Combsy.com

Top 10 Android Apps

With the Motorola Backflip launching at AT&T I thought I would keep you kids up to date with the top 10 android apps. www.Lifehacker.com really has a good list at their site. Check it out and give them a comment or two.

Clear Your Head to Connect With Anyone

Robert over at pickthebrain.com has a great post on clearing your head before walking through a door. The concept is extremely simple but powerful. Give it a shot.

Using a three-folder system to keep email under control

Really rather simple idea from unclutterer.com. To-do, Wait, Reference. Three easy to use folders in your email inbox that can help you stay organized. Hit the link for more ideas.

Do something you love, before you have something to do for money

This article was enough to get me to subscribe to www.frugaldad.com. The concept is so easy and this is advice that  I practically scream to guys and gals that still have a lot of life ahead of them. No spouse? No Kids? Out of school? You can afford to spend a ton of time (like 18 hours a day) doing something you love. Go for broke, literally, and watch your life turn out to be something amazing. You can always get a 9-5 when your older.

Mediocrity equates to winning and profits

Ryan Stephens, www.ryanstephensmarketing.com, has a great little post about what really matters in sales and business…well even in life. He uses the great example of  Steve Prefontaine to get his point across, worth a read…especially if you are a duck fan.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Image via Wikipedia

I often get this said to me “how do you know so much about everything!”. I am not trying to brag, it is really something people say. I get called a know-it-all…sometimes worse things as well. I do happen to know a lot of stuff, but lately with age I think I am starting to slip as far as retaining information.

I have always known how to bridge connections in my brain by using various techniques.

• Creating songs or stories about the information
• Total immersion into the topic
• Visual cues for remembering

There are a lot of ways that you can help your brain retain information you find useful. However, what information you retain is important as well. In fact I would argue as we get older we need to bring down the amount of topics we seek to understand – basically we need to become masters of fewer and fewer bits of information.

As children we are huge sponges, soaking up information from everywhere. If taught at an early enough age, being multi-lingual is not that big of deal. Kids can become amazing learners very quickly if we give them the opportunity to.

Adults though, we have our attention pulled in a lot of different directions and the need for focus becomes paramount. So that is why I came up with a technique called Brain-Hedging.

Brain Hedging:

Hedging can mean various things. In finance hedging refers to offsetting your risk on one investment with another. In affect you are protecting yourself from an outside risk. In gardening you can create hedging by planting hedges around your yard creating a natural fence. That is the image I want you to stick with when it comes to Brain Hedging.

Brain Hedging is all about determining what you want entering into your brain for posterity and use. Do you really want to learn 4 different languages in your 30’s? Can you do that and still maintain the information you need for your career? Some people can, most can’t.

By determining exactly what you want to focus on and study, you can eliminate a lot of information that you don’t need your brain to hold on to. I mean really, do you still need the names of all the fraggle rock characters in there? Gobo Fraggle!

You can determine exactly what you want to focus on pretty easily by making a list of about 7 items that you really are passionate about or that you absolutely need to be sharp on for work. As a trainer/coach focusing on training would be a good thing, right? Focusing on accounting, while interesting, may not be the best course of action and it takes up needed brain resources.

So, I gave it a shot and these are the 7 focus topics I came up with for myself.

*in no particular order

1. History
2. Primal Diet/Fitness
3. Religion
4. Survival
5. Spanish
6. Training & Development
7. OpenBSD

That was harder than I originally thought it would be, you see I am a generalist so I have a lot of interests. However, this exercise is all about focus. I want to break down each one of my topics to give you a better idea of what I was thinking with each one.

History:

To me history includes a few differing topics. Really you can’t study History without studying politics and economics as well. Also, you can’t study history without knowing the present. So keeping up to date on political events is part of focusing on history. I don’t need to be studying mandarin, but I could study the mandarins.

Primal Diet/Fitness:

I could have labeled this topics Health, but I wanted to narrow it even more to focus on the Primal diet. The primal diet can best be summed up in Mark Sisson’s book The Primal Blueprint. Basically going back to a diet that more closely represents what our Paleo-ancestors ate. Meat, Vegetables, Fruit, and Nuts. Pretty simple, I have seen a lot of people have great results with it. The fitness aspect of it intrigues me as well. I figure if I go full bore into this I will get some results and learn a lot about my physical self. Should be interesting.

Religion:

Religion is mainly focused on Christianity for me, but I study all religions as a course of habit. This will stretch my brain out of its normal logic based thinking. This topic also includes by default – philosophy. I spend a lot of time in this area of study, so controlling other sources of information is key to keeping my brain hedged enough for me to take in as much as possible.

Survival:

Guns, tents, water, foraging…these are all areas of study I think most of modern American has let slip and to the detriment of their overall life. If things do continue to get worse this information will keep me alive long enough to study the others.

