Are You a Boss or a Leader?

“The best leader is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and the self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” – Theodore Roosevelt

We’ve all worked for bosses and we’ve all worked with leaders, but few people in positions of authority spend enough time thinking about the differences between the two roles. At a glance they seem similar, but they are deeply and profoundly different. Bosses can be leaders, but they aren’t necessarily. The same goes for leaders. They can be bosses, but they might not be.

You can be a leader at your company or organization even if no one reports to you. Alternatively, you can be a boss who rules by fear and is followed by no one.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was a civil rights leader, but he wasn’t anyone boss. People followed him voluntarily. He was on the side of justice. He was charismatic. He inspired millions of people, and he changed the world.

During the war in Iraq, General David Petraeus didn’t order men and women into battle from an air conditioned office. He went onto the streets of Baghdad and Baqubah and risked his life alongside them. He was a commander—a boss—but he was also a leader.

Richard Branson is the boss of plenty of people at his various Virgin Group companies, but he’s also a genuine leader who inspires his employees with his own thirteen leadership principles. Who wouldn’t want to follow a leader who believes in the following?

1. A good leader should be genuinely interested in people and strive to see the best in them.
2. To succeed in business you need to build a great team around you that believe in what you are doing.
3. If you praise people, they flourish. Always look for a way to praise your team.
4. Leadership requires knowing how to delegate and how to be a good listener.
5. A leader should promote people above what they expect. This demonstration of trust often causes them to excel.
6. A successful business comes from creating something that makes a difference to other people’s lives.
7. You can identify a gap in the market by asking yourself how you can do what others are already doing – better.
8. Go for quality, make sure you are the best in what you do otherwise it’s pointless. Create something you can be proud of.
9. Always be prepared for the worst that can happen. This will help turn adversity into success.
10. Starting a business is tough, but you have to fight for its survival.
11. Don’t treat your bank like your GP, be ready to switch to get the support you need to ensure your business succeeds.
12. There is no point launching a product unless you can get the word out about it. Free PR is one of the best ways to do this.
13. Get the details right

The ultimate bad boss is a tossup between Kevin Spacey’s character in Swimming with Sharks and Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada. Both of those films were successful—and their characters unforgettable—because only the luckiest among us gets through life without working for a real-life version of one of these horrible characters at least once.

Don’t get the wrong idea. Not all bosses are bad, even if they aren’t leaders. There are, however, some key differences.

Leaders inspire and motivate. Bosses give orders.

Leaders give pep talks. Bosses say, “or else.”

Leaders teach. Bosses simply expect.

Leaders assist. Bosses micromanage.

Leaders listen to and respect their employees and followers. Bosses say, “my way or the highway.”

The best bosses are leaders. The worst bosses never are.

It’s much easier to be a boss than a leader. If you’re hired as a supervisor or manager, if you do your job, you’re a boss. That’s all there is to it. Genuinely inspiring and motivating people, convincing them to follow you voluntarily—that’s much more difficult to pull off. Not everybody can do it.

It’s essential, though, that supervisors, managers, and CEOs at least aim to be leaders rather than bosses if they truly want their companies and organizations to succeed. Ruling with brazen authority and fear doesn’t work any better in the business world than it does in North Korea. Sam Walton got it right when he said, “outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.”

Virtual Reality Will Transform Marketing

Virtual Reality is here. And it’s going to dramatically tranform marketing as much as it will change entertainment.

The Oculus Rift headset was released this week, and the content reel on the company’s website makes it look like a blast. The content itself isn’t anything new, though. Mostly, it consists of video games, and video games have been around in one form or another since the 1970s.

We should expect the first generation of virtual reality applications and content to mimic the old forms, the way the first films resembled stage plays on screen, and the way early websites resembled print flyers.

What’s new here is the immersive experience. And with an immersive experience, we have an entirely new set of possibilities that we haven’t even begun to explore yet. Imagine, for instance, using a more advanced version of Google Earth with a virtual reality headset. Imagine, while you’re at it, using a more advanced version of Google Moon with a virtual reality headset.

