How To Start A Talk Show
Starting your own talk show should be easily feasible.
The cool thing about creating a talk show is that it costs nothing other that time and a few opinions. Here are a few things I would think about before beginning.
Forget the radio. Consider newer mediums for communication. The democratization of broadcasting technology allows anybody to have a voice. Podcasts, and YouTube videos are great places to start.
Focus on a topic. Pick a few articles or blog posts from the week that you feel comfortable discussing for 15 minutes. Have someone lead the discussion by keeping people on topic, and making sure transitions are made at the right time.
Have a regular schedule. How often do you want to do the show? Once you figure that out make sure you release your show at the same time every week.
Find a few guests. Guests add different perspectives to the show. If they don’t live close by have them call-in through Skype.
8 Books That Will Change Your Life
Here is a collection of books that will change your life.
I have divided them up into three sections: Books that will change your perspective, Books that will help you build a business, and Books that will help you understand education.
Books are like teachers, most simply provide information, while the best ones inspire you to discover information for yourself. That is my hope for the books on this list. I hope that they light a spark. I hope they force you to ask questions. I hope they make you as thirsty for knowledge about entrepreneurship, education and life as they did for me.
If these books are not worth every second of your time I’ll buy you a beer.
Mathematicians of the Roman Empire
How one simple concept prevented the technological advancement of the Roman Empire.
Laying the foundation of western thought and philosophy, few civilizations in history have contributed to humanity more than the Greeks. They built on the exceptional mathematics of the Egyptian and Babylonian empires, and were without a doubt the best mathematicians on the planet at that time.Names like Pythagoras, Archimedes and Ptolemy are so synonymous with mathematics that we recognize them two millenia later.
Fast forward to the first century B.C. and the Romans replaced Greek civilization.
The Romans carried a great deal of Greek culture with them. For centuries they were the dominant empire on earth. However, there is one missing element in the Romans contribution to humanity.
They had no notable contributions to mathematics, or mathematicians for that matter.
The Romans built roads, invented the water wheel, and constructed vast aqueducts that we marvel at today. How can that be?
The Venture for America Essays
Friday I was told that I would not be considered in the inaugural class of Venture for America Fellows.
I knew the program was a long shot. I had a 1 percent chance with 5,000 people applying for 50 fellowships. Just for perspective, the acceptance rate at Harvard this year was about 7 percent.
Venture for America, a post graduate program for America’s best young entrepreneurs, hopes to create 100,000 new jobs for the United States by 2025. The concept is simple, more entrepreneurs equals more jobs. It is a fantastic idea, and I give my best to the 2012 fellows. Below you will find my responses to some of the essay questions.
I know that forgone opportunities only lead to new ones, and will continue to look optimistically towards the future. I would like to thank everybody that supported me. I want to give a special thanks to Michael Isaacs, Dale Vaughn and Lauren Smith for writing letters of recommendation.
The Architecture of Success is Failure
The biggest lesson I had to learn was how to fail faster… That’s why when I left Xerox at five o’clock, I would go up the street to the nonprofit charity, helping homeless kids, and I would dial for donations at night. I had a goal every night of getting rejected thirty times. The more I increased my failure rate, the more success I had at Xerox.-Robert Kiyosaki in The Education of Millionaires by Michael Ellsberg
Thirty rejections a day! Thirty!
I do a large amount of reading, and cannot remember the last time I read something so completely stunning.
Not the fact that he failed 30 times, but that he went out with a goal of coming home with at least 30 failures.
I suppose the biggest successes are built, often on a mountain of failure. Before Microsoft, Bill Gates started a data company that went nowhere. Before Twitter Evan Williams, started a podcasting platform that was crushed by iTunes.
The concept of failing faster goes hand-in-hand with lean startup theory: fail fast, fail cheap, move on to the next idea.
A Windows Desktop Mac Users Envy
Yeah, I said it. A Windows desktop Mac users can envy.
If you own a Mac you should probably stop reading.
You see that image above?
That is what my desktop looks like right now. It’s efficient, beautiful and has an awesome clock. The best part is that setting it up takes less than an hour. That includes cleaning all the crap off your desktop.
However, it wasn’t always that way. It was once cluttered with a mess of folders and papers in complete disarray.
How to Get a Job Interview Tomorrow with Facebook Ads
I know that writing this will give away some of my good mojo, but I think this post will be extremely useful to many job seekers.
About a month ago I began a proactive job hunt experiment – Use Facebook ads to target potential employers, and use a landing page to see if I could sell them on my potential.
I have always questioned traditional job hunting methods. Everybody is creating the same bland one column, Times New Roman, 1-inch-margin resume. How are you supposed to stand out from the pack if you do the same things that everybody else does? Even if you submit a well designed resume with decent credentials like mine, the chances of an employer calling you back are slim.