Spanish:

Okay, I don’t need to explain this too much. I live in an area where learning Spanish and speaking it fluently would give me a big advantage in the workplace.

Training & Development:

To continue to get better at my career I need to get better at training and developing my clients/customers/co-workers. Learning to coach, motivate, and teach are my main focus points here. They will make me better, as well as those I am working with – as Michael Scott would say “A win-win-win”.

OpenBSD:

You will probably start seeing this leak onto combsy.com in the coming weeks. I have always wanted to know the ins & outs of OpenBSD. If you don’t know what it is go here. I am a total novice at this point, but I am learning very quickly. Very interesting topics…for geeks anway.

Review:

So there you have my 7 focus points. If you know me, you know I also enjoy sports and video games. I will still enjoy them, but gone are the days of memorizing stats or level maps. I just don’t have the capacity for it anymore. Brain Hedging is all about becoming  a Master of something, 7 things in this case, no mediocrity.

I will update you with this experiment as I get deeper into the process and technique. Any psychologist out there want to experiment? Just kidding…maybe…

Practice limiting the sources of information coming into your brain. Multi-tasking is dead. Focus and go full blast. In a later post I will start ranking each of my topics to show you how to focus even more. The idea is to become great at something for the benefit of others. Being a generalist can be good but often it leaves you out of doing some amazing things as well.

Related articles :

• Primal Blueprint 2010 Action Plan (marksdailyapple.com)
• Eat Like a Caveman (lewrockwell.com)
• How Passion and Focus Will Rock Your Career (zenhabits.net)
• Focus (combsy.com)

Popularity: 3% [?]

Due to FTC regulations I have to tell you that if you buy one of these books, I will get paid a small amount from amazon.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Image by Dunechaser via Flickr

Each Saturday I am going to write a post that just recommends a few different websites for you to check out.

I hope that you find some gems in this list.

How to find a Cow-pooling source.

Looking to buy a whole cow for your family but can’t quite afford it? Have a few friends who want to buy some meat too? Marksdailyapple.com has a great guide on where to buy the beef.

Why popularity at work matters.

An interesting take on popularity in the work place from www.lifehack.org, of course they tell you how to achieve this in a positive way.

Bono hates poor people.

Poor people who download pirated music that is…interesting little take on Bono’s recent NYT article.

Vouwwow  is dutch for “Wow, it folds”

A really cool design concept for a chair using thick cardboard. From www.Minimalissimo.com

Five Best Goal-Tracking Tools

A great hive-mind list of goal-tracking tools that really work well. From www.lifehacker.com

Email me with your links

Popularity: 5% [?]

Image by photographer padawan *(xava du) via Flickr

1. Set two goals to achieve in 30 days and focus just on them
2. Limit playing video games or television watching to 1 day a week.
3. Clean out your wardrobe to just the things you actually wear.
4. Find 5 things every day that you can either throw or give away.
5. Give away the books that you have already read to your local library or to a friend.
6. Cook all of your own meals for a day.
7. Give up relationships that don’t help you grow.
8. Spend 30 minutes cleaning your place before you go to bed.
9. Drink only water.
10. Spend 30 minutes working out.
11. Cancel your subscription the paper and subscribe to their rss feed instead.
12. Get a DVR and batch your tv show watching to one period of time.
13. Only check email twice a day.
14. Answer all of your voice-mails at the same time unless they are urgent.
15. Reduce the amount of activities your family participates in.
16. Get rid of your desktop and only have a laptop
17. After 6:00 turn off your blackberry.
18. Take everything off of your desk and only put back 2 items.
19. Rise Early
20. If you have a blog, focus on one or two topics.
21. Stop drinking soda.
22. Take time to pray or meditate every day.
23. Have coffee/tea with a friend once a week.
24. De-clutter one room a week.
25. Turn your wifi connection off when you work on projects.
26. Remove all the icons off your desktop and access them via command lines.
27. Remove any software off your computer that you don’t use.
28. Get rid of all your CD’s and save them to a hard-drive.
29. Take the TV out of your bedroom.
30. Only check the news once a day.

Related articles:

• Clean Windows 7 Desktop with CleanDesktop (techblissonline.com)
• How to Maximize Your Windows Experience (maketecheasier.com)
• Low-Stress Ways To Move House and Declutter Your Life (zenhabits.net)
• The Essential Zen Habits of 2009 (zenhabits.net)

Popularity: 15% [?]

SUMMARY:

The Vikings were ravaging the land. The Anglo-Saxon people are disorganized and without a true leader. An unlikely king rises up from the ashes of his homeland to save his people from a pagan enemy. Through strategy and faith this king becomes the only king of Anglo-Saxon decent to ever be named “the Great”. He starts a renaissance of education and peace that the island hadn’t seen in years.

