Blog | Living Radically

How to Be A Life Connoisseur

On September 8, 2010, In Uncategorized, By Vanessa

Can you taste test your way through life? I believe you can…it’s called being a life connoisseur. Living life to it’s fullest, enjoying the moment and finding happiness in what you have are all principles of being a life connoisseur and you do not need to be rich, or jobless or perfect to do it. Here is how you can be a connoisseur of life:

1. Cultivate the things you find beautiful

I usually do not write such esoteric posts, but this is one area that, as I cultivate it, has increased my happiness tremendously. First, there is so much beauty in everyday life. Take a few moments and think about the areas of your life you find most beautiful, and by beautiful I mean appealing, attractive and happy-making. They can be both big and small. Here are some of mine:

-My best friend’s dogs

-Nicely shaped wine glasses

-Laughing at YouTube videos

-Driving down Ocean Blvd in Los Angeles

-Calling my friend Margo

-Sending nice text messages to my mom or grandma.

2. Be Aware of Experience

Once you identify those things that make you appreciate life, work on bringing them into your life with more awareness on a daily basis. Once I realized how much joy I get from my friend’s dogs—because I cannot have my own in my apartment. I started to make dates with them where we could bring the dogs with us. This was super easy, and my friends loved it so they did not have to leave their dog home alone. The awareness made me appreciate them more, live in the moment and not take for granted what I already had.

3. Savor Life Experience Like Fine Wine

Why can’t we taste life as we taste wine? Wine connoisseurs collect their favorite wine’s, taste test all around the world—or at their local wine bar and discuss and relish in their favorites. I think we can do the same with life experiences. My friends know that they can invite me to the most bizarre events, and I will probably go. I like to taste test them like wine. Last weekend’s hot dog eating contest isn’t my favorite bottle, but it was fun to try it and made me appreciate my favorite local restaurant even more afterwards.

This is the kind of lifestyle that can start with one hobby and grow into a lifestyle. What other life experiences do you cultivate?

Do We Teach Ourselves To Settle At Misery?

On September 2, 2010, In Living Radically Principles, By Scott

In the book Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman, a study was done that observed dogs and pain. Dr. Seligman and his researchers placed dogs in a cage that had shock pads in the floor. The shocks were moderately painful for the dogs and the dogs searched around the cage and jumped trying to get away from the painful shocks—not a very pleasant experiment! But, Seligman wanted to see if he could train the dogs to put up with the pain and stop searching for relief. With the group, Seligman continued to shock the dogs in the cages. Yet, after a few weeks of this the dogs stopped moving around and simply sat and received the shocks. Then, Seligman placed the dogs were in a cage where only half of the floor was laid with shockers. Sadly, the dogs did not even try to escape. They had stopped looking for a way out. Even when the dogs were shown how to move onto the shock-free area, the dogs still did not move!

This brings up the question, do we teach ourselves to put up with pain, give in to it and accept it? I consistently see this when I work with people who feel that their situation as hopeless—whether that is hard time at work, an abusive boss or a bully on Facebook. Let’s take for example a friend who had an unfair boss. This boss was incredibly strict and seemed to have it out for my friend, Jenny. Jenny, normally very hard-working, found her job–once fulfilling, completely debilitating to her self-esteem. She dreaded it all weekend long and after the first few failed assignments and projects, merely stopped trying to do better. Like a dog who experiences his first few times in the shock cage, Jenny’s first instinct was to avoid the pain and do better. Yet, this didn’t work, the boss continued to throw her curve balls and pick on her in meetings—like the dog that had nowhere to go. In the end it just sat miserably, receiving shock after shock. However, a few months after the new boss came, he transferred to another office. I said to Jenny, “Aren’t you so excited you will get a second chance at work! You can do better again.” Jenny stared at my blankly, much like I imagine a dog would in a half shocking cage. “I can’t do it. I am just going to keep slacking. The job can’t be fun anymore.”

This experience, which comes up in many other scenarios reminded me how easy it is for the human mind to become accustomed to pain and hopelessness and then even when there is a way out, fail to take it. Somehow, either the pain of the experience is more tolerable—once Jenny failed once, it did not seem so difficult to keep failing, or it seems easier to stay miserable. How can we prevent this from happening in our own lives?

First, I think it is important to constantly examine the areas of your life that you think bring you emotional or physical pain. Sometimes we are unaware of the misery, because we have come to accept it or assume it is natural. Second, looking at that pain and examining alternatives. A silly example is a gym I was going to for two years. I hated this gym and felt it was poorly kept and the trainers were rude to many of the non-private gym members. I would dread workouts even more because of the awful gym. Yet, when renewal came around each year I continued to renew it even though there are many gyms to choose from in my area. It took this study for me to realize that I could easily switch—or move off the shocking floor of my cage. Third, make sure you are not suffering as a martyr or because you think you deserve it. Many people I work with often pick difficult routes or refuse help because they do not think they deserve to be helped or be happy. Think carefully what purpose misery serves in your life and decide to move on from it. Everyone deserves to be happy.

