Armaghan Saqib

I am thrilled to attend TEDx Ravi (TEDx Lahore). A large number of great thinkers are coming there to help make this world a better place by sharing their ideas.

A similar event, TEDx Karachi, was held on 4 June this year.

For those who are not familiar with TED/TEDx conferences, here are some excerpts from TED.com.

TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer.

TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TEDx program and the annual TED Prize.

And TEDTalks:

TEDTalks began as a simple attempt to share what happens at TED with the world. Under the moniker “ideas worth spreading,” talks were released online. They rapidly attracted a global audience in the millions. Indeed, the reaction was so enthusiastic that the entire TED website has been re-engineered around TEDTalks, with the goal of giving everyone on-demand access to the world’s most inspiring voices.

Hats off to the hard working team.

Register here: http://www.tedxravi.com/attendee-registration/

See you there.

In a previous post I posted a link to Seth Godin‘s 7 free ebooks. Today I stumbled upon this link which contains 7 more free books including his book Tribes in audio format. Happy reading.

Dropbox is the easiest way to backup files on your PC or laptop. Visit dropbox website to download and install this software. It adds a ‘My Dropbox’ folder into your ‘My Documents’. It also creates a dropbox.com login, the place where your backup is kept. Now put any file in the dropbox folder and it will get updated to dropbox.com servers.

Dropbox gives you 2000 MB free space (or 2250 MB If you visit the website using links in this post.) If you need more backup space, you can purchase it. You can use ‘My Dropbox’ folder as a default folder for all your work and your data will keep getting backed up automatically.

An interesting use is to install dropbox software on your office as well as home computer using the same login. From now onward, whatever you do on your office computer will get copied to your home computer. (or the other way around.)

I have been using dropbox on my Windows and Linux (ubuntu) laptops for about a month and quite satisfied. For details, read the ‘getting started.pdf’ which gets copied to your dropbox folder after dropbox installation.

And don’t forget to cleanup your hard drive first.

Its time to “stop worrying and start living”.

Our evolutionary tendency is to keep accumulating things. We buy or create stuff, use it and often keep it forever. The best rule is to either sell such stuff, gift it to a friend or throw it away. To combat this natural tendency of accumulating stuff, we need to keep cleaning on regular basis.

Our computers and laptops are another area which constantly need cleaning of downloaded files, temporary files, copies of files, copies of copies of files; you got it. Too often I hear people complaining they can’t keep a backup because they have too much data. And they keep worrying about any impeding disaster with their PC.

Trust me. You don’t have (or should not have) more than 1000 MB of data on your PC or laptop. If you have more than this, start cleanup drive this weekend and keep doing it for few weekends (and probably often after that). This 1000 MB does not include any downloaded movies, images, software which I believe is not something “mission critical” and can be arranged if you even need again. (No I am not taking about you. I know you are a designer, photographer or a movie maker. You have a lot of stuff which needs to be kept forever.)

For our sanity, we should not have to worry about the stuff we won’t use again ever.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/salim/53178920

There was a time when I was under-confident. Everyone said I was a wizard in my field. I never believed these “lies”. I was never confident enough. I wanted to learn, learn and learn. I now realize that I missed many opportunities to grow big, to expand my business and to make better contacts; just because I did not feel confident enough.

This under-confident thing had one benefit; I became a staunch self-learner. Whenever confronted with a new task, I always picked a book and started reading.

Then a time came when I had become over confident. I thought I could do anything, just anything, with all my knowledge and a bit of effort. Sky was not the limit. This over-confidence almost killed my business and burned all my savings. I literally had to start from scratch and survived, fortunately.

This over confidence did help me achieve couple of almost impossible goals.

Any emotions and thoughts based upon your experience and hunch for which you can’t offer much justification come under metaphoric red hat. Being over-confident or under-confident without any reason is red hat.

Red hat thinking is a necessary part of our day to day thinking. We should depend on our hunch; we should take emotional decisions. But we should also give due share to black, yellow, white, blue, green hat thinking.

Here is a common sequence of thinking:

==> red ==> [ACTION] ==> black yellow green blue white

With six thinking hats we want to transform it to:

==> black yellow green blue white ==> red ==> [ACTION]

Note that in both sequences emotions (red hat) precede action but the second one is a better way to being under-confident or over-confident.

This is the story of an Internet security researcher who posed as a pretty girl and made 300 connections on social media. Read it here and another one here.

Boys please don’t make fool of us.

Elevator pitch is an interesting concept. You try to sell yourself to someone during a short elevator ride (30-90 seconds).

My elevator pitch may look like this:

I think simplicity is the most neglected core value in business and personal life. My advice and solutions with ‘simplicity’ as core component can revolutionize your business and/or life.

I really wanted the following one but deBono has already “stolen” this:

Human thinking is the least utilized resource. I can bring change with lateral thinking.

What is yours?

Photo credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/merlijnhoek/2320577867/

A very good friend of mine is exhibiting at ITCN Asia 2010 next month. Few years ago I asked him if he could measure the outcome of his participation in exhibitions. He said no he could not. But he did believe that it was going to enhance his brand image in long term.

This friend has been longing to start an email newsletter for so many years but has yet to take the first step. Perhaps it looks so easy. Perhaps it can be done anytime he wants to so let us get done with “important” things first. His company blog stinks there in the cyberspace for many years now with the only ‘hello world’ post.

In fact I have yet to see a good newsletter or a good company blog here in our country. (Ok lets be fair. May be I am missing some. if you know one, let me know in comments).

ITCN Asia 2010 (or any other conference and exhibition) is an event. Getting an expensive website done is also an event. So are many other things.

Building a mailing list, sending fortnightly newsletters, updating a blog/website, self-learning are all processes.

Holding events is easier. Building processes is hard. Some attention to building processes may eliminate the need of costly events. Let us start building some processes after this year ITCN Asia event.

Photo credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oxfam/2087484701/

I have mentioned Dr. Edward de Bono‘s lateral thinking tools many times here. These tools direct your attention to a particular aspect of thinking by asking you to do PMI (plus, minus, interesting), APC (alternatives, possibilities and choices), OPV (other people views) etc.

People often ask what is the big deal with these tools? Any good thinker can look into pros and cons and can identify alternatives without knowing about these tools. So why thinking tools?

It is true good thinkers can do all the good thinking without thinking tools. But good thinkers are rare and asking to do a particular kind of thinking all the time without a mnemonic is difficult if not impossible. And kids love thinking tools.

Thinking tools make it formal and simpler to ask anyone (or yourself) to do a particular kind of thinking. Asking everyone to do PMI in a meeting saves a lot of time. People will know that a good PMI includes equal emphasis on plus, minus as well as interesting aspects.

Without PMI we may favor ‘plus’ or ‘minus’ (whatever our past experience suggests).

This recommendation is not about food. It is about your media intake from TV, cable, newspapers and Internet. We are now consuming media as recklessly as we do with our food. I know people who watch news every hour quickly cycling different news channels with remote control in their hands.

I can tell from my personal experience (when I was a media addict too) that this reckless media intake can be disastrous to our concentration.

Just ask yourself few questions:

Can you find any actionable item in your daily media intake?

What is the practical value of staying this much “informed”?

Don’t you have any other goals in your life which are waiting for your free time?

May be you need to question your idea of entertainment from media aligning it to your long term goals.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vagabondiamo/4455223388/