Ability to find alternate paths to overcome obstacles
Able to take on large situations
Adaptive/collaborative
Adventurous, courageous, lives outside of boundaries
[…]
Philosophical
Holistic thinking
Playful
Pragmatic
Problem solver
Profound
Quick thinking
Quick witted
It is a long list and it was created by seminar participants asked to describe positive influences that their ADD has had on their lives. Many of these qualities are the ones that we see over and over in “self-improvement” articles. Take a few minutes and peruse the whole list.
Which of these qualities is descriptive of your own personality? How does ADD help you to become successful?
And the most important question: Which of these attributes do you think that you could add to your description in order to improve your productivity and the quality of your life?
I chose these:
Compassion for others and for themselves.
Learning as much as I can to help children and others with ADD.
Thinks 2 meters ahead of the world.
Very creative, able to generate a lot of ideas.
I am adding these qualities to my list of actions to review weekly.
A new article from Al Ries in AdAge magazine describes the problem with attempting to extend your company’s brand into the digital realm, as if it were just another “outlet”:
Line extension is rampant in the media. Take Talk magazine, or rather Talk Media, a company founded in 1998 by Tina Brown and financed by Miramax, a division of Disney. The former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, Ms. Brown announced that she would, according to The New York Times, “publish a new monthly magazine, publish books and produce films and television programming.”
Twenty-nine months after its launch, Talk magazine folded, losing a reported $54 million, including the money spent on a launch party on Liberty Island for 1,400 of the world’s most famous people.
Multimedia has been a buzz word for years. “Investors just can’t get enough of multimedia,” reported Business Week. “Wall Street has bid up the shares of almost all media companies, figuring they’ll offer much of the information that will give multimedia zing. Most publishers, meanwhile, are rushing to set up on-line services.”
When was this published? Last week? Last month? Last year?
No. Business Week reported on the multimedia movement in its December 6, 1993, issue. That’s more than 13 years ago.
More than 13 years of watching the New Media grow into the greatest two-way conversation ever held. And yet so many companies still do not “get it”. The future is here, and it is going to look just like yesterday:
…very few brands have made a successful transition from an older medium to a newer one. Remember “USA Today on TV”?
Putting a magazine on radio or TV never worked either. Literally dozens of publications tried to take their successful print formula into the radio and TV arena. They all failed.
Why? The essence of radio is the human voice and the essence of TV is motion. A printed piece just sits there, says nothing and doesn’t move.
A new medium needs a new concept and a new brand. The most successful internet brands have not been WSJ.com, Forbes.com, CNN.com or any other line extension from a traditional medium.
The most successful internet brands have been new brands such as Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, You Tube, MySpace, Facebook, Priceline, Craigslist, Wikipedia, AOL.
Indeed, the internet tubes are awash in “content” that is trying to look like TV, or a magazine, or a book. The new concept-driven brands mentioned above look different. They act different. The big paradigm change has come around in the field of monetizing the content.
I get the search results from Google for free. I get the information from Wikipedia for free. I can advertise my brand on YouTube for free. The new, post-Cluetrain model is one where the publisher pays to provide the content, and advertisers pay to ride along. Unlike books, magazines, newspapers, and cable TV, where the receiver pays (some of) the cost of production. (Snarky aside: In fact, I pay so much to Time Warner Cable, it makes me angry when I have to sit through six and eight minutes of commercials at a time during a movie.)
In fact, this change-over is going to look so much like the last one that some companies aren’t going to know what hit them:
“I’ve got a thousand brilliant print salespeople who are going to be transformed into a thousand brilliant multimedia salespeople,” said Ann Moore, chairman-CEO, Time Inc. “We are a content company, OK? We create and we edit, and we aggregate the best content out there. We can deliver to you, our reader, in whatever format you want it in the future — maybe not on paper.”
Some 25 years ago, one of the biggest believers in multimedia was … me[Al Ries, ed.]. Our advertising agency was hired by Norelco to prepare advertising for its new multimedia projector and we got very excited. “The one machine that mixes slides, movies and sound” was the headline of our first ad.
Needless to say, the multimedia projector went nowhere.
I wonder if Ms. Moore must not have a magic wand that she picked up in Diagon Alley. She’s going to need it to transform all of those salespeople, provided that the remaining 1,000 are among those who survived the layoffs. And the sacrifice of 18 titles. From the Feb. 12, 2007 Business Week:
Since 2002, when the fiercely talented Moore started running the world’s largest magazine company, the threat posed by online media has become brutally clear to even the most hard-core print supremacist. Parent Time Warner (TWX ) underwent a highly public siege from investor Carl Icahn. Time Inc. itself atypically began missing budgeted numbers and, also atypically, sold 18 magazines. (Industry wisdom long held that Time Inc. was a buyer, never a seller.) Revenues dropped in 2006. And the unit underwent a long, wrenching series of layoffs that ended only in January.
“Once you know how to process your stuff and what to organize,
you really just need to create and manage lists”
~David Allen, Getting Things Done
Call it an organizer, a day planner, a calendar, a diary, or just a capture notebook; the paper organizer has lasted through two or three generations of productivity systems. In the last few years, digital organizers have become wildly popular as they can synchronize a portable unit with your desktop computers at work and home.
Managing your lists
One of the core practices of Getting Things Done is making a list of your Next Actions, the base unit of your productivity. Whether you are working on a large project or simply running errands you need to know what actions you should take in order to accomplish your goal. As you organize and process your life, you will be creating a series of lists that need to be collected and readily accessible. I submit that an organizer of some sort is the best way to collect these lists, which will consist mainly of your Projects, Next Actions, and a Calendar. (Your calendar is a special kind of list, laid out in a chronological fashion.)
Additionally your organizer can contain lists of longer-term goals, life principles, a “Waiting For” list, and Reference material. All of this information can be contained in anything you like, from a simple, spiral-bound notebook from the dollar store to the ever-popular Moleskine. My personal favorite is a Levenger Circa notebook, 5.5″ x 8.5″, divided into the appropriate sections. I have used a Palm Pilot in the past, but I have found that it just does not have the flexibility or tactile quality of a paper-based system. Read the rest of this entry »
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July 26th, 2007 by Stephen
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