Hanoi toddler and b-boy, from a trip Ma.tt and I took in 2009. (Photo: Matt Mullenweg)
The next post will be an interview on writing process with the inimitable Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist and Aleph, among many others. His work been translated into 71 languages.
In the meantime, I’d like make a few offers and provide a few updates, as well as a few reading links:
1) Would you like to be in The 4-Hour Chef? I’d love for you to be.
Amazingly, it hit both #1 and #2 (for Kindle version) in cookbooks on Amazon when it was announced, and I think it could be bigger than the last two books. If you’ve had success on The Slow-Carb Diet™, have any before/after pics, and would like to be featured in the book, please click here!
2) Random articles from around the web that readers of this blog might enjoy (or find amusing):
- IBM Worker Email-Free for 4 Years: How to Live without Email
- Interview on travel for the BBC – Tim Ferriss: Forms of Identification
- SF Chronicle interview – Tim Ferriss has strong likes: knives, kettlebells
- Volkswagen turns off Blackberry email after work hours
3) The winner of the free roundtrip anywhere in the world, a prize from the Christmas Countdown experiment (intermittent fasting, plus training), is Daniel Kislyuk! There were some fantastic self-trackers, but Daniel gave constant status updates and then wrapped up with a summary post. Daniel, please keep an eye on your e-mail for a note from Amy.
4) For the trip to SF for all-day training with Chip Conley, I’ll let Chip deliver the message himself:
Surprise + Joy = Elation. That’s my new Emotional Equation of the day. Wow, I’m elated by the response to my guest blog and how many insightful entries were submitted. Thank you so much for diving into the deep end of the emotional swimming hole with me. It seems like this book is made for these times. The more externally chaotic the world, the more we yearn for some kind of internal logic.
There were 7 entries (of the first 100 submitted, although I did read every single one of the almost 500) that deserved extra recognition. I will give an Honorable Mention to Divya (1/19 at 7:03 am), Eric Sigfried (1/19 at 8:52 am), Marcus (1/19 at 9:18 am), Susan Dupre (1/19 at 10:19 am) and Ryan (1/19 at 10:50 am).
We have a runner-up whose dissection and use of the Anxiety Balance Sheet impressed me, and that’s Ryan Riegner (1/19 at 9:22 am). Ryan, I believe you live in the NYC area and I’ll be there from Feb 19-25 for a book launch party and media tour. I would like to invite you out to a meal with me while I’m in town. This wasn’t planned to be an extra prize, but your response deserves it. And, our winner is Diego Velasquez (1/19 at 7:54 am) who will be flying out to SF to stay at our luxurious Hotel Vitale for a couple of nights and spend a day learning what it means to be a Chief Emotions Officer. For those who’d like to continue to learn more about Emotional Equations, check out our DIY contest on the Emotional Equations Facebook page, as it gives you another shot at a trip to SF and dinner with me.
Thanks once again for the phenomenal efforts and I hope you enjoy the book if you read it!
Chip Conley, founder of Joie de Vivre Hotels
Chip Conley is the founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, which he began at age 26 and built to more than 30 properties in California alone. In 2010, Joie de Vivre was awarded the #1 customer service award in the U.S. by Market Metrix (Upper Upscale hotel category).
Conley has also been named the “Most Innovative CEO” in the Bay Area by the San Francisco Business Times, and I’m proud to call him a friend.
We’ve shared many glasses of wine together. He doesn’t know what I’m about to tell you, but it’s true (Hi, Chip!). When we first met, and after reading his first book on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I wondered “Is this Chip dude for real? Implementing self-actualization in a company?!?” My curiosity drove me to visit a few of his hotels, including Hotel Vitale, where I eventually concluded: these are the happiest employees I’ve ever met.
He has figured out what makes people tick.
The following post is a guest post by Chip and based on his new book, Emotional Equations. Be sure to read to the end, as there is a chance to win an expense-paid trip to SF to spend an entire day training with him.
Deal-making? Empire building? Self-fulfillment? He’s your guy.
Enjoy… Read More
This post might seem odd, as it starts with a random sequence from a random skill. There are three reasons for this:
1) I like to expose readers to things they’ve never explored.
2) The best long-term policy for keeping a blog fun to read (and write) is to cover things that subsets of your readers love, not things that everyone merely likes.
3) I think all of you should know how to respond to a real physical attack.
Keeping these in mind, I hope you enjoy a lil’ taste of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, often nicknamed “human chess.”
If it’s not your thing, I still suggest you skip to the end, where you can see the free (and short) video series I did with Dave Camarillo on defending against real-world attacks of various types. I had these videos up at one time in 2007, but the code became corrupted, so I’m updating them here.
One of the last videos is of me getting thrown on my head, or heels-over-head, repeatedly.
Enter Dave Camarillo
Since the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) came to prominence in 2005, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) has been the most sought-after skill-set in the marital arts world. There are many world-class athletes, but there are only a few world-class teachers. Dave Camarillo, who’s coached UFC fighters like Cain Velasquez, is one of them… Read More
Article 126: No brown M&M’s! (Photo: Mr. T in DC)
Happy New Year, all! I’ll be putting up a “Lessons learned in 2011″ post soon. In the meantime, here is a taste of things to come.
###
I can come across as anal retentive, even severely Monk-ish. One reason for the madness: with rare exceptions, I’ve come to believe that how we do anything is how we do everything.
I’m not alone.
The following is a short excerpt from The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, also reprinted by Tehelka magazine in India. In it, we learn the logic of David Lee Roth’s famous obsession with brown M&M’s:
Listening to the radio, I heard the story behind rocker David Lee Roth’s notorious insistence that Van Halen’s contracts with concert promoters contain a clause specifying that a bowl of M&M’s has to be provided backstage, but with every single brown candy removed, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation to the band. And at least once, Van Halen followed through, peremptorily cancelling a show in Colorado when Roth found some brown M&M’s in his dressing room. This turned out to be, however, not another example of the insane demands of power-mad celebrities but an ingenious ruse.
As Roth explained in his memoir, Crazy from the Heat, “Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, thirdlevel markets.
We’d pull up with nine 18-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move thegear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function.” So just as a little test, buried somewhere in the middle of the rider, would be article 126, the no-brown-M&M’s clause. “When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,” he wrote, “well, we’d line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error… Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.” These weren’t trifles, the radio story pointed out. The mistakes could be lifethreatening. In Colorado, the band found the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and the staging would have fallen through the arena
Do you have any similar tests that you’ve found helpful in business, hiring, life, or love?
