Short Email Quotes

I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond! I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial! I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers. I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail. But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!

We email, Facebook, tweet and text with people who are going to spend eternity in either heaven or hell. Our lives are too short to waste on mere temporal conversations when massive eternal realities hang in the balance. Just as you and I have no guarantee that we will live through the day, the people around us are not guaranteed tomorrow either. So let's be intentional about sewing the threads of the gospel into the fabric of our conversations every day, knowing that it will not always be easy, yet believing that eternity will always be worth it.

Jordan, Attached, please find a copy of the schedule for our trip. Best Courtney." I was really proud of it. The email i mean. Because it was so short and cold.Of course, it took me and my friend Jocelyn about two hours to come up with the perfect wording, but Jordan doesn't know that.

This book was started during the first wave of COVID pandemic, when pictures of bodies loaded into refrigerated trucks were coming out of New York. It came about because an ICU nurse emailed us and asked us to post something, anything, because reading our work on her short break between grueling shifts kept her sane.

Lidewij, I believe Agustus Waters sent a few pages from a notebok to Peter Van Houten shortly before he (Augustus) died. It is very important to me that someone reads these pages. I want to read them, of course, but maybe they weren't written for me. Regardless, they must be read. They must be. Can you help? Your friend, Hazel Grace Lancaster "She responded late that afternoon." Dear Hazel, I did not know that Augustus had died. I am very sad to hear this news. He was such a very charismatic young man. I am so sorry, and so sad. I have not spoken to Peter since I resigned that day we met. It is very late at night here, but I am going over to his house first thing in the morning to find this letter and force him to read it. Mornings were his best time, usually. Your friend, Lidewij Vliegenthart p.s. I am bringing my boyfriend in case we have to physically retsrain Peter.

Marturano recommended something radical: do only one thing at a time. When you’re on the phone, be on the phone. When you’re in a meeting, be there. Set aside an hour to check your email, and then shut off your computer monitor and focus on the task at hand. Another tip: take short mindfulness breaks throughout the day. She called them “purposeful pauses.” So, for example, instead of fidgeting or tapping your fingers while your computer boots up, try to watch your breath for a few minutes. When driving, turn off the radio and feel your hands on the wheel. Or when walking between meetings, leave your phone in your pocket and just notice the sensations of your legs moving. “If I’m a corporate samurai,” I said, “I’d be a little worried about taking all these pauses that you recommend because I’d be thinking, ‘Well, my rivals aren’t pausing. They’re working all the time.’ ” “Yeah, but that assumes that those pauses aren’t helping you. Those pauses are the ways to make you a more clear thinker and for you to be more focused on what’s important.

Reading the e-mail was like getting an ice pick to the brain. I stared blankly at my computer, all higher mental functions short-circuited, and resisted the urge to punch the screen.

NO SHORTS or SANDAL!! This for your own protection. Tomorrow's boot camp will be something SPECIAL! Meet in front of the maintenance shed at the north end of the quad at 10 A.M! Latecomers will be left behind and this is a day you will not want to miss! - Adara - I roll my eyes. Besides her overuse of exclamation points and her tendency to yell, the idea that we're doing "something special" in camp tomorrow is not exciting. It's terrifying.

In short order, I became America’s foremost “irregardless” apologist. I recorded a short video for Merriam-Webster’s website refuting the notion that “irregardless” wasn’t a word; I took to Twitter and Facebook and booed naysayers who set “irregardless” up as the straw man for the demise of English. I continued to find evidence of the emphatic “irregardless” in all sorts of places—even in the oral arguments of a Supreme Court case. One incredulous e-mail response to my video continued to claim “irregardless” wasn’t a real word. “It’s a made-up word that made it into the dictionary through constant use!” the correspondent said, and I cackled gleefully before responding. Of course “irregardless” is a made-up word that was entered into the dictionary through constant use; that’s pretty much how this racket works. All words are made-up: Do you think we find them fully formed on the ocean floor, or mine for them in some remote part of Wales? I began telling correspondents that “irregardless” was much more complex than people thought, and it deserved a little respectful respite, even if it still was not part of Standard English. My mother was duly horrified. “Oh, Kory,” she tutted. “So much for that college education.” —

Google gets $59 billion, and you get free search and e-mail. A study published by the Wall Street Journal in advance of Facebook’s initial public offering estimated the value of each long-term Facebook user to be $80.95 to the company. Your friendships were worth sixty-two cents each and your profile page $1,800. A business Web page and its associated ad revenue were worth approximately $3.1 million to the social network. Viewed another way, Facebook’s billion-plus users, each dutifully typing in status updates, detailing his biography, and uploading photograph after photograph, have become the largest unpaid workforce in history. As a result of their free labor, Facebook has a market cap of $182 billion, and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has a personal net worth of $33 billion. What did you get out of the deal? As the computer scientist Jaron Lanier reminds us, a company such as Instagram—which Facebook bought in 2012—was not valued at $1 billion because its thirteen employees were so “extraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it.” Its inventory is personal data—yours and mine—which it sells over and over again to parties unknown around the world. In short, you’re a cheap date.

This person has hoped and dreamed and now it is really happening and this person can hardly believe it. But believing is not an issue here, the time for faith and fantasy is over, it is really really happening. It involves stepping forward and bowing. Possibly there is some kneeling, such as when one is knighted. One is almost never knighted. But this person may kneel and receive a tap on each shoulder with a sword. Or, more likely, this person will be in a car or a store or under a vinyl canopy when it happens. Or online or on the phone. It could be an e-mail re: your knighthood. Or a long, laughing, rambling phone message in which every person this person has ever known is talking on a speakerphone and they are all saying, You have passed the test, it was all just a test, we were only kidding, real life is so much better than that.

Paying attention matters in the smaller moments in everyday life, too: driving to work, short conversations by phone, clearing a few e-mails, cooking a quick meal, folding laundry. Pay attention and appreciate how full small moments can be. Find the special in the ordinary. That “stop and smell the roses” advice we’ve always heard may sound trite, but there’s truth there. It

Time blocking is transformational for salespeople. It changes everything. When you get disciplined at blocking your time and concentrating your power, you see a massive and profound impact on your productivity. You become incredibly efficient when you block your day into short chunks of time for specific activities. You get more accomplished in a shorter time with far better results.

Every week seems to bring another luxuriantly creamy envelope, the thickness of a letter-bomb, containing a complex invitation – a triumph of paper engineering – and a comprehensive dossier of phone numbers, email addresses, websites, how to get there, what to wear, where to buy the gifts. Country house hotels are being block-booked, great schools of salmon are being poached, vast marquees are appearing overnight like Bedouin tent cities. Silky grey morning suits and top hats are being hired and worn with an absolutely straight face, and the times are heady and golden for florists and caterers, string quartets and Ceilidh callers, ice sculptors and the makers of disposable cameras. Decent Motown cover-bands are limp with exhaustion. Churches are back in fashion, and these days the happy couple are travelling the short distance from the place of worship to the reception on open-topped London buses, in hot-air balloons, on the backs of matching white stallions, in micro-lite planes. A wedding requires immense reserves of love and commitment and time off work, not least from the guests. Confetti costs eight pounds a box. A bag of rice from the corner shop just won’t cut it anymore.

a short study break—five, ten, twenty minutes to check in on Facebook, respond to a few emails, check sports scores—is the most effective technique learning scientists know of to help you solve a problem when you’re stuck.

The work I do is not exactly respectable. But I want to explain how it works without any of the negatives associated with my infamous clients. I’ll show how I manipulated the media for a good cause. A friend of mine recently used some of my advice on trading up the chain for the benefit of the charity he runs. This friend needed to raise money to cover the costs of a community art project, and chose to do it through Kickstarter, the crowdsourced fund-raising platform. With just a few days’ work, he turned an obscure cause into a popular Internet meme and raised nearly ten thousand dollars to expand the charity internationally. Following my instructions, he made a YouTube video for the Kickstarter page showing off his charity’s work. Not a video of the charity’s best work, or even its most important work, but the work that exaggerated certain elements aimed at helping the video spread. (In this case, two or three examples in exotic locations that actually had the least amount of community benefit.) Next, he wrote a short article for a small local blog in Brooklyn and embedded the video. This site was chosen because its stories were often used or picked up by the New York section of the Huffington Post. As expected, the Huffington Post did bite, and ultimately featured the story as local news in both New York City and Los Angeles. Following my advice, he sent an e-mail from a fake address with these links to a reporter at CBS in Los Angeles, who then did a television piece on it—using mostly clips from my friend’s heavily edited video. In anticipation of all of this he’d been active on a channel of the social news site Reddit (where users vote on stories and topics they like) during the weeks leading up to his campaign launch in order to build up some connections on the site. When the CBS News piece came out and the video was up, he was ready to post it all on Reddit. It made the front page almost immediately. This score on Reddit (now bolstered by other press as well) put the story on the radar of what I call the major “cool stuff” blogs—sites like BoingBoing, Laughing Squid, FFFFOUND!, and others—since they get post ideas from Reddit. From this final burst of coverage, money began pouring in, as did volunteers, recognition, and new ideas. With no advertising budget, no publicist, and no experience, his little video did nearly a half million views, and funded his project for the next two years. It went from nothing to something. This may have all been for charity, but it still raises a critical question: What exactly happened? How was it so easy for him to manipulate the media, even for a good cause? He turned one exaggerated amateur video into a news story that was written about independently by dozens of outlets in dozens of markets and did millions of media impressions. It even registered nationally. He had created and then manipulated this attention entirely by himself.

In return for that help I have a free science fiction ebook short story, titled 'THE SQUAD', waiting for anyone who joins my email list. Also, find out when the next exciting release is available by joining the email list at comments@arsenex.com. I like feedback!

And she’d also found Logan again. Now he was her … what? New-old boyfriend? Lover? Skype buddy? Pen pal with benefits? Whatever his title, his e-mails filled her inbox. Sometimes he sent five a day, short and quipping. Other times he sent longer, more serious ones. She kept her tone light when she replied. That’d always been her MO—a joke, a jab. A way to deflect from what she was really feeling. A way to keep the nonstop ache of missing him from becoming too painful to survive. And honestly, what was there to say that would come close to what she felt? The moments they’d spent together before he’d shipped out on his latest naval tour had been the most peaceful she could remember—even with her anxiety about her dad. It’d been the first time she’d felt complete in a long time. And then, just like that, he was gone again.

Bezos is a fan of e-mail newsletters such as VSL.com, a daily assortment of cultural tidbits from the Web, and Cool Tools, a compendium of technology tips and product reviews written by Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired. Both e-mails are short, well written, and informative.

I read daily, not so much for the benefit of my writing, but because I am addicted to it. There is nothing in the world for me that compares to being lost in a really good novel. That said, reading is an absolute must if you want to write. It is a trite enough thing to say, but very true nonetheless. I cannot understand aspiring writers who email me for advice and freely admit that they read very little. I have learned something from every writer I have ever read. Sometimes I have done so consciously, picking up something about how to frame a scene, or seeing a new possibility with regards to structure, or interesting ways to write dialogue. Other times, I think, my collective reading experience affects my sensibilities and informs me in ways that I am not quite aware of, but in real ways that impact how I approach writing. The short of it is, as an aspiring writer, there is nothing as damaging to your credibility as saying that you don’t like to read

Molar pregnancies like Janet’s are indeed rare, but they do happen. Over the last decade, frustrated and worried women have emailed me, asking why their doctors won’t pay attention to their symptoms, telling them to just “wait it out.” I think this happens because obstetricians see so many situations, and most of the time, it works out the way they expect—the recovery may be short, medium, or long, but will not require intervention. But statistics like one in five hundred are meaningless if you are the one. I always tell women who can’t get through to their doctors to start looking for one whose office responsiveness matches her needs. Not every doctor and every patient are going to be a good fit.

