By Lindsay Bell-Wheeler
Welcome to the 45th edition of The Three Things, the weekly update of three links, podcasts, videos, or books you can’t miss from Michael Schechter (Honora, A Better Mess), Howie Goldfarb (Blue Star Strategic Marketing), and yours truly, Lindsay Bell.
For those of you new to this series, The Three Things arrives in your inbox on Sunday mornings (unless you don’t subscribe, but that can easily be fixed if you hurry over and enter your email address or add to your RSS feed) so you have some extra time to spend perusing the obscure content we’ve curated for you (and one another) before your week begins and deadlines, meetings, and work takes over.
This week we look at ‘running to stand still’: More efficient and better organized note taking, failure, and why it’s such a naughty word, and the terrible toll the struggle to succeed takes on people.
Bullet Journal: An analog note-taking system for the digital age
Michael on note taking. If, like Gini, you love to use paper to help guide your daily actions, you’re going to love the system proposed by Bullet Journal. It’s a great system for “Rapid Logging” tasks, note, events, and just about anything else you’d want to capture on paper. It also provides tactics for properly referencing and accessing your notes, which may appeal to those who struggle to make the most of all of the material in their notebooks. It’s also a damn fine looking website, so be sure to check it out on your desktop.
Twenty Things You Didn’t Know About…The “F” Word
Howie on the F word.
This is a great article giving perspective on failure. Great people fail. Brilliant people fail. Why is it often as taboo a word as that other F word?
Google the NASA Program Genesis. It was a probe that collected solar wind. Upon re-entry after three years in space, the sensor (from my company) that was supposed to alert the parachutes to deploy didn’t work – the chutes had been installed backwards. So instead of a helicopter pick-up, the probe instead crashed to the ground, at 200mph, in front of hundreds. Luckily 90% of the cargo was salvaged. The mission was a success. The landing a definite failure.
The Psychological Price of Entrepreneurship
Lindsay on false hero status. It’s not news that extreme achievers are put on a pedestal these days. People forever post Facebook status updates about how busy they are, how much stress they’re under (and yes, I’m guilty as charged), or how little they slept last night. It seems we’re trying to ‘out-stress’ each other in a mad scramble to win the Who’s Having a Nervous Breakdown contest. But let’s face it. Most of us are small-fry in the stress department compared to that brave club I would NEVER want to be a member of – the entrepreneurs.
For all the multi-million dollar start-up success stories out there, there are an equal number – if not more – of dismal failures. Of marriage breakups, bankruptcies, depression, anxiety and even suicide. In fact, many of the *successes* went through the same perilous, ‘wire-walking across the Grand Canyon’ times of barely keeping it together, before things turned around for them. Luckily, they made it through. This article speaks specifically of the high-achievers out there *koff Gini* – but I think it’s a valuable read for all of us, as we all struggle to keep up in this insane world.
Now it’s your turn. Is there a podcast, video, book, or article you think we need to see?