Now imagine immersive marketing using a virtual reality headset. No, not immersive junk mail. Not immersive spam. And not 3-D banner ads. Imagine transporting your would-be customers to another place and time altogether.

SocialTimes recently interviewed Joshua Keller, CEO of Union Square Media, about the possibilities. “The most exciting aspect of VR,” he said, “is that the possibilities of it are limitless. Unlike traditional marketing forms like print, radio, and TV where you’re confined to a certain box of how you can spin campaigns, with VR marketers are much less restrained in the creativity of their campaigns. An auto-maker can offer virtual test drives or can walk users virtually through the manufacturing process. It is much more personal than a commercial spot where they’re seeing a model drive a car along the coast.”

You’d miss a couple of things on a virtual test drive. You wouldn’t really know how it feels. You wouldn’t know how well the seat fits your body, how much you can and can’t feel the road, or if the ride is quiet or loud on the freeway. But still. How much fun would that be?

And imagine if you’re looking for a new home. You could virtually tour a house before requesting a real-life showing by the real estate agent. You could “walk” up the steps, onto the porch, into the living room, down the hallway, through the kitchen, and out the back into the yard. You could place mockups of your own furniture into the house and see what it would look like.

Maybe you’re trying to decide where to stay on vacation. You could virtually tour resorts, hotels and vacation rentals. You could “stroll” the beaches on Maui or the back country trails in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

The possibilities really are endless.

Some forms of marketing—junk mail, spam, online ads that bog down websites—are annoying. But virtual reality marketing won’t be the least bit annoying when it’s done right. Customers will love it. At its best, it could be indistinguishable from entertainment.

Who wouldn’t want to virtually attend a live concert by their favorite new band while they’re on the road promoting their new album? Who wouldn’t want to virtually tour the Florida Keys if they’re in the market for a vacation to the Florida Keys? Who wouldn’t want to virtually test-drive the new Audi on a winding coast road even if they can’t feel the seat?

How to End the Adblock Arms Race

Everybody hates ads on the Internet. Even advertising and marketing professionals hate ads on the Internet if they’re too intrusive.

So there’s a huge market for adblocking software such as Adblock Plus, which anyone can download for free. Adblock Plus advertises itself with an irresistible line. “Surf the web without annoying ads!”

Who isn’t in the market for that? Anyone? Raise your hand if you like annoying ads on the Internet.

Yeah, we didn’t think so.

Ads are necessary, though, and almost everyone understands why. It’s how online content providers make money. No ads, no money. So content providers are now blocking ad-blocking software.

Forbes magazine, for instance, is current blocking browsers with an ad blocker enabled. Instead of the magazine’s articles, the following message appears on the homepage: “Thank you for visiting Forbes. We noticed that you have an ad blocker enabled. Please disable it, or whitelist Forbes.com, to enter our site and receive an ad-light experience for the next 30 days.”

Forbes if an outstanding magazine. It wouldn’t be able to publish any content at all if it did not pay its writers. That money has to come from somewhere. If it doesn’t come from advertising revenue, it will have to come out of your pocket directly if you want to read the magazine.

But everybody hates annoying ads on the Internet, so companies like Adblock Plus will soon figure out how to get around the ad-blocker blockers.

It’s a classic arms race. No side ever wins once and for all, which is one reason why advertising and marketing professionals shouldn’t freak out about it.

The most recent freakout occurred when Apple announced it will allow ad-blocking extensions in its mobile browsers on devices using iOS 9. It’s giving ad-blockers the upper hand temporarily, but the ad-blocker blockers will come up with a workaround soon enough.

The solution here is to figure out how everyone can win, and it should not be that difficult. We should start by identifying the root of the problem. Adblock Plus put its finger on it. Its marketing slogan, again, is “Surf the web without annoying ads!”

The key word in that sentence is annoying. If ads weren’t annoying, no one would go out of their way to block them.