How to Find Great Interns for Your Business

On August 30, 2010, In Uncategorized, By Vanessa

For companies, entrepreneurs and small businesses, interns can be a huge asset. Additionally, providing internship opportunities can offer work experience to potential employees and individuals. I currently manage over 120 interns with the help of an intern manager. It was a long process to figure out how to attract wonderful intern applicants, vet them and make sure both you and your intern are feeling fulfilled with the work they are doing.

Here are my tips to find great interns and set them up in an intern program:

1) Pick one place to funnel all of your intern applicants. We use this page as our funnel:

http://www.radicalparenting.com/radical-teens/teen-programs/

We have links to this page from other career websites, other parts of the blog and partner sites, but they all come to this one page. On your funnel page give a very brief explanation of the programs and then let them click through to their desired track—whether you will offer more than one internship or if you want to have different pages for FAQ, Applications and About Us. This way the page isn’t too long and serves as a landing page for potential intern applicants.

2) I like to put a video on my pages. Even if you have a virtual internship, it helps people feel that you are real and will treat them well. Since most internships are unpaid, it is all relationship based. Videos can help convey this.

3) Be specific on what they will do for you. You can see how we described one of our internships here: http://www.radicalparenting.com/radical-teens/teen-writers/ Especially if it is unpaid, you want to give applicants an idea of what the work is, how long it will take and when they have to complete it. This will also help weed out people who will not work for you later.

4) Have lenient but poignant qualifications. Since internships are usually unpaid it is important that you are open to all kinds of people to get a variety of applicants, but if there are skills you need, ask for them! You do not want to spend more time and energy training an intern on something when you could have found someone who already had the skills (like being able to use powerpoint, website editing or social media fluency).

5) Make three hoops. Interns have to usually really want the placement to do the work. I have interns go through three ‘hoops’ to make sure they are really dedicated and can do follow through. Here are my ‘hoops:’

-Email application meets the application qualifications (List name, number, address, sample writing and resume—if they forget one of these things I think that is a bad sign).

-Read and review a non-disclosure basic contract, sign and scan or mail back.

-Fill out a small bio in a welcome package and answer a few questions on their goals for working with my company.

6) List your mission and make it exciting. Interns usually have hard work, you want them to feel some perks. This can be learning or a charitable goal. List this to entice passionate people.

Overall, hiring and managing interns can be a long process. As you get more applicants you can begin to weed out serious and not serious. Stay tuned for our post on how to create an internship program and manage great interns!

How and Why You Should Cultivate Mistakes

On August 24, 2010, In Business Ideas, Living Radically Principles, By Scott

I do not know about you, but I was taught to avoid making mistakes. As I got older, I got good at avoiding making mistakes on tests, in relationships and in business. Yet, I still—as everyone, make many mistakes. When this happens, depending on how big the mistake is, I get very down on myself, feel disappointed and even a bit depressed. The self-talk goes something like this:

“Vanessa, what were you thinking! You know better than that.”

“Well, that was stupid, wasn’t it? How could you be so dumb?”

Negative self-talk and self-punishment not only made my mistakes worse, but also did not help me in preventing them from happening again. This made me realize that there was a fundamental part of my childhood lesson on mistakes that was not taught: Don’t make mistakes, but when you do, find a way to learn from them. I realized that learning how to cultivate our mistakes is essential for moving on from them, having less emotional grief and preventing them from happening again.

So, how do we cultivate our mistakes and learn to learn from them?

1. Examine past mistakes with a new eye.

I wanted to find the silver lining and lessons from all of my past mistakes—and believe me there are plenty. So I sat down with my journal and went through the ones that really made my skin crawl. You know those experiences that when you think of them your stomach instantly knots up? I wrote down all of the positive things that came out of the experience and how I have avoided, or not, making them again. This helped me focus on the lessons for later and not be so ashamed.

2. Practice your future mistakes.

I know it sounds weird to practice making mistakes, but this can actually take down anxiety and worry. I think this one is essential. If I am worried about something coming up, I often play ‘worst-case scenario and best-case scenario’ and think about what would happen if I did make a mistake. Often times I realize that it is not so bad, and I would learn to do it better next time.

3. Take the stigma out of mistakes.

This is a big one. I think the perfect syndrome is rampant, especially amongst anxiety-riddled 20 somethings in a recession. We need to be more gentle with each other and ourselves. Making mistakes can be good. Everyone is always reminded of how Edison failed and made thousands of mistakes before he finally got it right with the light bulb. Mistakes are how we learn, they are normal and I think, essential for success.

Please think about how your mistakes have helped, not hurt you and encourage your loved ones to cultivate mistakes, not avoid them.

