A misfit? Really??

Have you ever been called a misfit, meaning you don’t belong somewhere like your workplace, church, community, etc. Is that because you are different from others?

Not fitting is actually very good. I just came across these amazing people who are changing how music is played. Computer programming combined with live music – check it out. Another classic example of carving a niche for yourself. The world needs your talent.

Why and how to tweet?

I was talking to one of my friends the other day and he asked me, “Hey, do you know about the junk website everybody is talking about? Twitter?”. That is what Twitter has done to the world – Polarization. Like every great phenomena, anything that polarizes people is bound to spread, talked about and cross barriers. Like several million people, for me tweeting was not a no brainer and hence this late start.

Why Twitter in the first place? Yes, it let you stay connected and is cool, but why should you twitter?  Here are ten reasons.

• Many tweets are more often status updates. They give you a personality.
• People following you are interested in knowing what you are up to. This may give a sense of importance.
• You can be perceived as a boring or a happening person. Depending on what and how you tweet.
• The more followers you have, the more people you reach (directly and indirectly) about an interesting thing you have done like writing books, blog posts, charity or …
• When people want to hear what you are doing, you want to do important and non-trivial things.
• You have a chance to promote your ideas to change the world.
• You have a chance to get more ideas to change the world.
• It gives you a sense of what people around you are doing and where the world is heading in general.
• It follows every definition of society as defined in Merriam-Webster.
• It is lot of fun to stay connected with the world.

What is the right way to tweet? I have just started experimenting this. However, looking at the successful tweets and the other kind, this is my general understanding.

• Don’t make your tweets a kitchen sink. Don’t dilute your tweets by tweeting about everything.
• If you are a Guy Kawasaki and have 90,000+ followers, we want to know where to find you giving your next speech. Until then, don’t tweet that you will be in Midas for an oil change for your car.
• If you are gathering a lot of followers, people are getting interested in you. Don’t drive them away by tweeting on unimportant stuff.
• If your tweet adds personality or wow factor to you, then it is a good tweet.
• Get followers and keep them. Getting followers is hard and keeping them is harder. The secret sauce is to continue building a good web personality.
• Use tweets to sneeze great products and experiences.

If you have more thoughts and ideas, feel free to pitch in..Happy tweeting.

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A Rubber Band

If you have a lot of colored pens on your desk and a paper, how long does it take you to draw beautiful mulicolored lines or multicolored lines evenly spaced apart? Now, take a rubber band and tie the pens together and in one stroke, you will find this possible. This is now trivial. The power is not in the pen or paper or you, the power is in the way your small rubber band held everything together.

One common problem always in an organization is that everyone is like a colored pen wanting to exhibit the beautiful things they can draw. But very few people want to be the rubber band that brings everyone together to make the drawing beautiful and even better, easy.

To be a leader, be the rubber band. That is where value and useful experience lies.

Hold them together

A world of kind(l)er possibilities

Yesterday, I had an idea when thinking about the Amazon Kindle. Now, several people have bought the kindles and that means that have to buy the ebooks along with it. Say,  have 100 paper books in my library, what will happen to those books? If I want them on my kindle, I need to buy these 100 books (100 * 10 dollars = 1000 dollars). I have an idea:

1. What if the publishers decide to give away the electronic version of a book in exchage of the paper version?

-The way it would work is, that publisher announces that everybody who has a copy of some book can ship the book back and in turn receive a kindle ebook. They can charge a nominal fee like 2-3 dollars for this service, which is much less than the actual Kindle book price.

2. The paper books that are returned can be donated to organizations like to Room to read who help the children in developing countries by building schools and libraries.

-This would generate a bonus money for the publishing company to justify doing this. Also, it would help millions of children and adults in developing countries an access to knowledge.

I guess there are a lot publishing policies issue that might prevent this from happening. I guess this is more of bureaucratic nature than anything else. If this would happen, the world would be kind(l)er.

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