Ads aren’t annoying just because they’re ads. They’re annoying when they pop up and get in your way. They’re annoying when they take so long to load that the website you’re visiting hangs. They’re annoying and creepy when you can tell you’re being tracked everywhere you go on the Internet.

Otherwise, ads are no problem.

“Irritation is a persistent theme in writings about ad blocking,” writes Justin Fox at Bloomberg. “It is often attributed to the way advertisers track consumers across the Internet, clogging up their browsers, invading their privacy and sometimes just creeping them out.”

If none of that were happening, we’d be having an entirely different conversation about adblocking. We might not be talking about it at all.

Adblock Plus is trying to find a third way. Its creators understand that advertising has its place and a positive role to play in all of our lives, not only because consumers want to know what products and services are available, but also because advertising helps pay for the content we love on the Internet. So Adblock Plus goes ahead and whitelists ads that adhere to strict anti-irritation standards while blacklisting everything else.

Advertising and marketing pro Doc Searls thinks that’s not quite good enough because Adblock Plus makes no distinction between tracking and non-tracking ads. His proposal is a little more detailed and will probably be a lot more effective.

“The simplest way to end to the adblock war,” he writes, “is for non-tracking-based ads — the safe Madison Avenue kind — to carry a marker that ad  blockers can whitelist… I also suggest that ad blockers call themselves adtech blockers, so it’s clear that the user’s problem is with the online equivalent of junk mail, and not with the kind of advertising that has supported commercial media for the duration.”

Will it work? Who knows? But a truce of some kind is probably coming. No one can ever win an arms race, but if we can come up with a formula where advertising pays for content on the web without being annoying, everyone wins.

How to Ace a Job Interview

Job interviews stress everyone out, but preparing yourself materially and psychologically will go a long way toward making you feel better about the experience and boosting your odds of success.

Prepare. Make a list of typical interview questions and likely questions and write down your answers. Edit your answers and polish them until you get them exactly right. Then read your answers out loud over and over and over again.

The purpose here isn’t to memorize a fragmented speech one paragraph at a time. In fact, you’re better off not memorizing your answers because the questions you actuall get are likely to differ somewhat from your practice questions. You don’t want to come across like a robotic politician with rehearsed talking points.

The purpose of this exercise is to focus and organize your thoughts in advance so you won’t have to figure out what you want to say when you’re on the spot.

Ask Your Own Questions. Be sure to also write down some of your own questions in advance and ask them during the interview. Make sure they’re the kinds of questions that aren’t likely to come up in conversation until you ask.

This may not seem important, but it is for a couple of reasons. The last thing you should want is a job that you’ll hate, so you need to make sure it’s a good fit for you. If you learn from asking the right questions that it’s not going to work, consider yourself lucky. It’s far better to wait for the right job than to take one that will make you miserable. Remember, you’re going to work there for at least for a couple of months and probably for a couple of years.

If, on the other hand, you learn from your questions that the job is a good fit, that will come across. The interviewer will notice. You will seem—and be—more genuinely interested and engaged that most interviewees who just passively sit there.

Relax. Few people are truly relaxed during a job interview, but you’ll be a lot less stressed if you keep a couple of things in mind.

You are not on trial. Job interviewers are on your side. They need you, they want to hire you, and they’re predisposed to like you. They wouldn’t have called you and set up an interview in the first place if they thought you were wrong for the job.

They also expect you to be nervous. Everyone is nervous during job interviews. They’re just people. They’ve been interviewed, too. They know what it’s like. And you might be surprised by how many employers are nervous while they’re asking you questions.

So don’t fight the anxiety. That only makes it worse. Just let it be there. Don’t worry if you think you look nervous. You’re probably hiding it better than you think, and even if you aren’t, so what? No employer will ever hold it against you.

Be Yourself. This is the hardest part for some people. We want to make a good first impression and often feel like we need to present a superhuman version of ourselves. That makes a lot us nervous, but coming across as a braggart and phony is even worse.