In particular, interrogative e-mails like these generate an initial instinct to dash off the quickest possible response that will clear the message—temporarily—out of your inbox. A quick response will, in the short term, provide you with some minor relief because you’re bouncing the responsibility implied by the message off your court and back onto the sender’s. This relief, however, is short-lived, as this responsibility will continue to bounce back again and again, continually sapping your time and attention. I suggest, therefore, that the right strategy when faced with a question of this type is to pause a moment before replying and take the time to answer the following key prompt: What is the project represented by this message, and what is the most efficient (in terms of messages generated) process for bringing this project to a successful conclusion? Once you’ve answered this question for yourself, replace a quick response with one that takes the time to describe the process you identified, points out the current step, and emphasizes the step that comes next. I call this the process-centric approach to e-mail, and it’s designed to minimize both the number of e-mails you receive and the amount of mental clutter they generate.

Also consider the frustratingly common practice of forwarding an e-mail to one or more colleagues, labeled with a short open-ended interrogative, such as: “Thoughts?” These e-mails take the sender only a handful of seconds to write but can command many minutes (if not hours, in some cases) of time and attention from their recipients to work toward a coherent response. A little more care in crafting the message by the sender could reduce the overall time spent by all parties by a significant fraction. So

He hefts it out and sees that it is marked only with his name, and slowly opens it. Inside it is everything: every letter he had ever written Willem, every substantial e-mail printed out. There are birthday cards he'd given Willem. There are photographs of him, some of which he has never seen. There is the Artforum issue with 'Jude with Cigarette' on the cover. There is a card from Harold, written shortly after the adoption, thanking Willem for coming and for the gift. There is an article about him winning a prize in law school, which he certainly hadn't send Willem but someone clearly had. He hadn't needed to catalog his life after all - Willem had been doing it for him all along.

In the longer term, by bringing together enough data and enough computing power, the data giants could hack the deepest secrets of life, and then use this knowledge not just to make choices for us or manipulate us but also to reengineer organic life and create inorganic life-forms. Selling advertisements may be necessary to sustain the giants in the short term, but tech companies often evaluate apps, products, and other companies according to the data they harvest rather than according to the money they generate. A popular app may lack a business model and may even lose money in the short term, but as long as it sucks data, it could be worth billions.4 Even if you don’t know how to cash in on the data today, it is worth having it because it might hold the key to controlling and shaping life in the future. I don’t know for certain that the data giants explicitly think about this in such terms, but their actions indicate that they value the accumulation of data in terms beyond those of mere dollars and cents. Ordinary humans will find it very difficult to resist this process. At present, people are happy to give away their most valuable asset—their personal data—in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. It’s a bit like African and Native American tribes who unwittingly sold entire countries to European imperialists in exchange for colorful beads and cheap trinkets. If, later on, ordinary people decide to try to block the flow of data, they might find it increasingly difficult, especially as they might come to rely on the network for all their decisions, and even for their healthcare and physical survival.

My willingness to sacrifice much-needed rest and my prioritizing amusement or work over the basic needs of my body and the people around me (with whom I'm far more likely to be short-tempered after a night of little sleep) reveal that these good things—entertainment and work—have taken a place of ascendancy in my life. In the nitty-gritty of my daily life, repentance for idolatry may look as pedestrian as shutting off my email an hour earlier or resisting that alluring clickbait to go to bed. The truth is, I'm far more likely to give up sleep for entertainment that I am for prayer. When I turn on Hulu late at night I don't consciously think, "I value this episode of Parks and Rec more than my family, prayer, and my own body," But my habits reveal and shape what I love and what I value, whether I care to admit it or not.

Be brief, but do not make it painfully obvious that you like to keep things short and sweet. Keep your messages in the four to six sentence range. If a woman does not respond to your email immediately, make her wait an equal amount of time by delaying your response to her email. Doing this will make her think that you are not needy. Also, when she notices that you have read her email but not responded to it for a day or two, she will assume that you have many emails to respond to. In general, avoid complimenting women on their looks. That being said, it is okay to give exactly one superficial compliment as long as it is given in a very non-sexual way. For example, a simple, but effective first message to a woman could begin like this - Hi, you look lovely in your photographs. I noticed that …” Keep things light and fun by throwing in a joke

My hour with my phone off starts shortly after I get home from work. This is one of the hardest times of the day because my children are ramped up for my attention, but I’m still trying to come down from the workday. My habit is to get changed, make one final email check to make sure things are in order at the office—and if not, to tell someone that I’ll get back to them later that night—and then to turn it off and put it in my dresser drawer. It’s a weird feeling, almost like hiding a valuable under a mattress. You walk away but your mind stays on it. You can visualize it sitting there in the dark. But whether the boys and I are riding bikes to the park, initiating a royal rumble on the living room floor, or setting the table together, my presence is fundamentally different that hour of the day. I am with them. Whatever we’re doing, it is together.

Constant communication is not something that gets in the way of real work; it has instead become totally intertwined in how this work actually gets done—preventing easy efforts to reduce distractions through better habits or short-lived management stunts like email-free Fridays. Real improvement, it became clear, would require fundamental change to how we organize our professional efforts. It also became clear that these changes can’t come too soon: whereas email overload emerged as a fashionable annoyance in the early 2000s, it has recently advanced into a much more serious problem, reaching a saturation point for many in which their actual productive output gets squeezed into the early morning, or evenings and weekends, while their workdays devolve into Sisyphean battles against their inboxes—a uniquely misery-inducing approach to getting things done.

In the fall of 2000 I started getting calls and emails from people asking me to erase their memories. Karim Nader, Glenn Schafe, and I had recently published a paper in the journal Nature with a rather technical title, “Fear Memories Require Protein Synthesis in the Lateral Amygdala for Reconsolidation after Retrieval.”3 In this study we conditioned rats with a tone and shock and then later presented them with the tone alone after a drug that blocks protein synthesis had been infused in the lateral amygdala (LA), a key area of the amygdala where the tone-shock association is stored. When tested the following day, or at any time afterward, the rats behaved as though they had never been conditioned. The procedure, in other words, seemed to erase the memory that the tone was a signal of danger. Toward the end of the short piece, we proposed that it might be possible to use a technique like this (but without having to inject a drug directly into the amygdala) to dampen traumatic memory in people with PTSD.

A Note from Zibby: Hi! Thanks so much for coming by! I truly, truly hope that the thoughtful content my team and I produce daily helps you make the most of your (very limited!) time. I mean, if we don’t make time for what’s important, life will just pass us by in a blur of emails and to-do lists. And life is way too short for that. So let this programming enhance your life, not take it over. * Learn about a new book and then go read it. * Hear from an amazing author you’ve always loved and then attend their event. * Get some sex tips and actually try them out. * Receive writing advice from a bestselling pro and then write the essay or book you know you have in you. * Rethink weight loss and change what you eat or how you work out that day. * Message with someone you meet in our grief community over your shared loss. * Offer travel tips to someone who can use them. * Find a product you love or a gift that will delight someone. * Read a personal essay and feel deeply understood. * Connect, connect, connect. But we must find time to enjoy life, before our time runs out. So let’s outrun it while we can. Lace up, friends. Here we go. Warmly, Zibby

On November 3, 2015, the day after the Trump Organization transmitted the LOI, Sater emailed Cohen suggesting that the Trump Moscow project could be used to increase candidate Trump's chances at being elected, writing: Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process. . . . Michael, Putin gets on stage with Donald for a ribbon cutting for Trump Moscow, and Donald owns the republican nomination. And possibly beats Hillary and our boy is in.... We will manage this process better than anyone. You and I will get Donald and Vladimir on a stage together very shortly. That the game changer.327 Later that day, Sater followed up: Donald doesn't stare down, he negotiates and understands the economic issues and Putin only want to deal with a pragmatic leader, and a successful business man is a good candidate for someone who knows how to negotiate. "Business, politics, whatever it all is the same for someone who knows how to deal" I think I can get Putin to say that at the Trump Moscow press conference. If he says it we own this election. Americas most difficult adversary agreeing that Donald is a good guy to negotiate. . . . We can own this election. Michael my next steps are very sensitive with Putins very very close people, we can pull this off. Michael lets go. 2 boys from Brooklyn getting a USA president elected. This is good really good.328

On the other hand, some of the family’s impatience with the public is justified. When I use Federal Express, I accept as a condition of business that its standardized forms must be filled out in printed letters. An e-mail address off by a single character goes nowhere. Transposing two digits in a phone number gets me somebody speaking heatedly in Portuguese. Electronic media tell you instantly when you’ve made an error; with the post office, you have to wait. Haven’t we all at some point tested its humanity? I send mail to friends in Upper Molar, New York (they live in Upper Nyack), and expect a stranger to laugh and deliver it in forty-eight hours. More often than not, the stranger does. With its mission of universal service, the Postal Service is like an urban emergency room contractually obligated to accept every sore throat, pregnancy, and demented parent that comes its way. You may have to wait for hours in a dimly lit corridor. The staff may be short-tempered and dilatory. But eventually you will get treated. In the Central Post Office’s Nixie unit—where mail arrives that has been illegibly or incorrectly addressed—I see street numbers in the seventy thousands; impossible pairings of zip codes and streets; addresses without a name, without a street, without a city; addresses that consist of the description of a building; addresses written in water-based ink that rain has blurred. Skilled Nixie clerks study the orphans one at a time. Either they find a home for them or they apply that most expressive of postal markings, the vermilion finger of accusation that lays the blame squarely on you, the sender.

Well, my epic freedom moment was short-lived, because I realized my cell phone was dead. I walked down the road to a gas station and asked if I could use the phone. I called Tracy and told her where I was and asked her to pick me up. When Tracy arrived I hopped in the car and the very first thing I said to her was “I gotta get home. I have to print out some TV guides and I need to write a letter to some of the guys in there.” She started laughing and when she could compose herself enough to talk said, “My sisters and I all said we guarantee Noah is going to come out of jail with new friends. He’s going to be friends with everybody.” I got home and immediately wrote a letter to Michael Bolton. I put my email address at the bottom. I printed out TV guides. I printed out crossword puzzles. I even printed a couple of pages of jokes and riddles and whatever would be fun to read and do and folded them up and put them in an envelope. All that was left to do was to write the address, put a stamp on the envelope, and put it in the mailbox. I put the envelope in the car in between the seat and the center console to take to the post office. I must have been distracted or had to do something else because the envelope sat there for months. Every so often I would look at it and go, Oh crap, I haven’t sent that yet. And then at some point I spilled something on it so I knew I would never send it now. I threw it out. To this day I’m worried that one day I’m going to be at the gas station in line and hear a voice behind me say, “I’m Michael Bolton and you never sent me my damn TV guide. You’re just like the rest.” He’s going to shank me in my side and that will be the end of the Noah Galloway story.