Top 3 Time Saving Web Tools

On August 4, 2010, In Digital Life, By Scott

Living Radically is all about effiency and living life to it’s fullest potential. We also loved the Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss and are always looking for ways to save time working so we have more time to play. Here are some great online tools to save you time:

1. Taking Notes While Driving/Talking/Working

Jott is an amazing service that does voice-to-text services and lets you capture thoughts and reminders to send emails and text messages. For someone who has a lot of things on their lists, this is invaluable.

2. Avoiding The Five Thousand Emails to Set-up a Call or Meeting

Whenisgood is a way to plan the time to have your meeting or event by coordinating availability with all the participants using this easy online tool.

3. Sharing Desktops and Having Virtual Meetings

Dimdim is a great website for web conferencing to collaborate and share voice, video, slides, whiteboard, even your desktop. It saves time because there is no downloads required to host the calls and you do not have to meet in person with this service.

We also chose these tools because they are very easy to use–even for non-techies.

5 Tools for Entrepreneurs Who Have No Home Office

On July 27, 2010, In Digital Life, Travel, By Scott

We are always working from faraway locations because we have no home office. The lower overhead, mobility and flexibility that comes with this is great, but it makes you very reliant on online tools. Entrepreneurs especially can use some of these services to play with the big boys without paying like a big boy. Here are a few of our favorites:

1. RosterBot

We like RosterBot because it lets you organize your teams easily. It does this by polling each person to see if they’re coming to your next event or meeting and then shows you the results, along with some other bells and whistles, on a nicely-organized web page.When you are traveling and need to know who can come to a conference call or the meeting you need to have when you are in town, this is great!

2. BlankSpaces

If you need to have a professional meeting room, or just need to get out of the house to work. Blankspaces is a great option. It is a shared office space for rental for entrepreneurs, freelancers, writers and producers, etc.

3. Legalzoom

This is an online legal document preparation service for pretty much everything you could need–estate planning, trademarks, corporations. For entrepreneurs who do not want to hire a full time lawyer this is a great way to save money and protect yourself.

4. Mikons

If you need to make a logo or icon for yourself, this is a cheaper service that still produces great product. It is an online community and social website where people communicate through visual symbols, logos, icons, or avatars.

5. DimDim

If you need to be out of the office, you can still do your web conferencing with Dimdim. I like them because I think they are the easiest and do not require a lot of downloading.

What are your favorite tools for being an entrepreneur without an office?

10 of the Weirdest Things You Can Do With Technology

On July 26, 2010, In Digital Life, By Scott

I love technology. Over the past few years I have kept a log of all the websites and kinds of technology that have surprised be. Here are a few of the most interesting ones from my list:

1. Bug Spray iPhone App

Whoever thought you could have a sprayless bugspray? I didn’t. But this app supposedly sends out a vibration/sounds that bugs hate.

2.Texting Helps Liver Transplants

This one is a lot more positive and I love it! For teenagers who’ve had a liver transplant, text message reminders to take their medications reduce the risk of organ rejection.

3. GPS to Track Your Child On Their Gap Year

Isn’t the whole point of a gap year to get away from your parents and be off on your own? A mom in England ordered her son Harry, 19, to carry a credit-card sized tracker while he travels across Australia, Thailand and South Africa in his gap year.

4. Fake Flushing Sounds to Get Off the Phone

I have been tempted to use this, but never have. This website: Sorrygottogo has a variety of sounds that help you get off the phone. Everything from a doorbell to a barking dog.

5. Letting Others Decide with Websites

Being indecisive is no longer a great hinderance. There are a few websites that are helping people make choices. Letsimondecide is one such website that has you put in your question or issue and ‘Simon’ tells you what to do. You can also use Ask500 where you ask 500 people a question and they respond!

6. Dog translator

’nuff said.

7. Track Your Happiness on an iPhone

This iPhone app lets you track when you are happy and when you aren’t and then helps you figure out your best and worst times of day!

8. Storysomething

Have you ever wished you could create or be in your own bed time stories? Now you can with Story Somethin. It puts your children at the center of their own interactive story worlds.

9. Sonar Ruler

If you are a student and do not want ot carry around a rule. This iPhone app will help you use a sonar ruler instead!

10. Wecamlocator

This is a directory of all worldwide webcams. Everything from ship webcams to videos of animals–live. Sounds creepy, but it is a pretty cool way to see the weather in Antarctica.

I love these tools, which are your favorite?

How to Make Money Selling Books

On July 9, 2010, In Uncategorized, By Vanessa

It is hard to make money selling books, but it CAN be done!

Here are a few tips for authors on actually making money on their books:

1) Approach other service providers

Go to doctors’ or veterinarians’ offices, truck stops, souvenir stands, restaurants and coffee shops, and ask them if they will sell your book on consignment. Offer them a discount if they buy them from you in bulk.