Sounds like a great movie doesn’t it? The real Alfred the great is the subject of the book by Benjamin Merkle.Mr. Merkle took the time to piece together the often controversial life of Alfred the Great in a book that makes history an easy read. It reads more like a fantasy novel than historic work but overall gives you a good basic picture of this man’s life.

MY THOUGHTS:

So, I started out reading this book like a sports car taking off the line. I was extremely interested in the topic, I found the the characters amazing, and I really didn’t want to put it down. Then…then it started to get dry. I don’t really know why, but I found myself struggling to finish this book. (I am glad I did.) I hated myself for it because Alfred himself is a controversial and amazing character that deserves to be learned about.

Myth and fact are blended here…only because the history we do have of Alfred could be  a re-write and thus be not entirely true. However, most scholars believe that most of what people said he did was true. Mr. Merkle does a great job of blending the two sides and letting you know which one he believes most.

Really the things this man did by the time he died (in his 50’s) makes my first 27 years look extremely boring. I mean really, this guy saved England from the vikings and then educated the whole nation, oh all before he was in his 40’s. I mean this guy has some serious wisdom. He strove after it, yearned for it, and wanted others to feel the same way about it. His title “The Great” was well earned and this book makes me want to learn more.

I say this book makes me want to learn more because it feels like the cliff notes of the subject. It gives me a ton of information and tries to be compelling at the same time but for some reason it isn’t. I mean it felt like the author was spewing facts at me and occasionally throwing in a thrilling story. I commend him for doing as well as he did, don’t get me wrong here. However, I just feel he either should have written a scholarly work or gone for complete entertainment. Blending them here, unlike Alfred’s myths and facts, does not work.

PEOPLE’S THOUGHTS:

“A Decent Springboard”

“Where is our White Horse King?”

“Complete History of Alfred – But it’s dry reading”

LIFE:

How do we apply this information to our lives? I mean that is  why we read right? Sure it may be entertaining, but deep down we seek to gain wisdom from the things we read.

1. Leadership comes from adversity:

You quickly learn that the reason Alfred was so great was because of his upbringing. He lived through viking raids and saw brothers and friends murdered right in front of him. He knew how precious life was and because of that he was a good leader. He knew how precious people were and treated them that way. He wanted every one to have an opportunity to become the best version of their self as they could be. I mean this man fought on the front lines at around the age of 17…shield to shield with the most fearsome warriors in the world. That will put some hair on your chest.

So take time to learn from your adversity and apply it to becoming better. Don’t waste those moments when things are hard and life seems doomed. Go after it. Fight it like a “wild boar” as Alfred was said to do.

2. Education is key:

Alfred grew up with a love for Anglo-Saxon poetry. His mother instilled this love into his life very early on (good lesson for you moms out there) and it stuck with him. Even though he was known as a great warrior, his love for knowledge and poetry was even greater. He used the information and wisdom he gained from reading to better his life and the lives of his subjects. From developing an education system to making sure his leaders were of the same mind as him, he truly changed the Anglo-Saxon world with a love for reading and a thirst for knowledge.

3. Faith and Hope matter:

In this book we learn that at one point in his life Alfred was living in a swamp while his kingdom had been overrun by the Danish Vikings. Despite this he continued to have faith in his God and hope that he would one day rule his country. We know this eventually came true, but I still can’t fathom what was going on in his head at the time.

No support, no troops, hardly any food. I mean this guy was basically a run down robin hood hiding in the swamp! He kept at it though and eventually ran a guerrilla campaign that forced the vikings out. It really proves to me that a lot of success is not talent or being in the right place at the right time, but just to shear will power. He knew he would reign again and take care of his people…so he went about life thinking that way and it got him back to the place he belonged.

RATING:

4 out of 5 stars

Definitely go out and pick up a copy of this. You can even click on the picture of the book above and help support my book buying habit! Take some time and really go through this material, there is a lot of wisdom to comb through. I will probably have to read this book about every 5 years just so that I can see his life from a different vantage point.

Related articles:

• A Saxon War Story (online.wsj.com)
• Anglo-Saxon Gold (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
• Largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure found in UK (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

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I remember the day I suggested it. My team totally laughed at me, but they got it. (I was grateful for that.) I mean it really was going to be a fun way to teach new employees how a wireless network works. Granted it was unconventional…but it was something that I did as a kid. Is playing unconventional?

We were going to build a wireless network with Dots candy and toothpicks.

Now before you laugh me off the internet, wait for a second. I guarantee every single one of the employees that we trained that way remembers that part of the training. They may have forgotten what frequencies GSM service ran on, but I know for sure they wouldn’t forget how a call routed on our network.

