Friday 23 July 2010

Inspiring happiness

Take an hour out of your day as soon as possible to watch this inspirational video by Tony Hsieh the CEO of zappos.com.



Tony is not only a business genius, he's also an amazingly humble and grounded human being who has realised very early in life how to achieve his own dreams, but more importantly align his dreams with creating a better world for others.

Once you've watched this, another great resource to look at is A Brief Guide to World Domination by Chris Guillebeau. In this pdf Chris asks what he calls the Two Most Important Questions in the Universe. When you read it you'll see that Tony has cracked these questions and that's probably why he's so inspirational.

There's a lot you can learn from Tony, take a look at Delivering Happiness for even more inspiration.

Heirarchy of needs

I come across this image of Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs quite a bit in my marketing work. In fact, I think one of the reasons I decided to get out of agency life and corporate marketing was that it got used so much by planners and marketers to manipulate people into thinking their products and services would deliver a better quality of life for people. I never believed that increased consumption, or buying stuff you don't need, could lead to self-actualisation, in reality it's usually the opposite. But when you work for people, you often have to do whatever it takes to create success, even if you don't necessarily agree with the methods or the outcome.


I'm not going to write a thesis on this, but looking at the pyramid again today it struck me that for most people, my self included, it's pretty obvious why it's so hard to achieve self actualisation and real happiness in life.

Monday 12 July 2010

Remote working

One of the first things I'm aiming to do whilst maximising my life is to put everything in place to be able to work from anywhere I choose. At worst this will allow me to be free of the wasted time, energy (mine and the planet's) and money consumed by commuting (and see my girlfriend more and not be too exhausted to go for a run), and at best allow me to live and make a living wherever I choose in the world.

So I'm on the hunt for tools that can make this possible. Here are a few I've already found and am using or am considering using: