What Is Success? Here’s a Better Definition

**Great article we found on Inc.com.**

If you believe success is simply making (or having) a lot of money, you may be setting yourself up for failure.

I’m often amazed at how many people define success as making (or having) a lot of money.

It’s very strange, because many of the people who think this way are harried, stressed and, frankly, pretty miserable.

• Read more: 10 Questions That Create Success

The way I see it, everybody’s definition of success can be mapped on a simple grid, with one axis being the amount of money that you have and the other being the amount of happiness in your life, like so:

The way a lot of people think, success should be defined as follows:

To my mind, however, a much more sensible definition of success is:

There are two reasons why this definition is better.  First, there’s no point to being rich if you’re not enjoying yourself.  Second, you’re more likely to get rich if you’re happy doing whatever you’re doing.

Being unhappy, of course, can definitely spur people to action.  However, the action should be pointed at trying to become happier–not trying to become richer, in the rather naive belief that being rich, in and of itself, will make you happy.

Needless to say, if you’re struggling to put food in your mouth and keep a roof over your head, none of this applies.  When you’re just trying to survive, you’re not thinking about happiness.

Even so, I’d rather be poor and happy than rich and miserable.

Real Way to Get Rich

Of course, all things considered, I’d prefer to be rich and happy rather than poor and happy. However, I believe that it’s easier to get rich if you start from a place of being happy–with what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

**To read the rest of this article from the original source, click here.**

Fast Growth for Healthy Snacks

**Great article we found on Inc.com.**

Inc. 5000 applicant Snikiddy, founded by Mary Schulman and her mother, is finding success in the health food market with its snacks.

After nearly 10 years working in financial institutional sales, Mary Schulman decided she wanted to give back. She also wanted her family to have healthy snacks but didn’t see many options that met her healthy and tasty criteria. So in late 2006, Schulman and her mother founded Snikiddy.

Schulman grew up in a healthy household, courtesy of her mother’s particular shopping style. “We had this crazy circle bread in our lunch that was made with only sprouted grains and things of that nature,” Schulman says. Her mother’s healthy eating habits were passed down to her by her own mother, Schulman’s grandma, one notorious for packing lunch boxes filled with local produce and simple foods.

So notorious, in fact, that her children became known as “the snikiddy kids.” In actuality they were “persnickety eaters,” according to a teacher. But the kids used their own version of the word, snikiddy, and it stuck. They donned the nickname with pride.

The health-conscious snack food company started off with cheese puffs and cookies. But despite the deliciousness of their sweet treats, the cookie market wasn’t showing the growth Schulman wanted, so the product was cut. “It was a decent business under probably a lot of standards,” Schulman says, “but we weren’t seeing the tremendous growth we were seeing from the salty snack arena, and we really wanted to be a growth company.” From that point on Snikiddy honed in on the salty snack category.

**To read the rest of the article from the original source, click here.**

Hit the Presentation Sweet Spot

**Great article from Inc.com.**

Research shows there’s an ideal duration for a presentation. Exceed it at your peril.

There’s a reason “Death by PowerPoint” is a well known and roundly recognized problem. Despite their occasional dullness, Word, Excel, QuickBooks, and the rest, are rarely charged with bringing users to the brink of their own demise. Sure, bad spreadsheets are annoying. But bad presentations can be ridiculously painful.

As an entrepreneur, you still probably need to make presentations regularly in order to sell your ideas or train your staff, but like dangerous weapons or flammable liquids, presentations need to be handled with care.

Luckily, there is research available to guide you away from inflicting undue agony on your audience. Behavioral psychologist Susan Weinschenk is at work on a forthcoming book that explains the science of presenting and aims to help even novice presenters make their point without tormenting their audiences. The book, entitled 100 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People, is due out in May, but Weinschenk is now previewing some of the principles it contains on her blog.

Among her advice is the simple but powerful truth that duration matters. Even rock star presenters (consider some of TED’s most riveting speakers) are only given 20 minutes to make their case. Apparently, there’s a solid scientific basis for this duration, according to Weinschenk:

20-minute presentations are an ideal amount of time.  Maureen Murphy tested this idea in an experiment. She had adults attending a 60 minute presentation at work, and tested to see the difference in memory and reaction to the same talk given in one 60 minute long presentation, versus a presentation that had 20 minute segments with short breaks in between. What Dr. Murphy found was that the people enjoyed the 20-minute chunked presentations more, learned more information immediately after, and retained more information a month later.

