a
 medium better suited for images than arithmetic. However, I thought if all it took was a 
little math to divine the Romney tax plan, I was up to the challenge.



It turns out the math is less complicated than you would think, though probably still
 too much for a channel like Fox News. According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center, 
cutting federal income tax rates by twenty percent would save all households with
 income above $200,000 a grand total of $251 billion every year. That's a lot of money!
 However, that money has to come from somewhere if it's not going to add to the deficit.



Ryan said it would come out of deductions, so I took a look at how much all those 
deductions for high income individuals are actually worth. And I had to keep in mind 
that Romney's website promised to keep tax rates steady on all earnings from interest,
 dividends, and investment. But adding up all those deductions together less any
 deductions for savings and investment equals less than $165 billion. That's almost
 $100 billion less than the value of the twenty percent tax cut high-income households
 would be getting. I realized that the reason the plan details on Romney's website didn't 
add up is because they simply couldn't. Even if Romney did eliminate all those pesky deductions, the wealthy would still get billions in tax cuts.



This money has to come from somewhere. It either will increase the deficit, or people 
like me will have to pay higher taxes, or federal spending will be cut. Because Paul Ryan 
and Mitt Romney don't want to go into detail about the arithmetic, I can't really guess 
what will happen. I thought maybe I could get a better sense of what might happen if 
I vote for Romney by looking at his record in government and business. Boy, if trying
 to figure out his policy agenda was difficult, understanding his record was positively 
confounding.



One concern I had about Mitt Romney was his staunch opposition to Obamacare,
 since I currently benefit from the part of that law that allows young people to stay on
 their parents' health insurance policy until the age of 26 (this makes sense when you
 work at a tech start-up that can't yet afford extensive health insurance benefits for
its employees). But then I found out that Obamacare actually modeled its regulate-
mandate-subsidize approach to health care reform on a very similar plan that was 
passed in Massachusetts when Mitt Romney was governor. How could Mitt Romney 
have signed health care reform into law while praising it as a model for the nation and then
 later excoriate the President of the United States for actually using it as a model for the 
nation, insisting that if he became president, he would repeal it?



Unfortunately, whether it's climate change, reproductive rights, auto bailouts, or even his own proposed tax and regulation policies, the story is the same: Romney has switched sides on many of the most important issues of our time, then declined to give a coherent explanation as to why. In fact, in some cases he actually denies that he ever changed his position despite crystal clear video evidence to the contrary. Between this unsettling tendency to switch positions without providing a reason, and a consistent reliance on vague assertions with contradictory details when it comes to discussing a policy agenda on his website and in his speeches, I have come to the following conclusion:



I have no idea what Mitt Romney would do if he became President of the United States.



He has taken a lot of stances that I disagree with, both those that would make life
 more difficult for me personally like repealing Obamacare, and others like eliminating reproductive rights which would hurt immeasurably the women I count as friends and family. But prior to taking these stances, he held the opposite ones. Who is to say which set of beliefs are really his?



I made some sense of this when I thought back to what Mitt Romney had said about 47 percent of Americans: They pay no federal income taxes, and therefore they are reliant on the government.  According to his logic, I had become less dependent on the government when I started earning enough to pay federal income taxes, and therefore more important for him to reach since I was taking responsibility for my life.



But when I looked at Mitt Romney's own tax returns, I found out that he earns tens of millions of dollars annually but pays federal income taxes on a vanishingly small portion of that money. Because of the government's special tax treatment for investment income — that is money that you earn from what you own rather than what you actually do — Mitt Romney pays income taxes on almost none of his income. By contrast, I pay federal income tax on all of my income. Therefore, using his own logic, I am less dependent on the government, and more personally responsible than Mitt Romney himself because the government hands him preferential tax treatment that I don't receive.



Romney's total lack of clarity about his own preferred policies reflects a discrepancy between what he says and who he is. I simply cannot vote for such a man, since at a bare minimum I think the President of the United States should demonstrate some semblance of knowing his own mind.

Dawn Gluskin’s article from the Huffington Post

The Art of Manifesting Our Dreams

Ever wonder why some people seem to walk around with a dark cloud hovering over them and others appear to bring their own sunshine wherever they go? While one group tends to be generally unhappy, finds things to complain about, and nothing seems to go their way, the other group can walk the exact same earth finding gratitude in everything around them, keeping up a positive outlook, and easily creating the lives they want. In both cases, these individuals are very much creating their own destiny as the law of attraction is at work with the basic principle: Like attracts like. Simply put: If you focus on positive things, you will get positive results. If you focus on negative things, you're going to attract negative results.