GCHQ has traveled a long and winding road. That road stretches from the wooden huts of Bletchley Park, past the domes and dishes of the Cold War, and on towards what some suggest will be the omniscient state of the Brave New World. As we look to the future, the docile and passive state described by Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World is perhaps more appropriate analogy than the strictly totalitarian predictions offered by George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Bizarrely, many British citizens are quite content in this new climate of hyper-surveillance, since its their own lifestyle choices that helped to create 'wired world' - or even wish for it, for as we have seen, the new torrents of data have been been a source of endless trouble for the overstretched secret agencies. As Ken Macdonald rightly points out, the real drives of our wired world have been private companies looking for growth, and private individuals in search of luxury and convenience at the click of a mouse. The sigint agencies have merely been handed the impossible task of making an interconnected society perfectly secure and risk-free, against the background of a globalized world that presents many unprecedented threats, and now has a few boundaries or borders to protect us. Who, then, is to blame for the rapid intensification of electronic surveillance? Instinctively, many might reply Osama bin Laden, or perhaps Pablo Escobar. Others might respond that governments have used these villains as a convenient excuse to extend state control. At first glance, the massive growth of security, which includes includes not only eavesdropping but also biometric monitoring, face recognition, universal fingerprinting and the gathering of DNA, looks like a sad response to new kinds of miscreants. However, the sad reality is that the Brave New World that looms ahead of us is ultimately a reflection of ourselves. It is driven by technologies such as text messaging and customer loyalty cards that are free to accept or reject as we choose. The public debate on surveillance is often cast in terms of a trade-off between security and privacy. The truth is that luxury and convenience have been pre-eminent themes in the last decade, and we have given them a much higher priority than either security or privacy. We have all been embraced the world of surveillance with remarkable eagerness, surfing the Internet in a global search for a better bargain, better friends, even a better partner. GCHQ vast new circular headquarters is sometimes represented as a 'ring of power', exercising unparalleled levels of surveillance over citizens at home and abroad, collecting every email, every telephone and every instance of internet acces. It has even been asserted that GCHQ is engaged in nothing short of 'algorithmic warfare' as part of a battle for control of global communications. By contrast, the occupants of 'Celtenham's Doughnut' claim that in reality they are increasingly weak, having been left behind by the unstoppable electronic communications that they cannot hope to listen to, still less analyse or make sense of. In fact, the frightening truth is that no one is in control. No person, no intelligence agency and no government is steering the accelerating electronic processes that may eventually enslave us. Most of the devices that cause us to leave a continual digital trail of everything we think or do were not devised by the state, but are merely symptoms of modernity. GCHQ is simply a vast mirror, and it reflects the spirit of the age.

I struggle with an embarrassing affliction, one that as far as I know doesn’t have a website or support group despite its disabling effects on the lives of those of us who’ve somehow contracted it. I can’t remember exactly when I started noticing the symptoms—it’s just one of those things you learn to live with, I guess. You make adjustments. You hope people don’t notice. The irony, obviously, is having gone into a line of work in which this particular infirmity is most likely to stand out, like being a gimpy tango instructor or an acrophobic flight attendant. The affliction I’m speaking of is moral relativism, and you can imagine the catastrophic effects on a critic’s career if the thing were left to run its course unfettered or I had to rely on my own inner compass alone. To be honest, calling it moral relativism may dignify it too much; it’s more like moral wishy-washiness. Critics are supposed to have deeply felt moral outrage about things, be ready to pronounce on or condemn other people’s foibles and failures at a moment’s notice whenever an editor emails requesting twelve hundred words by the day after tomorrow. The severity of your condemnation is the measure of your intellectual seriousness (especially when it comes to other people’s literary or aesthetic failures, which, for our best critics, register as nothing short of moral turpitude in itself). That’s how critics make their reputations: having take-no-prisoners convictions and expressing them in brutal mots justes. You’d better be right there with that verdict or you’d better just shut the fuck up. But when it comes to moral turpitude and ethical lapses (which happen to be subjects I’ve written on frequently, perversely drawn to the topics likely to expose me at my most irresolute)—it’s like I’m shooting outrage blanks. There I sit, fingers poised on keyboard, one part of me (the ambitious, careerist part) itching to strike, but in my truest soul limply equivocal, particularly when it comes to the many lapses I suspect I’m capable of committing myself, from bad prose to adultery. Every once in a while I succeed in landing a feeble blow or two, but for the most part it’s the limp equivocator who rules the roost—contextualizing, identifying, dithering. And here’s another confession while I’m at it—wow, it feels good to finally come clean about it all. It’s that … once in a while, when I’m feeling especially jellylike, I’ve found myself loitering on the Internet in hopes of—this is embarrassing—cadging a bit of other people’s moral outrage (not exactly in short supply online) concerning whatever subject I’m supposed to be addressing. Sometimes you just need a little shot in the arm, you know? It’s not like I’d crib anyone’s actual sentences (though frankly I have a tough time getting as worked up about plagiarism as other people seem to get—that’s how deep this horrible affliction runs). No, it’s the tranquillity of their moral authority I’m hoping will rub off on me. I confess to having a bit of an online “thing,” for this reason, about New Republic editor-columnist Leon Wieseltier—as everyone knows, one of our leading critical voices and always in high dudgeon about something or other: never fearing to lambaste anyone no matter how far beneath him in the pecking order, never fearing for a moment, when he calls someone out for being preening or self-congratulatory, as he frequently does, that it might be true of himself as well. When I’m in the depths of soft-heartedness, a little dose of Leon is all I need to feel like clambering back on the horse of critical judgment and denouncing someone for something.

Starting a little over a decade ago, Target began building a vast data warehouse that assigned every shopper an identification code—known internally as the “Guest ID number”—that kept tabs on how each person shopped. When a customer used a Target-issued credit card, handed over a frequent-buyer tag at the register, redeemed a coupon that was mailed to their house, filled out a survey, mailed in a refund, phoned the customer help line, opened an email from Target, visited Target.com, or purchased anything online, the company’s computers took note. A record of each purchase was linked to that shopper’s Guest ID number along with information on everything else they’d ever bought. Also linked to that Guest ID number was demographic information that Target collected or purchased from other firms, including the shopper’s age, whether they were married and had kids, which part of town they lived in, how long it took them to drive to the store, an estimate of how much money they earned, if they’d moved recently, which websites they visited, the credit cards they carried in their wallet, and their home and mobile phone numbers. Target can purchase data that indicates a shopper’s ethnicity, their job history, what magazines they read, if they have ever declared bankruptcy, the year they bought (or lost) their house, where they went to college or graduate school, and whether they prefer certain brands of coffee, toilet paper, cereal, or applesauce. There are data peddlers such as InfiniGraph that “listen” to shoppers’ online conversations on message boards and Internet forums, and track which products people mention favorably. A firm named Rapleaf sells information on shoppers’ political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving, the number of cars they own, and whether they prefer religious news or deals on cigarettes. Other companies analyze photos that consumers post online, cataloging if they are obese or skinny, short or tall, hairy or bald, and what kinds of products they might want to buy as a result.

OBAMA WENT THROUGH STAGES. That first day, I was in multiple meetings where he tried to lift everyone’s spirits. That evening, he interrupted the senior staff meeting in Denis McDonough’s office and gave a version of the speech that I’d now heard three times as we all sat there at the table. He was the only one standing. It was both admirable and heartbreaking watching him take everything in stride, working—still—to lift people’s spirits. When he was done, I spoke first. “It says a lot about you,” I said, “that you’ve spent the whole day trying to buck the rest of us up.” People applauded. Obama looked down. On the Thursday after the election, he had a long, amiable meeting with Trump. It left him somewhat stupefied. Trump had repeatedly steered the conversation back to the size of his rallies, noting that he and Obama could draw big crowds but Hillary couldn’t. He’d expressed openness to Obama’s arguments about healthcare, the Iran deal, immigration. He’d asked for recommendations for staff. He’d praised Obama publicly when the press was there. Afterward, Obama called a few of us up to the Oval Office to recap. “I’m trying to place him,” he said, “in American history.” He told us Trump had been perfectly cordial, but he’d almost taken pride in not being attached to a firm position on anything. “He peddles bullshit. That character has always been a part of the American story,” I said. “You can see it right back to some of the characters in Huckleberry Finn.” Obama chuckled. “Maybe that’s the best we can hope for.” In breaks between meetings in the coming days, he expressed disbelief that the election had been lost. With unemployment at 5 percent. With the economy humming. With the Affordable Care Act working. With graduation rates up. With most of our troops back home. But then again, maybe that’s why Trump could win. People would never have voted for him in a crisis. He kept talking it out, trying on different theories. He chalked it up to multiple car crashes at once. There was the letter from Comey shortly before the election, reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email server. There was the steady release of Podesta emails from Wikileaks through October. There was a rabid right-wing propaganda machine and a mainstream press that gorged on the story of Hillary’s emails, feeding Trump’s narrative of corruption.

Cultivating loyalty is a tricky business. It requires maintaining a rigorous level of consistency while constantly adding newness and a little surprise—freshening the guest experience without changing its core identity.” Lifetime Network Value Concerns about brand fickleness in the new generation of customers can be troubling partly because the idea of lifetime customer value has been such a cornerstone of business for so long. But while you’re fretting over the occasional straying of a customer due to how easy it is to switch brands today, don’t overlook a more important positive change in today’s landscape: the extent to which social media and Internet reviews have amplified the reach of customers’ word-of-mouth. Never before have customers enjoyed such powerful platforms to share and broadcast their opinions of products and services. This is true today of every generation—even some Silent Generation customers share on Facebook and post reviews on TripAdvisor and Amazon. But millennials, thanks to their lifetime of technology use and their growing buying power, perhaps make the best, most active spokespeople a company can have. Boston Consulting Group, with grand understatement, says that “the vast majority” of millennials report socially sharing and promoting their brand preferences. Millennials are talking about your business when they’re considering making a purchase, awaiting assistance, trying something on, paying for it and when they get home. If, for example, you own a restaurant, the value of a single guest today goes further than the amount of the check. The added value comes from a process that Chef O’Connell calls competitive dining, the phenomenon of guests “comparing and rating dishes, photographing everything they eat, and tweeting and emailing the details of all their dining adventures.” It’s easy to underestimate the commercial power that today’s younger customers have, particularly when the network value of these buyers doesn’t immediately translate into sales. Be careful not to sell their potential short and let that assumption drive you headlong into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Remember that younger customers are experimenting right now as they begin to form preferences they may keep for a lifetime. And whether their proverbial Winstons will taste good to them in the future depends on what they taste like presently.