**To read the rest of the article from the original source, click here.**

Recovery for Real? | TIME Magazine

**Great article from TIME Magazine.**

Economists often cite job losses and stock performance to assess the state of the economy. But boxer briefs? It’s not as crazy as it sounds. Because underwear buys are so steady, even a small drop could signal a major downturn. “We should’ve known something was rotten when sales stopped cold [in 2009],” says Marshal Cohen, head retail analyst at NPD Group. Good thing underwear is rebounding–alongside beauty salons, mobile homes, cable TV and other surprising sectors that forecast a real recovery.

Underwear 6.6%

Yearly sales jumped 6.6% in 2011. PROGNOSIS: Great! According to the Underwear Index–an economic principle championed by Alan Greenspan– a sales uptick in household staples like boxer briefs is a likely sign that consumers have stopped penny pinching.

Pay TV 0.2%

Cable and satellite subscribers were up 0.2% in the last quarter of 2011.  PROGNOSIS:  Decent!  Even amid the rise of cheaper streaming options like Netflix and Hulu Plus (each $7.99 per month), Americans are still spending $50 to $100 a month on TV packages — a signal that we’ve got some discretionary income.

Golf 21.4%

Rounds played increased 21.4%  in January over the same month in 2011.   PROGNOSIS: Good!  The uptick spans public and private courses, suggesting it’s not just the rich who are willing to shell out.

Beauty Salons 5.4%

Sales grew 5.4% over the past two years.  PROGNOSIS:  Great!  In downturns, most Americans do away with pricey hair gels, creams and cuts.  The masive turnaround — 34% of salons say they’ve hired employees in the past two years — puts us back at prerecession spending levels.

**To read the rest of the article from the original source, click here.**

4 Creative Ways to Use the New Facebook Brand Pages

**Great article we found on SearchEngineWatch.com.**

Facebook is scheduled to fully switch over all Facebook brand pages to the new Timeline look and feel at the end of March. Search Engine Watch’s Miranda Miller wrote about the new changes in her post, “New Facebook Brand Pages Guide: Everything You Need to Know”.

For marketers who manage a few Facebook pages, changes like these are almost never easy to deal with. But after you take a few deep breaths and remind yourself that you have to play by Facebook’s rules, you can start thinking about creative ways to reinvent your page. Here are just a few ways to use the new Facebook brand pages.

Featured Cover Photo

Facebook now offers brand pages the ability to capitalize on the featured photo section. A massively awkward space of 851 by 315 pixels is offered up for you to customize. With some imagination, however, this awkward space can be transformed into something pretty awesome.

Think about ways to use this space to your advantage. Facebook does limit you from adding obvious calls to action in the graphic like “click like now” or “tell your friends”. Additionally price or purchase information can’t be contained in the featured photo, contact information and no references can be made to user actions like Likes or shares.

These 40 examples of Facebook timeline designs can help you get an idea for what the possibilities are for your page. Or you can take a play out of Verizon’s book and ask your fans to submit their favorite photos, giving them a chance to have their photo chosen to be featured as a cover photo.

Switch out the photos daily, weekly or have monthly photo contests. This takes the guess work out of choosing the design – let your fans do it for you!

Contests

Have you heard about the Red Bull Timeline Timewarp contest? Talk about creative!

The folks behind the Red Bull Facebook page launched an incredible scavenger contest. Fans were encouraged to search through the brands timeline to find historical milestones that led them to clues. The initial clue was to go back to the first Red Bull ever sold – April 1, 1987.

This contest was pretty complex, but other pages could roll out similar contests.