Do this instead. Imagine you’ve been on the job for six months. You know everybody in the office. You see them at lunch and occasionally after hours. You’re good at your job because you’ve been doing it for a while now. Spend some time imagining how it would feel to be completely comfortable with everything and everyone. You’re only pretending for now, but if you’re hired, you’ll feel that way for real after a while. You know this is true because it has happened at every job you’ve ever had in your life.

Here’s a secret: there is a part of your brain that makes no distinction between things that are real and things that are imagined, and that part of your brain is partly responsible for your emotional state. It’s why horror movies are scary even though we know they’re not real.

Actors and actresses use this in their craft. They can imagine a gut-wrenching scene, or remember something tragic that has happened to them in real life, and make themselves cry. They are feeling genuine sadness when they do this.

Positive emotions can be conjured the same way. You can make yourself feel confident and at ease just by imagining yourself confident and at ease. So think of your interview as an acting performance. You’re sort of playing a role, but not really. You’re playing yourself. You’re playing yourself in the future, after you’re comfortable with the job and comfortable with your boss and comfortable with your co-workers.

Do this, and the interviewer won’t see a nervous version of yourself or a puffed up version of yourself, but the real you, the actual person they’ll work with every day after you’re hired and get settled in. You will come across as authentic because you will be authentic. You’ll exude confidence and competence, and you’re more likely to get hired.

How To Create a Stand Out Resume

If you’re one of 100 people applying for a job, your resume had better be good. You need to format it correctly, of course, but that’s the easy part. The hard part is distinguishing yourself from the other 99 applicants.

It’s not as hard as it seems, though. It just takes a little more work.

Include accomplishments

Don’t just list your job duties under your job title. Make sure you list your accomplishments. For example, in addition to saying you were in charge your company’s social media marketing, tell your prospective employer that you increased the number of social media followers by 50 percent over a year.

If your accomplishments are hard to quantify with hard numbers, list the ways you went above and beyond. Perhaps you were a marketing manager who wasn’t afraid to dive in and create content yourself. Or you were a marketing content developer who stepped up and mentored new employees.

A lot of people have a hard time with this, but if you spend some quality time thinking hard and brainstorming, you’ll figure out how to distinguish yourself from everyone else who spent the last couple of years in the exact same job. And you’ll stand out when you do.

Create more than one resume

If you’re applying for similar but different jobs, don’t send the same resume to every employer.

Let’s say you’ve spent the last four years as a copywriter and social media marketer and did occasional project management on the side. And let’s say you’re applying for all three types of jobs at the same time. The three versions of your resume won’t be very different, but they should be a little bit different.

Your social media resume should include as many social media accomplishments as possible. Your copywriter resume should include as many copywriting accomplishments as possible. And your project management resume should emphasize project management as much as possible.

The easiest way to create three slightly different resumes is to start with one master resume that includes every single accomplishment you can think of at every single job. You won’t actually send that resume to an employer. You’ll use it to create smaller and more focused resumes tailored to the specific jobs you’re applying for. When you do that, you’ll look like you fit the job you’re applying for like a key in a lock.

Include a cover letter

Ninety percent of job applicants don’t write a cover letter, so if you include one you’ll stand out from the pack before anyone even reads it.

Ninety percent of job applicants who do include a cover letter use the same cover letter every time. Boilerplate letters are obviously boilerplate letters, so you’ll stand out from the pack again if you write an original letter that’s focused like a laser on the job you’re applying for.

Yes, it takes time to write a new cover letter every time you fire off a resume. It takes a lot of time, actually, and you might be able to apply for only one or two jobs per day instead of ten. So what? You’ll probably find a job faster. And you’re more likely to find a job that you like because you’ll be pickier about what you go after.

Try to fit everything on one page

You can write a two-page resume if you want or if you need to. Go ahead. Despite what some people think, two-page resumes are normal now.

