When you’re in a fast growing company, it’s more than possible to overhire and overstaff, filling in perceived gaps before they really are needed. Today I was emailed an amusing, if slightly over cutesy, fable about overstaffing that I thought I’d share. I think the important thing with respect to growth is to ensure you don’t end up navel-gazing and over analyzing. The fable in slideshow format is after the jump … (more…)

Photo by Matthew Hogan Photography

Editor’s Note: I originally wrote this for ZenHabits back in June 2008, but I’ve brought it over as I think NS readers will find it interesting!

Have you ever written out a list of goals you’d like to achieve and thought, ‘How can I get all this done’? Or seen an opportunity that you’ve had to pass by because you are just flat out? Life is a torrent of choices and possibilities, and often it’s hard to let them go. Should you compromise? Or do you just need a better game plan?

As an easily excitable person, I have a really hard time constraining myself to doing just a few things. Every project seems worth doing, every opportunity worth taking. Still I know that for many people, work is a way to make enough money to relax and enjoy life. If that sounds like you, then you may not get much out of this article. However, if your days are filled to the brim and yet you still can’t wait to start that new project, then I am speaking to you! (more…)

To look at a guy like Woody Allen, you’d never think he had a chance at being a household name and a famous comedy star. I mean, let’s be honest he’s a bit odd looking, has a very peculiar manner and if you met him on the street you’d think he was just an amusing eccentric. When he was asked some years ago how he came to success, his reply was that "80 percent of success is just showing up". Early in his career with nothing happening, he just used to go to every single audition, party, event, opening, anything that was going on.

People like to talk about luck being a factor in success, and you could say that eventually that’s exactly what happened, Allen got lucky. But of course the message in this story is not that he got lucky, but that he set it up so that he could get lucky.

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The other day I came across a short presentation on entrepreneurship by Larry Page, co-founder of Google. In the presentation Page discusses setting aggressive goals and quotes a rather catchy motto which I think is just brilliant: “Have a healthy disregard for the impossible”.

In this post I thought I’d discuss some of the benefits for entrepreneurs and startups to setting aggressive goals and creating deadlines. But first let me begin with a story from my own experience… (more…)

Being a netsetting entrepreneur is very much about motivating oneself. Unlike traditional employment there is no boss-figure watching over you, making sure you’ve done your job and giving you new tasks to do. That’s an extremely liberating feeling, but it also presents its own challenges. How do you stay on track? How do you keep yourself moving when you’re feeling lazy? And when things are going well, how do you push yourself to grow, to take risks and to be better?

Motivation is a rather complex subject so in this post I’m going to talk about just one motivation tool that I use, namely other people. Heroes, role models and rivals are three types of people that keep me focused.

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