Don't get me wrong. You can't just say, "I want a million dollars," focus all of your attention on that desire and then voila: instant millionaire. There's more to it than that. Actual hard work, for one thing! But, there is a spiritual element to it as well. Sometimes the universe has other plans for us, or we just aren't ready to receive yet. This phenomenon is also well-documented in science with the placebo effect.

I can personally attest to the power of purposefully attracting and manifesting. I have somewhat honed this skill over the years out of pure necessity. Having multiple business and social ventures of my own as well as being a mother to a young child with another one on the way, I have been forced to adopt a very Yoda-like mindset in my daily routine: "Do or do not. There is no try." Having many people rely on you for their livelihood and wanting to be there for them is surefire motivation to find a way to get things done. From scoring national press coverage and columnist spots for my businesses, to generating revenues in a tough economy and competitive marketplace, to just making sure my family gets a healthy dinner at night and mama bear doesn't totally burn out in the process are all major accomplishments that I have purposefully manifested over recent years. Reflecting back on these, I have come to realize there are some basic principles involved and would like to share with the intention of helping others get a little closer to their best potential self!

Tips on Allowing the Law of Attraction to Work for You:

• Is it meant to be? Use your inner light as a guide. The musical key of your life's symphony must be in harmony with the desire you wish to manifest. In other words, there needs to be a strong connection with what you want and what you're destined for. I have had plenty of "pouty" moments in my days after working so hard for something and coming up short in the end. But after the fact, I always came to realize that there was a reason something didn't happen exactly how or when I wanted it to. Don't let this stop you from trying, though, as you miss 100 percent of the shots you never take! You just have to trust your gut and have faith in your instincts, which will become stronger the more you become self-aware. A meditation practice also helps bring more insight. Some good questions to ask: Is this desire in line with my life's passion and purpose? Is my intention positive and for the greater good of many and not just rooted in self-interest? If the answers are "yes" and something in your gut is telling you to go for it, than chances are you on the right path. Just remember to hold ever-so-loosely to your desires, as too strong of an attachment will likely bring disappointment and suffering.
• Hold powerful visions. Now that you've identified your desires and they feel intuitively right: Imagine yourself as actually having achieved your dream already. In this visualization, really see and believe it. Incorporate all of the senses: How does it feel, smell, tastes and sound? Think about all of the important aspects of your life and what they look like when this happens. What were some of details that surrounded getting there? Writing out your vision story is a very productive and powerful tool as it helps to make your dreams seem more real, brings your vision into focus in your present situation and triggers your subconscious into action.
• Identify blocks and fears... and believe! You have to really believe in yourself and your vision. It's not a matter of if you can, but when you can. Self-doubt is a form of negative thinking that will actually prevent your dreams from manifesting. Believing is receiving! The more you resonate with your fears, the more likely you will make them come true instead of allowing your real desires to manifest. For example, if you have a fear of public speaking and focus on all the things that could possibly go wrong before your speech -- don't be surprised if you fall flat on your face when you get on stage for your big moment. Literally! To avoid this, try noticing any internal resistance or self-doubt that comes up when you think about your desire and realize that both fears and desires exist only in the mind. It is best to identify any fears or roadblocks as soon as possible so you can accept them and move forward despite them. If the little voice of self-doubt in your mind is too loud to allow you to move forward or you are not sure what is holding you back, consider working with a business or life coach to help you work through it.
• You've got to work! You've set a positive intention; now focus your energy on its manifestation for the highest good. It's not magic, though. If you want it bad enough, you'll need to roll up your sleeves and put in the time and effort to make it happen. The more systematic you are in the execution stage, the better results you will see. Start setting goals and creating new daily habits to help inch you towards making your vision story a reality. Have an accountability system in place whether to yourself, friends and family, or to a coach. Remember to celebrate all of your small successes along the way. Having a vision is a great start and often referring back to it is very powerful. However, remember, "Vision without execution is hallucination." -- Thomas Edison. Work it!
• Trust and allow. Don't get tripped up in your wants and desires. Have faith and confidence that if/when it is meant to happen, that it will. Keep your eyes and mind open for clues in the universe that will tell you if you are on the right path, or if you might need to tweak your vision slightly (or vastly, even!). Remain living in the now, while you ever-so-loosely and delicately hold onto your dreams and allow them to unfold as they are meant to. If you are totally focused on what you want for your future, than you are focused on manifesting more of what you don't have. Trust and allow that things will play out as they are supposed to while you gently help to guide things along. There is perfection in everything that happens along the way. Enjoy the journey!