If you can fit everything onto one page without cramming it in there with a tiny font, though, you’ll stand out. The reason you’ll stand out is because there will no fluff and no filler. Every line will be relevant. If you’re a stickler about listing accomplishments instead of just job descriptions, every line will pack a punch. No one’s eyes will glaze over when they take a look at it.

Don’t pay someone to do it for you

People who write resumes for a living often suck at it. They shouldn’t. It’s their job. But the folks in human resources departments are sometimes appalled at what lands on their desks.

Former human resources pro Allison Green put it this way at her popular blog, Ask a Manager: “[Y]ou can’t just assume that because someone hung out a shingle, they’re good at it. And to vet effectively, you need to have some basis for judging, which means you need to put in the work to educate yourself about what a good resume looks like … which might get you to the point where you can do it yourself anyway.”

If you take the time to do it right and do it yourself, you’ll save time, you’ll save money, and you’ll get hired faster. Put in the work and you shall be rewarded.

Leap Year Means You’re Working For Free on Monday

If you’re a salaried employee, you’re working for free this coming Monday, and it’s all because of Caesar Augustus.

Yes, really. Here’s why:

There are 365 days in a year, right? Wrong. There are 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds.

But we’re not going to set out clocks back almost six hours every New Year’s Day. That would be ludicrous. Six o’clock in the morning would be the new midnight, until the following year when noon would be the new midnight. So every four years we add an extra day in February instead. This is one of those years. You probably learned that in the third grade, but there’s more to the story.

The ancient Egyptians were the first people to figure out that the earth takes slightly longer than 365 days to revolve around the sun. They weren’t sure exactly how many hours, minutes and seconds it took, but they were smart enough and precise enough to realize that something was…off.

The Roman Empire figured it out, too, but, unlike the Egyptians, the Romans used a lunar calendar instead of a solar calendar, and it created all kinds of problems that took them a lot longer than it should have to figure out how to solve.

They started with a ten-month 29.5 day lunar calendar. Which was pretty ridiculous. That only accounted for 295 days in a 365+ day year. Around 70 days passed every year that weren’t on the calendar. The Romans just blew those days off because they were winter days that didn’t affect the harvest.

After a while, though, they got tired of wondering what day it was and not having an answer, so they wised up and added January and February. That still left them with ten spare days at the end of the year, so they added a whole extra month every couple of years after February so that winter months didn’t eventually turn into summer months.

Julius Caesar finally said enough of this nonsense and came up with a solar calendar instead of a lunar calendar. Each month then had 30 or 31 days, except for August, which had only 29 days.

Back then, February had 30 days. Today it only has 28. Why? Because Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus had Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The month of August was named after him, and he was cheesed off that July, which was named for his predecessor Julius Caesar, had two extra days in it. He filched two days from February.

So now, almost 2000 years later, if you earn a monthly salary, you end up working for free every February 29. And that’s this coming Monday.

Congress could make Leap Day a national holiday. Maybe it should. It’s bonus time. It’s like time that falls out of the sky. We’d still have 365 productive days every leap year even if no work of any kind ever took place on February 29.

Then again, February is normally a short month anyway, so salaried employees get a screaming deal three years out of four. Maybe it’s best to leave well enough alone.

The solar system doesn’t keep time like a Swiss watch. We skip Leap Year every 100 years (except every 400 years when we don’t), which means we’re scheduled to skip this whole production in the year 2100. So if you really can’t stand it, rest assured that 84 years from now you’ll get some relief.

The Walking Dead is Going to Break Our Hearts

The mid-season premiere of AMC’s The Walking Dead was a gut puncher, and we’re heading for a real heartbreaker in the season finale.

We won’t spoil anything for you if you haven’t yet seen it, but Sunday’s episode opens with one character falling to the zombie horde that has overtaken the Alexandria Safe-Zone, followed immediately by another. A third goes down within sixty seconds, and a fourth is mortally wounded.

The episode leaves us in a stunned state of shock before it’s even half over, and it’s hard not to seriously wonder for the first time if it’s the beginning of the end, if we’re about to see most of the main characters fall.

