http://archive.aweber.com/rajesh-settyLiving a Life Beyond CodeThu, 15 Mar 2012 23:57:28 -0400http://archive.aweber.com/rajesh-setty/KB7.g/h/_Life_Beyond_Code_The_Unpaved.htm [Life Beyond Code] March 15, 2012 Hello and welcome: Over the last few years, I have had the privilege of teaching hundreds of aspiring entrepreneurs at the Founders Institute. Every session has been fulfilling to say the least for one simple reason that the people in the audience seriously want to make a difference in the world. With that in the background, they are hungry for actionable knowledge. The side benefit of teaching there has been tremendous as I get to build real long-term relationships with people who will one day change the world or help someone change the world in some significant way. I also have watched how some of the startups there have evolved and what struggles they go through to get their first customers. Getting first customers is not very easy especially for a first-time entrepreneur. The company has no credible history and there is no guarantee that the company will survive. If some customer is looking for reasons to not make a deal, they don't have to look hard. They will find many reasons right off the bat. Rather than just watching this phenomenon, we decided to do something about it. We started collecting real stories of how people got their first customers. That was the birth of The Unpaved Road. For some more background on the motivation for this project, please read the first post on the blog. Here are the stories so far: 1. The power of the follow up by Bernard Lauper 2. The 3P Mantra by Prabakaran Praba Murugaiah 3. The Accidental Client by Jeremy Epstein 4. Seeding the Market by Adam Peterson Please take a look and if you like what you see, please consider sharing. There is someone in your network trying hard to build their startup and they will benefit from reading these stories. Make someone's day on Twitter Our little project LoveThiz is slowly and steadily gaining traction. It is the fastest way to send a smile via Twitter. Take a few seconds to share your love, appreciation and gratitude to anyone on Twitter. Thanks for the help and once again, you might just make someone's day today. http://www.lovethiz.com Have a great week ahead! Warmly, Rajesh (facebook, blog, bio, twitter, thinkbook) Thu, 15 Mar 2012 23:57:28 -0400http://archive.aweber.com/rajesh-setty/G9Iow/h/_Life_Beyond_Code_The_amazing.htm [Life Beyond Code] March 1, 2012 Hello and welcome: It takes only a few minutes to come up with a good headline - be it a subject line for an email, a title for a blog post, a title for a video etc. That extra few minutes you think about the title is well worth the ROI you get from choosing the right headline. I did an experiment with my blog with this new blog post. The title was This book will transform your life I won't say much about anything else except to see that the chart below was the result of that blog post in a matter of minutes: Other blog posts you might have missed: 1. A positive spin 2. Uncomfortable Triggers 3. Important but Underrated 4. Free Upgrade 5. Is your Boss killing your ideas? For those in the bay area: I am helping Corp-Corp to put together a breakfast event called Trends, Technology and Talent for 2012 on March 8, 2012 (8am to 10am. Obviously, I am going to be there so if you plan to attend, please stop by to say Hi to me. How generous are you to share your love? Our little project LoveThiz is slowly and steadily gaining traction. It is the fastest way to send a smile via Twitter. Take a few seconds to share your love, appreciation and gratitude to anyone on Twitter. Thanks for the help and once again, you might just make someone's day today. http://www.lovethiz.com Have a great week ahead! Warmly, Rajesh (facebook, blog, bio, twitter, thinkbook) Thu, 01 Mar 2012 22:19:31 -0500http://archive.aweber.com/rajesh-setty/J9pkQ/h/_Life_Beyond_Code_Advice_on.htm [Life Beyond Code] Feb 20, 2012 Hello and welcome: I attended a conference once where a serial entrepreneur was sharing his advice on what works now. The people in the audience were employees from high tech companies who wanted to be entrepreneurs. The speaker shared a lot of things that were counterintuitive. Examples included: Don't form partnerships (waste of time) Don't outsource (teams offshore will be never as passionate as you are) and so on. The speaker was very passionate and also totally believed in what he was sharing. I am sure he shared everything that worked for him. Only problem? He generalized the specifics as if what worked for his specific situation was the general truth in the world. I do hope that everyone in the audience took the advice with care. I hope that they know that they were in a different life stage than where the speaker was at. So what works for the speaker may not work for them. The big time lag: The advice you read from many accomplished people everywhere generally comes with a time lag. They share what works now for them in the present circumstances and forget that they might have acted differently and used different approaches a few years ago. If you are reading that advice, always apply a time lag for that advice and adjust it to reflect for your current situation and capacity. Else you will be trying to do something that will work a few years from now when your situations and capacity are different. The Thinking Whenever you read any advice - think about it for a minute before accepting it as gospel. If there is one thing to be super