The Fred Factor by Mark Sanborn is a book about how passion in your work and life can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. I liked the format of the book. It was broken down into simple steps and points. Points were often supported with quotes (which I love). Each chapter actually started with a quotation as well which I’ve always enjoyed in books. The book was small (119 pages) and I was able to read it in a night. Below are various quotes from the author and quotes that he mentions by other people that I related with in the book.

Make each day your masterpiece. Joshua Wooden, father of John Wooden

Whatever you are, be a good one. Abraham Lincoln

Principle #1: Everyone Makes a Difference

There are no unimportant jobs, just people who feel unimportant in their jobs. Mark Sanborn, the author

There is more credit and satisfaction in being a first-rate truck driver than a tenth-rate executive. B.C. Forbes, founder of Forbes magazine

Faithfully doing your best, independent of the support, acknowledgement, or reward of others, is a key determinant in a fulfilling career. Mark Sanborn, the author

Principle #2: Success is built on relationships

Service becomes personalized when a relationship exists between the provider and the customer. Mark Sanborn, the author

…relationship building is the most important objective because the quality of the relationship determines the quality of the product or service. Mark Sanborn, the author

The 7 B’s of Relationship Building

1. Be Real.
2. Be interested (not just interesting).
3. Be a better listener.
4. Be empathetic.
5. Be honest. Say what you’ll do and do what you say.
6. Be helpful.
7. Be prompt.

Principle #3: You must continually create value for others, and it doesn’t have to cost a penny

The object is to outthink your competition rather than outspend them. Mark Sanborn, the author

Sanborn’s Maxim says that the faster you try to solve a problem with money, the less likely it will be the best solution. Mark Sanborn, the author

There are two types of people who never achieve very much in their lifetimes. One is the person who won’t do what he or she is told to, and the other is the person who does no more than he or she is told to do. Andrew Carnegie

Principle #4: Reinvent yourself regularly

IQ = Implementation Quotient. It’s the difference between having a good idea and implementing it.

Practice one a day. If you had to do everything in an extraordinary manner, you’d barely make it to work in the morning. Focus on doing one extraordinary thing per day. If you do that 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, your life will soon be a record book full of extraordinary.

Compete with yourself. There will always be people who accomplish more or less than you. It’s more productive and fun to compete against and benchmark yourself.

Becoming a Fred

You change the world of another driver when you allow her to change lanes abruptly without blaring your horn, recognizing that she too is human and fallible. Of course you alter her world in a different way if you blast your horn, yell and gesture obscenely.

You also change the world of a coworker, a customer, a vendor, or a cafeteria worker with your smile or your frown.

No these aren’t dramatic changes. They won’t alter the course of world affairs or bring about a cure for AIDS. But whose to say these little changes don’t have a cumulative, profound effect in the lives of others and, ultimately, in your own life. Mark Sanborn, the author

The fact is that everybody is already making a difference every day. The key question is, What kind of difference is each of us making. Mark Sanborn, the author

Developing Other Freds

There is something that is much more scarce, something finer by far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability. Elbert Hubbard

When people feel that their contributions are unappreciated, the will stop trying. And when that happens, innovation dies. Mark Sanborn, the author

You teach what you know but you reproduce who you are. John C. Maxwell

You can preach a better sermon with your life than your lips. Oliver Goldsmith

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act, but a habit. Aristotle

At the Day of Judgment we shall not be asked what we have read but what we have done. Thomas A Kempis

I was looking for some light reading this weekend and this magazine caught my eye. The cover page article is actually pretty interesting. The “Super Rich” part did it’s job in catching my eye but it would more aptly be named “The Secrets of the Super Successful” but I digress. I really enjoyed the article so I thought I would post the seven secrets here and several of the quotes that I highlighted in my copy.

1. Perseverance beats education.

If this wasn’t true, I feel I’d be in trouble in my profession. I’m a programmer the majority of the time but didn’t really take much computer science in college. I’ve gotten where I am completely through hard work, not through being smart.

“Smartness is an ability to absorb new facts. To ask an insightful question. A capacity to remember. To relate to domains that may not seem connected at first.” - Bill Gates

Love the absorb new facts line and the connect things that normally don’t seem connected. I am fortunate to be around a lot of smart people, so often I just sit back and soak it all in. I also think one of my strengths is common sense and making things simple which relates to the latter part of Bill’s quote. Can we agree that I’m smart? No? Maybe next year…

“I think I overcame every single one of my personal shortcomings by the sheer passion I brought to my work. I don’t know if you are born with this kind of passion or if you can learn it. But I do know you need it.” - Sam Walton

I really think passion and a desire to do good are the best things you can bring to your career. People love passion. In fact, from what I’ve seen, people respond to passion over reason. The reason I team passion and good together is otherwise you might end up like Jim Jones or some other cult.