2) Who are your mavens?

Malcolm Gladwell wrote about Mavens or trendsetters in certain groups. Figure out who the mavens are in your specialty. Hair salon owners? PTA presidents? Approach them and give them your book.

3) Get into catalogs

Many catalogues will offer your book if it has to do with their specialty. It cannot hurt to ask and this is a great way to make money selling books!

4) Write articles

Good articles do sell books. When you write an article that gives away great information and lets readers know your writing style, people will buy your books.

5) Do radio interviews

Radio interviews are a great way to get your book onto the airwaves. It also gets people talking and increase your book sales so you can make more money. They also lead to bigger media interviews.

6) Get others to sell books for you

Many speakers make money selling books in the “back of the room” (BOR). If you cannot or will not do speaking events many other speakers can sell your books for a cut…and will talk about your book.

Be sure to check out our other free tips on marketing and selling your book: How to Make Money Selling Books and Build Your Online Author Platform. We offer packages for authors to get started on building their online and offline platforms. Learn how to make money selling books in our unique author packages!

How to Sell Books with an Author Platform

On July 1, 2010, In Business Ideas, By Scott

Every author needs to think of their platform. An author platform is a combination of how you market yourself and where you market yourself.

Ask yourself the following questions to build your author platform:

1) What makes you different?

2) Where do you want everyone to go to read about your book (newspaper, website, twitter)

3) Do you prefer video, writing articles, or interviews to promote your message?

4) How comfortable are you pitching yourself to producers?

5) Do you like to dialogue with readers and potential readers?

Here is what you can do to build your author platform:

1) Be a Guerrilla

Think of some cool events that are newsworthy to get on local news having to do with your book/speciality.

2) Get and awesome and relevant business card

3) Make a one sheet that talks about you, your book and where to buy it

4) Make sure people can find you

Whether that is your website or a social media package, make sure people can find you easily in Google.

Be sure to check out our other free tips on marketing and selling your book: How to Make Money Selling Books and Build Your Online Author Platform. We offer packages for authors to get started on building their online and offline platforms. Learn how to make money selling books in our unique author packages!

How to Open a Bank Account in China

On June 27, 2010, In Flat Finance, Living Abroad, Travel, By Scott

Image by myuibe

If you’re going to spend a decent amount of time in CHina, it probably makes sense to open a bank account there. You should open one if you plan on earning any money while over there, as it’s not the best idea to have cash stuffed in your pillow. Even if you have a foreign bank account, you won’t be able to deposit the yuan you earn in there as your account will be denominated in a different currency.

Fortunately for you opening a RMB denominated account is actually a straight forward process. You should only need your passport and yourself. If you have other supporting documentation like a local address, letter of employment and a Chinese friend, none of those would hurt your attempt.

You may be tempted to head to the local branch of a foreign bank. Most foreign banks now have branches in major Chinese cities, but most of them also have fairly substantial minimum balance requirements you will need to fulfill to avoid paying maintenance fees. If you pick a local bank, there are usually very low to no minimum balance requirements.

When you get to the bank, ask if someone speaks English. It may take an extra ten minutes to find that person who speaks English, but it’s worth your time to get this right the first time. You should also make sure you’re signing up for a checking account, and ask if you can get a debit card too. They are becoming more and more common in China in major cities. If you’re in the boonies it’s still almost totally cash.

As far as which bank you should choose, you have no shortage of options in CHina. Shanghai literally has more bank branches than any other city I’ve ever visited. Some of the biggies are Bank of China, ICBC, Construction Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, the list goes on and on.

One important thing you should know. If you are changing money from your local currency to Chinese RMB and depositing it, you’ll have very little trouble. If at any point you need to reconvert that currency to something else, all bets are off. Technically foreigners are allowed to convert 500 dollars per day, but must be present at a local branch and bring their passport. Even this requirement is spotty however. Some branches won’t let you do it at all, some don’t enforce any limits or ID requirements. It will be infinitely easier for you if you can bring a Chinese friend along. They don’t face the same restrictions you do as a foreigner and will probably be able to get the job done in a tenth the time.

Tagged with: banking • china • shanghai

How to Be A Life Connoisseur

Do We Teach Ourselves To Settle At Misery?

How to Find Great Interns for Your Business

How and Why You Should Cultivate Mistakes

Top 3 Time Saving Web Tools

5 Tools for Entrepreneurs Who Have No Home Office

10 of the Weirdest Things You Can Do With Technology

How to Make Money Selling Books

Here are a few tips for authors on actually making money on their books:

Other Articles and Videos to Help Authors Sell Books:

How to Sell Books with an Author Platform

Ask yourself the following questions to build your author platform:

Here is what you can do to build your author platform:

Other Articles and Videos to Help Authors Sell Books:

How to Open a Bank Account in China

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