Just noted from Small Biz Trends have a list of about 16 good trade and technology publications which you can subscribe for free.  Great Resource!

Small Businesses of the Future » Small Business Trends

Intuit just released the first installment of a report called, “Future of Small Business.” The report forecasts what the small business landscape will look like in the United States over the next 10 years, to 2017.

And it is a fascinating picture:

Its Valentine’s Day. Here are some great quotes I came upon:

Then there was a man who said, “I never knew what real happiness was until I got married; by then it was too late.”

When a woman steals your husband, there is no better revenge than to let her keep him

My wife and I were happy for 20 years - then we met. -Rodney Dangerfield

Men marry women with the hope they will never change. Women marry men with the hope they will change. Invariably they are both disappointed. — Albert Einstein

Many a man owes his success to his first wife and his second wife to his success.– Jim Backus

I’ve had bad luck with both my wives. The first one left me and the second one didn’t.” — Patrick Murray.

In my house I’m the boss, my wife is just the decision maker.” -Woody Allen.

I married Miss Right. I just didn’t know her first name was Always.

I was having my hair cut in a hair salon the other day, and noticed that besides me was a girl who was barely 16. She was accompanied by two women, one probably an aunt , the other probably her mother. It looked like she had her face all made up, her hair in a kind of braid that looked like it took the last of 2 hours, and her nails, and toenails were all nicely painted. I took a look at her intently, but all she seemed to care about was how ( as did her mom probably) the hair stylist was doing her hair.

She looked good, except that she did not smile, and probably her disposition was not somebody sunny that you want to stay in a room with for more than a few minutes, nor did it looked like she could strike an intelligent conversation, except on how she looked. I pity the girl, and what she had been misled to believe about succeeding in life.

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I have had a great moment sharing all my thoughts.  I’d like to hear from you!  I have put in a new page which is a form where you may ask questions / post feedbacks.  You can throw me questions on business, technology, or on living life!  I will do my best to give a good answer in the blog!

I started my day staring at a Joke Toon which advised ” if you lose weight, you’ll have more energy. why do you think they call it FATigue?”

I guess while it was said tongue in cheek, there is a point - being overweight does mean you don’t have the energy to move as much as you want. I outlined in an earlier blog about my plan to lose weight. Since then, 4 weeks have passed, and I shed another 4 pounds. As I outlined earlier, I think the plan to lose weight, or any plan that needs to be executed for that matter, really depends on the availability of instant and constant feedback. If we get the right feedback fast, we as supposedly intelligent human beings will be able to adjust our behavior to accomplish our goals.

For instance, for the last one year, I believe I am now a more sensible driver who is getting more mileage from my car — simply because there is an electronic counter in the car dashboard that automatically feedbacks to me how much mileage I get from the car based on my driving habits. I can easily glean for instance, that when I accelerate too fast and too much, the mileage goes down, and therefore I automatically Read the rest of this entry »

One of the blogs I follow is Joel on Software.  Joel is an entrepreneur who founded Fog Creek Software, and his books, and blogs are one of the most popular in the Internet.

He is an avid entrepreneur and digs into details on how things work, and consistently come up with observations everybody sees but does not note.  His interview as one of the personalities interviewed  in the newly released book, Founders at Work reveals a lot of salient points if you want to be an entrepreneur ( especially one coming from a tech background).

I was informed that one of the more popular things you can do on the internet in Korea is to provide you with a fake parent, a fake boyfriend or fiance, or a fake son or daughter.  These are ordinary people who acts as stand ins to make a few extra money.

Getting a ‘phony’ parent to make a phone call to the teacher would cost $30, and getting him to visit the school would cost $100.

Another one of the things that is happening to China, because of the one child policy, is that there are now more boys than girls.  Boys are more priced than girls, and parents go to lengths to insure that their only child is a boy, including, as I am told forced abortion when they know that the coming baby is a girl.  According to statistics, 110 boys were born for every 100 girls in 2000, and this has increased to 118 boys for every 100 girls born in 2005.

  The last few weeks since the start of the new Year, I have focused a lot of my time in doing one-on-one meetings with my colleagues.

It was something that I only started the last few years.  Before in the interest of efficiency, I would normally hold group meetings of anywhere between 5 to 20 people.  It would normally be a group discussion.  No, it was too big a waste of time to meet people one by one.
But lately, I have found out that there are circumstances that merits one on one meetings.  When you meet somebody and only talk to him for the whole half hour, it says something to him or her — I am important, and I have the undivided attention of my manager and  boss. You get to share things you normally would not talk about when there are others in, and there is really a ‘connection’.  At the end, such is the way you build organizations - one at a time.

I have also lately been doing that to my kids.  I have 3 kids, and normally, we would play with them all together, and we would spend time together.  But lately, my wife and I have tried something different - Sometimes I travel with my second kid, sometimes I bring my eldest kid to dinner.  Sometimes, I just talked to my last kid — as if at least on that time being, he was my only kid.  Such kind of undivided attention, I believe, gives them the kind of feel good that you could not get if you constantly have to deal with them all three together.

One on One meetings — not very efficient, but very effective!

I have always wanted to be a scholar and a businessman. In some way, this is an oxymoron - and if you look at it, few have been able to bridge the difference that it entails.

According to ” the American Political Tradition: and the Men who Made it” which was written by Richard Hofstadter, American business people are rarely men or women who were thought leaders. Business people have more traditionally been oriented toward action rather than contemplation. Business people can often be highly intelligent, but what makes them successful is the excellence of mind that is employed within a fairly narrow, immediate and predictable range:

Whereas the mind of the intellectual not only wants to work with ideas, but also to play with them. Thus, ideas for an intellectualhave an integrity of their own, and the intellecutal
approaches them therefore with’piety’, while the business executive lives off ideas, not for them.”

To a certain degree, therefore, it is hard to be an intellectual businessman. In my personal sense, I do sense that - sometimes, I tend to think ” too much”, or analyze too much, or tinker too much, rather than let it be. And that can sometimes not be too good for business….

What do you think?