this reaction. This was on college campuses, exactly the kind of environment where I had expected curiosity, lively debate, and, yes, the thrill and energy of like-minded activists. Instead almost every campus audience I encountered bristled with anger and protest. I was accustomed to radical Muslim students from my experience as an activist and a politician in Holland. Any time I made a public speech, they would swarm to it in order to shout at me and rant in broken Dutch, in sentences so fractured you wondered how they qualified as students at all. On college campuses in the United States and Canada, by contrast, young and highly articulate people from the Muslim student associations would simply take over the debate. They would send e-mails of protest to the organizers beforehand, such as one (sent by a divinity student at Harvard) that protested that I did not “address anything of substance that actually affects Muslim women’s lives” and that I merely wanted to “trash” Islam. They would stick up posters and hand out pamphlets at the auditorium. Before I’d even stopped speaking they’d be lining up for the microphone, elbowing away all non-Muslims. They spoke in perfect English; they were mostly very well-mannered; and they appeared far better assimilated than their European immigrant counterparts. There were far fewer bearded young men in robes short enough to show their ankles, aping the tradition that says the Prophet’s companions dressed this way out of humility, and fewer girls in hideous black veils. In the United States a radical Muslim student might have a little goatee; a girl may wear a light, attractive headscarf. Their whole demeanor was far less threatening, but they were omnipresent. Some of them would begin by saying how sorry they were for all my terrible suffering, but they would then add that these so-called traumas of mine were aberrant, a “cultural thing,” nothing to do with Islam. In blaming Islam for the oppression of women, they said, I was vilifying them personally, as Muslims. I had failed to understand that Islam is a religion of peace, that the Prophet treated women very well. Several times I was informed that attacking Islam only serves the purpose of something called “colonial feminism,” which in itself was allegedly a pretext for the war on terror and the evil designs of the U.S. government. I was invited to one college to speak as part of a series of

Twenty years? No kidding: twenty years? It’s hard to believe. Twenty years ago, I was—well, I was much younger. My parents were still alive. Two of my grandchildren had not yet been born, and another one, now in college, was an infant. Twenty years ago I didn’t own a cell phone. I didn’t know what quinoa was and I doubt if I had ever tasted kale. There had recently been a war. Now we refer to that one as the First Gulf War, but back then, mercifully, we didn’t know there would be another. Maybe a lot of us weren’t even thinking about the future then. But I was. And I’m a writer. I wrote The Giver on a big machine that had recently taken the place of my much-loved typewriter, and after I printed the pages, very noisily, I had to tear them apart, one by one, at the perforated edges. (When I referred to it as my computer, someone more knowledgeable pointed out that my machine was not a computer. It was a dedicated word processor. “Oh, okay then,” I said, as if I understood the difference.) As I carefully separated those two hundred or so pages, I glanced again at the words on them. I could see that I had written a complete book. It had all the elements of the seventeen or so books I had written before, the same things students of writing list on school quizzes: characters, plot, setting, tension, climax. (Though I didn’t reply as he had hoped to a student who emailed me some years later with the request “Please list all the similes and metaphors in The Giver,” I’m sure it contained those as well.) I had typed THE END after the intentionally ambiguous final paragraphs. But I was aware that this book was different from the many I had already written. My editor, when I gave him the manuscript, realized the same thing. If I had drawn a cartoon of him reading those pages, it would have had a text balloon over his head. The text would have said, simply: Gulp. But that was twenty years ago. If I had written The Giver this year, there would have been no gulp. Maybe a yawn, at most. Ho-hum. In so many recent dystopian novels (and there are exactly that: so many), societies battle and characters die hideously and whole civilizations crumble. None of that in The Giver. It was introspective. Quiet. Short on action. “Introspective, quiet, and short on action” translates to “tough to film.” Katniss Everdeen gets to kill off countless adolescent competitors in various ways during The Hunger Games; that’s exciting movie fare. It sells popcorn. Jonas, riding a bike and musing about his future? Not so much. Although the film rights to The Giver were snapped up early on, it moved forward in spurts and stops for years, as screenplay after screenplay—none of them by me—was

Once we assembled the entire package, Mike named it Netscape SuiteSpot, as it would be the “suite” that displaced Microsoft’s BackOffice. We lined everything up for a major launch on March 5, 1996, in New York. Then, just two weeks before the launch, Marc, without telling Mike or me, revealed the entire strategy to the publication Computer Reseller News. I was livid. I immediately sent him a short email: To: Marc Andreessen Cc: Mike Homer From: Ben Horowitz Subject : Launch I guess we’re not going to wait until the 5th to launch the strategy. — Ben Within fifteen minutes, I received the following reply. To: Ben Horowitz Cc: Mike Homer, Jim Barksdale (CEO), Jim Clark (Chairman) From: Marc Andreessen Subject: Re: Launch Apparently you do not understand how serious the situation is. We are getting killed killed killed out there. Our current product is radically worse than the competition. We’ve had nothing to say for months. As a result, we’ve lost over $3B in market capitalization. We are now in danger of losing the entire company and it’s all server product management’s fault. Next time do the fucking interview yourself. Fuck you, Marc I received this email the same day that Marc appeared barefoot and sitting on a throne on the cover of Time magazine. When I first saw the cover, I felt thrilled. I had never met anyone in my life who had been on the cover of Time. Then I felt sick. I brought both the magazine and the email home to Felicia to get a second opinion. I was very worried. I was twenty-nine years old, had a wife and three children, and needed my job. She looked at the email and the magazine cover and said, “You need to start looking for a job right away.” In the end, I didn’t get fired and over the next two years, SuiteSpot grew from nothing to a $400 million a year business. More shocking, Marc and I eventually became friends; we’ve been friends and business partners ever since. People often ask me how we’ve managed to work effectively across three companies over eighteen years. Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship. With Marc and me, even after eighteen years, he upsets me almost every day by finding something wrong in my thinking, and I do the same for him. It works.

And don’t just email them once.  Keep them up to date, wanting more.  Give new tidbits every 1-2 weeks leading up to the launch, then email them the day before launch, 3 days into the campaign, one week into the campaign, 2 weeks and with one week and 48 hours left.  Always provide updated information and a call to action. Short and sweet and frequent.

in “Wyrd Sisters was plagiarized from Shakespeare.” That was a book of mine and, yes, well, it certainly does add to the enjoyment if you’ve heard of a certain Scottish play and … er … where do I start?) Now add to this the growth of strange ideas about copyright. At one end of the spectrum I get nervous letters asking “Will it be all right if I name my cat after one of your characters?” At the other are the e-mails like: “I enjoyed the story so much that I’ve scanned it in and put it on my Web page … hope you don’t mind.” Copyright is either thought to exist in every single word, or not at all. In short, I began to worry, in this overheated atmosphere, about what would happen if I used a story line that a fan had already posted on the Net or on some fan-fiction Web page.

BUILDING RENEWAL INTO YOUR WORKDAY – Tony Schwartz Zeke is a creative director at a large agency. The workday he described when we first met was typical of the managers and leaders I meet in my travels. After six or six and a half hours of sleep—which never felt like enough—Zeke’s alarm went off at 5:30 a.m. each morning. His first move was to take his iPhone off the night table and check his e-mail. He told himself he did this in case something urgent had come in overnight, but the truth was he just couldn’t resist. Zeke tried to get to the gym at least two times a week, but he traveled frequently, and at home he was often just too tired to work out. Once he got to work—around 7:30 a.m. most days—Zeke grabbed a cup of coffee, sat down at his desk, and checked his e-mail again. By then, twenty-five or more new messages were typically waiting in his in-box. If he didn’t have an early meeting, he might be online for an hour or more without once looking up. Zeke’s days were mostly about meetings. They were usually scheduled one after the other with no time in between. As a result, he would race off to the next meeting without digesting what he’d just taken in at the last one. Lunch was something Zeke squeezed in. He usually brought food back to his desk from the cafeteria and worked while he ate. Around two or three in the afternoon, depending on how much sleep he’d gotten the previous night, Zeke began to feel himself fading. Given his company’s culture, taking even a short nap wasn’t an option. Instead, for a quick hit of energy, he found himself succumbing to a piece of someone’s leftover birthday cake, or running to the vending machine for a Snickers bar. With so many urgent demands, Zeke tended to put off any intensive, challenging work for later. By the end of the day, however, he rarely had the energy to get to it. Even so, he found it difficult to leave work with so much unfinished business. By the time he finally did, usually around 7:30 or 8 p.m., he was pretty much running on empty. After dinner, Zeke tried to get to some of the work he had put off earlier in the day. Much of the time, he simply ended up returning to e-mail or playing games online. Either way, he typically stayed up later than he knew he should. How closely does this match your experience? To the extent that it does resonate, how did this happen? Most important, can you imagine working the way you do now for the next ten or twenty years? YOUR CAPACITY IS LIMITED The challenge is that the demand in our lives increasingly exceeds our capacity.

Here are eight tips for writing effective cover letters.   Address the cover letter to a specific person, ensuring the correct name, title, company, and address. This shows respect for the person you are sending the résumé to. “To Whom It May Concern” salutations should be used only if you can’t determine the name of the hiring person or the company (for instance, when responding to a blind ad). If you were referred by someone, be sure this is included in the first sentence of the cover letter: “Jennifer Wells suggested I contact you in regard to an accounts receivable position you have open …” It’s an attention grabber. If asked to include salary history or requirements, you must address this or risk being disqualified. Provide a healthy range, such as “Over the past five years I have earned between $35,000 and $48,000. However, I am open to any reasonable offer consistent with my ability to produce results and meet your performance expectations.” If asked for salary requirements, use the same strategy: “I am aware that the salary range for a loss prevention manager in the Houston area averages between $75,000 and $110,000. Given my experience and, most importantly, my ability to make significant contributions to your company, I would hope to be on the upper end of this scale.” If you are sending the résumé out electronically, the cover letter can be inserted as the e-mail itself; just attach your résumé. If you prefer that your cover letter is the first page of the attachment, that’s fine. But the general guideline is not to attach multiple files. Make it easy on the hiring manager and send only one attachment or file to open (unless you have a good reason to do otherwise). Do not rehash what is on the résumé. This is disrespectful of the reader’s time. If you have done a good job with your résumé, you want the cover letter to quickly entice the hiring manager to read your résumé. Cover letters should not be preachy. Sales managers know that sales are the heartbeat of any company; you don’t have to lecture them on this. Nurse supervisors know the importance of compassionate patient care; you don’t have to tell them what they already know. Keep the letter short and concise. The cover letter is not the place to preach or teach. It’s the place to invite recipients to read your résumé! Finally, the four most important words on the cover letter are “I respect your time.” The following cover letter is a sample template to use in these challenging and troubled times. Notice the first four words of the second paragraph.

Online-Utility.org

The only way to keep up with all of this work was to do what SpaceX had promised from the beginning: operate in the spirit of a Silicon Valley start-up. Musk was always looking for brainy engineers who had not just done well at school but had done something exceptional with their talents. When he found someone good, Musk was relentless in courting him or her to come to SpaceX. Bryan Gardner, for example, first met Musk at a space rave in the hangars at the Mojave airport and a short while later started talking about a job. Gardner was having some of his academic work sponsored by Northrop Grumman. “Elon said, ‘We’ll buy them out,’” Gardner said. “So, I e-mailed him my resume at two thirty A.M., and he replied back in thirty minutes addressing everything I put in there point by point. He said, ‘When you interview make sure you can talk concretely about what you do rather than use buzzwords.’ It floored me that he would take the time to do this.

Eric was listening to the managers, who were doing their old-school best to control the flow of information upward (the regurgitation and parsing technique works both ways, as any red-blooded middle manager worth his weight in plausible deniability knows full well). But Larry was listening to the engineers—not directly but via a smart little tool he had implemented called “snippets.” Snippets are like weekly status reports that cover a person’s most important activities for a week, but in a short, pithy format, so they can be written in just a few minutes or compiled (in a doc or draft email) as the week goes on. There is no set format, but a good set of snippets includes the most important activities and achievements of the week and quickly conveys what the person is working on right now, from cryptic (“SMB Framework,” “10% list”) to mundane (“completed quarterly performance reviews,” “started family vacation”). Like OKRs, they are shared with everyone. Snippets are posted on Moma, where anyone can see anyone else’s, and for years Larry received a weekly compendium of the snippets from engineering and product leads. That way he always could get at the truth.