Sometimes the best training of all is laughable and childish. As kids we learn from playing and games, why should our adult learning lives be any different? Do we really believe that power-point and lectures are going to make me any better at my job?

Unconventional training methods pop up all over the place. Kettleball training for fitness is really catching on. Companies are using video-game-like online trainings to teach people & even one trainer is using Dots to teach about wireless network structures. (haha)

Think outside the box…but remember to think inside the sand box. Put a little play into your trainings and watch that information stick…like Dot candies.

Related articles:

• Focus (combsy.com)
• A Better Way to Learn (combsy.com)
• 10 iPhone Apps for Trainers (combsy.com)
• Follow up: The Great Trainers Secret (combsy.com)

Popularity: 15% [?]

Image via Wikipedia

So my brother is starting a new blog over at www.dreamloaf.com. I really do mean starting, nothing is even up there yet. (1/31/2010) So he wanted some ideas for what to read/watch to learn how to blog well. So I put together a list of the resources I use for learning  to blog better. (I hope i am getting better haha). Maybe you will get some good advice from these too.

Things to set up:

Analytics.google.com

Adsense.google.com

www.wordpress.com

www.feedburner.com

www.twitter.com

Stuff to read:

www.problogger.net

www.zenhabits.net

http://www.43folders.com/

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/

www.lifeexcursion.com

www.upstartblogger.com

www.writetodone.com

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/how-to-make-money-from-your-blog/

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/01/how-to-build-a-high-traffic-web-site-or-blog/

http://www.pronetadvertising.com/articles/5-ways-to-building-a-better-blog.html

Stuff to watch:

http://garyvaynerchuk.com/tagged/keynotes

Related articles:

• 50 most influential bloggers of 09 ! (incomediary.com)
• 3 Mind Power Techniques to Become A Better Blogger (problogger.net)
• Checking out Tim Ferriss’ How to Blog without Killing Yourself (fredzimny.wordpress.com)
• 4:30 Am (combsy.com)
• Easily make your blog or website more interactive. (72suited.com)
• A Better Way to Learn (combsy.com)
• The Simple, Ridiculously Useful Guide to Earning a Living from Your Passion (zenhabits.net)

Popularity: 23% [?]

Image via Wikipedia

Instead of re-inventing the wheel for my Paleo diet post for my manifesto I went and got two videos that pretty much sum up the diet well and then give you some tips for keeping it. I still haven’t gone completely paleo/primal yet.

I just finished the Paleo Diet book recently and I am also reading The Primal Blueprint . After that I will probably go for a 30 day challenge. I am already losing weight just doing a pushup/squat workout on alternating days. Look for more on that, I was pretty shocked at the results in so little time. Well without further ado’ enjoy these two quick videos, they might just change your life.

Related articles:

• 5 ways to save money on the Paleo Diet (paleoaddict.com)
• Diet Trend: Going Caveman (shoppingblog.com)
• Is the Paleo Diet Eurocentric? (americapeals.com)
• 10 added benefits to the Paleo diet (not health related) (paleoaddict.com)
• 17 Reasons You’re Not Losing Weight (marksdailyapple.com)
• The New Age Cavemen and the City (nytimes.com)
• I’m Looking for Paleo Bloggers (paleoaddict.com)
• The Ultimate How to Get Lean Guide (zenhabits.net)
• Stuff That I Read (or Watch), And You Should Too (marksdailyapple.com)

Popularity: 31% [?]

Yabusame – Tim Ferriss from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.

Tim Ferriss has a lot of credits to his name:

• Record holding Tango dancer
• Speaks multiple languages
• Author of NYT best selling book, twice.
• TV Star
• Internet Star

I mean seriously this guy gets things done. What I want you to see from this video is the way he breaks down an extremely difficult task into something he can do. He takes unfamiliar movements and uses movements he is familiar with to conquer them. In the video above he likens reloading his bow with reaching for a lost scuba mask, brilliant.

He learns fast because he takes a very scientific method of learning.

• Break down the key movements or ideas
• Relate them to familiar activities
• Recognize your strengths and weaknesses
• Train better than you need to. (He needs to reload in 9 seconds, he trains to reload in 7)
• Learn by watching pros
• Have confidence

Those are just a few of the learning keys you are going to learn by watching this 45 minute video. The greatness of the way he learns is that you can use it for anything.

Do you a way of learning that helps you get things done faster? Leave it in the comments.

Related articles:

• Must Reads from Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose (800ceoread.com)
• 100 Terrific Twitter Feeds for Young Entrepreneurs (sociableblog.com)
• What Can You Learn from the 4-Hour Workweek? (cloudave.com)
• 10 Blackberry Apps for Trainers (combsy.com)

Popularity: 32% [?]