Knowing when to quit…
#Personal
Quitting is never easy, people told me that quitting is the easy way out and it’s a loser’s way of taking care of a problem. Well I disagree, quiting is hard, and it doesn’t solve the problems of those that you leave behind.
Nevertheless quitting is infact necesarry. Maybe it’s because of the countless disagreements, lack of appreciation, the long hours of meetings, the pointless bickering, the feeling of going nowhere.. But I guess it all comes down to the different personal vision about the business.
It may look like all the work you did in the past is such a waste but it’s better to waste the past that you can never get back rather than wasting the future that you can actually fix.
At this moment of time. I believe it is better to go separate ways and hope each other the best. So here I am hoping the best for Anang Pradipta which will be leaving his position as Partner and Chief Marketing Officer of Gantibaju.com.
Things will change, and things will change for the better.
Good luck and Na zdorovie!
The Case of the Curious Hiatus
Yeah so I kind of bail on this blog for a week due to being super busy on work and late night super secret activities that I can only mention as codename:cerberus. On a totally unrelated note, Mass Effect 3 is awesome! The ending however..
Well anyway, I’m still writing for dailysocial.net (since I’m under contract) and here’s last week’s writing about the grim reality of newspaper digital distribution
The push for digital in the US is so heavy that it forces traditional newspapers to either go digital or go bankrupt. But then again the push for digital posed more problems than solutions for the business owners as they’re still finding it hard to find a profitable business model. For every $1 gained in digital, $7 are lost in print revenue.
You can also read it in Bahasa Indonesia here. Thx for translating it guys
~cheers
Productivity Tuesday #2: Delete all your emails
Who here has more than 1,000 unread emails? I do, it happens every couple of months. Those emails that you think you will read but never really have time to, those mailing lists from the marketing club that you promise to read, the email from an old friend that you’re planning to reply, the events you’re planning to RSVP, the groupon deals that have expired, etc. Well, if you haven’t replied to an email after 2 weeks then you’ll probably never ever reply it anyway.
What I do with every important email is turn it into a task on my favorite to do app or put it into evernote for archiving. The rest of the email that doesn’t get into the to do app is pretty much useless. It’s just there as an archive just in case I need to get back at it.
Hit me with your best ideas
I’ve been getting some emails from people with ideas, some are challenging, some got me excited. I love hearing fun and new ideas and would love to discuss them. So in the spirit of sharing knowledge, I’m announcing an open invitation to all who wishes to challenge their business ideas to email me to aria[et]rajasa.com. If it’s interesting enough let’s meet up at a cafe and chat, would expect you to pay for my meal though.
Of course I would only comment on things that I’m interested like creative business model, digital startup, and Indonesia-related scene and environment. It doesn’t have to be a startup idea, it can be some marketing strategy you would like to try, a launch plan, a new business model from existing business, etc.
This is basically from startup to startup, I’m a practitioner myself building startups from scratch. This is not me acting like I’m better than anyone, I just love helping people out and listening to great ideas. This is also a learning process for me.
I love my Playbook, like.. for real
I just sold my iPad, it’s been sitting around the house collecting dust for months. Other than playing a couple of games (which are mostly also available on my iPhone), I see no other purpose for it. Not a single thing that I can do on my iPad that I can’t do better on my iPhone, so it’s a bother to have both at all times. In the phase of decluttering my life I decided to let it go. It’s been a while and I didn’t miss it at all.
I didn’t sell my Playbook though. Contrary to the iPad, the Playbook fits nicely for my needs. It has the books that I want to read, the movies that I haven’t watched and the games to keep me occupied. I’ve been using it for months and unlike all my other friends, I love my Playbook. You want to know why?
[DailySocial] Foxconn Factory: A reality check on Indonesia wages
Wednesday dose of reality check
Then it hit me, is $1.78 per hour cheap? The workers work 12 hours a day, let’s assume that they work 5 days a week. That would make about $1.78 x 12 hours x 20 days equals $427.2. That’s bigger than my first salary at an IT company in 2004! Not to mention it’s still a starter salary for most small companies in 2011.