2. Make your own luck.

My dad used to play the quarter game with my sister and I. He would flip a quarter and whoever guessed correctly would win all the change in his pocket (which was often dollars!). I won the game one time out of maybe 50 in my life and my dad probably lied because he knew I couldn’t take another loss. In fact, he used to pull out the quarter and I would run away crying, yelling that he should just give Em the money. I say all that to point out that making your own luck is important to me because I don’t have any. :)

“I don’t consider myself to be lucky. I think luck is preparation meeting a moment of opportunity.” - Oprah Winfrey (this ones for Erin cause I know she loves herself some Oprah)

Luck can also be defined as having vision or being flexible or forward thinking. - Anna Isgro, article author

“I don’t remember any mistakes, only the opportunity to overcome problems.” - James Sorenson

“Vision is what determines who will be a leader. Great leaders can see how a situation will play out and take action in response.” - Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad

3. Gamble, but wisely.

“People who win are careful with their thoughts, not saying ‘I can’t do that.’ Or ‘It’s too risky.’ Or ‘I can’t afford it.’ Instead they say, ‘How can I do that?’ Or ‘How can I reduce my risk?’ Or ‘How can I afford it?’” - Robert Kiyosaki

4. Know your market…intimately.

“Experts have more highly differentiated cognitive abilities. They can see opportunities others can’t and figure out how to turn them into a business.” - Kelly Shaver, Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies

I know the web but that is not my a market. It is a tactic. So what do I know intimately? I grew up on a farm. I probably know farming better than any other web developer. Farming, at least on the scale that my dad operates, is very technical. Chemical measurements. Irrigation systems. GPS. Knowing when to sell and buy. Hedges and futures, etc. That said, there aren’t a lot of people building web applications for farmers and co-ops. It could be a huge market.

5. Focus obsessively, and work, work, work.

Focus is uber important. You have to hedgehog. I don’t necessarily agree with the work, work, work though. Maybe it’s important to be a billionaire but I think you can be plenty successful working normal hours.

“The rich don’t base their actions on what’s easy and convenient.” - T. Harv Eker

“If you don’t know every aspect of what you are doing, down to the paper clips, you’re setting yourself up for some unwelcome surprises.” - Donald Trump

6. Timing is everything.

“I had zero expectations that the market was efficient or had a clue about what it was doing. So when I had the opportunity to protect myself, I did. - Mark Cuban, who sold broadcast.com to yahoo and then sold his yahoo stock in 1999 before the 2000 dot com bust, he now owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks

Enough said. Mark Cuban is the man.

7. It’s not just (or even mostly) about the money.

“No one is saying that they don’t like wealth; but what matters more is the innovation, the intense commitment they have to an idea and the difference it can make. Money is the byproduct.” - Raphael Amit, Wharton School management professor

Once you hit comfortable, money is no longer an issue. It’s about creating value by making something great (whether it’s a company or a piece of software or whatever).

Conclusion

I love lists and quotes, so needless to say, this article hit home with me. I’ve been thinking and reading a lot lately about what makes people successful. I haven’t read the rest of the magazine yet but I’ll post again if I find anything else this good.

So we are pretty busy right now at Notre Dame. Both sides of the agency (print, web) are swamped. The thing I’ve noticed is when you have too much work to get done, there are two ways of catching up and getting ahead.

Work Harder or More Hours

The first is to work harder. Working harder is easy. Anyone can do it. All you have to do is increase your intensity or work more hours. I can promise you this, it won’t get you anywhere. Chances are you’ll keep getting more and more busy as higher volumes of work come in, which will make it harder to ever work more efficiently. Working hard might inflate your hours logged but it turns you into another cog in the machine. You can boast your dedication and hard work but you are tying your worth to the amount of time you have available.

Work More Efficiently

Stated as the opposite option of working harder and more hours, this seems like the obvious selection. However, because working harder is easier, it is often the first choice and, like learned helplessness, becomes a mainstay as the pressure continues to mount.

So why don’t more people attempt to work more efficiently? I believe it is because they can’t see the patterns. Think assembly line for a moment. Henry Ford noticed the pattern that is building an automobile. Mass production was made possible for Ford Motor Company not because Ford told his employees to work harder, but because he taught them to work more efficiently. Wait a second you might be thinking? By turning your task into an assembly line, aren’t you turning yourself into a cog just like Mr. Hard Worker? My answer to that question would be another question. Was Henry Ford a cog? Absolutely not.

The world is made up of two kinds of people. Those who can do a job and those who invent new ways of doing that job. Both are necessary, but the latter creates value that is greater than the hours they have available. This means you work less and get more done.

Putting it into Practice

So how do you avoid becoming another cog? Below are some tips that will help you on your way to efficiency land.

1. Look for new ways to do each task. Don’t always do something the way you did it last time. After each timely task, reserve time for thinking about how you could have completed it faster. This might seem like a waste of time but will ultimately lead to more speed. The first few times it will take longer as you analyze the patterns and attempt to automate more, but each time after that you’ll start seeing results. A side effect of this is increased knowledge in what you are doing as often the only way to get faster is to know something intimately.