I decided to take a different approach. Rethink the channel for job candidacy. Using specifically targeted Facebook advertisements, I created different ads targeting companies in industries that interested me. I gave myself $150 and about two weeks to see what would happen.
The results? I placed my first Facebook Ads and got a phone call the following afternoon from a startup in Los Angeles (hence the post name). As a result of this campaign I scheduled five interviews, received 18 job related emails, and had others wishing me luck. I had two blog posts written about the campaign. One from Tom Singer, College Student Seeks PR Job and Goes Beyond the Normal Path to Get Noticed, which was picked up by the Texas Entrepreneur Network. The other post was by Dave Ambrose, founder of Scoop St., a company similar to FRUGGL.
My Most Successful Failure
FRUGGL was the first business I’ve ever created. Now that FRUGGL is officially dead, I wanted to take some time to reflect on my experience.
FRUGGL was my first foray into the world of entrepreneurship. A social coupon website, FRUGGL offered college students discounts to local shops, or restaurants every week. It was created before all of the deal website the hype. Groupon was only in a handful of cities. I simply saw an opportunity to give deals to college students around the country.
It all began the summer of my junior year, I was working an internship with V3 Media Group doing copy writing, seo and social media stuff. During that time I discovered several startup blogs such as Mashable, TechCrunch and The Next Web. Every morning that summer I woke up and devoured every new story on those sites (yeah, I know that is a lot of reading). I was addicted.
Startup Articles
A collection of must-read startup articles for the first-time entrepreneur. The articles below should give you inspiration and direction for your next startup. Most of the articles are geared towards web-based startups; however, the principles of starting a business remain the same. You may be unfamiliar with some of the tools and terminology used in the articles. It is imperative that you learn what they are and how to use them. Google is one of the most invaluable learning tools ever created.
Getting Started
How to Create a Million Dollar Business this Weekend - Tim Ferris, Noah Kagan of AppSumo on creating a profitable idea, finding customers, and assessing their value.
How I Quickly Test and Validate Startup Ideas - David Berube founder of MoFuse. A short post that will give you a taste of how to test startup ideas. NOTE: Contrary to what he says, I think Facebook and Google AdWords are awesome for testing.
How to Build a Web Startup - Steve Blank’s Lean Launchpad. He is an expert on starting a business with minimal risk. This is one of the most complete posts on starting a business.
Minimum Viable Products & Testing
How I Built My Minimum Viable Product - Micro-testing (testing products that don’t exist yet) won’t work for all products. Ash Maurya on putting together a MVP.
From Minimum Viable Product to Landing Pages - Ash Maurya on creating and testing landing pages.
Customer Development
Customer Development Checklist for Web Startups – Part 1 - Ash Maurya’s checklist could be the most valuable to startup entrepreneurs on the internet. It is a step by step process for building your product.
Customer Development Checklist for My Web Startup – Part 2 - These articles have been so popular that he built, Running Lean, an entire book around them.
The First Thing That Matters: Product/Market Fit
How I am Measuring Product/Market Fit
Educators to Follow on Twitter
This is a list of my favorite thought leaders in the realm of education reform. You can skim through and individually follow them or you can follow my list.
@MichaelEllsberg - Michael Ellsberg is the author of “The Education of Millionaires,” which includes interviews with some of the most successful people on the planet who didn’t complete college and who educated themselves in the real world.
@khanacademy - Salman Khan is the founder of Khan Academy, a Gates Foundation backed nonprofit that uses YouTube to provide a free world-class education to anybody anywhere.
@DaleJStephens - Dale Stephens is a Thiel Fellow, and founder of the UnCollege movement. His UnCollege Manifesto lays the groundwork for ways to acquire an education outside of college.
@SirKenRobinson - Sir Ken Robinson is a internationally recognized leader in education, creativity and innovation development. He is the author of The Element and Out of Our Minds. His TED talk Do Schools Kill Creativity? has had more than 200 million views worldwide.
@clarkaldrich - Clark Aldrich is and educational game designer, and the author of Unschooling Rules. He discusses the value of experience-based learning.
@aronsolomon - Aron Solomon (no relation) is an education entrepreneur. He is the founder of Smartswise, and is currently a partner at Futurlogic, an education venture development studio.
Resources
Recent Blog Entries
- How To Start A Talk Show
- 8 Books That Will Change Your Life
- Mathematicians of the Roman Empire
- CrowdFunder Campaign
- The Venture for America Essays
- The Architecture of Success is Failure
- A Windows Desktop Mac Users Envy
- BISON BOX
- How to Get a Job Interview Tomorrow with Facebook Ads
- Burn, Beard, & Stache