careful about, it is sweeping generalizations - when people start telling you how the world really works, how customers really behave, THE process for hiring superstars etc. Remember that people tend to share their truth as the truth for this world. How generous are you to share your love? Our little project LoveThiz is slowly and steadily gaining traction. It is the fastest way to send a smile via Twitter. Take a few seconds to share your love, appreciation and gratitude to anyone on Twitter. Thanks for the help and once again, you might just make someone's day today. http://www.lovethiz.com Have a great week ahead! Warmly, Rajesh (facebook, blog, bio, twitter, thinkbook) Mon, 20 Feb 2012 09:19:18 -0500http://archive.aweber.com/rajesh-setty/7metA/h/To_be_loved_AND_to_know_why.htm It is great to be loved and appreciated. It is even better to know why you are being loved and appreciated. Do you know how many people love and appreciate you? Hopefully, it's a big enough number to bring a smile on your face. Of the people that love and appreciate you, do you know why do they do that? My guess is that you may have an idea about this, but you may not know it for sure. Most people that love and appreciate you don't come out openly and say why they love and appreciate you. There are many reasons for it but let's just agree that only a small percentage of your fans will openly appreciate and state the reason for why they appreciate you. If tomorrow all the people that love and appreciate you come out openly and say why they love and appreciate you, your world will instantly change. At the least, you will get an insight about what you should continue doing. You might even be surprised that people care about things that you yourself took for granted. How about this? Rather than asking the world to change, how about you making a small change in your life? How about you making a list of all the people that you love and appreciate and going and telling them why you love and appreciate them? Others are just like you - they want to be loved and appreciated and they want to know why they are loved and appreciated. Rather than just talking about it, I embarked on a project to help with this. The project is called LoveThiz and the the goal for the project is to make it easy to share your love and appreciation for someone on Twitter. The project was built by my friend Boris Glants and his team. With LoveThiz, you have only two things to enter: The twitter handle for the person you wish to express your love and appreciation. The reason why you love and appreciate them. Yes, there is a limit of 140 characters as LoveThiz will post your love and appreciation on Twitter. You might ask - why add another layer? Why not just post this on Twitter? Because there are 750 tweets posted per second and sooner than later (sooner, in most cases) what you posted will disappear in the noise. When you post something on LoveThiz, the system instantly creates a page for that person or brand on LoveThiz. For example, @LizStrauss has a page called lovethiz.com/lizstrauss. It got created the first time someone posted about Liz not the system. It takes less than ten seconds to post a note of appreciation and love to someone on LoveThiz.com. And, it will stay permanently on that person or brand's page. Soon, that person or brand gets feedback from across the world why they are being loved and appreciated. I request you to take a look at lovethiz.com and more importantly, go ahead and share your love and appreciation for someone over there. It will probably take you a few seconds only but it might make someone's day. Have a great week ahead. Warmly, Rajesh (facebook, blog, bio, twitter, thinkbook) Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:19:40 -0500http://archive.aweber.com/rajesh-setty/7jnOQ/h/The_Relentless_Manifesto_and.htm What would it take for you to do something meaningful this year? Many things, of course The foundational requirement is to be relentless. I am sure most of you who are subscribing to this newsletter are relentless, meaning you will keep on going. This is a manifesto that outlines 7 things that will help you be relentless. Here is the manifesto for your consideration The Relentless Manifesto My friend Ambal Balakrishnan (founder of ClickDocuments) was kind enough to create a Pllop based on this manifesto. You can access the Pllop here: The Relentless Manifesto Pllop Every worthwhile project comes with varying levels of resistance throughout the lifecycle of the project. If you can resist that resistance, you win. If you succumb to that resistance, you lose. The 30% Factor comes into play here. Please take a look: The 30% Factor Also, please be wary of your personal big bubble this year. Lastly, thanks to all of you who bought one or more ThinkBooks. I am happy to see a wonderful review of ThinkBook by Chuck Frey. Here is what Chuck wrote on his blog Innovation Tools: The ThinkBook notebook is an ideal creative companion. Have a great year ahead! Thank you for being a subscriber. If you like any of the articles above, please share it with people that you think will benefit. Warmly, Rajesh (facebook, blog, bio, twitter) Mon, 23 Jan 2012 03:06:32 -0500http://archive.aweber.com/rajesh-setty/53tHc/h/Happy_New_Year_2012_One.htm Hello There, A new year starts with a lot of hope for everyone. It is a trigger for lots of people make some sort of (positive) change. Whatever it is that you chose to do, I want to wish you all the success in that endeavor. Wish you and your