Those who haven’t experienced The Walking Dead yet have no idea why it’s the most popular show in the history of cable television. Sure, it speaks to our modern anxieties about global pandemics, terrorism and economic collapse, but there’s a lot more to it than that, starting with the fact that it’s not about zombies. Not really. If it was just about zombies, it would be the world’s longest B-movie.

Storytellers of all types take note: the only stories worth telling in this world are about people.

And The Walking Dead is about people. It’s about survival. It’s about the struggle to behave as a civilized person after civilization has been annihilated. The zombies are just there to blow up the world.

The story is necessarily violent and gruesome and terrifying as well as horrifying, but most of all it’s emotionally wrenching. We love these characters—most of them, anyway—and there’s no way they could all survive the end of the world.

Some of the human survivors are as bad as the zombies—or walkers as the characters call them—and we know already that a seriously bad dude named Negan is on his way to wreak yet more destruction on whatever’s left of the Safe-Zone.

He’s going to kill one of our favorite characters. Readers of the graphic novel series know who’s head is going to roll. At least they think they do. According to set rumors, though, the writers may have mixed things up a bit and are going to have Negan kill somebody else. It’s an interesting decision, if true. Those who think they know where the story is heading can enjoy, if that’s the right word, the suspense as much as the rest of us.

We can’t spoil it for you because we don’t actually know. No one leaked the script to us. We haven’t even read the graphic novels.

Whatever ends up happening, it will be devastating.

“I felt sick to my stomach when I read the script,” says star Andrew Lincoln, who plays Rick Grimes, the group’s leader. “It was the first day in the whole six years of working on The Walking Dead that I was late for work because I woke up in the middle of the night and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I was so angry and frustrated and I felt sick. And that was just after reading it.”

“The word ‘finale’ gives me a physical reaction because it’s the hardest day on set that I’ve ever had in my life,” says Lauren Cohan, who plays Maggie. “I never even imagined that as an actor you could have that experience. It’s one of the most raw experiences that I think any of us have ever had. Andy talks about being late to work; I didn’t want to go to work that day. It took a really, really long time for everybody to feel okay again after the finale, let’s put it that way.”

Season 7 is in the works, so somebody is going to survive whatever’s coming, but we may have to fortify ourselves with a box of Kleenex and some anti-depressants before we get there.

What the Best Super Bowl Ads All Have in Common

Super Bowls ads cost a staggering $170,00 per second to air.

They’d better be good, then. They’d better be the best. If you want to air a boring infomercial that tells most people it’s time for a bathroom break, go ahead, knock yourself, but if you air it during the Super Bowl, not only will you lose millions of dollars, the people you’re trying to reach are likely to throw things at the TV.
Super Bowl fans expect the ads to be the best. Some people even watch the Super Bowl because of the ads.

They expect to see the best ads all year.

But why are they the best?

Some of them are funny, sure, and others are visually impressive, but we see funny and visually impressive ads all the time on TV that don’t cost $170,000 per second to air.
There’s something else going on here, something all marketers can learn from.
Let’s look at five of them.

First, a Pantene commercial shows masculine football players doing their daughters’ hair. We get see a softer side of these guys for a change. They are human beings before they’re football players. They have wives. They have children. They’re three-dimensional, not one-dimensional.

Next we see a boring guy in a boring beige suit step into his boring beige walk-in closet full of nothing but boring beige suits looking for a pair of boring beige socks. (Is there really anything in his house that isn’t beige?) An intimidating Christopher Walken appears in his closet like a nightmare apparition. Walken finds this guy utterly contemptible, and he cuts him down in the kind of blistering performance that actor is famous for. Then he offers Boring Guy salvation with the new Kia Optima. “It’s like the world’s most exciting pair of socks,” he says, “but it’s a mid-size sedan.” The guy gets behind the wheel and is instantly transformed from boring to Whoah!