**To read the rest of the article from the original source, click here.**

10 Steps to Make Your Employees Smile

**Great article we found on Inc.com.**

A common-sense approach to building a company culture of engagement

I normally use a lot of examples, metaphors, and random pop culture references when I talk about company culture. But sometimes you just have to realize that good rules to live by don’t necessarily need a picture or analogy. Here are the 10 things I always do, without fail, to make employees smile:

1. Give them a voice. Listen to them. Implement their ideas.  Give them all the credit.
2. Pay them fairly. To build a great culture, you have to have the basics in place. That means reasonable compensation and benefits. You don’t have to be at the top of the market.  But if you try to create a culture of fun and miss the money part, it will appear disingenuous.
3. Recognize and reward. Don’t just give them more cash.  People just want to feel valued. Ask them how they want to be recognized; you’ll be surprised at some of the answers.
4. Offer opportunities for advancement. Most of your employees want to feel there is room to grow. Do they know the path? Have you written it down for them? Show them the way.
5. Support out-of-the-box semantics. Stop with the fancy titles. All that does is build silos and internal competition.  Our receptionist’s official title is the “director of first impressions” and my assistant is the “director of executive wrangling.”
6. Infiltrate the workplace with fun. Decorate the place, put up photos, host dress-up days, plan fun events, and bring families to the party.

**To read the rest of the article from the original source, click here.**

Thinking inside the box | The Economist

**Check out this article we found in The Economist.**

Should the state allow mothers to abandon their newborn babies?

FOUNDLINGS? In 2012? Yes, mothers still dump unwanted newborns in boxes and steal away. Foundling wheels were an artefact of medieval times; but they reappeared in 2000 in Hamburg, where a lot of abandoned babies were dying. Now Germany has around 200 places where a mother can either leave her baby—heated “baby hatches”, usually with an alarm to summon a carer—or where she can give birth anonymously. They have taken charge of around a thousand babies, many of whom will never know where they came from.

Such refuges are “a last chance to give an opportunity to save a life,” says Gabriele Stangl, chaplain of the Waldfriede hospital in Berlin, which runs one. But there is a problem: abandoning children is illegal. The German constitution gives citizens a right to “knowledge of their origins” and fathers a right to help bring up their children. Both are breached when a mother gives birth anonymously. Baby hatches are tolerated, but operate in a legal grey area.

Ever since the Hamburg hatch opened, there have been arguments over whether to ban or sanction them. The debate intensified in February with the publication of a study by the German Youth Institute, which found that the anonymous services had lost trace of a fifth of all abandoned babies. Foes have long insisted that baby hatches do not save lives (neonatal deaths have not dropped). They compete with services that offer more responsible care, argues Terre des Hommes, a child-care charity. In 2009 the German Ethics Council, an independent body, said baby hatches and other anonymous birth services should be replaced by “confidential child delivery” with a limited anonymity right. Since the Youth Institute findings such demands have grown louder.

**To read the rest of the article from the original source, click here.**

10 Ways to Stretch Your Marketing Budget

**Great article we found on Entrepreneur.com.**

Useful strategies to help you maximize your campaigns and save money.

This article has been excerpted from The Marketing Plan Handbook by Robert W. Bly, available on Entrepreneurpress.com.

Most small businesses have modest marketing budgets, which means you have to make every dollar count. Here are 5 ways to get big results from a small budget:

1. First, use your ads for more than just space advertising. Ads are expensive to produce and expensive to run. But there are ways to get your advertising message in your prospect’s hands at a fraction of the cost of space advertising.

The least expensive is to order an ample supply of reprints and distribute them to customers and prospects every chance you get. When you send literature in response to an inquiry, include a copy of the ad in the package. This reminds a prospect of the reason he responded in the first place and reinforces the original message.

Distribute ads internally to other departments–engineering, production, sales, customer service and R&D–to keep them up to date on your latest marketing and promotional efforts. Make sure your salespeople receive an extra supply of reprints and are encouraged to include a reprint when they write to or visit their customers.

Turn the ad into a product data sheet by adding technical specifications and additional product information to the back of the ad reprint. This eliminates the expense of creating a new layout from scratch. And it makes good advertising sense, because the reader gets double exposure to your advertising message.

Ad reprints can be used as inexpensive direct mail pieces. You can mail the reprints along with a reply card and a sales letter. Unlike the ad, which is “cast in concrete,” the letter is easily and inexpensively tailored to specific markets and customer groups.

If you’ve created a series of ads on the same product or product line, publish bound reprints of the ads as a product brochure. This tactic increases prospect exposure to the series and is less expensive than producing a brand new brochure.