families a happy and prosperous 2012. Three quick things and a request to consider 1. New Year Card Mini Saga: I posted a short mini saga called New Year Card. It's only 50 words so please take a few seconds to read it. The core message there is that sending a card is optional. Truly caring is not. http://www.rajeshsetty.com/2011/12/31/mini-saga-121-new-year-card/ 2. Metrics that matter: I have been using a one page checklist for the last three years with almost no change in the 11 metrics. I am not saying that it's right for everyone. You might get inspired to create your own such checklist after seeing this. You can download this for FREE here. No registration required for anything. http://www.rajeshsetty.com/2011/11/22/metrics-that-matter-for-2012-one-page-pdf/ 3. Give a thoughtful gift: The most thoughtful you can give and receive is an extension of one's canvas. This was the topic of my latest blog post for American Express Open Forum. It's about 800 words and it took my two weeks of thinking to write it. Hopefully you will find it valuable. http://www.openforum.com/articles/give-a-thoughtful-gift-extend-the-canvas One request to consider: I have been blessed to have several people in my life who extended my canvas until now. I am sure it's the same case with you. The fact is, you may not be in touch with all of them and you may not even have the contact details of several people who have made that significant impact. My request is to take a few minutes to thank those who made you who you are. If you have their contact details, reach out to them and thank them. If not, at least take a minute and wish them and their families well. There is power in positive thoughts and it will matter. Warmly Rajesh Cheers, Rajesh Raj (facebook, blog, bio, twitter) Sat, 31 Dec 2011 20:59:52 -0500http://archive.aweber.com/rajesh-setty/KG64s/h/Have_you_seen_the_ThinkBook_.htm Hello there, This is going to be a short email mainly because whatever I wanted to say about this is already on the website (link below) My latest book is called ThinkBook - it's a notebook and a business book combined in one. Think of it like a Moleskine notebook which is interspersed with insights every now and then. There are 30+ insights embedded within 192 pages. So there are enough insights and there is a lot more pages for you to write. The idea is that you have a notebook that you can carry but every now and then there is an inspirational message to light you up further. This is the first place I am announcing the book. It sells for $17.95 (after 10% discount) and what I have done is to offer flat shipping of $4.95 for up to 100 books. Obviously, I can't do this for a long time but for now, you are welcome to take advantage of it. There are many ways to use a ThinkBook. Some of them are: 1. For yourself 2. For your friends and family 3. For your employees 4. For your customers and partners as gifts You can read all about it and order at http://www.gothinkbook.com Thanks again for all your support and happy holidays! Cheers, Rajesh Raj (facebook, blog, bio, twitter) Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:58:03 -0500http://archive.aweber.com/rajesh-setty/66hRs/h/Telling_a_good_story_You.htm Hello there, Just like any other skill, telling a good story requires a lot of education and practice. There is generally no course on storytelling in schools and colleges, although what human being do day in and day out is to tell stories. I wrote a little piece about the art of storytelling on Quora and you can see it here: http://www.quora.com/How-does-one-become-a-better-storyteller/answer/Rajesh-Setty I love stories and I have loved it since I was able to start reading right around the age of four. I am very thankful to my parents who allowed me to read without putting any restrictions about how many or what kind of books I was reading. My own story about me getting into the art of writing stories is here: http://www.rajeshsetty.com/about/the-story-so-far/the-first-ten-years/ If stories are really powerful, why are very few good storytellers out there? Because, good storytelling goes to the background and the focus goes to the story. People get mesmerized by the story when a good one is told and probably forget to give enough credit to the storyteller. If you are already telling a good story, there are not many people who appreciate you for that skill. Their appreciation will come in the form of comments like That was a great story. The vice versa is true too. When you don't tell a good story, the storytelling part goes to the background and the people just don't like the story. It may not matter much if it is fiction but even in your work and your career, you are telling stories and the stakes are high. Amplify, or.. Good storytelling will amplify your stories. What is the opposite of good storytelling? Non-amplification? No. It is to become invisible. Either there is amplification that will get you a chance to be heard or you become invisible because there are other reasonable good storytellers who are vying for the mindshare of your audience. Pllop for Visual Storytelling I am always looking for tools that will help tell good stories. So, when I came across Pllop, I was fascinated by what I could do with it. It is a cloud-based service to tell visually rich stories. As a first step, we created a short story that will provide a sneak preview of my book THINKTweet. You can see that story here: http://www.pllop.com/14934 Things to notice: 1. Pllop is highly visual - it is like Slideshare on steroids. 