 

 

16 People Who Worked Incredibly Hard To Succeed

Article from Business Insider

16 People Who Worked Incredibly Hard To Succeed

Successful people in every field are often said to be "blessed with talent" or even just lucky.

But the truth is, many worked harder than the average person can even imagine.

From athletes like Michael Jordan to executives like Howard Schultz, these people are known for waking up early and working toward a goal while other people are still in bed, and staying later than everyone else too.

Old fashioned hard work. Anyone can do it. Let these people be an inspiration.

NBA legend Michael Jordan spent his off seasons taking hundreds of jump shots a day

Michael Jordan had prodigious physical gifts. But as his long time coach Phil Jackson writes, it was hard work that made him a legend. When Jordan first entered the league, his jump shot wasn't good enough. He spent his off season taking hundreds of jumpers a day until it was perfect.

In a piece at NBA.com, Jackson writes that Jordan's defining characteristic wasn't his talent, but having the humility to know he had to work constantly to be the best.   

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz continues to work from home even after putting in 13 hour days

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz must be a frequent consumer of his company's products to maintain his frenetic schedule. Since returning to turn around the company, he gets into the office by 6 in the morning and stays until 7.

Schultz continues talking to overseas employees even later at night from home. He goes into the office on Sundays and reads emails from his thousands of employees on Saturdays.

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban didn't take a vacation for seven years while starting his first business

Michael Seto

At first glance, the amazing success of Mavericks owner and entrepreneur Mark Cuban looks like a stroke of luck. He sold his first company at the peak of its value, and got into technology stocks at exactly the right time.

Cuban writes on his blog that it took an incredible amount of work to benefit from his luck. When starting his first company, he routinely stayed up until two in the morning reading about new software, and went seven years without a vacation. 

Phillies pitcher Roy Halladay's workouts are so intense, others can't make it halfway through them

Getty Images

Cy Young award winning pitcher Roy Halladay is one of the hardest working man in baseball. According to Sports Illustrated, he routinely puts in a 90 minute workout before his teammates make to the field.

His former pitching coach told SI that when other pitchers attempted one of his workouts, none of them could complete half of it. His pre-game preparation is so intense that he had a personal entrance card to his former team's training facilities.

GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt spent 24 years putting in hundred hour weeks

A 2005 Fortune article on GE CEO Immelt describes him as "The Bionic Manager". The article highlights his incredible work ethic, he worked 100 hour weeks for 24 years. Immelt strictly divides that time, devoting a specific portion of each day to deal with every part of his business.

All of that comes after a 5:30 A.M. workout where he's already reading the papers and watching CNBC. 

Apple CEO Tim Cook routinely begins emailing employees at 4:30 in the morning

Tim Cook

Business Insider

Steve Jobs left incredibly big shoes for Tim Cook to fill. However, the man got the top job for a reason. He's always been a workaholic, Fortune reports that he begins sending emails at 4:30 in the morning.

A profile in Gawker reveals that he's the first in the office and last to leave. He used to hold staff meetings on Sunday night in order to prepare for Monday. 

American Idol host Ryan Seacrest hosts a radio show from 5 to 10 A.M. and runs a production company while appearing seven days a week on E!

Seacrest told the New York Times that even as a young child,  his goal was to be a “a classic iconic broadcaster". He's moved towards that goal by taking on a preposterous workload.

In addition to hosting American Idol, Seacrest appears 7 days a week on E!, hosts a daily radio show from 5 to 10 A.M., appears on the Today show, runs a television production company, and recently received $300 million in private equity funding to acquire more businesses. 

Nissan and Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn flies more than 150,000 miles a year

Carlos Ghosn runs two of the world's largest automakers, which should tell you something about his work ethic. A profile in Forbes describes how Ghosn works more than 65 hours a week, spends 48 hours a month in the air, and flies more than 150,000 miles a year.

His turnaround of Nissan is the subject of many case studies. Within a month he deployed a system that completely changed ingrained practices, helping save a company many thought irredeemable.  

Hong Kong business magnate Li Ka-Shing became a factory general manager by age 19

One of the richest men in Asia and a dominant figure in Hong Kong's economy, Li Ka-Shing started outworking everybody as a teenager en route to building a $21 billion empire.  