Productivity Tuesday #1: Leave your email alone!
This is one of my attempts to make a themed post every week and I think productivity is still an interesting take. So here’s my take on tips to increase productivity. Some will be plain obvious, but I guess we (especially me) need reminders once in a while. For the first tip I’ll start really simple: Leave your email alone!
Here’s the 3 main reason why you should just leave your email alone and get back to work
What’s with the obsession about being the first?
I just saw the ad about HP Z1 workstation and it claims to be the first 27″ all-in-one Workstation in the world. Hello! Never heard of the iMac? How about the first Xperia Smartphone from Sony? Really, how can that sway me into buying the product? Intel went so far as to invent a new word: Ultrabook. What is an Ultrabook anyway? It’s meaningless, it’s just a catch phrase so that companies can feel good about being the first to release an ultrabook.
What’s with the obsession about being the first? Did you know that being the first sucks? Being the first means you have no idea whether what you’re doing is right or wrong. You can’t learn from something that does not exist since you’re actually the first of its kind (assuming that you are, not just you claim it to be) . You’ll be doing a lot of trials and errors, and I bet it will be mostly errors.
We all know how Google gets bested Yahoo. Friendster who was the first social network site got forced to pivot into a social gaming site by Facebook. MySpace got sold for approximately $35M in 2011 after the whooping $850M acquisition by News Corporation in 2005.
Being the first means you’re being a guinea pig for the next company which will learn from your mistake and past you by. Don’t be obsessed about being the first, be obsessed about being the best.
[DailySocial] Content Curation is Taking Over The Web
Today is wednesday and its my debut on the new column at dailysocial.net. Here’s a little excerpt
Content is often the most overlooked element of a startup. This usually happens because most founders are techies and techies concentrate on what they know best: Technology. They can tinker days and months perfecting their code, playing with the test unit and scaling the servers like crazy. Yes, playing with technology is awesome but content is King.
We don’t really need that much in life
I’m selling my iPad, along with a lot of other stuffs that I don’t use. I have no place for another TV, the PS3 should suffice as a gaming platform so I’m selling my Xbox and Wii (Along with the Guitar Hero Band Kit and WiiFit), I put my NAT external harddrive at the office and the last time I’ve use my Jabra Halo is like a year ago. My Nintendo DS have just been revived to play Ghost Trick and Zelda Spirit Train while I’m under quarantine because I had chicken pox but that’s about it. It remain dormant since.
Before I got married I just put all those stuffs in my apartment. I hate the idea of selling it back then because maybe it would suddenly be useful somehow. Yeah it’s a wishful thinking but since I bought it, I must have bought it for a reason, right? Well apparently not really. After moving out to my mother-in-law’s house, I learn to live without a lot of stuffs. The funny thing is, it doesn’t really bother me that much. Not having an Xbox and Wii means playing more on the PS3 which means getting a bigger price-by-value on a single game. Not having an external harddrive means being efficient in managing space. Having less stuffs means spending more quality time on another activity, which is nicer in the end. I learn to live with the things that I have and to forget about the things that I don’t have. Sometimes we are to focused on the things that we don’t have that we forgot about the things that we do have.
Long have I cluttered my life with things I hardly use just to have my options open just in case I need it later on. It’s not really healthy at some point, especially to my savings. So my 2012 resolution is to live with less items, be minimal, rethink the stuffs that I really need and set aside things I don’t. All my action figures are all boxed up and put in my parents house, TV and Xbox already sold and the rest of the stuffs are already put on sale in Kaskus and Twitter. If you’re interested in buying one of my stuffs then feel free to contact me. I’ll gladly sell to a friend rather than a stranger.
After selling all this stuffs, will I clutter myself with new items and complain about the same thing next year? Yeah maybe LOL, but it’s a fix for the present. We’ll see how it goes from here. But one thing is for sure, from this experience I learn that we don’t really need that much in life.
