BUILDING BLOCKS WITH MINTS

It is time for me to study numismatics again. Did you collect stamps as a kid? As an aspiring author, writing on my first forthcoming book on (black) tea, I want to use an excerpt from Ayn Rand's essay, Why I Like Stamp Collecting:

In all those years, I had never found a remedy for mental fatigue. Now, if I feel tired after a whole day of writing, I spend an hour with my stamp albums and it makes me able to resume writing for the rest of the evening. A stamp album is a miraculous brain-restorer.

I am often asked why people like stamp collecting. So widespread a hobby can obviously have many different motives. I can answer only in regard to my own motives, which I have observed also in some of the stamp collectors I have met.

The pleasure lies in a certain special way of using one's mind. Stamp collecting is a hobby for busy, purposeful, ambitious people ... because, in pattern, it has the essential elements of a career, but transposed to a clearly delimited, intensely private world.

(Minkus Stamp Journal, Vol. VI, No. 2 - 1971.)

Here are some photos from my collection of silver coins:  

If you are interested in learned more about collectible coins, check out this video by MintBuilder, LLC.:

If you want to support my blogging and a hobby as a numismatist, please use my affiliate link on MintBuilder.com. You could start your own coin collection today, by register now! [Editor's note: my sponsor ID 29688.]

I look forward to visit a mint someday in the future.

LOL CATS CREATING BUZZ & BIZ

It is amazing how cats could create a such online buzz and big business. I am missing Morris the cat very much, but Robin & Rufus are our family's precious cats nowadays.


Robin & Rufus

Here is an excerpt from Rahul Varshneya's interview with Ben Huh, CEO and founder of Cheezburger (featuring LOLcats):

Rahul Varshneya: What are your greatest learnings as an entrepreneur, things that you would give as advice to an aspiring entrepreneur? 

Ben Huh: Don’t have a fear of talking about your failures. Don’t hide your mistakes. Because we know that running a startup is really hard, and it’s a lot harder if you lie about it. It’s a lot harder if you can’t be honest about the situation you’re in, and you can’t be honest about asking for help.  

(http://rahulvarshneya.com, December 20, 2012.)

You could read what I learned from my business failures in my post (from 2009), Five Lessons Learned from my Start-up — And why I’d Do it Again, on Open Forum (powered by American Express).

Let's keep the game going! Please add your thoughts in the comment section.


Game For Cats

UPDATE 01/13/2013:

Check out Catmoji! Hat tip to Sarah Lane of The Social Hour.

Why Entrepreneurs Need Friends

Entrepreneurs are an unusual breed. After all, who in their right mind would check email on a Sunday afternoon, or work longer than they had to each day? Who would live on savings while trying to grow a startup, straining family relations until funding comes through?


Needless to say, entrepreneurs are sometimes a lonely bunch. Sure, we have friends, but if you're like me, they're teachers and nurses and have respectable jobs that they don't enjoy talking about at dinner parties. Me? I could talk about my marketing firm and marketing in general until I'm the last one at the party.

I recently met some other female entrepreneurs. The feeling of belonging was new and refreshing. They understood what an accomplishment it was to reach 5 years with my company. Or to win a new client. Sometimes with my "regular" friends, I wonder if they really know what it is I do. With entrepreneur friends, you can talk about working out of your home office, traveling to The Bay for business and playing golf, all without feeling ill at ease.

Having a support group is an amazing thing in any situation, but especially for entrepreneurs. We can learn from one another and support each other through good and lean times.

Do you have entrepreneur friends, or are you the "black sheep" of your group? What does having entrepreneur friends mean to you?

HENDRICKS PARK - PERSONAL STYLE EXPERTS

Today I had a great phone conversation via Skype with Lisa Bruckner, CEO of Hendricks Park. As a chile-head, Lisa's post, How to correctly pronounce 'wasabi', piqued my interest:

This lovely game has continued into my adult life; most surprisingly with the name of my blog Wasabi Nights. When I first named the blog and mentioned it to people, they didn't understand what I meant. I would raise my eyebrows in surprise and say "Wasabi. It's the green paste you eat with sushi." The response was always the same: "oh, you mean wasabi!"