2. Look for patterns. Practice makes perfect. Look for patterns in everything–letters, numbers, road signs, commercials, etc. Awareness will go along way in discovering patterns. Anything that you find yourself doing that feels repetitive is prime for automation. Find ways to do similar tasks together. For example, for quite a while I was doing 4-5 flash spaces in the nd.edu carousel per week. If I did all 4 together, it only took 2 hours but if I did them separately it would often take 3 or 4.

3. Look for others to share the efficiency gains with. Like they say in most sports, the great ones are not just great by themselves, they also make the others around them better. There is also something educating about teaching others. You really have to know your stuff to teach it. Also, you sometimes notice things when teaching that you don’t when learning.

I guess that is all I have. Did I connect the dots? Was I talking gibberish? I’m curious if others have noticed the same.

A few days back Firefox 3 beta 5 was released. I just got around to downloading it and a few things struck me.

The Back Button

The back button is probably the most clicked button in a web browser. I’m amazed when I watch my family and friends that aren’t “webbies” continually hit the back button. I’m more of an “open a new tab” kind of guy, than a “click and wait for something and then it’s not what I want so hit the back button” kind of guy. Anyway, everyone knows the bigger something is, the easier it is to click. Firefox 3 thought about that and made the back button twice the size of the forward button. Really nice touch.

The Address Bar

Another nice touch is when you click in the address bar, it auto-selects the entire url. The Firefox crew probably thought (correctly in my opinion) that people more often replace the entire url than modify the one currently there.

Also, the address bar now is a bit contextual. As you type it searches through your history by url and by page title. This means I could type in ‘addictedtonew’ or ‘about me’ and my about page would likely show up in the results. You can see the example in the screenshot below.

Overall

Overall, it feels a lot faster and lighter. It still doesn’t feel like a Mac application but it seems to be getting better.

You may or may not know that I’ve been building a pretty sweet (in my opinion) website management system at Notre Dame. Every content management system of any sort on the web always starts with a text field for a title and a text area for content. Knowing this, that’s how Conductor started. Each page was made up of at least a title and some content.

The Trend

Now, with 13 sites live and another 16 in development, I am seeing a trend. Most pages on the web are more than just a title and some content. Thankfully, when originally developing Conductor, I tweaked some ideas that I liked from other systems and created page parts. Basically, we can put a page part in a template and a new tab will appear in the page editing area. The picture below has a main content area and three page parts (info, thumbnail and url).

The Problem

Nothing seems wrong with that idea, right? It allows us to store content in smaller chunks which gives developers more control over markup, which in turn gives designers more control over layout. Wrong. Exhibit #1: the edit window for a page using a faculty template on the law school website.

Below is an example page rendered in the template above.

We wanted to show things like biography, courses, and contact information in unique ways but not force content owners to mark things up uniquely. Because I assumed that all pages will be made up of huge content regions and not tiny pieces of data, the only way we could do that is by creating a page part for each item we wanted to store separately. This, as you can see in the screenshot above, caused a very tab happy interface. While this works, I believe it creates a sub par experience for the content owner (who does all of the updates). One reason I believe that is now the content owner has an entire text area, to fill in something as small as a website url, which could be better represented by a small text field.

The Solution

All of the above has led me to an idea. It might be something that sounds good as an idea but in reality would be awkward. It might also not be my original idea, as someone else could have used it somewhere in the same fashion I speak of, unbeknownst to me, but here it goes. All you need is a way to store data and a way to present data. Also, those two things are completely intertwined. How you want to display data affects how you want to store it. The more control you need when displaying data means the more separated the data needs to be stored.

Each piece of content that makes up a website needs two templates: one that determines how it is stored and the other how it is displayed. There could also be a third template that is how it behaves but I’ll leave that out for now. I think the ideal website management system has almost a form builder interface for developers to define what they need stored. From there, the developer should also be able to create the xhtml or xml or json templates that determine how the data will be consumed. The final piece of administration would be an area where content owners can fill in those created forms with glorious content.

The Use Case

Here is an example use case. Content owner wants to show courses on their website. Developer creates new content template called ‘Course’. They define the storage half of the template to be name and number as text fields, professor and semester as selects (from comma separated list of options), summary as a text area and order the fields how they should be presented to content owner. At this point, the content owner can begin entering name, number, professor, semester and summary for all their courses, while developer starts creating the other half of the template, which is how it should be viewed by site visitors. Developer dumps in xhtml, css, and javascript to view all the courses styled up to meet a designer’s every whim.

You might be thinking, uh, duh, this is what happens on every web application. Someone needs something stored, so you create your model and your controller and your views and you are good to go. You’re right, but that stuff always happens at the programmer level and requires a programmer to do it. What I’m thinking about would be at the software level and could be done by anyone with front end web development skills (xhtml, css and javascript).

The Conclusion

Once this beast was created, a front end web developer could build dynamic websites very easily tailored to a content owners needs and the administration of the website could be left in the hands of the content owners. The bad news is that I would have to start from scratch to build a pure version of what I just explained. The good news is I can get close to the same result using what I’ve already built in Conductor (more on this at a later date).