I felt super-frustrated. We’d hired all these talented people and were spending tons of money, but we weren’t going any faster. Things came to a head over a top-priority marketing OKR for personalized emails with targeted content. The objective was well constructed: We wanted to drive a certain minimum number of monthly active users to our blog. One important key result was to increase our click-through rate from emails. The catch was that no one in marketing had thought to inform engineering, which had already set its own priorities that quarter. Without buy-in from the engineers, the OKR was doomed before it started. Even worse, Albert and I didn’t find out it was doomed until our quarterly postmortem. (The project got done a quarter late.) That was our wake-up call, when we saw the need for more alignment between teams. Our OKRs were well crafted, but implementation fell short. When departments counted on one another for crucial support, we failed to make the dependency explicit. Coordination was hit-and-miss, with deadlines blown on a regular basis. We had no shortage of objectives, but our teams kept wandering away from one another. The following year, we tried to fix the problem with periodic integration meetings for the executive team. Each quarter our department heads presented their goals and identified dependencies. No one left the room until we’d answered some basic questions: Are we meeting everyone’s needs for buy-in? Is a team overstretched? If so, how can we make their objectives more realistic?

•Compliment at least one person every day. Maybe you begin the day by sending a short email or text telling someone why you appreciate them. “Just wanted to thank you for being a great friend.” Or “I appreciated your call yesterday. Thanks for being

It’s easy to argue over the intent of the written word. A short email can easily be misinterpreted. A text even more so. This, however, there’s something real about it.

What to read next? Hm…well, if you want more Carrie Jo, check out the Idlewood books. She’s at a new house, and there are heartbreaking child ghosts that need her help, but be warned, you’ll love them too. Most of them, anyway. I have also completed a historical fiction series about Queen Nefertiti. It’s called the Desert Queen series, and I’m very happy with it. If you fancy a bit of adventure in ancient Egypt, check it out. The first book in that series, The Tale of Nefret, is on Kindle. I also have a spooky plantation series called Sugar Hill. There are five books in that one: The Wife of the Left Hand, The Ramparts, and Blood by Candlelight, The Starlight Ball, and His Lovely Garden. I can’t wait to introduce you to the Dufresne family and take you through their plantation, Sugar Hill. Like Seven Sisters, the series will be chock-full of Southern folklore and historical places. Sugar Hill is like Gone With the Wind, but with ghosts! Thanks again for staying with me through this series. I appreciate all your kind words, the reviews, and the emails. Don’t forget to sign up for my mailing list or follow me on Amazon or BookBub so you can get the newest release information right in your inbox. I’ve got a website too that I visit infrequently. Check it out. See y’all soon. M.L. Bullock Christmas at Seven Sisters Three Short Stories from the Seven Sisters Series By M.L.

If you have a list of numbers that you would like your fax marketing company to broadcast to, they will. It's that easy. Much of the time you can even do it throughemail, but either way, you all of them the ad and the list and they'll take care of it. The problem is, people can make a few mistakes when typing up long listsof numbers or possibly have a customer listed more than once, so their fax number should make it onto the list several times. Shredding cause some problemsonce the ad starts going out, especially when short term installment loan fax machine is overrun by multiple ads coming a person. Fortunately for businesstoday, the fax marketing industry has set up, in the majority of cases, a screening process that will guarantee that no number on your list gets more thanone fax, even in the event you listed it several times. Sure - you precisely how many leads (opt-ins) each promotion generates immediately the. you can precisely how much each lead spend you . an individual alsocan know -- generally -- simply how much your average lead will expend with you over the time. Faster Moolah: Unlike the U.S. Postal Service which takes two fax list marketing to 3 weeks to provide bulk mail, the Internet lets me deliver my sales messageand begin generating sales instantly. If to be able to pictures, or marketing plans written on a table napkin and do not want to have supply file for it, then you just take a picture associated with in yourdigital camera or phone camera that has it transferred to your computer. It is then ready for sending as an internet based fax list marketing. Now, since it's outright develop a call to action straight away, several to convince first, so lets buy fax marketing get started. Initially, you might need to pique yourprospect's interest. You'll be able to do this visually, a few eye catching design. You will do it literally start by making an appealing offer, or possibly by spellingout an edge of goods. Better still, you may make use of both approaches. Twitter.com is really a source that can announce publishing a paper, changes to your website, good books and articles, workshops that you could be offer, etc. Manyoffer free things like recordings, articles, etc. It's another strategy network with the other professionals. It's popularity is exploding. Most business people still consider direct mail to be one of the extremely credible methods in contact with them. This makes marketing your services and productswith a mailing list a choice. Be an important person - Show for ones customers that you're made of flesh and blood. Add your complete name, phone number, fax, email address contact infoand business address showing that you might be a real guy with the business! faxmarketing.club/

In the year 2000, it was standard practice for the successful chief executive officer of a corporation to shuck his wife of two to three decades’ standing for the simple reason that her subcutaneous packing was deteriorating, her shoulders and upper back were thickening like a shot-putter’s—in short, she was no longer sexy. Once he set up the old wife in a needlepoint shop where she could sell yarn to her friends, he was free to take on a new wife, a “trophy wife,” preferably a woman in her twenties, and preferably blond, as in an expression from that time, a “lemon tart.” What was the downside? Was the new couple considered radioactive socially? Did people talk sotto voce, behind the hand, when the tainted pair came by? Not for a moment. All that happened was that everybody got on the cell phone or the Internet and rang up or E-mailed one another to find out the spelling of the new wife’s first name, because it was always some name like Serena and nobody was sure how to spell it.

Nora’s e-mailed response was, “Oh, Kathleen . . . How could I ever say no to you—and yet I have.

Podesta had initially wanted to release all of Hillary’s State Department correspondence, writing to Clinton consigliere Cheryl Mills shortly after the story broke on March 2 that “we are going to have to dump all those emails so better to do so sooner than later.” But that would have had disastrous consequences. Whether she knew it or not, her e-mail held classified material. If she published the messages, she would expose herself to possible prosecution. The debate over how to react was just one reason why Hillary was slow to get out in front of the story.

Anyone can follow up by pushing calls and emails, but follow-through is the next level. It’s simple: do what you say you’re going to do. If you tell a client you’ll do some research and get back to him, do it. If you say you will answer your emails within twelve hours, do it. If you make a promise to yourself that you’re going to meet three new people every day, don’t sell yourself short. Do it.

E-mail is a whole new way of being friends with people: intimate but not, chatty but not, communicative but not; in short, friends but not. What a breakthrough.

Constant communication is not something that gets in the way of real work; it has instead become totally intertwined in how this work actually gets done—preventing easy efforts to reduce distractions through better habits or short-lived management stunts like email-free Fridays.

As has been the case far too often in the Obama administration, which may go down as the least transparent administration in history, the IRS refused to respond to our FOIA requests. Judicial Watch was forced to sue the IRS in federal court in October 2013, shortly after Lois Lerner had “retired” to avoid the consequences of her actions. Judicial Watch’s efforts through these FOIA requests and subsequent litigation led to the discovery that in addition to targeting conservatives at the IRS, Lois Lerner sent confidential taxpayer information to attorneys at the Federal Election Commission, which enforces federal campaign finance rules, in violation of federal law. Email communications revealed that Lerner, who formerly worked at the Federal Election Commission (FEC), sent extensive materials on conservative organizations—the American Issues Project and Citizens for the Republic—to the FEC, including detailed confidential information, after inquiries from the FEC attorneys. She disclosed this information in spite of Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code, which bars the IRS from sending such information to anyone, including other federal agencies. It also turned out that the FEC attorneys were acting without authority to make such an inquiry, because the commissioners who run the agency had never approved an investigation. The emails discovered by Judicial Watch provided a disturbing window into the activities of two out-of-control federal agencies, whose employees, because of their political bias, were trying to target conservative organizations.

Win was still in hiding. Myron had only gotten one message from him in the past six weeks—an e-mail with a short, simple message: You are in my heart. But Yu and Mee are in my pants. Win. Terese,

I was just beginning to wonder how long I would have to wait when finally a guard sauntered up and said, “Galloway, get your stuff, get your bed.” I ran to my cell to get my stuff and I grabbed the toothpaste. The toothpaste was in this clear tube and was clear like hair gel. It had a muted, watered-down mint flavor. Everything you got in jail was made specifically to be as safe as can be. One of the guys told me, “Don’t ever take anything from being locked up. It’s bad luck.” But I told myself, You ain’t coming back. You ain’t getting locked up again, so you’re taking a souvenir. I grabbed that little clear tube and I put it in my pocket and walked out of my cell. As I came out, all of the guys from my cellblock were lined up to say goodbye. The guard had this look on his face like, “What is going on?” I walked down the line shaking each man’s hands. They all told me they were glad they had met me. They told me that I made an impact on them. One guy said, “You came in here and you’ve been to war and back, you’re missing two limbs, but you still had a smile on your face the whole time. You’ve gone through so much and you are able to keep smiling. That motivates me.” I was really touched. I kept going down the line, shaking hands and saying my farewells, and finally I got to Michael Bolton. He said, “Hey, man, I’ve asked people this before and they never follow through with it but I believe you will. Could you print out some TV guides? Because you know we just tell them the number. We don’t know what’s on at what time, what station.” I said, “Yeah, man, I’ll do that.” And I looked around to the other guys and asked, “Does anybody want any crossword puzzles or anything like that?” They all said that would be awesome. “All right, Michael, I’ve got your address so I’m gonna send it to you. And listen, man, I’m gonna give you my email address. When you get out shoot me an email. I want to stay in touch and see how things are going.” I turned to the guard who was still baffled by what was happening and said, “I’m ready.” He rolled his eyes and opened the door. We walked out and they handed me my clothes. I pulled off the orange jumpsuit and tossed it. I changed back into my clothes. I signed everything I had to sign, got some paperwork to take with me, and walked out a free man again. Well, my epic freedom moment was short-lived, because I realized my cell phone was dead. I walked down the road to a gas station and asked if I could use the phone. I called Tracy and told her where I was and asked her to pick me up. When Tracy arrived I hopped in the car and the very first thing I said to her was “I gotta get home. I have to print out some TV guides and I need to write a letter to some of the guys in there.” She started laughing and when she could compose herself enough to talk said, “My sisters and I all said we guarantee Noah is going to come out of jail with new friends. He’s going to be friends with everybody.