T-mobile provides us with a little humor. Rap singer Drake is in front of a camera singing some smooth lyrics for a cell phone music video when three executives suddenly yell, “Cut!” They tell him to add the most annoying and schlocky corporate lines imaginable to his song. Lines like, “Device eligible for upgrade after 24 months,” “Mexico and Canada not included,” and “streaming music will incur data charges.” Drake laughs and says, “those changes don’t ruin the song at all!”

Coke brings us a fight between Marvel Comics’ largest superhero, the Incredible Hulk, and its smallest, the Astonishing Ant Man. Ant Man steals the last can of Coke from Bruce Banner’s fridge, which, natch, enrages Bruce and turns him into the Hulk. So Hulk chases Ant Man through the city and finally wins, only in his gigantic state he can’t get his thumb under the tab to open the can. The more-dexterous Ant Man pries it open for him and they both get a sip.

And finally, we see a depressed elderly man sitting in his living room staring at a blank television set. He’s not eating. His family is worried about him. He’s thinking about the glory days in his youth when he was an astronaut. He walked on the moon. He met the president of the United States. But that was all a long time ago. Today he looks like he’s just waiting to die. His son walks in and says, “Okay, Commander. Come with me.” It’s a genuinely touching moment. His son takes him outside and sits him down in the driver’s seat of a brand-new Audi R8. The astronaut stirs to life again as they zoom along a coastal road beneath a full moon while listening to “Starman” by the late and great David Bowie.

Some of these ads are light while others are serious. Some makes us laugh while others pull at our heart strings. But they all have one thing in common:

They’re all stories.

Some are just character sketches while others have more of a plot, but they’re all stories.

Storytelling is and always has been the most effective way to connect brands to customers. Humans beings have been wired for stories for as long as we have had language.

If you can tell people a story and touch them in some way by making them laugh or—if you’re really good—by making them cry, they won’t forget you. Some of them will share your stories with others.

The numbers don’t lie. Four million people watched the Christopher Walken ad on YouTube in less than a week. Five million watched the Coke ad on YouTube in less than a week. Seven million people watched the astronaut and shampoo ads on YouTube in less than a week.

So get out there and make your mark in this world by telling great stories.

New Year’s Resolution #5: Get Organized

A lot of us are disorganized. Our desks, if we’re not careful, can eventually look like miniature versions of hoarder houses.

None of us are born organized. We have to work at it a bit and cultivate some organizational habits.

Organize your mind

Start with getting enough sleep. There’s little chance you’ll be able to get yourself better organized if you’re groping through your day in a haze of brain fog.

One-third of Americans are sleep-deprived and another third are extremely sleep-deprived. So fix that first.

According to WebMD, sleep deprivation leads to decreased performance and alertness, memory and cognitive impairment, stress and occupation injuries. And that’s just in the short term. Long term sleep deprivation can give you a heart attack or a stroke.

Organize your work space

If you’re in a disorganized physical environment, your mind will be unfocused and scattered. Nothing should be on your desk except the things you use every day (or at least on most days) and whatever it is you’re working on at the moment.

If you don’t have anywhere to put all your stuff, get yourself some new cabinets, shelves or paperwork pockets that hang off the side of your desk.

Change your work space

Changing your physical work place once in a while can have the psychological equivalent of clearing everything off your desk. It helps you concentrate on whatever it is you’re working on.

If you work in an office, try working from home once in a while if you can to minimize distractions from your co-workers. If you work from home, try working in a café or a library occasionally.

You might be amazed how much more you can accomplish if you go to a specific place for a specified period of time to do one thing and one thing only.

Organize information

Put all your sources of electronic information in one place on your computer, either on a browser toolbar, a bookmark page, or a file or page you create yourself with links to everything you need to check regularly.

If you have more than one email address, make sure one is your primary address and that all emails from your secondary address or addresses are forwarded to your primary one.

Organize your projects

Write down every single one of your deadlines in one place. You should put them on your calendar, of course, but chances are you have all kinds of other things cluttering up your also, from meetings and lunch dates to doctor’s appointments and days off. You can easily blow a deadline if it’s wedged between six other items on the same date.

