Rick's Reading List - Updated 8/2/2017

I often stumble across an interesting link that I want to remember - and possibly share. The sites are not worthy of a full blog on their own, but....

[Each link will open in a new window.]

2017

Aug 2: LastPass Review ~ LastPass is the password manager I personally use.

___May 2017___
Robots Won't Save the American Dream

The Shocking Reality of Scaling an Online Business

___Apr 2017___
If You Want Success, You Have to Go Out and Get It (7 min video)
Highlights:
Seek out the experience you want.
Make connections.
Don't assume customers will come to you.
Build your own website: This sounds like old news to seasoned marketers, but it bears repeating, as younger entrepreneurs continue to make the mistakes many have made before them. Don’t build your entire audience on a social media platform.
Always write down your inspiration and ideas.
Create momentum.
Schedule time for what matters.
Get needle-moving results.

___Mar 2017___
On Laziness:
"When I first started Radiate, the biggest question investors asked most frequently was: What's your runway? In other words, given how much money you have in the bank, how long can your company keep operating? 12 months? 24 months? 36?

"Because you are on such a time-sensitive trajectory, you literally can’t afford to be lazy. There is no time to sit around a "mission-less" meeting. If emails go unanswered, that's a cost. If you make a big expensive mistake, you've just eaten up more of your precious time.

One Critical Thing I Stopped Doing Since Becoming an Entrepreneur

___Oct 2016___
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/obituary-billable-hour-tim-williams

1. It misaligns the interests of the professional and the client. What the firm wants more of (hours), the client wants less of.
2. It focuses on efforts, inputs, hours, costs, activities, rather than what clients really buy: outputs and results.
3. It places all the transaction risk on the client.
4. It fosters a production mentality, not an entrepreneurial spirit.
5. It penalizes advances in the firm’s effectiveness. The faster the firm can solve a problem, based on deepening expertise, the less the firm earns.
6. It commoditizes the firm’s talent and intellectual capital into a unit of time, which significantly reduces the firm’s ability to differentiate itself from the competition.
7. It places an artificial ceiling on a firm’s income since there are only so many hours in a day.
8. It rewards busyness and utilization instead of effectiveness and accountability.
9. It discourages innovation. With time constantly measured, a professional's motivation is to be "billable," not innovative. 
10. It provides no useful information about what really matters, such as the quality of the work, the satisfaction of the client, or the effectiveness of the firm.
11. It incents the wrong allocation of resources. Instead of assigning the talent that can most effectively solve the problem, firms assign people the client can "afford."
12. It builds silos and produces a disincentive to collaboration. The goal becomes coming in “on estimate” rather than drawing on internal brainpower that can solve client problems.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-partners-break-golden-rule-prepared-walk-away-strive-masiyiwa (The source article has been deleted.)

Why do we need partners in business? There are many different kinds of partners:

• Partners who can provide capital;
• Partners who can provide technical expertise (or specialized knowledge) that you don’t have;
• Partners who can provide access to markets and opportunities;
• Partners who can provide services to your business.
• You’ll need partners to undertake things you cannot do alone, and partners to share risk.

There are many excellent reasons to work in partnership, and also many bad ones that will lead to heartbreak. For a start, ask yourselves and each other:

• Do we share core values?
• Do we trust and respect each other?
• Do we agree on the goals and vision to take the business forward?
• Do we agree on how we’ll use the money raised and how the profits will be distributed?
• You must want to see your partners prosper because of what you’re doing together.

___May 2016___
https://wpsoar.com/6-reasons-you-should-own-your-name-domain

___Mar 2016___
Your Website: Do you chunk your pages? Kate Meyer posted a great article about chunking data:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/chunking/

___Blog 2010___
"...the popular web fonts (Arial, Verdana, Georgia, and Times New Roman) are such not only because of their wide availability, but because they are drawn with the screen’s limitations in mind."
http://designforhackers.com/blog/why-you-dont-use-garamond-on-the-web/
~~~  Here's a link to his entire blog about typesetting, which apparently ended in 2015. He has a really annoying popup plugin that demands your email address, but there's an arrow at the bottom that allows you to read the rest of the page. Read More.