By age 15 Ka-Shing had left school and was working in a plastics factory. He told Forbes how he quickly became a salesman, outsold everybody else, and became the factory's general manager by 19. In 1950, he started his own business and did almost everything, including the accounting, all by himself.

Venus and Serena Williams were up hitting tennis balls at 6 A.M. from the time they were 7 and 8 years old

The Williams sisters, who have dominated women's tennis for many years, were all but raised on the court.

From an extremely young age, their life was, as described to the New York Times "..get up, 6 o’clock in the morning, go to the tennis court, before school. After school, go to tennis..." The Williams family was built around propelling the two towards success in the sport.

Petrobras chief Maria Das Gracas Silva Foster's work ethic earned her the nickname "Caveirao", slang for the armored vehicles used by police in Brazil

The current head of Brazilian Oil Giant Petrobras spent her childhood in a favela collecting cans to pay for school. She started as an intern in 1978, but quickly became the company's first female head of field engineering.

Bloomberg reports that her tireless work ethic has earned her the nickname Caveirao, for the armored vehicles police use to clean up crime ridden Brazilian neighborhoods. 

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer routinely pulled all nighters and 130 hour work weeks while at Google

Newly minted Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is known for her incredible stamina and work schedule. She used to put in 130 hour weeks at Google, and told Joseph Walker that she managed that schedule by sleeping under her desk and being "strategic" about her showers. 

Even people critical of her management style acknowledge that she "will literally work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week." That paid off with one of the biggest jobs in technology.

Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant completely changed his shooting technique rather than stop playing after breaking a finger

Nobody in basketball drives their body harder than Kobe Bryant. A profile in GQ describes how he has changed his shooting technique repeatedly rather than take time for dislocated and broken fingers.

When growing up outside of Philadelphia, ESPN describes how Kobe would spend his free time endlessly practicing jump shots in the park. The Laker's staff finds him doing the same thing at their practice facility at all hours of the day and night.

JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon spends his weekends preparing to grill employees on Monday

Though tarnished lately by the London Whale scandal, Jamie Dimon has been one of the most successful bankers of the past few decades.

The New York Times reveals that Dimon spends his weekends working through piles of reading and putting together a list of questions with which to grill employees on Monday. Fortune reports that his life is spent almost entirely on work and family, his one hobby is listening to music. 

Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi worked the graveyard shift as a receptionist while putting herself through Yale.

Now of the most powerful and well known women in business, Pepsi chief Indra Nooyi worked midnight to 5 A.M. as a receptionist to earn money while getting her masters at Yale.

In an interview for a speakers series at Pepsi, she describes coming in to work every day at 7, rarely leaving before eight, taking home bags of mail to read overnight, and wishing there were 35 hours a day in order to do more work. She did all of this while raising two young daughters.

WB CEO Sir Martin Sorrell is a legendary workaholic whose employees can expect emails at any hour of the night

The CEO of advertising giant WBB is described by the Financial Times as a "notorious workaholic and micro manager." His typical workday begins at 6 A.M. and never seems to end.

A former client described sending Sir Martin a message while he was in a different time zone in the earliest hours of the morning. Sir Martin responded almost immediately.

 

 

Your sleeping position says a lot about you

Do you sleep like a log? Or are you more of a yearner, a freefaller or a foetal?

The position you choose while sleeping reveals a startling amount about your personality, according to body language expert Robert Phipps.

Phipps has identified four positions and says the foetal – most favoured by worriers – is by far the most common. More than half of us (58 percent) adopt it and sleep with knees up and head down. The more we curl up, the more comfort we’re seeking, he says.

The second most common position is the log (28 percent).

A straight body, with arms and legs by the side, apparently indicates stubbornness and they can wake up stiffer than when they went to sleep, says Mr Phipps.

The 25 percent of us that are a yearner – arms stretched out in front – are either chasing a dream or being chased. Yearners are their own worst critics says Phipps, always expecting great results. They wake up eager to face the challenges of the day.

Freefallers – face down, arms outstretched – make up 17 percent and feel they have little control over their life. Physically this is the least comfortable position.

Phipps’s survey asked people to record their most common sleeping positions, with some naming more than one.

He said: “A good night’s sleep sets you up for the following day and our sleeping positions can determine how we feel when we wake.”

The foetal position: Indicates a tendency to worry but also a conscientious nature

The yearning position: Sleeping this way indicates chasing a dream – or being chased

The log position: Suggests being set in your ways – and the need to break out of rigid thinking

The freefalling position: Such sleepers may feel they are not in control of their life. - Daily Mail