Confused? I was, until I realized my correct pronunciation was incorrect for American vernacular. Wasabi is correctly pronounced "wa-sa-bee." It's pronounced in an elegantly, quick manner. Wa! Sa! Bi! Americans however pronounce it "wu-saaaw-bee" and heavy on the "wasssup" part. (WasabiNights.com, May 7, 2009.)

I will definitively use a personal style expert in the future. I am in favor of this kind of service. I have had a hard time going to shops in Sweden due to the overall poor customer service, with a few exceptions, e.g., Acqua Limone and The Fair Tailor. I am missing Eddie Bauer from USA and I look forward to test Lands' End's mail order service in Europe.

Read Sameer Reddy's article, Man Shops Net. A duffel-load of new websites provide shopping-skittish guys with a reason to never leave the house again. I found it via @HendriksPark's tweet.

How do you buy matching clothes? Are you "dressed for success"?


Dressed For Success by Roxette.

Why Aspiring Entrepreneurs Should Stop Planning and Start Doing

My good friend Adam Kalsey - Founder of many successful enterprises, including IMified (acquired last year by Voxeo) and SacStarts (Sacramento's Startup Network) - dishes out some refreshing advice for new entrepreneurs over at the SacStarts blog:

I talk to a great many erstwhile entrepreneurs that tell me all about their ideas and all the things that they’re going to do when they start their company. Or people who have started but aren’t really getting anything done because they can’t find the right co-founder or they need to design every last detail first, or they don’t have the marketing copy for their web site quite right yet.

Entrepreneurs do. We take an idea and a market and drive to make it happen. Figure out what’s standing in the way of you getting stuff done and just go through it. Once you’re actually building your company, a lot of those things that looked insurmountable turn out to be no problem at all.

These are two paragraphs that any aspiring entrepreneur should read over and over again - this is the essence of why so many wannabe companies never get off the ground.  And why so many wannabe entrepreneurs are forever waiting for the stars to align for them to go whole hog after their vision.

Here's an unfortunate fact of life: The stars will never align.  So if you're waiting around for a few things to "fall into place", you're wasting time.  Just get started and get after it.

As Adam mentions, most problems you're planning for right now will never come to fruition.  At least 95% of your planning time and energy is likely being wasted.

On the flip side, there are obstacles that you'll never anticipate until you start off on your journey.  That's OK - you'll deal with them as they come.

The important thing is to "fail fast" - if something is not working, stop doing it, and start doing more things that are working.

But - what if nothing is working at all?  That's OK too - actually it's completely normal, especially for a startup.  See, you don't have to be that far off for it to feel like nothing is lining up.

If I may, let me use Chrometa as an example.  One year ago at this time, we had very little working.  Our messaging and value proposition was not connecting with the market - people would go to our website, and wonder what the heck we (and our product) did.  Not good.

Our product itself was a little better.  It had evolved to the stage where trial and beta users would say "I can see where this is going."

So we kept tweaking everything - our focus, the product itself, our messaging, etc.  It can be a maddening process, quite honestly, because you can make a lot of incremental improvements, and have nothing to show for it.

"How's the startup going?" is a question people love to ask.  And it's a question a pre-revenue company usually hates to answer!  Because it's tough to say things are going well when you don't yet have a product that people will gladly pay for.

But eventually, it came together for us.  We defined who we were.  We kept honing the product (and continue to do so).  And eventually things started to click.

Moral of the story - inaction is the enemy of the entrepreneur.  Get moving today.  You'll figure out what works, what doesn't (that'll be a real long list initially), and most importantly, you'll be able to go from there and start building something of real value.