I don’t believe in texting while dining, sending one-word e-mails in lieu of formal thank-you cards, wearing shorts to the theater, or settling for any of the modern trends that favor comfort over politeness, ease over style. Manners are simply about asking yourself, What’s the right thing to do?

brought by the U.S. Department of Justice against Cioffi and Tannin sought to prove that the two men had knowingly deceived their investors, overlooking the possibility that they simply had no idea what they were doing, and failed to grasp the real risk of a triple-A-rated subprime-backed CDO. The case was weak, and turned on a couple of e-mails obviously ripped from context. A member of the jury that voted to acquit the Bear Stearns subprime bond traders told Bloomberg News afterward not only that she thought they were innocent as charged but that she would happily

She lives here now, Mom. With me. And it won’t be long before you can meet her, but there’s one more thing. During that short time we knew each other in Grants Pass, we had a little…ah, a little…blessing, that’s what it was. We had a blessing. Well, actually a couple of blessings. On the way. Soon.” Dead silence answered him. “It came as a shock to poor Abby at first, and I admit—I was pretty surprised, but we’re very happy about it. Happy and excited.” Silence. It stretched out. “Mom? Twins. We know one is a boy, but the other one is hiding.” Again, a vacuum. Then he heard his mother shriek, “Edward! Come here! Cameron got some girl pregnant!” “Mom! Just have a little sip of that wine!” “I think it’s going to take something a little stronger! Twins? You got some girl pregnant with twins?” He couldn’t help it—he laughed. “Mom,” he said. “She’s not some girl—she’s not a girl. Her name is Abby and she’s thirty-one.” “Cameron, how in the world—” “Now, Mother, I’m not going to explain. You’ll just have to trust me, I’ve never been careless and neither has Abby. So—here’s the deal. She’s probably going to go early, though the babies are due the second of July. Anytime, Mom. Abby wants to have her mother come as soon as they’re delivered, so I hope you can be a little patient. Twins is a pretty big—” “Cameron! Are you married?” “Not yet, Mom. Even though we’re in this together, completely, we just haven’t had time to get married. That will come—we’ll take care of the details. No point in rushing it now. Besides, we’re not going to be fooling anybody, including the great-grandmothers and great-aunt Jean, by rushing into it right now. They’re nearly here.” “Dear God in heaven,” his mother said. And in the background he could hear his father, Ed, saying, “What? What? What?” “I’ll call you the moment they’re born. Tomorrow, when I’m at the clinic, I’ll get Mel to take a picture of me and Abby and e-mail it to you. By then you will have calmed down.” “But, Cameron,” she said, “you haven’t given me time to knit anything!” He laughed again. “Well, get started. Abby’s really ready to unload. She just has to make it a couple more weeks to be completely safe.” “Oh, dear God in heaven,” she muttered.

My favourite quotes, Part Two -- from Michael Connelly's "Harry Bosch" series The Black Box On Bosch’s first call to Henrik, the twin brother of Anneke - Henrik: "I am happy to talk now. Please, go ahead.” “Thank you. I, uh, first want to say as I said in my email that the investigation of your sister’s death is high priority. I am actively working on it. Though it was twenty years ago, I’m sure your sister’s death is something that hurts till this day. I’m sorry for your loss.” “Thank you, Detective. She was very beautiful and very excited about things. I miss her very much.” “I’m sure you do.” Over the years, Bosch had talked to many people who had lost loved ones to violence. There were too many to count but it never got any easier and his empathy never withered. The Burning Room 2 Grace was a young saxophonist with a powerful sound. She also sang. The song was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and she produced a sound from the horn that no human voice could ever touch. It was plaintive and sad but it came with an undeniable wave of underlying hope. It made Bosch think that there was still a chance for him, that he could still find whatever it was he was looking for, no matter how short his time was. ---------------- He grabbed his briefcase off his chair and walked toward the exit door. Before he got there, he heard someone clapping behind him. He turned back and saw it was Soto, standing by her desk. Soon Tim Marcia rose up from his cubicle and started to clap. Then Mitzi Roberts did the same and then the other detectives. Bosch put his back against the door, ready to push through. He nodded his thanks and held his fist up at chest level and shook it. He then went through the door and was gone. The Burning Room 3 “What do you want to know, Bosch?” Harry nodded. His instinct was right. The good ones all had that hollow space inside. The empty place where the fire always burns. For something. Call it justice. Call it the need to know. Call it the need to believe that those who are evil will not remain hidden in darkness forever. At the end of the day Rodriguez was a good cop and he wanted what Bosch wanted. He could not remain angry and mute if it might cost Orlando Merced his due. ------------ “I have waited twenty years for this phone call . . . and all this time I thought it would go away. I knew I would always be sad for my sister. But I thought the other would go away.” “What is the other, Henrik?” Though he knew the answer. “Anger . . . I am still angry, Detective Bosch.” Bosch nodded. He looked down at his desk, at the photos of all the victims under the glass top. Cases and faces. His eyes moved from the photo of Anneke Jespersen to some of the others. The ones he had not yet spoken for. “So am I, Henrik,” he said. “So am I.” Angle of Investigation 1972 They were heading south on Vermont through territory unfamiliar to him. It was only his second day with Eckersly and his second on the job. Now He knew that passion was a key element in any investigation. Passion was the fuel that kept his fire burning. So he purposely sought the personal connection or, short of that, the personal outrage in every case. It kept him locked in and focused. But it wasn’t the Laura syndrome. It wasn’t the same as falling in love with a dead woman. By no means was Bosch in love with June Wilkins. He was in love with the idea of reaching back across time and catching the man who had killed her. The Scarecrow At one time the newsroom was the best place in the world to work. A bustling place of camaraderie, competition, gossip, cynical wit and humor, it was at the crossroads of ideas and debate. It produced stories and pages that were vibrant and intelligent, that set the agenda for what was discussed and considered important in a city as diverse and exciting as Los Angeles.

For pretty much my whole life, I thought I was living to better myself, to create the best life possible. About a year ago, that mindset changed. I now believe I’m here to create the best world possible. This shift from me to everyone is what altered my entire understanding of passion, and my purpose. Ben Horowitz is one of my digital mentors (meaning I follow his blog). I find him very insightful. Whenever he says (or writes about) anything, I inevitably start nodding my head until my neck is sore. Here’s an excerpt from the commencement speech he gave at Columbia, his alma mater: “Following your passion is a very me centered view of the world, and as you go through life, what you’ll find is that what you take out of the world over time—be it…money, cars, stuff, accolades—is much less important than what you put into the world. And so my recommendation would be to follow your contribution. Find the thing that you’re great at, put that into the world, contribute to others, help the world be better. That is the thing to follow." Most of the time, if you follow your contribution, it’s either already a passion, or likely to become one. Doing something you’re good at is intoxicating, as is contributing to the world. Writing and launching The Connection Algorithm was a full year of hard work. It was the result of countless hours of reflection, deeply philosophical thinking, and brutal honesty. Throughout the entire process, I felt driven, passionate, and motivated. At first, I thought this was because I was doing it on my own. But I’ve come to realize it was something else—something far more profound. Shortly after the book was released, I began receiving emails from people who had read the book and been deeply impacted by it. A highschooler in Miami. An entrepreneur in Amsterdam. A small business owner in the midwest. People were also leaving reviews on Amazon—people I didn’t know, saying the book helped them live a better life. And on my Kindle, I could see passages that people were highlighting. People weren’t just reading my book, they were taking notes on useful things to remember. The craft of writing has been unbelievably fulfilling for me. And so I’m continuing the pursuit. My motivation is no longer to make a buck, or “win at life.” Rather, I’m working to improve the world. I think of myself as an inventor, creating a new piece of art for the world to discover. When you make the world better, you get rewarded. So find your craft, and then determine the best contribution you can make with it.

Noah Kagan went to UC Berkeley and graduated with degrees in Business and Economics. He worked at Intel for a short stint, and then found himself at Facebook, as employee #30. You’d think this is where the story would get really good: Noah went on to become the head of product and is now worth 10 billion dollars! That’s not what happened. Instead, he was fired after eight months. Noah has been very public about this, and it’s well documented. He even wrote about why it happened, which mostly comes down to the fact that he was young and inexperienced. Here’s where the real story gets interesting. After being fired, Noah spent ten months at Mint, another successful startup. For Noah, that was a side-hustle. After Mint, he founded KickFlip, a payment provider for social games. He also started an ad company called Gambit. Both of those companies fluttered around for a while and then fizzled out. Next came AppSumo, a daily deals website for tech software. AppSumo has done very well, and it’s still in business as of this writing, but Noah eventually turned his attention to another opportunity. While building up his other businesses, he had become an expert at email marketing, and realized there was a huge need for effective marketing tools. So he created SumoMe, a software company that helps people and companies build their email lists. SumoMe has exploded since its launch. Over 200,000 sites now use it in some capacity, and that number is growing every day. It’s easy to imagine SumoMe becoming a $100 million dollar company in a matter of years, and it’s completely bootstrapped. The company has taken zero funding from venture capitalists. That means Noah can run the business exactly how he wants. I’ve known Noah for almost ten years. I met him when my first company was getting off the ground. Several months ago, we were emailing back and forth about promoting my first book. He ended one of the emails with, “Keep the hustle strong.” I smiled when I read that. Noah is, and always will be, a hustler. He’s been hustling for his entire career―for over a decade. And he deserves everything that’s coming his way. Hustle never comes without defeat. It never comes without detours and side-projects. But the best hustlers all know this simple truth: All that matters is that you keep on hustling.

The problem with many to-do lists is that when we write down a series of short-term objectives, we are, in effect, allowing our brains to seize on the sense of satisfaction that each task will deliver. We are encouraging our need for closure and our tendency to freeze on a goal without asking if it’s the right aim. The result is that we spend hours answering unimportant emails instead of writing a big, thoughtful memo—because it feels so satisfying to clean out our in-box.

Surprisingly, Clinton and her advisers believe that the most dramatic day of the campaign, October 7th, the day of the “Access Hollywood” tape, was a disaster for them. Early that day, the director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Homeland Security released a statement concluding that the Russians had been attempting to interfere in the U.S. election process. But when, shortly afterward, the Washington Post released the tape—in which Donald Trump describes how he grabs women by the genitals and moves on them “like a bitch”—the D.H.S. statement was eclipsed. “My heart sank,” Jennifer Palmieri, a top Clinton adviser, recalled. “My first reaction was ‘No! Focus on the intelligence statement!’ The ‘Access Hollywood’ tape was not good for Trump, obviously, but it was more likely to hurt him with the people who were already against him. His supporters had made their peace with his awful behavior.” That evening, a third media vortex formed, as Julian Assange went to work. WikiLeaks began to dole out a new tranche of stolen e-mails. “It seemed clear to us that the Russians were again being guided by our politics,” Clinton said. “Someone was offering very astute political advice about how to weaponize information, how to convey it, how to use the existing Russian outlets, like RT or Sputnik, how to use existing American vehicles, like Facebook.

Whether they are answering your questions with really short replies or always choosing to email you instead of just walking over, it’s a pretty sure sign a coworker doesn’t like you. If they are normally chatty with others, but always quiet and moody around you, that’s another signal. They don’t want to interact with you anymore than is absolutely necessary.   -People

Consider a 2012 study, led by psychologists Wilhelm Hofmann and Roy Baumeister, that outfitted 205 adults with beepers that activated at randomly selected times (this is the experience sampling method discussed in Part 1). When the beeper sounded, the subject was asked to pause for a moment to reflect on desires that he or she was currently feeling or had felt in the last thirty minutes, and then answer a set of questions about these desires. After a week, the researchers had gathered more than 7,500 samples. Here’s the short version of what they found: People fight desires all day long. As Baumeister summarized in his subsequent book, Willpower (co-authored with the science writer John Tierney): “Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception.” The five most common desires these subjects fought include, not surprisingly, eating, sleeping, and sex. But the top five list also included desires for “taking a break from [hard] work… checking e-mail and social networking sites, surfing the web, listening to music, or watching television.” The lure of the Internet and television proved especially strong: The subjects succeeded in resisting these particularly addictive distractions only around half the time. These results are bad news for this rule’s goal of helping you cultivate a deep work habit. They tell us that you can expect to be bombarded with the desire to do anything but work deeply throughout the day,

If you want to observe the power of control up close in the workplace, look toward companies embracing a radical new philosophy called Results-Only Work Environment (or, ROWE, for short). In a ROWE company, all that matters is your results. When you show up to work and when you leave, when you take vacations, and how often you check e-mail are all irrelevant. They leave it to the employee to figure out whatever works best for getting the important things done. “No results, no job: It’s that simple,” as ROWE supporters like to say.