If your ads provide valuable information of a general nature, you can offer reprints as free educational material to companies in your industry. Or, if the ad presents a striking visual, you can offer reprints suitable for framing.

Use your ads again and again. You will save money–and increase frequency–in the process.

2. If something works, stick with it. Too many marketers scrap their old promotions and create new ones because they’re bored with their current campaign. That’s a waste. You shouldn’t create new ads or promotions if your existing ones are still accurate and effective. You should run your ads for as long as your customers read and react to them.

How long can ads continue to get results? The Ludlow Corp. ran an ad for its erosion-preventing Soil Saver mesh 41 times in the same journal. After 11 years it pulled more inquiries per issue than when it was first published in 1966.

If a concept still has selling power but the promotion contains dated information, update the existing copy–don’t throw it out and start from scratch. This approach isn’t fun for the ad manager or the agency, but it does save money.

**To read the rest of the article from the original source, click here.**

The Kids Are All Right

**Great article we got from phillymag.com.**

Being young and employed in this city makes the recession seem not so bad.

“Fourteen bucks for three drinks?!” my friend shouts across the bar. “That’s unheard of  in D.C.” We were out in NoLibs, and though she’d only moved from Philly to D.C. three years ago, she was still shocked when the bartender told us the total for a mixed drink and two beers. (She picked up the tab.)

Like me, most of my friends are in their late 20s or early 30s, and the bulk of us are fortunate enough to have been employed regularly since the economy collapsed. There’s no denying we haven’t been hit as hard as our younger counterparts—the 18-to-24-year-old media-bemoaned young adults unemployed at record rates, living on their parents’ couches. But for us slightly bigger kids, Philly isn’t such an awful place to be during a recession.

“If you go out in Northern Liberties or Center City on a Friday or Saturday night, the bars and restaurants are packed. You’re thinking, Where is the recession?” says economist Kevin Gillen, vice president of Center City’s Econsult Corporation. “The economy certainly isn’t any better here than it is in New York or D.C., but the cost of living is cheaper.” Although taxes are comparable to those of our neighbors to the North and South, Philly has far fewer higher-income jobs. And according to Gillen, that’s what helps keep food and rents cheap.

**To read the rest of the article from the original source, click here.**

Green Ergonomic Office – Voodoo Ergonomics

**Great article found on TreeHugger.com by our Director of HR, Megan!  Thanks, Megan!**

A “green ergonomic office” can refer to several different things. Today, we are looking at salvaging and reusing your current office equipment, rather than purchasing a whole new set. You may think that new and improved “ergonomic” stuff will vastly improve your office performance and comfort, when in truth, it may not be as much improved as you think.

Voodoo Ergonomics
Tony Biafore of Ergonetics has been in the ergonomic business for 25 years, plus currently contracts with the U.S. Department of Labor to help with their in-house ergonomics program. Tony tells us, “There is no such thing as an ergonomic product—it is all in how you use things.”

In other words, a new ergonomic computer mouse used in the same bad position will leave you no better off than the old mouse you’d been using. This is what Tony considers to be the very common misconception of what he likes to call “voodoo ergonomics.” VE is the belief that a product alone can be a fix-all for such office related ailments. Good quality office products can be valuable tools, but you must also know how to use them properly in order to gain the full benefit from them. Tony advises that you must look around your space and take into account how you use things and the positions that you are putting yourself into that could be causing you injury. Some folks continue to try new products and surgeries, but will continue to suffer from these injuries until they actually cure the source of their problem, which many times has more to do with a bad habit than a poor product.

Tony doesn’t understand why there isn’t more involvement of business office curriculum to ensure that employees are using their office equipment correctly. Especially when you consider that adjusting the operating position of your computer mouse and seating posture will always prove less expensive and easier on the environment than trips to the doctor, insurance payments, surgeries, and countless new product purchases.

Uncle Charlie Factor
Even if you are not currently suffering from these symptoms, it is good practice to give yourself a heads-up and try to avoid any problems in the future. This is what Tony considers to be the “Uncle Charlie Factor.” As Tony explained, some Uncle Charlie’s can live for 99 years smoking and drinking and never have a problem. While other Uncle Charlie’s are not as lucky and suffer a whirlwind of complications from such abuse.

**To read the rest of the article from the original source, click here.**