2. Pllop is tablet-friendly. It provides easy way of navigating on an iPad or an Android based tablet 3. Pllop is social-friendly. On top of every Pllop, you see all the social media links to easily share Pllop. There is a FB social plug-in to encourage conversations on Facebook right from within Pllop. 4. Free Prize Inside: On the last page, there is a Facebook share feature. When you click and share, you will see a link to download the first 30 pages of the book for FREE. If you are interested in telling stories via Pllop platform, I will be happy to connect you to folks over there. It is not cheap but the for the value it delivers, it is not expensive either. Have a great weekend. Talk to you soon. Warmly, Raj (facebook, blog, bio, twitter) Sat, 10 Dec 2011 15:13:33 -0500http://archive.aweber.com/rajesh-setty/65cKM/h/Time_sensitive_On_becoming.htm Hello there: For those of you who were celebrating thanksgiving, hope you had a good holiday weekend. The latest blog post is titled On becoming small heroes This post is close to my heart. I meet a lot of ambitious people all the time. Many of them want to move from wherever they are to become big heroes. I am not talking about making big money but in terms of making a big impact to a large number of people. Some of them become obsessed about reaching there as quickly as possible - sometimes missing the intermediate (and important) step - becoming small heroes. Small heroes are those people who make a BIG impact to a small number of people. It is an essential (and already) fulfilling step on your way to achieving even bigger dreams. The blog post highlights five reflective questions that you can ask yourself to check your progress on becoming a small hero. Please take a look: On becoming small heroes Some help for your journey to become small heroes: This seems like a real cyber monday promotion. Only72 has put together an amazing package of resources that are discounted by 90%. I bought this package and I think I am covered for my ongoing education for the next three months (probably until end of March 2012) with this package. There are many good courses and the ones that caught my attention were: * Chris Guillebeau's Empire Building Kit * Jonathan Mead's Trailblazer self-study * Pam Slim and Desiree Adaway's Partnership Playbook and * Laura Roeder's Twitter Fame Please click below to find out more (affiliate link) Only72 Yearly Sale of Business Education ( until 12pm ET on December 1, 2011) Have a great week ahead! Warmly, Raj (facebook, blog, bio, twitter) Mon, 28 Nov 2011 19:40:33 -0500http://archive.aweber.com/rajesh-setty/PSflM/h/Why_MANY_smart_people_are_not.htm Hello there, First of all, happy holiday season to you and your family. I still remember the day - Feb 14, 2005. That was when I started blogging. It has been close to seven years now and I have 1687 blog posts as of today. A few days ago, a blog post titled Why MANY smart people are not social became the most popular blog post on my blog - by a wide margin. You can read the blog post here: http://www.rajeshsetty.com/2011/11/13/why-many-smart-people-are-not-social/ I want to give you the background about the blog post and tell you my analysis of why this became the most popular blog post. Hopefully the lessons I learned may be useful as you create your own blog posts. 1. Six weeks of Research The blog post is a short one but it took me about six weeks of research to come up with the conclusions. In my network, I have a lot of very smart people who are not very social. They are friendly, connected and belong to communities but not social the way others expected them to be. My research process was simple - ask close to two dozen of them for their reason. I collected all of them - probably about twenty reasons in all. Over a week, I reduced them down to seven reasons and posted a short paragraph for each reason. 2. A simple image I got several emails that people connected with the simple image that summed up the blog post - It was a 2 x 2 matrix with smartness on one axis and social on another axis. 3. The title with the right amount of mystery The title is short but has enough mystery within it. It asks a simple question that the reader himself might have asked especially if the reader is a smart but not very social person. Once the reader clicks, the post had to have some meat otherwise the reader would not engage and share with his or her network. The #1 item (6 weeks of research) took care of that need. 4. Connecting emotionally with the untold story Think about this for a minute. You are a smart person and you are not very social and you have a story for why you are that way. It is an untold story until now because nobody asked you for your reason. However, there were many people who asked you to become social. You want to scream out loud that there is no need for you to be social and you are fine just the way you are. If you then read the blog post and connected with one or more reasons, you were motivated a bit to share it with your network. 5. A glowing endorsement To top it all up, a glowing endorsement from one of my blogging heroes Om Malik sealed it all. http://gigaom.com/2011/11/19/7-stories-to-read-this-weekend-5/ Here is the blog post again and if you like it, kindly consider sharing with your network. Thanks for your support in advance http://www.rajeshsetty.com/2011/11/13/why-many-smart-people-are-not-social/ That's all for now. Talk to you soon. Warmly, Raj (facebook, blog, bio, twitter) Sun, 27 Nov 2011 11:45:33 -0500