My two cents: Excellence is the next five minutes or nothing at all. It’s the quality of your next five-minute conversation. It’s the quality of, yes, your next email. Forget the long term. Make the next five minutes rock!

The X1 Search program: instant, precision searching by independent criteria (not just Google-style search string goulash) to pinpoint my files and emails going back to the 1980s. As info explodes, and my memory doesn’t get better, it’s a godsend.

In contrast, technology now exists that would allow a future global totalitarian state to record every phone call, email, web search, webpage view and credit card transaction for every person on Earth, and to monitor everyone’s whereabouts through cell-phone tracking and surveillance cameras with face recognition. Moreover, machine learning technology far short of human-level AGI can efficiently analyze and synthesize these masses of data to identify suspected seditious behavior, enabling potential troublemakers to be neutralized before they have a chance to pose any serious challenge to the state.

Relying on screens, on typing at high speed, we have constructed an environment in which it is more difficult than ever to get a sense of context... We comment glibly rather than engage; there just isn't time... We check in with friends in short text messages about inane topics rather than sit down for a proper chat or withdraw to write a letter that can impart thoughts and emotions and give us a sense of our tangible selves in our handwriting, in our choice of stamp, that even the most elegantly composed e-mail will lack.

In fact, the culture of innovation is so pure and so stridently noble that it often sounds like advertising. You hear about the startup that is going to help with sanitation in African cities; the one that’s going to print out prosthetic hands for disabled children; the one that’s procuring clothes for homeless children. “We’re with people who are curing cancer in a different way, and changing banking technology, and helping folks who can’t see anymore,” says a woman in a short YouTube video about MassChallenge. Inno is going to solve global warming. Inno is coming up with new treatments for autism. Inno is so inherently moral that there is even a UNICEF Innovation team; dial up its homepage and you will encounter the following introductory sentence: “In 2015, innovation is vital to the state of the world’s children.” The fog of righteousness surrounding this concept is so thick it allows all manner of absurdly altruistic claims. “Can startups help solve Boston’s Biggest Problems?” asked an email I received last spring. Of course they can! The group that sent it, CityStart Boston (“Leveraging the Innovation Community to Tackle Civic Issues”), announced plans to mobilize “the entire Boston startup ecosystem” to “collaborate to develop viable ventures designed…” Wait! Stop here for a moment, reader, and try to guess: in what way is the startup ecosystem going to collaborate to solve Boston’s biggest problems? If you guessed “to enhance innovation in Boston’s neighborhoods,” you were right. Startups are going to collaborate to enhance startups.

The criteria that I found most valuable when making my decisions were the following: What is the size of the investor community invested in other offerings on the platform to-date? Does the platform accept investments via credit card? For example, about 40% of my crowdfunding investors invested with a credit card. Does the platform allow for campaign extensions (if you fall short of your goal within your campaign period, can you extend the campaign until you reach your goal)? I’ve extended my campaigns multiple times. Does the platform allow for multiple disbursements? I prefer to disburse money from my campaign once a month. However, many platforms don’t allow you to disburse the funds until after the campaign is over What are the fees? Platforms can charge between 5-20% of your raise as fees, with some platforms having complicated fee structures that involve taking some of your Securities as part of the offering. Some platforms require you to pay them cash upfront before launching an offering. Does the platform allow you to set your own terms? For example, some platforms don’t allow you to sell convertible notes. Some others don’t allow you to sell non-voting common stock. Some platforms insist that they set the valuation for your startup in order to launch—the logic being that they know their investors, and they want to provide them with a “good deal.” For many reasons, you want to sell the Security that’s right for your startup. Does the platform allow you to have design freedom on the campaign page? You want to make sure that your brand is well represented. The aesthetics and optimization of the page are highly correlated with conversion (how many people invest after visiting your page). Does the platform support analytics? You need advanced analytics to market your offering. Some platforms, for example, allow you to enter a Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics code into the campaign page, while others do not. Does the platform have a good reputation? You will be driving a lot of potential investors and media folks to this platform, and you want to be sure that your platform of choice hasn’t been involved in anything shady in the past. Does the platform allow you to update your investors and prospective investors with campaign notifications? Some platforms have a built-in functionality where you can post updates right on the campaign, download email, and mailing contact lists of your investors (allowing you to contact them by email and allowing you to build Facebook “lookalike audiences”). Whereas, other platforms don’t even share the email addresses of the folks who have already invested in your startup. Does the platform support or plan to support secondary trading for the Securities that it sells on its platform? Will your investors be able to sell the Securities that they buy from you? The ability to sell Securities in a marketplace brings a lot of liquidity and increases its value significantly. In order to allow for secondary trading, the platform needs to obtain an Alternative Trading System (ATS) approval from FINRA.

You can find event planners by doing an online search of the following key words: DESTINATION MANAGEMENT COMPANY GENERAL CONTRACTORS FOR EVENTS EVENTS PRODUCTION Then send an introduction e-mail that is short and to the point. It should mention that you are available for events and that you would like them to consider you for future clients. Include your PDF brochure and ask them to call should they have any questions. When you get an Account Manager on the phone from an event company, ask them questions to help you understand what their needs are. Here are a few: What do you look for when contracting with an artist? Who are your main clients? What type of companies? What seems to be the most popular theme of the events you do?

Direct response marketing is designed to evoke an immediate response and compel prospects to take some specific action, such as opting in to your email list, picking up the phone and calling for more information, placing an order or being directed to a web page. So what makes a direct response ad? Here are some of the main characteristics: It’s trackable. That is, when someone responds, you know which ad and which media was responsible for generating the response. This is in direct contrast to mass media or “brand” marketing—no one will ever know what ad compelled you to buy that can of Coke; heck you may not even know yourself. It’s measurable. Since you know which ads are being responded to and how many sales you’ve received from each one, you can measure exactly how effective each ad is. You then drop or change ads that are not giving you a return on investment. It uses compelling headlines and sales copy. Direct response marketing has a compelling message of strong interest to your chosen prospects. It uses attention-grabbing headlines with strong sales copy that is “salesmanship in print.” Often the ad looks more like an editorial than an ad (hence making it at least three times more likely to get read). It targets a specific audience or niche. Prospects within specific verticals, geographic zones or niche markets are targeted. The ad aims to appeal to a narrow target market. It makes a specific offer. Usually, the ad makes a specific value-packed offer. Often the aim is not necessarily to sell anything from the ad but to simply get the prospect to take the next action, such as requesting a free report. The offer focuses on the prospect rather than on the advertiser and talks about the prospect’s interests, desires, fears, and frustrations. By contrast, mass media or “brand” marketing has a broad, one-size-fits-all marketing message and is focused on the advertiser. It demands a response. Direct response advertising has a “call to action,” compelling the prospect to do something specific. It also includes a means of response and “capture” of these responses. Interested, high-probability prospects have easy ways to respond, such as a regular phone number, a free recorded message line, a website, a fax back form, a reply card or coupons. When the prospect responds, as much of the person’s contact information as possible is captured so that they can be contacted beyond the initial response. It includes multi-step, short-term follow-up. In exchange for capturing the prospect’s details, valuable education and information on the prospect’s problem is offered. The information should carry with it a second “irresistible offer”—tied to whatever next step you want the prospect to take, such as calling to schedule an appointment or coming into the showroom or store. Then a series of follow-up “touches” via different media such as mail, email, fax and phone are made. Often there is a time or quantity limit on the offer.

Approaching Existing Investors If you ever need to raise more money, there’s no better audience than your existing investors! I find that the best way to reach out is with a super short email blast. For example: “Dear Backers, [2-3 sentences on what you just accomplished, extremely excited] We’ve also got a very exciting opportunity. Based on our milestones, we are gearing up for a serious product launch and will raise another $1M at a special-priced note to accelerate a few components. If you’ve wanted to get more deeply invested, now is the time. I imagine this being accounted for very quickly, so please ping me ASAP!” You might want to send a couple of “momentum” emails leading up to this message so that they’re already excited by the time they get the email from you.

Mê Mẩn Với Các Kiểu Áo Phông Mix Đồ Đơn Giản Voibac .vn/ao-phong-voi-cac-kieu-phoi-do-cuc-dep/ Áo phông là loại áo thun không cổ đơn giản nhưng làm say mê giới trẻ. Với nhiều màu sắc và họa tiết được khác nhau nhưng cùng một form thiết kế đã làm chao đảo các bạn trẻ mê thời trang. Hãy để bài viết mang đến bạn những kiểu dáng áo phông và đa dạng phong cách phối đồ. Từ đó làm nổi bật lên vẻ thần thái, tính cách của các bạn. Áo phông cổ tròn, với 2 tay ngắn có dạng hình chữ T in hoa. Vì thế mà sản phẩm này còn có tên gọi là T-shirt. Chất liệu áo có thể được thiết kế bằng nhiểu loại vải khác nhau. Chất lượng trung bình cũng có. Chất lượng cao cũng có. Nhưng có điểm chung ở chỗ là cùng mẫu mã và kiểu dáng. Chỉ khác size, màu sắc, các họa tiết logo và biểu tượng mà thôi. Loại áo này cực kỳ dễ mix đồ. Có thể kết hợp với đủ loại quần áo, giày dép, nón, áo khoác,… khác nhau. Đây chính là ưu điểm khiến cho giới trẻ cả nam và nữ đều si mê. Cách bảo quản cũng đơn giản không cầu kỳ. Tránh để nơi quá nắng nóng hoặc quá ẩm ướt. Không sử dụng chất tẩy rửa mạnh. Khuyến khích dùng nước ẩm để giặt, nên giặt bằng tay, hạn chế giặt máy. Khơi phơi áo, cần phơi ở nơi thoáng mát nhẹ nhàng, lộn ngược áo ra để phơi. Có nhiều kiểu mix đồ đẹp khác nhau khiến cho sản phẩm luôn có mặt trong tủ đồ người trẻ. Quần thì có thể là quần jeans hay kaki, quần short đều có thể mặc chung với áo phông. Áo khoác ngoài các loại không cài dây kéo, để lộ áo phông bên trong. Nữ có thể mix với chân váy ngắn các loại. Đơn vị luôn sản xuất các loại sản phẩm quần áo đồng phục chất lượng đó là Voi Bạc. Chúng tôi có nhiều năm kinh nghiệm lành nghề sẽ mang để trải nghiệm tuyệt vời nhất cho khách hàng. Hãy liên hệ ngay để được tư vấn miễn phí. MIỀN NAM:  VPGD: Tòa nhà INNOVATION, 27E - Đường số 36 - P. Hiệp Bình Chánh - Thành Phố Thủ Đức - TP HCM  ĐIỆN THOẠI: (028)66849666  HOTLINE /ZALO: 0938528965  FACEBOOK: facebook .com/VOIBACvn  EMAIL: KinhDoanh@voibac.com MIỀN BẮC VÀ TRUNG:  VPGD: Tòa nhà số 11, Ngõ 146 - Vương Thừa Vũ - Phường Khương Trung - Q. Thanh Xuân - TP Hà Nội.  HOTLINE /ZALO: 0965871759  FACEBOOK: facebook .com/VOIBACvn  EMAIL: KinhDoanh@voibac.com #VoiBac #áophông #áophôngnữ #áophôngđẹp

Do you need a quick long or short term loan with a relatively low interest rate as low as 2%? We offer business loan, personal loan, home loan, auto loan, student loan, debt consolidation loan etc. no matter your credit score. We are guaranteed in giving out financial services to our numerous clients all over the r world. With our flexible lending packages, loans can be processed and transferred to the borrower within the shortest time possible, contact our specialist for advice and finance planning. If you need a quick loan to contact us at email: stiwartbenard83348@gmail.com)

The email alarmed Ive and Dye. They feared that the message Chaudhri sent could be interpreted to mean that Apple’s best days had passed. Its river had run dry. It was one thing for outsiders to say that the company was no longer innovative, but another thing altogether for that critique to come from someone who had helped birth multitouch technology for the iPhone. They worried it would poison morale and moved to contain the damage. Shortly after the email, Dye fired Chaudhri. The move had crushing financial ramifications. Chaudhri would no longer receive his shares. Stung, he complained to friends about the dismissal, telling them that Ive and Dye misunderstood his comment about the river. He explained to those people that the email was a personal reflection on his own lack of joy, not a comment on Apple.