Throw things away

Go through your email once a day or once a week and purge everything you don’t need. Likewise with the paperwork on your desk and in your drawers.

You will accumulate a horrendous mass of paperwork if you never get rid of it, and you can waste boat loads of time looking for something if you’re not sure which huge stack it’s buried in.

Don’t think of tossing and recycling as a chore. Think of it as liberation.

New Year ’ s Resolution #4: Manage Your Time Better at Work

Nobody is naturally good at time management. A lot of us suck at it. It’s a skillset we develop over time.

If you find yourself overwhelmed, if you wish there were 36 hours in the day instead of the measly 24, or if you wish you could genetically modify yourself so you no longer need sleep, these tips are for you.

Don’t eat the elephant

How would you feel if someone ordered you to eat an entire elephant? You might feel sick to your stomach. You’d almost certainly feel overwhelmed.

But let’s say you like the taste of elephant meat. And let’s say someone delivers 500 individually wrapped elephant steaks, along with a freezer for you to store them in, and says you can eat them for dinner one at a time.

You probably would not feel overwhelmed. You might even think that was awesome. Hey, free dinner for more than a year.

Think about that when you create your to-do list.

If you’re writing a book on tech start-ups in Europe, don’t put “finish the book” at the top of your list. That’s an elephant.

Put a steak on your to-do list instead. Put “write the next 500 pages” at the top of your list. All you have to do next time you sit down is write 500 words. No big deal. Do that every day and you’ll have an entire draft in less than six months.

Don’t write “create an IT budget” at the top of your list. That’s also an elephant. Instead, put the next individual step in the budgeting process at the top of your list.

You’ll feel a whole lot better if you do it this way. You won’t feel overwhelmed, there won’t be any doubt about what your next step is, and creating your to-do list and schedule will be a lot more straightforward.

Don’t sweat the small stuff

The small stuff can pile up and kill you with a thousand paper cuts if you let it, so get it out of the way as quickly as possible.

If a task will take two minutes or less to complete, don’t even bother adding it to your to-do list. Just do it. That’s one of the main takeaways from David Allen’s best-selling time management book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

Just be sure not to take this too far. If you’re in “the zone,” so to speak, and deeply plugged into whatever it is you’re working on, don’t slam on the brakes of your thought train for some little thing that only takes a minute and a half to complete.

The time to knock out the small stuff is while you’re putting your to-do list together or after you’ve finished one task and haven’t yet started the next one.

Schedule blocks of time

Don’t just put appointments and meetings on your calendar. If you’re working on more than one thing at a time, schedule blocks of time for one.

Let’s say you’re working on a long project that you’ll need to chip away at for months before it’s finished (like a book, for instance), while at the same time you have weekly deadlines in addition to tasks that need to be finished daily. You can easily go off the rails if you don’t block out your time properly. Before you know it, you hardly get around to even starting the huge project because the more immediate deadlines of your weekly and daily tasks steal all your time.

One option, when facing this kind of workload, is to work on the long project first thing in the morning before looking at or even thinking about your more immediate tasks. There’s little chance you’ll blow your weekly and daily deadlines because you’ll stay at work late if you have to. But you won’t stay at work late to put in an hour or two on a project that doesn’t need to be finished until an eternity in the future.

Adhere to your natural rhythm

There’s no right or wrong way to schedule blocks of time for yourself. What works for one person won’t necessarily work for somebody else.

If you try to force yourself to behave in ways that don’t come naturally to you, you’re less likely to succeed than if you take your natural rhythm as a starting point and only tweak it as much as you have to.

If you’re not a morning person, don’t force yourself to become one by scheduling your most difficult tasks at 9:00. Get the easy stuff out of the way first and tackle the harder projects when you’re fully awake and energized.

Likewise, if you are a morning person and tend to crash during the afternoon, schedule the no-brainer tasks at 3:00 or even 4:00.