Five Things You Need To Do Immediately To Succeed With CRM

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Twitter hits 50 Million Tweets a day

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The Hidden Art of Achieving Creative Flow

The Hidden Art of Achieving Creative Flow





Flow in the present moment.

Have you ever had a creative evening when time suddenly flew by? A day when you executed a difficult project at work flawlessly? A brief moment in time when your challenging exercise routine felt effortless?
All of these times you were in a state of flow.
Flow is a concept developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the University of Chicago, who has studied the phenomena his whole career. Daniel Pink reintroduces the concept in his new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.
Many people flow through their lives in an effortless fashion, while countless others have a difficult time achieving a flow state.

Why flow is hard to achieve
Flow is a moment in time when you’re both challenged at the activity that you’re doing, and when you also have complete autonomy in the task you’re conducting.
We engage in flow under your own volition, with a skill which we’ve had some amount of experience.

If you’re not flowing, it’s probably because you aren’t allowing yourself to be challenged, you’re completely overwhelmed, or someone else is holding you back.
The majority of my experience with flow has been with dance and writing. I’ve studied dance for many years, and one of the technical skills that dancers work on is called improvisation. Improv is very tricky in dance. You have to turn off your mind and simply dance with your instincts.

When you’ve mastered improv dance, you’ve reached the sweet spot between your brain transferring commands to your nervous system. There is no longer any thinking involved, as thinking in improv dance will make everything stop. There just isn’t any time for brainwork when you are constantly moving.
Csikszentmihalyi hypothesizes that these moments of flow occur because we’re simply activating too many neurological functions. Because of this we no longer have capacity to be aware of what functions we’re engaging in. So the ‘conscious of me’ part of the mind switches off, your awareness of yourself slips away, and you just do.

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Do you use Google Buzz?

(CNN) -- Google plunged into the world of social networking on Tuesday, melding pieces of Facebook and Twitter into a new feature, Google Buzz.
Buzz, which will work through the popular Gmail service, will allow users to post status updates, photos and links to members of their network -- as well as pull in their activity on other sites like Twitter, Flickr and Picasa.
Google spokesman Bradley Horowitz said the service, which was rolling out to some Gmail users Tuesday afternoon and should be available to all in the next couple of days, aims to weed out what he called the clutter of other networking sites.
With networking sites, "there's obviously value there," he said. "It's a phenomenon that's real, but it's increasingly becoming harder and harder to make sense and find the signal in the noise."
By letting users post photos, links and updates openly, the tool would mimic Twitter's micro-blogging format. But users also will be able to make their content available to "friends only," more closely following the Facebook model.
At an event at the company's Mountain View, California, headquarters, Google also seemed poised to take a poke at the AOL Instant Messenger service, saying Buzz will be offered to companies as a tool for interoffice communication.
"It will change the way businesses communicate around the world," Horowitz said.
Despite the inevitable comparisons, Google spokesmen said they didn't set out to tread on anyone else's turf...(read more)

Infographic of the Day: What Crises Could Crush Us in 2010?

A map connecting the myriad risks to the global economy.
Last weekend, the World Economic Forum held its annual meeting at Davos, and the theme this time was "Improve the State of the World." Which naturally meant coming to terms with the risks out there. Their economists came up with a comprehensive list and assigned probabilities to each--and also mapped the linkages between each one. Then they summarized all those findings in a handy dandy interactive map that's sure to delight paranoid conspiracy theorists everywhere: Read More...

Pew Survey: Teens Love Facebook, Hate Blogging, Are Always Online, and Don't Use Twitter

Everybody goes online, everybody has a cell phone, and kids hate blogging and Twitter, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project.
The findings show that the Internet isn't just prevalent in our lives, it is our lives. Ninety-three percent of teens ages 12 to 17 go online, 75% of them own a cell phone, and 66% say they text. In fact, 58% of 12-year-olds now have mobiles, compared to 18% just five years ago. Sixty-two percent use the Internet to access information on news and politics, and some teens are even using the Internet as a guardian: 17% say they go online to research information about drug use, sexual health, and other topics that are awkward to talk about with real people...Read More

Having success with social media: correlation or causality?

It’s very popular to blame violent movies, internet sites and games for violent behavior of violent youngsters (hmm where did that come from “youngsters”? think I’m getting old.) When there is a shooting in a school, some politicians or other activists think they can score easily by jumping on the barricades and yelling that we need to protect our children from all the violence in the media. Read more...