Bad fit customers and technical support There is a line between helping a customer and building custom software for them. You want to avoid one-off features because the effort to build one custom feature is the same effort to help ten good fit customers. If a customer requires custom work, then they are usually a poor fit. These bad customers will drain the life from your team and these customers redirect resources from critical tasks, such as mandatory upgrades, and helping good fit customers succeed. Enough bad customers can cause low employee morale and high turn-over in any department. Here are the differences between good and bad fit customers: Good Customer Traits Bad Customer Traits Software performs the features that he needs Constantly emails about missing features An attractor that leaves reviews, case studies Rude or unpleasant over the phone, a detractor Entry level staff members provide support Senior level staff provides technical support Requires a short call to set-up and configure Requires coding changes and tons of phone support Company is organized Company is a mess Fits into an ideal customer profile Fits into no customer profile Feels like a good fit You get a bad feeling about the company

Quantum physics points at something we all sense intuitively: that our conscious thoughts have the power to affect our actions. This book will teach you the mental precision needed to harness this power. This all sounds nice, but what does quantum physics and all this mind talk have to do with your daily life? Well, have you ever asked yourself, Who is this person I’ve become? or What can I do that could help me change and or manage my problems? Am I actually happy and at peace? How do my thoughts, feelings, and choices impact the world around me? Searching for these answers often goes two ways. Perhaps you believe you’re a prepackaged, preprogrammed genetic avatar. The fates have decided what will happen to you—there’s no fighting it. Or you believe you have some level of influence over the quality of your life, perhaps through that elusive magic elixir, that exercise regimen, that new diet, or that meditation or breathwork you just did. Or maybe you do all these things and just hope for the best—because they’re healthy and good for you and must do something, right? And you may feel good for a few hours, but what happens when things aren’t going so well? What do you do when your spouse walks mud into the carpet, that person you can’t stand at work sends you a nasty email, or your best friend has a breakdown? The 5-Step Neurocycle Good mind-management skills can take you beyond healthy but short-lived mindfulness practices, such as meditation, which help in the moment to calm and prepare the brain but often don’t address the main issues behind your thinking. Meditation may bring awareness, but what do you do with that awareness? Awareness, not managed correctly, can do more harm than good.

Shortly before I was fired, the company at the Desoto Solar Farm emailed me the legally required OSHA signs to install in my office. They had never been displayed for the duration of my employment with them.

I recently recommended to Lea Endres, CEO of NationBuilder, which builds software for community leaders, that she follow Senghor’s lead. NationBuilder was operating close to the red and Endres was frustrated because, despite her reminding everyone that cash collection was a priority, she couldn’t get her team to care enough about it. Our conversation went like this: Lea: I’m really worried about cash collections. We use this outsourced finance firm and they don’t care. We have a low cash balance and we got surprised last month. A couple more surprises and we’re in deep trouble. Ben: Is there a team on it? How much do you need to collect this month? Lea: Yes. And $1.1 million at least. Ben: If you have a crisis situation and you need the team to execute, meet with them every day and even twice a day if necessary. That will show them this is a top priority. At the beginning of each meeting you say, “Where’s my money?” They will start making excuses like “Boo Boo was supposed to call me and didn’t,” or “The system didn’t tell me the right thing.” Those excuses are the key, because that’s the knowledge you’re missing. Once you know that the excuse is that “Fred didn’t answer my email,” you can tell Fred to answer the damned email and also tell the person making the excuse that you expect way more persistence. The meetings will start out running long, but two weeks later they’ll be short, because when you say, “Where’s my money?” they are going to want to say, “Right here, Lea!” Two weeks later: Lea: You wouldn’t believe some of the excuses. One was that we have an auto email that is one sentence long that tells customers they are late—but it doesn’t tell them what to do! I’m like, “Well, then, let’s fix the damned email!” We’re making progress and they know I want my money. End of quarter: Lea: We collected $1.6 million in September! And the team loves hearing me say “Where’s my money?!?!” To change a culture, you can’t just give lip service to what you want. Your people must feel the urgency of it.

The study found that “technological distraction”—just getting emails and calls—caused a drop in the workers’ IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that’s twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests, in terms of being able to get your work done, you’d be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages

The Axios audience team found that roughly 6 words is the optimal subject line for emails—short enough to show all words in a mobile phone format.

Smart Brevity’s Core 4 Smart Brevity, in written form, has four main parts, all easy to learn and put into practice—and then teach. They don’t apply in every circumstance but will help you begin to get your mind around the shifts you need to make. 1 A muscular “tease”: Whether in a tweet, headline or email subject line, you need six or fewer strong words to yank someone’s attention away from Tinder or TikTok. 2 One strong first sentence, or “lede”: Your opening sentence should be the most memorable—tell me something I don’t know, would want to know, should know. Make this sentence as direct, short and sharp as possible. 3 Context, or “Why it matters”: We’re all faking it. Mike and I learned this speaking to Fortune 500 CEOs. We all know a lot about a little. We’re too ashamed or afraid to ask, but we almost always need you to explain why your new fact, idea or thought matters. 4 The choice to learn more, or “Go deeper”: Don’t force someone to read or hear more than they want. Make it their decision. If they decide “yes,” what follows should be truly worth their time.

The Protocol Principle Designing rules that optimize when and how coordination occurs in the workplace is a pain in the short term but can result in significantly more productive operation in the long term.

And while seeking out the opinions and perspectives of people like ourselves may lead to a more personal and familiar buying experience, what’s even more amazing is the impact those trusted sources have on conversion rates. B2B sales cycle data from Salesforce demonstrates that, when it comes to lead conversion, the interest that originates from customer and employee referrals converts to deals at rates fifty times higher than email campaigns!9 Furthermore, data from marketing automation giant Marketo indicates that leads originating from referrals convert to opportunities at rates of four times the average, and similar to the next three highest-converting lead sources combined (those being partner, inbound, and marketing-generated).10 My personal experience over the years greatly corroborates these statistics. For example, when I started my own sales practice, Cerebral Selling, I needed to have a logo designed. Around the same time, my friend had recently had a nice logo designed for his business. I asked him who he used, he told me, and I just did the same. No further research or investigation required. A short time later, I wanted to head out of town with my wife for an overnight trip to the beautiful Niagara wine region of Ontario to celebrate our anniversary. I didn’t know where to stay or which restaurant to go to, so instead of sifting through pages of online content and reviews, I asked a friend who runs a vineyard in the region. When he gave me his recommendations, I simply booked the places he told me. No questions asked. Were there better places to stay and eat? Potentially. Were there other creative design shops that could have generated equally if not more spectacular logos? More than likely. Do I care? Absolutely not! I love my logo and had a great anniversary outing, and feel secure in my decisions around both because of the feeling I received by selecting recommendations from people I trust. Both experiences are perfect examples of the prescriptive-led sales cycle we spoke about in chapter 2. This means that when it comes to your selling motion, one of the most unobtrusive, empathetic, and authentic ways to convert prospective buyers is simply to surround them with like-minded customers who love you.

The study found that ‘technological distraction’ – just getting emails and calls – caused a drop in the workers’ IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that’s twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests in terms of being able to get your work done, you’d be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages a lot.

But it is not only the messages going out at 140 characters or less that are at risk of signifying nothing. Any medium carrying a message that lacks meaning will fall short of its intention: a television ad, a department memo, a client email, a birthday card.

For instance, to facilitate writing in the morning, I avoid checking my phone or my emails and leave my word processor open. Then, I often put on relaxing music and use a timer (I like to do 45-minute work sessions). By doing so, I’ve removed friction and obtained the buy-in from my mind. It wouldn’t make sense if I suddenly stopped the music, paused the timer, and moved on to another activity. My mind would see it as a waste of energy. Of course, I may still procrastinate, but removing friction and creating a simple routine reduces the chances of me doing so.

PACKING CHECKLIST Light, khaki, or neutral-color clothes are universally worn on safari and were first used in Africa as camouflage by the South African Boers, and then by the British Army that fought them during the South African War. Light colors also help to deflect the harsh sun and are less likely than dark colors to attract mosquitoes. Don’t wear camouflage gear. Do wear layers of clothing that you can strip off as the sun gets hotter and put back on as the sun goes down. Smartphone or tablet to check emails, send texts, and store photos (also handy as an alarm clock and flashlight), plus an adapter. If electricity will be limited, you may wish to bring a portable charger. Three cotton T-shirts Two long-sleeve cotton shirts preferably with collars Two pairs of shorts or two skirts in summer Two pairs of long pants (three pairs in winter)—trousers that zip off at the knees are worth considering Optional: sweatshirt and sweatpants, which can double as sleepwear One smart-casual dinner outfit Underwear and socks Walking shoes or sneakers Sandals/flip-flops Bathing suit and sarong to use as a cover-up Warm padded jacket and sweater/fleece in winter Windbreaker or rain poncho Camera equipment, extra batteries or charger, and memory cards; a photographer’s vest and cargo pants are great for storage Eyeglasses and/or contact lenses, plus extras Binoculars Small flashlight Personal toiletries Malaria tablets and prescription medication Sunscreen and lip balm with SPF 30 or higher Basic medication like antihistamine cream, eye drops, headache tablets, indigestion remedies, etc. Insect repellent that is at least 20% DEET and is sweat-resistant Tissues and/or premoistened wipes/hand sanitizer Warm hat, scarf, and gloves in winter Sun hat and sunglasses (Polaroid and UV-protected ones) Documents and money (cash, credit cards, etc.). A notebook/journal and pens Travel and field guide books A couple of large white plastic garbage bags Ziplock bags to keep documents dry and protect electronics from dust

Make the first sentence of your email attention-grabbing and short.