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Humanity is technological by definition. From flint-made tools to the smartphone, humans have always been drawn to invent and discover. But you never hear about technology in old writings.
This rubbed Kurt Vonnegut the wrong way. The American writer and humorist believed that literature, especially novels, should include all aspects of life as we know it, not just events unfolding page by page.
Pew Research loves to poll people. The think tank has an impressive number of fact sheets regarding phone usage in countless scenarios, including one about public usage, which reveals some interesting particularities about us using our handsets on the street.
As you can imagine, people use their devices for a wide array of tasks, from socializing to finding their way around the city. But here are the actual usage patterns of Americans:
It’s important to know where you stand. Like people, companies can be delusional about their chance of success in a given market. In the cloud industry, it happens quite a lot. Having Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM as competitors leaves little room for success, which means you need to strategize the hell out of your business.
Are you in it for the money, for the fame, or to change the world? NextGeneration Recruitment has put together a nice infographic that looks at three different generations as tomorrow’s leaders. Right off the bat, Gen-X are described as the best workers, but that’s not always what HR looks for in certain applicants. Sometimes you just want someone who, despite being a little slow, is 100% passionate.
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Since work is the only way to get anything valuable out of life, you might as well do it full time and make a difference, than to lug your body to and back from the office for half that time and achieve nothing.
Makes sense, right? It’s the mindset of inventor Lori Greiner, and it sounds a lot smarter coming from her mouth:
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procrastination
noun
the act or habit of procrastinating, or putting off or delaying, especially something requiring immediate attention:
She was smart, but her constant procrastination led her to be late with almost every assignment.
Everyone knows procrastination is productivity’s arch enemy. Putting off stuff clogs up your mind and your desk, it affects team goals and even individual teammates, your parents are disappointed with you, your boss gets angry, all that stuff. But what if I told you that procrastination can become an art that you can master and impress everyone around you with the results?
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Ask yourself this: “am I using my phone too much?” If you’re like most people, chances are you’ll say “yes.” And it’s difficult not to, with so much connectivity at our fingertips and everyone doing it. But the reality is our cell phone usage today is moderate compared to what’s coming.
One big limitation that keeps us from constantly fiddling with our phones is battery life. On a full tank, we have no problem watching videos, playing games and browsing Facebook, sometimes for hours at a time. But the minute that battery meter drops below 20% we enter power-save mode. And I’m not talking about dimming the screen or switching from 4G to 3G either. No. I’m talking about literally going into power-save mode ourselves, by limiting actual usage of the phone. However, all that is about to change really soon.
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What’s the #1 attribute that a CEO must possess? According to the hundreds of chief executives polled by PwC for its 2015 Pulse survey, the key ingredient to be at the top of your game in this line of work is “strategy.”
The respondents were not named (for obvious reasons), but PwC highlighted some of their answers in quotes. One CEO piqued, “The crucial thing a CEO has to be capable of is to think strategically, which means to recognise changes in the market early and then formulate the consequences for their business.”
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AI is the talk of the town these days. Every major tech juggernaut is trying to grasp machine intelligence and Facebook seems to be on a very promising track with an all-new personal assistant called ‘M.’ Unlike Google Now, Cortana, or Siri, Facebook M doesn’t ask you to repeat what you said, nor does it dump a bunch of Internet links on you when the query is too difficult for the algorithms to handle. When it hits a search roadblock, it starts to ask around.
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Some think there’s a good chance the Universe doesn’t actually have purpose. That it just exists and will forever contract and expand, with no reason other than it can.
But to bring something into existence, something else must have existed to produce it. Big Bang aside, everything we see around us today has been created as a result of chemical and physical processes. Each processes got its purpose in the chain of events that led to it. In other words, existence without reason doesn’t make much sense, be it living or non-living. Author Joshua J. Marine has a famous quote on this:
